; 
 
LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA CRUZ 
 
LECTURES 
 
 ON THE 
 
 HISTORY OF FRANCE. 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HONORABLE 
 
 SIR JAMES STEPHEN, K.C.B., LL.D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OK MODERN HISTORY IN T0E UNIVERSITV OF 
 CAJIBRIDGK. 
 
 N E W Y O R K : 
 HiRPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
 
 1875. 
 

uc 
 
 REV. WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D., 
 
 MASTER OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 I SHOULD be sorely embarrassed if it were necessary 
 for me, in dedicating this book to you, to attempt an 
 imitation of that lapidary style in which Dryden and 
 his contemporaries were accustomed to lay their works 
 at the feet of their patrons. I could with almost equal 
 ease present myself at your hospitable lodge at Trinity, 
 in a coat embroidered like that in which Dryden, when 
 in statu pupillari there, may have waited on the Mas- 
 ter of his days. Perhaps, indeed, neither our language 
 nor our appearance has really been improved by the 
 exchange of the habits of our ancestors for those now 
 in use among us. But, at present, I gladly avail my- 
 self of the unceremonious fashions of our age to ad- 
 dress you, not in a formal inscription, but in a familiar 
 letter, since in such a letter I shall best be able to pur- 
 sue that discursive, course which will, I foresee, be nec- 
 essary for bringing under your notice some of the many 
 topics to which I am desirous to refer. 
 
 When, in the summer of 1849, her majesty was 
 pleased to appoint me to be her Professor of Modern 
 History at Cambridge, I consulted three, and three 
 only, of my friends, as to the means by which I could 
 most effectually discharge the duties of my office, ap- 
 prising each of them that the History of France was 
 the subject on which I first proposed to enter. "In 
 that case," answered Mr. John Austin (from whose 
 company no man ever returned without a fuller mind 
 and a warmer heart), " your business will be to ex- 
 
IV DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 plain the institutions of the old French monarchy. 
 There are no questions connected with the history of 
 that country which so readily admit, or which so much 
 require, illustration from a lecturer." Mr. Macaulay's 
 answer was, in suhstance, that of all the fields of 
 French History, that of the wars of religion was the 
 richest and the least exhausted ; but he added that no 
 man could be competent to take possession publicly of 
 that, or any other wide subject of historical inquiry, 
 without a preliminary silence, and a particular prep- 
 aration of at least two or three years. By yourself I 
 was told that the arrangements so recently made foi 
 the better conduct of our academical studies and ex- 
 animations proceeded on the assumption that the pub- 
 lie duties of my own office would be undertaken and 
 performed without delay ; that the abandonment of 
 them, even for a single year, would defeat one essen- 
 tial part of the general scheme, and would involve the 
 rest in confusion ; and that, therefore, the interest of 
 the University required that I should do my best at 
 once, and that I might do it with a good hope of a 
 kind and indulgent acceptance of the endeavor. 
 
 If I had consulted either my ease or my credit, I 
 should have been guided by Mr. Macaulay's advice. 
 But I soon became convinced that it was my duty 
 rather to defer to Mr. Austin's opinion and to yours. 
 I therefore delivered, in Easter Term, 1850, the first 
 twelve Lectures contained in the accompanying vol- 
 ume. In Easter Term, 1851, I added to them the re- 
 maining twelve. 
 
 I anticipate your answer, that thus far I have been 
 explaining why I lectured prematurely ; but that what 
 is really wanting is rather a defense for my now pub- 
 lishing precipitately. To render my apology on that 
 head intelligible, you must allow me, in sea phrase, tc 
 take a good offing. 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. \ 
 
 In the year 1812 I ceased to be an under-graduate, 
 and at once became so deeply immersed in the active 
 business of life at London, that when, after an interval 
 of thirty-eight years, I returned to Cambridge, it was 
 a scene in which I found almost all the interest of 
 perfect novelty. Most of the venerable old buildings 
 were indeed standing, and among the occupants of 
 them I could still recognize some few of my old college 
 contemporaries. But I soon ascertained that the revo- 
 lutionary spirit, which is so active in our courts and 
 Parliaments, was not less wakeful in our collegiate 
 halls and cloisters. 
 
 If I had the pen of Edward Gibbon, I could draw 
 from my own early experience a picture which would 
 form no unmeet companion for that which he has be- 
 queathed to us of his education at Oxford. The three 
 or four years during which I lived on the banks of the 
 Cam were passed in a very pleasant, though not a very 
 cheap hotel. But if they had been passed at the 
 Clarendon, in Bond Street, I do not think that the ex- 
 change would have deprived me of any aids for intel- 
 lectual discipline, or for acquiring literary or scientific 
 knowledge. 
 
 But in 1849 I discovered that not only those ancient 
 under-graduate liberties were overthrown, but that 
 even the tradition and memorial of them had passed 
 away. They had given place to innovations which 
 would have made the hair stand on end on those ven- 
 erable wigs which were worn by the " heads of houses" 
 in my time. All the old text-books in science and in 
 literature had been superseded. All the public exam- 
 inations had altered their character. Studies unheard 
 of in the first decade of the present century were either 
 occupying or contending for a foremost place in our 
 system of instruction. All our academical statutes 
 had undergone or were undergoing revision. Reform- 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 atory enactments had succeeded each other in such 
 number and with such rapidity as to exercise severe- 
 ly the skill of the most practiced interpreter of the law. 
 Every principle of education, however well establish- 
 ed , and every habit of teaching, however inveterate. 
 had been fearlessly questioned, and not seldom laid 
 aside. And presiding over all this movement I found 
 one dominant mind, informed by such an accumula- 
 tion of knowledge and experience as might have be- 
 come a patriarch, and yet animated by such indomita- 
 ble hopefulness and vivacity as might have been sup- 
 posed to be the exclusive privilege of boyhood. 
 
 In the contemplation of all these changes, my chief 
 solicitude, of course, was to ascertain what were the 
 particular duties which had devolved on myself. I 
 found that I was not only expected, like my predeces- 
 sors, to read public lectures on Modern History, but 
 that I was also to conduct examinations on that sub- 
 ject, sometimes alone, and sometimes in concert with 
 others alone in the case of pupils who, being unam- 
 bitious of honorary distinctions, might seek merely to 
 obtain from me a certificate of their acquaintance with 
 some one or two particular historical books ; in con- 
 cert with others in the case of candidates for rank and 
 honor among the students of the moral sciences. 
 
 I will not conceal from you that I regarded, and 
 still regard, with some regret, my share in this appor- 
 tionment of labor ; not, indeed, that I consider it either 
 as onerous or unequal, but that I am constrained to 
 view it as of very doubtful utility. 
 
 Within the compass of the " moral sciences" em- 
 braced in these examinations are included Moral Phi- 
 losophy, English Law, General Jurisprudence, Modern 
 History, and Political Economy. Our honorary dis- 
 tinctions are to be awarded for proficiency, not in any 
 one of these pursuits alone, but in them all collective- 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. Vll 
 
 ly. The candidates for such distinctions must, until 
 within a month or two of their examination, have con- 
 tinued to prosecute those scientific, literary, and the- 
 ological studies, in which the entire body of our pupils 
 are engaged throughout the whole of their academical 
 course. To myself, therefore, it seems simply impos- 
 sible that they should really be conversant with even 
 any one of the five moral sciences in question. A 
 young man who, under such circumstances, should 
 really be conversant with them all, might read the 
 life of the admirable Oriental without incredulity and 
 without despair. 
 
 We shall, however, from year to year, propose ques- 
 tions on all of those subjects, and we shall, undoubted- 
 ly, receive many ingenious and specious answers to 
 them. I, for one, shall read such answers with re- 
 gret ; for if there be any one habit of mind which I 
 should especially desire to discourage in men entering 
 into the business of life, it is the habit of substituting 
 a shabby plausibility for sound knowledge ; and how 
 can we avoid promoting that disingenuous and per- 
 nicious practice when we invite the aspirants to dis- 
 tinction among us to submit themselves to an exam- 
 ination in sciences which we have not allowed them 
 time to investigate or to understand ? For example, 
 let any one who ever- devoted himself to the study of 
 the law of England say whether a few brief intersti- 
 tial hours, stolen with difficulty from his indispensable 
 academical pursuits, will enable a young man, in his 
 twenty-first or twenty-second year, to know any thing 
 worth the knowing of that boundless, and toilsome, 
 and ever-shifting field of inquiry. Yet an adroit and 
 dexterous man may, even under such circumstances, 
 assume the deceptive semblance of such knowledge. 
 I could, therefore, earnestly have wished that each 
 candidate for distinction in the moral sciences had 
 
Vill DEDICATORY LETTER, 
 
 been permitted to choose some one such science to 
 which alone his examination was to be confined, and 
 had also been first discharged from his classical and 
 mathematical labors during a period sufficiently long 
 to enable him to pursue it below the mere surface. 
 
 My duty, however, being to obey the law as I found 
 it, I applied myself to discover how such obedience 
 could be most effectually rendered. The result was, 
 to disclose to me some formidable and hardly antici- 
 pated difficulties. Thus I learned, that of the gentle- 
 men whom I was to instruct and to examine, a con- 
 siderable portion had no acquaintance with any mod- 
 ern language except their own, and that the most pop- 
 ular and elementary French works on the History of 
 France were apparently unknown to a still greater 
 number of them. Among such of them with whom 
 I conversed, I found, therefore, an almost unanimous 
 , solicitude to be directed to some English book on the 
 subject of French history, by the aid of which they 
 might prepare themselves for what was to be taught 
 in the lecture-room. 
 
 I need not remind you that the only such books are 
 Robertson's " Introduction to the History of Charles 
 V.," and the first volume of Mr. Hallam's "View of 
 the State of Europe during the Middle Ages," or rather 
 so much of that volume as is contained in its first and 
 second chapters. The second of those chapters so com- 
 pletely answered the demand of rny pupils, that, in 
 the fifth of the following Lectures, I referred them to 
 it and to Robertson as their guides on every question 
 connected with the French Feudal System. But the 
 first of Mr. Hallam's chapters, which contains an epit- 
 ome of the history of France from its conquest by 
 Clovis to the invasion of Naples by Charles VIII., was 
 not equally suited to my immediate purpose ; for my 
 plan embraced inquiries extending far beyond the 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. IX 
 
 reign of Charles VIII., and the very circumstance 
 which constitutes the beauty and excellence of that 
 passage of the " View of the State of Europe during 
 the Middle Ages" I mean the wonderful art with 
 which a narrative so lumindus and so comprehensive 
 is compressed into so small a space though befitting 
 it for higher ends, unfits it for serving as a class or 
 lecture book. Mr. Hallam every where presupposes in 
 his readers an extent and a variety of previous inform- 
 ation which it was impossible for me to ascribe to the 
 great majority of my youthful audience. 
 
 I found, therefore, that, in order to teach the His- 
 tory of France, I must begin by drawing up an intro- 
 duction to it, with the omission of the whole subject 
 of the feudal system, on which Mr. Hallam had left 
 me nothing material to say. I sought, however, dili- 
 gently at Paris, during a residence of several months 
 there, for any book, a translation of which might re- 
 lieve me from the labor of composing, and from the 
 risk of publishing, such an introduction. Finding no 
 such book, I performed that labor, as I now incur that 
 risk. 
 
 It has, indeed, been suggested to me that an annual 
 recitation of my lectures would supersede the necessity 
 of sending them to the press. My answer is, that, aft- 
 er once making the experiment, I have renounced the 
 hope of being ever able to repeat the same discourses 
 year after year. I must venture to add, that I am 
 extremely skeptical as to the real value of public oral 
 teaching on such a subject as mine. If Abelard him- 
 self were living now, I believe that he would address 
 his instructions, not to the ears of thousands crowding 
 round his chair, but to the eyes of myriads reading 
 them in studious seclusion. 
 
 I trust, therefore, that, in publishing this book with- 
 out farther delay, I am really acting in the spirit of 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 that advice for which I am indebted to you. In the 
 early delivery and ill the early publication of my Lec- 
 tures, my object has been the same. It has been in 
 either case to meet an exigency for which I am bound, 
 to the best of my power 5 , to provide, and for which I 
 knew not how otherwise to make provision. 
 
 I trust, also, that I have been regardless of Mr. 
 Macaulay's admonition in appearance rather than in 
 reality. Such rapidity of execution would, indeed, be 
 altogether absurd, if, in giving this volume to the 
 world, I were a candidate for a place in that small and 
 illustrious company of historical writers to which he 
 and Mr. Hallam belong. But to disclaim any such 
 pretension would not be so much superfluous as it 
 would be ludicrous. 
 
 In the few prefatory words with which I opened 
 these Lectures at Cambridge, and which I have no 
 means of quoting except from memory, I remember to 
 have said to the senior members of the University, who 
 had done me the honor to attend on that occasion, that 
 I had nothing to offer which invited or which would 
 reward their attention ; for that, having expected to 
 address myself to those, and to those only, to whom 
 Modern History was an almost untrodden field, I had 
 * prepared nothing which was not perfectly simple, fa- 
 miliar, and elementary. The Lectures which, in ac- 
 cordance with that announcement, I then proceeded 
 to deliver, and which I now publish, constitute neither 
 a history, nor a series of historical treatises, but merely 
 a class or lecture book for the use of the students of 
 our University. I entirely disclaim for them any more 
 ambitious character. I have entertained no higher 
 design than that of laying before my pupils what I 
 suppose to be an accurate summary of the actual state 
 of a particular branch of the science I have to teach. 
 I have not undertaken to enlarge the limits of that 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. XI 
 
 science. I have not passed over, nor have I thought 
 myself at liberty to pass over, in silence, any material 
 fact, or any important consideration, merely because 
 it may have been adduced by some, or repeated by 
 many, before me. Of those who may turn over these 
 pages, not a few may perhaps, therefore, find in them 
 no material addition to their antecedent stock of knowl- 
 edge ; but to those whom I have undertaken to instruct, 
 and for whom alone I have written, I have good reason 
 to believe that a very large part of what they will find 
 in this volume will have the attraction of novelty. 
 
 In making this statement, I have no design to de- 
 preciate or to disparage my own labors. An histo- 
 rian aims at one kind of praise, a lecturer at another. 
 It was no reproach to our great grammarian, Roger 
 Ascham, that he did not teach such lessons as our 
 great critic Richard Bentley afterward taught. The 
 lectures which in former days you delivered to your 
 pupils on some of the inductive sciences were, I pre- 
 sume, far less profound and original than the history 
 which you have given to the learned world at large, 
 of those sciences collectively. 
 
 Neither do I design to represent this book as a com- 
 pilation. The plan of it, at least, is my own. In the 
 execution of that plan I have declined no labor, mental 
 or bodily, which I have been able to sustain. I have 
 examined all the authorities, original and secondary, 
 to which it has been in my power to refer, and I have 
 diligently meditated every result to which those in- 
 vestigations have appeared to me to lead. Having 
 done so, I have freely availed myself of the aids which 
 I have been able to derive from many of the great au- 
 thors of France. To have declined such aid was not, 
 I think, permitted to me ; for I am well assured that no 
 teacher who has not, like them, devoted a long course 
 of laborious years to the investigation of their national 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 archives, could habitually substitute his own conclu- 
 sions for theirs, without sacrificing the interest of his 
 pupils to the mere vanity of authorship. 
 
 The motives which forbade the great lecturers of 
 our times, MM. Guizot, Schlegel, and Fauriel, and 
 their more humble followers, from referring to the au- 
 thorities for every fact which they had occasion to 
 state, have compelled me to follow their example. I 
 have, however, referred to most of the writers whom 
 I have chiefly employed. Yet there is one omission 
 which I am anxious to take this opportunity of sup- 
 plying. I allude to the work of M. de Choiseul 
 Daillecourt on the Crusades a book far less known 
 than it deserves to be in England, or, as I should in- 
 fer, even in France itself. Having the surest grounds 
 for concluding that he is the best of all existing guides 
 on that subject (vast as is the multitude by whom it 
 has been recently handled), I have followed him with 
 a confidence which has been increased by every test 
 to which I have been able to subject the accuracy of 
 his statements and quotations. 
 
 I fear that I shall appear to have been almost as 
 forgetful of Mr. Austin's counsels as of those of Mr. 
 Macaulay ; for though, in deference to them, I have 
 endeavored to illustrate the municipal, the judicial, 
 the noble, the sacerdotal, the fiscal, and the representa- 
 tive institutions of the old French monarchy, yet I 
 have much more often and more largely deviated into 
 topics of a more popular kind. But a brief experience 
 convinced me that, to pursue the subject of those in- 
 stitutions into all their ramifications and details, and 
 to render such discussions interesting to my young au- 
 dience, it would have been necessary for me to possess 
 all Mr. Austin's boundless acquaintance with the his- 
 tory of France, vivified by an imagination as rich and 
 as sleepless as that of Mr. Macaulay. I doubt not that 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER. Xlll 
 
 my successors will have to address themselves to pupils 
 prepared to follow them into the most arid fields of his- 
 torical investigation. In the present times, I believe 
 that the choice must be made between habitually 
 handling topics of more general interest and speaking 
 to empty benches. 
 
 As you frequently condescended, and sometimes at 
 no small personal inconvenience, to afford me your 
 support and countenance by taking a seat among 
 my auditors, you may, perhaps, observe that my Lec- 
 tures, as they are no'w printed, differ in some re- 
 spects from those which were actually spoken. In 
 general they are unaltered, the words, as well as the 
 substance, being to a very great extent retained. But 
 with a view to perspicuity, I have in many places 
 changed the arrangement, and have added passages 
 which I could not have pronounced in my lecture- 
 room without violating that wholesome law or cus- 
 tom which requires every lecturer among us to close 
 his discourse as soon as his hour-glass shall have run 
 out its sands. 
 
 Such are the circumstances under which I have 
 written, and now publish, this book, and commend it 
 to your protection. I have long since thought that 
 the stories which we learned in our nurseries to the 
 prejudice of the giants must have been so many cal- 
 umnies ; for, in the whole of my intercourse with 
 mankind, I have perceived that a man's willingness 
 to be pleased, his indulgence to every honest attempt 
 to be either useful or agreeable, and his talent for de- 
 tecting something admirable or praiseworthy in what- 
 ever he reads or hears, are in exact proportion to his 
 own intellectual stature. I therefore present this 
 book to you, quite at ease as to the spirit in which 
 you will receive and criticise it; and without even 
 soliciting your indulgent kindness, because experience 
 
XIV DEDICATORY LETTER. 
 
 has taught me how largely and spontaneously it flows 
 toward every one who stands in need of it. 
 
 I am, my dear sir, most truly yours. 
 
 JAMES STEPHEN. 
 
 Riehmond-on-Thames, October, 1851. 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 On the Decline and Fall of the Romano-Gallic Province ..... Page 1 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 On the Decline and Fall of the. Merovingian Dynasty 29 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 On the Character and Influence of Charlemagne . 58 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 On the Decline and Fall of the Carlovingian Dynasty 83 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Municipalities of France. ... 107 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Eastern Crusades 135 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 On the Anti-feudal Influence of the Alhigensian Crusades 157 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 On the Influence of the Judicial on the Monarchical System of 
 France 190 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 On the Influence of the Privileged Orders on the Monarchy of 
 France 229 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 On the States-General of the Fourteenth Century 252 
 
 LECTURE XI. 
 On the States-General of the Fifteenth Century 281 
 
XVI CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE XII. 
 On the States-General of the Sixteenth Century Page 319 
 
 LECTURE XIII. 
 On the Sources and Management of the Revenues of France 349 
 
 LECTURE XIV. 
 On the Power of the Purse in France 369 
 
 LECTURE XV. 
 On the Reformation and the Wars of Religion 404 
 
 LECTURE XVI. 
 On the Reformation and the Wars of Religion 43 1 
 
 LECTURE XVII. 
 On the Power of the Pen in France 460 
 
 LECTURE XVIII. 
 On the Power of the Pen in France 501 
 
 LECTURE XIX. 
 On the Power of the Pen in France 527 
 
 '> >}". I 
 
 LECTURE XX. 
 
 On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Henry IV. and by 
 Richelieu 562 
 
 LECTURE XXL 
 On the Absolute Monarchy during the Minority of Louis XIV. . . 586 
 
 LECTURE XXII. 
 
 On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Colbert and Lou- 
 vois 610 
 
 LECTURE XXIII. 
 
 On the Absolute Monarchy as administered by Louis XIV. in 
 Person 652 
 
 LECTURE XXIV. 
 The Growth of the French and the English Monarchies compared 685 
 
LECTURES. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 ON THE DECLINE AND FALL.OF THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 
 
 IN the discourse which precedes and introduces his lectures 
 on Modern History, my immediate predecessor has, with char- 
 acteristic perspicuity, stated and resolved the problem how his 
 labors might best be rendered conducive to the advancement 
 of his pupils. He states himself to have declined, as imprac- 
 ticable, the plan of entering into the details of any historical 
 narrative. He informs us that, having at first indulged, he 
 ultimately abandoned, the hope of exhibiting an estimate and 
 summary of the workings of our common nature on the theatre 
 of the civilized world in recent times. He appears to have at 
 one time entertained, and afterward to have rejected, the de- 
 sign of passing in review various historical epochs, and of ex- 
 amining into the relations which they severally bore to each 
 other. Finally, we learn that, after revolving the utility of 
 each of these projects, -he at length adopted the conclusion that 
 he should most effectually improve those whom he had under- 
 taken to instruct, by teaching them, not what the history of 
 the world actually had been, but rather by what methods, with 
 what views, and under the guidance of what teachers, that his- 
 tory ought to be studied. 
 
 Pursuing this design, Mr. Smythe proceeded to show by co- 
 pious illustrations how history might be rescued from barren 
 details, and from generalities no less barren, and might be con- 
 verted into a practical doctrine and a nutritive science. He 
 proposed and investigated several of the great questions to 
 which.it gives birth, and instructed his pupils by what con* 
 duct of the understanding similar problems might be elicited 
 from the chronicles of past times, and might be resolved by 
 
 A, 
 
2 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 the moral and political sciences of the times in which we live. 
 He proceeded to recommend various courses of reading, adapt- 
 ed to the different lines of research in which his hearers might 
 ultimately engage, and measured by the leisure, whether more 
 or less considerable, which they might be able to bestow on the 
 prosecution of them. He then indicated, with force and brev- 
 ity, and with a candor no less generous than intrepid, what 
 were the merits, and what the defects, of the various authors 
 to whom they would have occasion to refer. 
 
 Great as are the obligations which Mr. Smythe has thus con- 
 ferred on the University, and on the world of letters at large, 
 an especial debt of gratitude is due to him from myself as his 
 successor ; for he has relieved me from many arduous duties, 
 which, without his aid, it would have been incumbent on me 
 to undertake. Assuming, and not, I trust, erroneously assum- 
 ing, that every one who shall enter on that course of study to 
 which I am about to direct you, will have first carefully pos- 
 sessed himself of the substance of Mr. Smythe's lectures, I am 
 able to advance at once to the accomplishment of the design 
 which I have myself projected, and to which (as indeed to all 
 inquiries into the history of modern times) his writings contain 
 an invaluable introduction. 
 
 To a great extent, though not perhaps entirely, I concur in 
 my predecessor's opinion, that it would be impossible to deliv- 
 er from this Chair a connected narrative of any series of his- 
 torical events. But, on the other hand, he by whom this Chair 
 is occupied will address his hearers to no useful purpose unless 
 they shall possess some accurate knowledge of those events to 
 which he will have occasion to refer. Thus, it will be my en- 
 deavor to explain the relation which some of the greater occur- 
 rences in the civilized world bear to each other and to the per- 
 manent springs of human action. But to those who may be 
 ignorant of those occurrences, every such explanation must be 
 merely empirical. The philosophy of History must be no bet- 
 ter than so much unprofitable dogmatism to him who does not 
 know what are the facts of history. Truth will never exert 
 her vital and prolific energy except in minds which have ac- 
 cumulated, digested, and arranged the premises from -which 
 truth is to be inferred. 
 
 But, though general principles, whether political, social, or 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 
 
 economical, will be dormant and barren in him who is unac- 
 quainted with the premises from which they are deduced, yet 
 an exact knowledge of those premises will often be salient as 
 a spring of truth, and germinant as a seed of truth, in him to 
 whom those principles have never been formally propounded. 
 Just as an extensive intercourse with mankind will teach us 
 more of the offices of daily life than we can learn from the 
 most assiduous of our solitary meditations, so we may often 
 gather from naked historical narratives more and deeper les- 
 sons of wisdom than we can derive from any abstracted his- 
 torical philosophy. This is especially true of such narratives 
 as render us the spectators and associates of those who in for- 
 mer times took a conspicuous part in the great dramatic action 
 of the civilized world. The reader of Froissart or of Philip de 
 Comines is introduced into a society, every member and every 
 vicissitude of which tacitly inculcates some affecting or some 
 weighty admonition ; and the least acute observer, when placed 
 in a scene so glowing with form and color, and so quickened 
 by ceaseless movement and vitality, becomes to a great extent 
 his own teacher. With no monitor instructing us how to draw 
 inferences from such books, we draw them almost unconsciously 
 for ourselves, and therefore easily apprehend, and cherish, and 
 retain them. 
 
 The candidates for the honorary distinctions which are 
 henceforth to reward proficiency in historical learning among 
 us, will have another and more obvious, if not a more weighty, 
 reason for studying the occurrences which connect the various 
 epochs of history with each other ; for all public examinations 
 must, as far as possible, point at what is most absolute, defi- 
 nite, and certain in our knowledge. An examination in histo- 
 ry should therefore (as I conceive) relate far more to such facts 
 (and there are many such) as admit of no reasonable doubt, 
 than to any philosophical theories, which, however just or pro- 
 found, can hardly be exempt from some infusion of error. 
 
 What, then, are those series of facts, or what those passages 
 of history, of which it will be necessary that, for the present, 
 such candidates should possess themselves ? Assuredly not 
 the whole of the various sequences of political events which 
 have occurred in all of the nations of the civilized world since 
 the subversion of the Roman empire not (that is) the entire 
 
4 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 compass of Modern History. An undertaking of such mag- 
 nitude would require of those who should embark in it the 
 abandonment of those classical and scientific pursuits to which 
 (as I rejoice to perceive) the Senate has reserved their ancient 
 and rightful supremacy among us. 
 
 But, though compelled to decline so vast and so ambitious 
 an enterprise, may we not direct the student, first, to some 
 synopsis of the whole range of the history of modern times, 
 and then to some abbreviated course of reading, which shall 
 enable him to verify and to appreciate it for himself? Many 
 writers in France, in Germany, and in England have taken 
 such a survey of the state and progress of Christendom during 
 the last few centuries. Such, indeed (though incidentally and 
 indirectly), was one of the tasks which Mr. Smythe proposed 
 to himself, and partly executed. "Why not follow so eminent 
 and so successful an example ? 
 
 The answer is, that such historical outlines were drawn by 
 Mr. Smythe, and by others, for purposes essentially different 
 from those which I am bound to keep in view. Their design 
 -was either to prepare the future students of ancient chroni- 
 cles and records for the journey awaiting them, or to enable 
 those who had actually performed that journey to methodize, 
 to consolidate, and to revive the knowledge acquired in the 
 progress of it. My design is to conduct and accompany my 
 hearers through as large a part as we may be able to trav- 
 erse of that laborious pilgrimage. If, without submitting our- 
 selves to the fatigues and privations of the way, we should be 
 satisfied to vault from one eminence to another, overleaping 
 all that is wearisome in the intermediate distances, we should 
 at best acquire but a slight and transient knowledge of the 
 region over which we had passed, even though our flight across 
 it had been upborne by the wit and sagacity of Yoltaire, or by 
 the far deeper and more comprehensive wisdom of Bossuet. 
 
 Renouncing, therefore, both the hope of grasping the whole 
 of Modern History in its details, and the scheme of reducing 
 it into the form of a compendious summary, it remains that 
 we select, as the subject of our inquiries, the annals of some 
 one of the states which collectively compose the European or 
 Christian commonwealth. The state best adapted for our pur- 
 pose will be that which has maintained the most in timate anil 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. O 
 
 influential relations with the other members of that great fra- 
 ternity. If there be any people whose history may fitly he 
 compared to a main channel to which the histories of all other 
 nations are tributary, or which resembles a range of highlands 
 from which extensive and commanding views of all the adja- 
 cent territories can be obtained, that narrative, at once so cen- 
 tral and so eminent, will not only develop a connected series 
 of events composing the corporate life or existence of one great 
 people, but will unite and hold together much of what we are 
 most interested to know of the national life of the other states 
 of the civilized world. In studying such a national story, we 
 shall neither, on the one hand, be bewildered amid the intri- 
 cacies and the multitude of incoherent incidents, nor, on the 
 other hand, be hedged up within such narrow fences as to be 
 excluded from an occasional survey of the simultaneous prog- 
 ress of all the European sovereignties, from their original bar- 
 barism to their actual civilization. 
 
 There are natural feelings or prejudices which would pre- 
 dispose us to regard our own land as forming such a centre of 
 the political system to which it belongs. I believe, however, 
 that the more deliberate judgment of us all will induce us rather 
 to assign that distinction to France ; for, among the temporal 
 powers of the "Western world, monarchical France enjoyed the 
 longest, if not the most abundant, possession of whatever con- 
 stitutes national greatness ; such as unity and continuity of 
 government, military power, loyalty and love of country, intel- 
 lectual eminence, and skill in those social arts by which life is 
 humanized and softened. In industry, and wealth, and com- 
 merce, in the great science of ruling man, in the love and the 
 right use of freedom, and especially of spiritual freedom, En- 
 gland, indeed, has neither a superior nor a rival. In Northern 
 Italy, it is true, art and science were approaching their merid- 
 ian splendor, while France was yet scarcely emerging from 
 mental darkness. The Germanic body, it may be admitted, 
 was already holding in check the papal despotism and pre- 
 paring the way for the Reformation, and assuming its office 
 of conservator of the national independence in Europe, before 
 France had contributed any thing to the general interests of 
 mankind, or had learned to understand or to prosecute her own. 
 Yet, amid disasters so fearful and so protracted as no other 
 
6 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 people have endured in modern times, the French have, during 
 the last six centuries, from causes to be hereafter noticed, been 
 the arbiters of peace and war in Europe ; have borne to the 
 other European states relations more intimate and more mul- 
 tiplied than have been maintained by any other power with 
 its neighbors ; have diffused their manners, their language, 
 their literature, and their ideas even among the most zealous 
 antagonists of their power ; and have irresistibly attracted the 
 gaze, and not seldom the reluctant gaze, of all other people 
 toward their policy, their institutions, and their wonderful suc- 
 cession of actors on the stage of public life among them of 
 actors whom we occasionally love and not seldom abhor 
 whom we sometimes regard with admiration, but more often 
 with amazement whose biographies compose the greater part 
 of the history of their nation who have left no heights of virtue 
 or of wisdom unsealed, no depths of guilt or folly unfathomed, 
 and who exhibit in the strongest relief every conceivable va- 
 riety of human character unless, indeed, it be that they are 
 unable to be dull. On the history of this great people I there- 
 fore propose to enter. 
 
 The eventful scene of which, during the last six thousand 
 years, this world has been the theatre, when interpreted by 
 the revelation which has been made to man of the divine coun- 
 sels, may be viewed as a drama of which retribution is the law, 
 opinion the chief agent, and the improvement and ultimate 
 happiness of our race the appointed, though remote catastrophe. 
 And, to pursue the image one step farther, the annals of each 
 separate state may be considered as an under-plot, harmonizing 
 with the general action, and conducing to its more complete 
 development. With the progress of time, the power of opinion 
 has continually increased, until in these latter days it has acted 
 with a force, a consistency, and a perseverance altogether un- 
 known in the earlier ages of the world. From our common 
 Christianity, from the simultaneous condensation and diffu- 
 sion of the ecclesiastical authority, from the art of printing, 
 from the new facilities of intercourse between distant places, 
 from the growth of great cities, of commerce, and of wealth, 
 and from a wider intercommunity of laws and of legal cus- 
 toms, have at length resulted a free interchange of thought, 
 and a general concurrence of thought, to which mankind never 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 7 
 
 before attained, and a consequent union among the chief mem- 
 bers of the great human family to which mankind never before 
 aspired. To trace out the progress of public opinion in mold- 
 ing the character and the condition of the nations is the high- 
 est office of History, and especially of Modern History. To 
 indicate some of the stages of that progress in France is the 
 arduous task which I have ventured to propose to myself. 
 How imperfectly it must be executed, within the contracted 
 limits of the time assigned to me, it would be superfluous to 
 explain. 
 
 The history of the French people divides itself into three 
 principal eras. The first embraces the long and tardy passage 
 from the Roman despotism to the establishment of the abso- 
 lute monarchy under Charles VIII. and his immediate success- 
 ors. The second, commencing with the accession of that sov- 
 ereign, and terminating with the age of Louis XIV., includes" 
 the period of the greatness and glories of that monarchy. The 
 third, comprising the decline and fall of it, may be said to 
 commence with the accession of Louis XV., and to be con- 
 summated at the French Revolution of 1789. During the pres- 
 ent term I shall confine myself to the two earliest of those 
 eras. 
 
 For your assistance in prosecuting these inquiries, I could 
 much wish to indicate to you some history of France, in our 
 own language, which rises above mediocrity ; or, indeed, to in- 
 dicate any which does not fall below it. But I know of no 
 such book. Even the great French historians of their native 
 land, who nourished "before our own times, are to be read cau- 
 tiously and with much distrust, for they are arraigned as ig- 
 norant, as faithless, or as narrow-minded by the most emi- 
 nent of those writers in that country, who have, of late years, 
 imparted to history a character so nearly approaching to that 
 of the more exact moral sciences. 
 
 The earliest of those who gave to the world a complete his- 
 tory of France is Mezerai. His work was published exactly 
 two hundred years ago. He makes no secret of his ignorance 
 of the original sources of historical information, but avows 
 himself to be a compiler from the compilations of others. He 
 is to be studied rather as a commentator than as an historian, 
 and is more to be admired for the courage with which he as- 
 
8 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 sumed and exercised in the reign .of Louis XIY. a censorsnip 
 on the former rulers of France, than for any accurate knowl- 
 edge or profound appreciation of the course of events which he 
 has related. 
 
 After an interval of sixty years, Father Daniel, a Jesuit, 
 undertook to penetrate into those deeper and more remote 
 springs of knowledge which Mezerai had neglected, and pro- 
 duced a work of which the earlier part is of eminent value, and 
 far superior to the rest. His merits as an antiquarian are uni- 
 versally acknowledged. He is entitled to the still higher praise 
 of being among the earliest masters in modern times of what 
 may be called the art of historical painting. But the more 
 closely he approached his own age, the more both his knowl- 
 edge and his impartiality declined. Having shown, in the 
 commencement of his work, how history ought to be written, 
 he showed, in the latter stages of it, how much the prejudices 
 of a party and a profession may disqualify any one from being 
 a judge of the conduct and the motives of the men of other 
 days. 
 
 At the distance of forty years, Father Daniel was succeed- 
 ed by the Abbe Yelly, whose history of France was contin 
 ued by Yillaret, and afterward by Gamier. This series, and 
 especially the first part of it, once enjoyed a very high popu- 
 larity, which it has still partly retained, although Velly and 
 Villaret have gradually fallen in the estimation of the best 
 judges. Yelly is charged by them with great ignorance of 
 his subject and with reckless plagiarisms. The fascination 
 which he once exercised is akin to that which has obtained a 
 permanent place in literature for Pope's translation of the 
 " Iliad." He excelled in those artifices of style by which the 
 thoughts, the characters, and the imagery of remote times are 
 embellished with the refinement and the graces of the age to 
 which the writer belongs. His continuator Yillaret, on the 
 other hand-, was infected by an unfortunate taste for senti- 
 mental and declamatory writing ; a habit in which he again 
 was imitated by his follower Grarnier, who added to this mis- 
 placed rhetoric the most wearisome prolixity in insignificant 
 details. 
 
 In the commencement of the present century, M. Anquetil 
 published what is, in effect, little more than an abridgment a 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 
 
 very useful abridgment indeed of the histories of Daniel, Yel- 
 ly, YiUaret, and Grarnier. 
 
 M. de Sismondi followed. His profound acquaintance with 
 all the original authorities ; his almost boundless learning ; the 
 laborious fidelity with which he has conducted his inquiries 
 and exhibited the results of them ; &.ad the occasional, though 
 infrequent lights which his philosophy has enabled him to cast 
 over the narrative in which he is engaged, elevate him far 
 above all the French historians by whom he was preceded. It 
 must be confessed, however, that his work is heavy and weari- 
 some ; that his merits are rather those of an annalist than an 
 historian ; that he is oppressed with the multitude and extent 
 of his own materials, and is defective in the great arts of sub- 
 ordinating the accessory to the principal incidents of his nar- 
 rative, and of grouping characters and events into separate and 
 definite masses. M. de Sismondi is, nevertheless, the writer 
 to whom those who may accompany me in my proposed in- 
 quiries should chiefly address themselves. There is, indeed, at 
 present, in the course of publication, a new history of France, 
 by M. Henri Martin, which, however, is still incomplete, and 
 with which I am but very slightly acquainted. A similar and 
 much shorter work has been published by M. Michelet, of whom, 
 in this place, I am unwilling to say any thing, because I am 
 unable to characterize his writings except in terms which 
 might seem to fail in the respect due to a living author who 
 has long enjoyed much popularity, and to whom no one will 
 deny the praise of eloquence and of learning. 
 
 In thus suggesting M. de Sismondi's history to my hearers 
 as a text-book, I am bound reluctantly to add, that his Repub- 
 lican principles render him the stern, and not seldom the un- 
 just, accuser of almost all those who ever administered the 
 government of Monarchical France. His theological opinionsj 
 whatever they may be (for they are studiously kept out of 
 sight), have made him an almost equally severe censor of all 
 those to whom -the Church has delegated the exercise not only 
 of her usurped authority, but of her legitimate powers. M. 
 de Sismondi's liberality is not seldom too active for his charity. 
 
 Every one is probably aware that, in the unwrought mate- 
 rials of her national history, the literature of France is rich 
 beyond the competition of any other country, The re-tearohes 
 
10 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 of the Benedictines, the memoirs of the French Academy, with 
 the various provincial histories, have left no part of the anti- 
 quities unexplored; while her chroniclers, such as Joinville 
 and Froissart, and her writers of memoirs, such as Philip de 
 Comines and Sully, are at once the inventors and almost the 
 exclusive cultivators of a style of which it is scarcely possible 
 to say whether it is more instructive or delightful. 
 
 But I am aware that, to those who are engaged in our reg- 
 ular course of academical studies, it is impossible to pursue an 
 sxtensive course of reading in this or in any other department 
 of modern history. For my immediate purpose, therefore, I 
 content myself with referring you to a series of books, which, 
 though not of very formidable extent, may collectively afford 
 a sufficient survey of the history of France during the period 
 to be embraced in the lectures which I propose to deliver dur- 
 ing the present academical term. They are, 1st, Sismondi's 
 History till the end of the reign of Louis XIY. ; 2d, the Abrege 
 Chronologique of the President Henault to the same period; 
 3d, that part of Malte Brun, or of Arrowsmith's Abridgment 
 of Malte Brun, which relates to the geography of France ; 4th, 
 the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles V. ; 5th, that 
 part of Mr. Hallam's History of the Middle Ages which relates 
 to France ; 6th, M. Gruizot's Lectures on the Progress of Civil- 
 ization in that country; 7th, the Memoirs of Yillehardouin, 
 Joinville, Froissart, and Philip de Comines ; 8th, Gruicciardini ; 
 9th, the first book of the History of the Council of Trent, by 
 Paoli Sarpi; 10th, Davila; llth, the Economies Royales of 
 Sully ; 12th, the Life of Richelieu, by M. Jay ; 13th, M. Bazin's 
 History of France under Louis XIII., and under the Ministry 
 of Mazarin ; 14th, St. Aulaire's History of the Fronde ; 15th, 
 the Memoirs of De Retz and of Mde. de Motteville ; 16th Yol- 
 taire's Siecle de Louis XIY. ; and, lastly, the Memoirs of Dan- 
 geau and of St. Simon, during the reign of that monarch. 
 
 Some attention must also be bestowed on the physical geog- 
 raphy of France as connected with her political and social his- 
 tory. The limits which in our own days she has been accus- 
 tomed to claim as having been assigned to her by the hand of 
 Nature, were actually enjoyed by Transalpine G-aul at the time 
 of the invasion of Caesar, and, to a great extent, even by mod- 
 ern France as lately as the close of the reign of Charles YIIL 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. IL 
 
 The Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, the Ocean, and the Rhine, 
 from its mouths till it reaches the Alps, or their secondary 
 chains, the Jura and the Vosges, circumscribe a territory the 
 whole of which was once the inheritance of the Gallic race. 
 The five great rivers by which it is watered, with their respect- 
 ive tributaries, constitute one great connected system of inter- 
 nal navigation. The high lands from which they flow, includ- 
 ing all the country between the Alps and the lower slopes of the 
 Vosges and the Cevennes, with the table-land of Auvergne, have 
 ever been the fastnesses of national independence. The low 
 lands, extending from these more elevated regions to the ocean, 
 have been the battle-fields of the successive invaders and con- 
 querors of Graul. 
 
 With but few exceptions, the historians of France assume 
 and suppose the existence of the French monarchy as a distinct 
 state, and of the French people as a distinct nation, under each 
 of the dynasties which were established successively in the per- 
 son of Clovis, of Charlemagne, and of Hugues Capet. This 
 misuse of words has induced much substantial error. The 
 Frankish or Franco- Grallic empire had never really embraced 
 more of Graul than lies between the Rhine and the Loire, until, 
 by the cession of the Emperor Justinian, Provence was added 
 to it. To the Bretons the Franks were known, not as fellow- 
 subjects, but as allies. By the people of Aquitaine they were 
 regarded only as invaders and as enemies. It was not till the 
 dissolution of the Frankish empire, and the consequent growth 
 of the Feudal Confederation, that even the basis can be said to 
 have been laid of the French monarchy, properly so called. It 
 was not till nearly two centuries had elapsed after the establish- 
 ment of feudalism, that the various states of which that mon- 
 archy was at last composed, were fused into one great political 
 body. The history of France, and even the separate existence 
 of France, begins, therefore, not with the first dynasty, but 
 with the third ; not with the conquests of Clovis, but with the 
 election of Hugues Capet. 
 
 It might seem to follow that the inquiries into which we are 
 about to enter should also commence with that election ; and 
 that inference might perhaps be just if my object were to in- 
 vestigate the incidents, political and military, which distin- 
 guished the reigns of the Capetian monarchs. But as I propose 
 
12 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 to consider chiefly, if not exclusively, tlie formation and growth 
 of the civil government, and of the national institutions of the 
 French people, it will be necessary to advert to the state of 
 G-aul both at the dissolution of the Roman empire and during 
 the existence of the empire of the Franks, before we attempt to 
 study the progress of France under the third and latest dynasty ; 
 for, unless our retrospect be carried back to the fountains, we 
 shall in vain attempt to trace the current of the constitutional 
 history of that kingdom. I can not, indeed, promise much en- 
 tertainment from such a retrospect. "Whoever engages in it 
 must prepare himself for much which, if not barren, may at 
 least prove wearisome and uninteresting. Yet the general prob- 
 lems which he will have to consider are not very numerous. 
 They may all be resolved into the five following inquiries. 
 First) What were the nature and what the causes of those 
 changes, social and political, which conducted G-aul from the 
 state of a Roman province to that of a feudal sovereignty of 
 princes confederate with each other, but all subject to one com- 
 mon head or suzerain ? Secondly, What was the real charac- 
 ter of that feudal sovereignty, and what its influence on the 
 future condition of France ? Thirdly, What were the causes, 
 social and political, which conducted France from the state of a 
 feudal confederation to that of an absolute monarchy ? Fourth- 
 ly, What was the real character of that monarchy, and what its 
 influence on the future condition of France? And, fifthly, 
 What were the causes of its decline and of its fall at the French 
 Revolution of 1789 ? 
 
 Lightly as the hours at my command here will enable me, 
 at any time, to touch on all or any of these topics, I shall not, 
 in the present academical term, be able to reach the fifth and 
 last of them ; and, for reasons to be hereafter explained, I 
 shall pass over in silence the second, which respects the char- 
 acter and influence of the feudal system. To render my plan 
 regarding the rest as intelligible as may be to my hearers, I 
 proceed to state what are the more specific questions which I 
 propose to consider under each of the three other general heads 
 to what I have already referred. 
 
 1. I design then, first, very briefly to inquire, What were 
 the internal causes which detached the Romano- Gallic prov- 
 ince from the empire of E ome, and transferred it to the domin* 
 ion of the Franks ? 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 13 
 
 2. I shall next attempt to explain why the first Frankish 
 dynasty (that of the Merovingians) was superseded by the dy- 
 nasty of Pepin in his own person, and in the persons of his 
 Carlovingian descendants. 
 
 3. The character and influence of Charlemagne will then 
 engage our attention. 
 
 4. We shall have to consider why, in the persons of his de- 
 scendants, the Carlovingian dominion gave place to the Feudal 
 Confederation under the suzerainte of Hugues Capet. 
 
 5. Next in order will be the inquiry into the creation or de- 
 velopment of the municipalities of France as one of the means 
 of subverting the Feudal, and of elevating the Monarchical 
 power. 
 
 6. We shall endeavor to trace the influence of the Crusades 
 in producing the same results. 
 
 7. The manner in which those results were promoted by 
 the Crusade against the Albigenses that is, by the invasions 
 of Southern by Northern France will then be considered. 
 
 8. Our next problem will be, In what manner the judicial 
 system and institutions of France promoted the Monarchical 
 at the expense of the Feudal dominion. 
 
 9. We shall then consider why the authority of the privi- 
 leged orders of France, sacerdotal and noble, did not avert 
 the growth of the absolute dominion of the French monarchs 
 
 10. I shall attempt to show why the growth of that Mo- 
 narchical despotism was not arrested by the States- General 
 of France. 
 
 11. It will afterward be necessary to inquire why it was 
 not arrested by that power of the purse which belonged, at 
 least in theory, to the Seignorial Courts and to the States- 
 General. 
 
 12. I propose to investigate the reasons why the Reforma- 
 tion did not yield in France its appropriate fruits of civil lib- 
 erty. 
 
 13. In immediate connection with that subject, I shall (as 
 far as my time will allow) enter on the corresponding inquiry, 
 Why literature, the mother of freedom in other lands, failed to 
 give birth to it in Monarchical France. 
 
 14. Passing to the consideration of the real character and 
 influence of that monarchy, I hope to explain the transition 
 
14 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 from the paternal rule of Henry IV. to the stern despotism ol 
 Richelieu. 
 
 15. The struggle of the Fronde for constitutional freedom 
 and the administration of Mazarin will then occupy our at- 
 tention. 
 
 16. We shall afterward pass to a review of the government 
 of France under Colbert ; and, 
 
 Finally, my lectures for the present term will close with an 
 attempt to estimate the administration of that government by 
 Louis XIY. in person. 
 
 Recurring to the preceding arrangement, I now proceed, 
 though very briefly, to inquire, What were the internal causes 
 which detached the Romano-Gallic province from the empire 
 of Rome, and transferred it to the dominion of the Franks ? 
 
 Hereditary international hatred has never exhibited itself 
 with more bitterness or greater deformity than between the 
 Romans and the Gauls. The "proprium atque insitum^in 
 Romanes odium," which Livy ascribes to the Gallic people, 
 was repaid by an enmity not less inveterate. During very 
 nearly five centuries, the two nations waged against each other 
 an internecine warfare ; and, from the time of Brennus to the 
 days of Hannibal, the advantage was, almost invariably, with 
 those whom Rome characterized as barbarians. After their 
 victory at Allia, their entrance into the city, and their siege 
 of the capital, they devastated the Latian territory throughout 
 seventeen successive years. At the head of the great Italian 
 confederacy, their descendants encountered consular armies at 
 Sentinum, at Aretinum, at the Lake Yadimon, at Fesulse, and 
 at Telamone. In the first Punic war they undertook the de- 
 fense of the Carthaginian cities in Sicily. In the second, they 
 composed a large majority of the force with which Hanni- 
 bal triumphed at Placentia, Trebia, Thrasymene, and Cannae. 
 They followed him to Africa, and partook of his defeat at 
 Zama. And then came the day of fearful retribution. Ex- 
 pelled from Italy, invaded in Gaul, compelled to witness the 
 settlement among them of the Roman colony of Narbonne, and 
 to cede to Rome the province afterward known as Gallia Nar- 
 bonensis, the Gauls had also to undergo, in their conflict with 
 Marius, that defeat which half exterminated their Kimric or 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 15 
 
 Belgic tribes, and for which Rome hailed the conqueror as her 
 third founder, and poured out libations to him as to a god. 
 And then appeared, to the north of the Alps, the greatest of 
 the warriors, and perhaps the greatest of the historians, whom 
 Rome has produced; whose genius is, however, insufficient 
 to rescue from' abhorrence the carnage which he both accom- 
 plished and recorded. The best apology of Caesar is, that he 
 was the avenger of the wrongs and humiliations of centuries. 
 The best eulogy on the Grauls is, that even he, detailing with 
 a hostile pen his relentless warfare against them, has drawn 
 a picture with which the annals of Rome itself have nothing 
 to compare as an exhibition of national heroism. Distracted 
 as they were by dissensions between the different races, the 
 different cities, and the different parties in the same cities of 
 their common country, they balanced during nine years the 
 arms of the wealthiest, the most powerful, and the most war- 
 like of the nations of the earth, conducted by the greatest of 
 her commanders, and possessing the advantage of a secure 
 basis for their military operations in the Roman colonies on 
 the shores of the Mediterranean. Nothing which either vir- 
 tue or courage, craft or desperation could suggest, was left 
 unattempted for their defense. The Duguesclins, the Colig- 
 nis, and the Condes of a far distant age might pass for anti- 
 types of Ambiorix, Dumnorix, and Yercingetorix, and of the 
 other Gaulish chieftains whom the pen of Caesar has deline- 
 ated. Defeated, but not subdued, they prolonged their strug- 
 gle for independence during more than a century after his 
 death ; nor was it till the reign of Vespasian that, finally as- 
 suming the character of a Roman province, Graul adopted the 
 institutions, imitated the manners, and acquired the language 
 of Rome. 
 
 Two centuries of comparative tranquillity succeeded. If 
 the eye be directed merely to the surface of society during 
 that period, it may be depicted in the most brilliant colors. 
 From the Mediterranean to the Scheldt might be numbered 
 one hundred and fifteen cities, rivaling those of Italy in wealth, 
 in population, and in architecture. Of these, Treves and Aries 
 had the character of capitals. Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and 
 Strasbourg frequently became imperial residences. In each 
 of these cities was a municipal government, of which Rome 
 
16 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 herself supplied the model. All the arts which minister to the 
 luxuries of the rich, flourished in them. The nobler pursuits 
 of learning were widely cultivated in schools established there 
 by Augustus, and enlarged by Claudius. From Pliny and Ju- 
 venal we learn how large was the demand for books at Lyons, 
 and how great the eminence of the rhetoricians of that city. 
 Terentius Yarro and Trogus Pompeius among historians, Cor* 
 nelius Gfallus and Petronius among poets, were either natives 
 or inhabitants of Gaul. In the letters of Pliny may be read 
 an account of the purchase made by one Grallic city of a statue 
 of Mercury, on which a Greek sculptor had bestowed ten years' 
 labor, and for which he declares that the incredible sum of for- 
 ty millions of sesterces, or about d320,000 sterling, was paid. 
 In the eleventh book of the Annals of Tacitus may also be 
 seen an account of the elevation and fall of Valerius, a native 
 Graul, whose story illustrates the facility with which, in those 
 times, the highest dignities of the empire could be attained by 
 the wealthy and powerful natives of that once abhorred and 
 dreaded race. 
 
 But if we penetrate below the brilliant surface of civic so- 
 ciety, we may, with equal truth, employ the darkest colors in 
 depicting the state of Graul between her final submission to 
 Rome and her subjugation by the Burgundians, the Yisigoths, 
 and the Franks. The changes which the habits, and, with 
 them, the opinions of the people, underwent in that interval, 
 may be considered as relating, first, to their nationality ; sec- 
 ondly, to their civic institutions ; thirdly, to the public reve- 
 nue ; fourthly, to their social condition ; fifthly, to their lan- 
 guage ; and, lastly, to their religion. 
 
 First, then, when invaded by Csesar, and when finally sub- 
 jugated under Civilis, Graul was inhabited by three distinct 
 races of people, among each of whom the sentiment of national 
 unity manifested itself in public spirit, with all its attendant 
 virtues, and, in antipathy to their neighbors, with all its at- 
 tendant crimes. But when Gaul had become a mere Roman 
 province, that sentiment became rapidly, and altogether, ex- 
 tinct. Under the successors of Vespasian, the conquered 
 tribes no longer thought of themselves as belonging to Aqui- 
 taine, or to Belgic or to Celtic Graul. But neither had they 
 learn erl to consider themselves as citizens of the Western em- 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 17 
 
 pire. They heard of the rise and fall of new Caesars, of im- 
 perial victories and defeats, of invasions of Italy, and of mu- 
 tinies among the Praetorian Gruards, with the kind of indiffer- 
 ence with which we may suppose the people of the Carnatic 
 to have received the intelligence of our recent wars in the 
 Punjaub, or of t-he succession of governors-general at Calcutta. 
 
 It appears, indeed, from a fragment of Livy, that Augustus 
 convoked a general assembly of the Gauls at Narbonne ; and, 
 at the distance of a hundred years, a similar assembly seems 
 to have been held at Rheims, to arrange their final submission 
 to his successors. But no subsequent mention occurs of any 
 such national convention until the fifth century, when Hono- 
 rius made an attempt to revive their ancient diets as an in- 
 strument of defense against the Barbaric invaders. The living 
 spirit had then, however, passed away, and the dead form was 
 evoked in vain. The sentiment of nationality was no more. 
 The love of country was extinct, and with it had departed the 
 best security for virtue, for courage, for freedom, for individual 
 safety, and for social happiness. 
 
 But, secondly, the civic institutions of Graul, even in her 
 provincial state, might seem to have been well adapted to 
 nourish and to shelter among her people this national spirit ; 
 for, in appearance at least, her cities were governed by the 
 same polity to which Rome herself, and the great body of her 
 allies, had been indebted for their greatness. In the days of 
 the republic, Marseilles and the adjacent G-reek settlements, 
 Narbonne and the other Roman colonies, had become rich and 
 powerful, and had enjoyed their full share in the dominion of 
 Rome. But in the second and three following centuries, the 
 cities of the Grallic province retained nothing of free municipal 
 government but the hollow and deceptive semblance. Their 
 magistracies had ceased to be electoral. All civic offices were 
 divided among a small local aristocracy, who were called to 
 the discharge of them in rotation or by lot. The great mass 
 of the inhabitants of the cities was composed of emancipated 
 slaves, or of proprietors or cultivators of land who had sought 
 within their walls a temporary refuge from oppression. Im- 
 perial rescripts continually interfered with the trades and 
 common business of life, with the franchises of the citizens, 
 and especially with the franchise of local legislation. But the 
 
 B 
 
18 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 decay of the municipal greatness of G-aul was induced chiefly 
 by thi edicts which imposed on every municipality that fiscal 
 office, to which, in modern France, was given the title of 
 Farmer-General. The Curiales of each city were made re- 
 sponsible to the imperial treasury for the annual revenue, not 
 only of the city itself, but of the whole circumjacent territory. 
 It was their duty to remit these funds to the Praetorian Pre- 
 fect at Treves, or to his vicar at Aries. They were bound to 
 levy and equip the proportion, for which their city was respon- 
 sible, of the recruits annually raised for the imperial army. 
 They were required to provide for the conveyance and main- 
 tenance of all persons traveling at the public expense through 
 the districts under their superintendence. To acquit them- 
 selves of these various obligations, the Curiales had to appor- 
 tion the consequent expenditure between the inhabitants both 
 of their city and of the adjacent district. They were thus 
 placed in a position at once the most invidious and the most 
 dangerous. They had to answer the insatiable demands of 
 the imperial treasury, and to encounter the discontents, the 
 resistance, and the evasions of the contributors. To partici- 
 pate in a municipal government thus came to be regarded, 
 not as an honorable distinction, but as an unwelcome respon- 
 sibility. In the Justinian code may be found many rescripts 
 overruling claims for exemption from this service, although in 
 some of those cases the grounds alleged by the claimants 
 would seem to have been irresistibly strong. 
 
 Thirdly, the change whtch the Roman conquest effected in 
 the financial or fiscal system of Gaul was even yet more fatal 
 to the happiness and character of the provincials. Laws, till 
 then without example, were promulgated by the emperors for 
 the supply of the wants of the Roman treasury. No national 
 revenue, in the proper sense of the word, had ever been levied 
 in Graul while her people were still independent. But the 
 conquerors crushed the conquered people beneath a burden of 
 direct and improvident taxation, from which they had no longer 
 the energy to escape by resistance and revolt. A land tax, 
 rising to the almost incredible amount of one third of the net 
 produce of the land, rendered agriculture the most unprofit- 
 able, as, for other reasons, it was in those times among tne 
 most hazardous, of all the employments of capital. To en- 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 19 
 
 hance both the rigor and the absurdity of this impost, there 
 was a new assessment, or, as it was called, indiction, every 
 fifteenth year, when the contribution to be made from every 
 farm was determined according to the increased or diminished 
 productiveness of it. Nor was the cultivator entirely secure 
 that, even during that term, his liability to the fisc might not 
 be increased ; for on any urgent occasion the PrsBtorian Prefect 
 might enhance it by what was denominated a superindiction. 
 
 By confiscations, or by the right of succession to land-owners 
 who had died childless and intestate, the emperor became pos- 
 sessed of an immense territory in every part of Graul. Such 
 estates in such hands were, of course, unproductive. As the 
 imperial proprietor was no longer able to collect the land tax 
 from these districts, so he found himself also unable to derive 
 any rent from the greater part of them. Under the pressure 
 of the indiction, farmers could not be found to till the soil. 
 Many tracts of it were therefore abandoned, and many were 
 assigned to discharged soldiers, to be held on a species of mili- 
 tary tenure. Such was, at length, the depreciation of this 
 property, that, as we learn from still extant rescripts, an inde- 
 feasible title to public lands in the province was created in fa- 
 vor of any one who should occupy and cultivate them during 
 the period of only two years. At first sight, this unproductive- 
 ness of the public lands might appear rather as a waste of the 
 public resources, than as a direct fiscal oppression. But the 
 fact is otherwise. To promote the culture of these unprofita- 
 ble imperial domains' were invented corvees ; that is, the obli- 
 gation of personal services in conveying the produce of such 
 lands to the public magazines, and in repairing the roads along 
 which it was to be drawn. 
 
 To the land tax and the corvees, the rapacious and ignorant 
 financiers of Rome added a poll tax, payable by every female 
 from the age of twelve, and by every male from the age of 
 fourteen to the age, in either case, of sixty-five. The amount, 
 however, seems to have differed really, though not avowedly, 
 with the circumstances of the contributors. The maximum 
 per head was about eighty shillings of our money ; but it was 
 customary, because it was inevitable, to allow a considerable 
 number of poor persons to pass as a single person, and to make 
 up among them the required payment. 
 
20 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 The pressure of these accumulated burdens was 3ontinually 
 augmenting. As one tract of land after another was thrown 
 out of culture, the indiction on the rest "became more and more 
 oppressive. As increasing poverty diminished the number of 
 those who could contribute the full amount of their poll tax, 
 the demands on the less indigent rose in exact proportion to the 
 deficiency. The besom of fiscal oppression swept over the land 
 as if the locust or the tempest had passed across it. The ex- 
 actions of the tax-gatherer, beginning by the discouragement 
 of industry, were followed by dejection, by distress, by disease, 
 and by depopulation. 
 
 And yet, fourthly, the Roman conquest produced results still 
 more disastrous than these on the social condition of the Gallic 
 people. 
 
 "While Graul was yet independent, society had been divided 
 into three classes, consisting first of the free warriors and pro- 
 prietors ; secondly, of their clients or vassals (ambacti) ; and, 
 thirdly, of their slaves. A Highland chieftain of the seven- 
 teenth century, with his clansmen, may represent to us the re- 
 lation which subsisted between the two first of those classes 
 A body of English serfs of the twelfth century, adscripti gle- 
 bce, may stand as antitypes of the third 1 for the Grallic slave 
 was sometimes the fellow- workman and sometimes the partner 
 of his owner. In a country where manual labor was abundant, 
 and where the owner and the slave toiled together in the same 
 fields, partook of the same repasts, and slept beneath the same 
 roof, the bitterness of slavery could be scarcely known. 
 
 But when Graul was merged in the body of the Empire, an 
 entire social revolution followed. "While war had greatiy di- 
 minished the number of manual laborers, a change of manners 
 had greatly enlarged the demand for such labor. The old Gral- 
 lic chieftain began to aspire to the dignities, the indulgences, 
 and the immunities of a patrician, or, rather, of a noble of 
 Rome. Adopting the ideas, and with them the habits, of the 
 Italians, he dispossessed and destroyed that class whom we call 
 the yeomanry the very heart of the Grallic people, the true 
 nation itself. He ejected his old tenantry or clansmen from 
 their ancient holdings, to constitute from the aggregation of 
 them one of those vast estates or latifundia which were culti- 
 vated entirely by slaves, for the behoof of the proprietor alone, 
 
 Jf: 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 21 
 
 and to which Pliny and Columella joined in ascribing the ruin 
 of Italy. From that vast territory he drew the means of "bound- 
 less self-indulgence, "but left to the husbandmen nothing beyond 
 the most scanty allowance of the bare necessaries of human 
 existence. "When they were hurried by fatigue, by want, and 
 by sickness to premature graves, he recruited their number 
 from the Roman slave-markets. During his habitual residence 
 at Rome or Baise, at Narbonne or Toulouse, he was repre- 
 sented at his domain by the Villicus, a middle-man, who had 
 also his fortune to wring out of the unrequited toils of these 
 miserable bondsmen. "Whoever is informed of the state of a 
 West Indian plantation before the abolition of slavery, and of 
 the relations in which the absent owner and resident manager 
 then stood to each other and to the Negroes, has before him a 
 lively image of an estate in Provincial Gaul in the second and 
 third centuries of the Christian era. "Whoever knows what 
 was the effect of that system on the waste of human life, may 
 estimate the depopulating effects of slavery during two hundred 
 successive years in Provincial Gaul. 
 
 Fifthly, the disappearance of the Celtic language in Gaul 
 during the era of its provincial dependency on Rome, affords 
 perhaps the most impressive of all illustrations of the sufferings 
 of the people in that period. From the Rhine to the Pyrenees, 
 a single tongue, though molded into several different and very 
 dissimilar dialects, was spoken in the time of Julius. It was 
 confined to Armorica in the time of Clovis. In the interven- 
 ing centuries, it had -been entirely laid aside throughout the 
 rest of Graul. By the powerful and wealthy proprietor it was 
 regarded with contempt, as a remnant and a badge of ancient 
 barbarism. With his fashionable guests at his villa he con- 
 versed in Latin, with grammarians and rhetoricians at the 
 capital in Greek, with his bailiffs perhaps in Celtic. Gradu- 
 ally, though more slowly, his slaves also abandoned the use of 
 that vulgar idiom. They invented a kind of patois in which 
 to make themselves intelligible not only to their superiors, but 
 to their fellow-bondsmen, who had been brought together from 
 many distant lands. So universal was the change, that they 
 even lost their national appellation ; and at the time of the 
 Frankish invasion and conquests, were universally spoken of, 
 not as Gauls, but as Romans. From this singular compromise 
 
52 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 between the copious speech of Cicero and the rude discourse 
 of CaractacuSj at length emerged that language which excels 
 all others, now vernacular among men, in the precision and 
 delicacy with which it discriminates all the more subtle forms 
 of thought, and all the fluctuating shades of emotion. French 
 bears to Latin the same relation in which English stands to 
 Anglo-Saxon ; but there is this most significant distinction, 
 that in France the language of the superior, in England the 
 language of the subordinate, race forms the basis of the mod- 
 ern nomenclature. 
 
 But, sixthly. While these changes were in progress, there 
 was silently at work another, a more mighty and a more en- 
 during revolution. I refer to the introduction of Christianity. 
 This is a subject on which it is not possible that I should be 
 silent ; but neither is it possible that I should handle it with- 
 out the risk of inducing some misapprehension. It will be 
 my careful endeavor to obviate that danger. In referring to 
 the diffusion of the Gospel in Graul, I shall view it only as one 
 of those great events, or rather as one of those chains of events, 
 by the collation and interweaving of which the political or so- 
 cial history of mankind is constructed. I shall pass by in 
 total silence the controversies, theological or ecclesiastical, 
 with which such inquiries are so often allied. Those so much 
 agitated questions respecting the government, the worship, and 
 the doctrines of the ancient Church, are equally beyond my 
 province and my competency. 
 
 The earliest of the great conquests of Christianity were ef- 
 fected in the East. In the "Western empire it triumphed more 
 tardily. Notwithstanding the zealous efforts of so many French 
 antiquarians to give a more remote date to the establishment 
 of the principal seats of episcopacy in France, it is difficult to 
 find any authentic proof of their existence before the middle 
 of the third century. At that era were founded the churches 
 of Tours, Clermont, Paris, Toulouse, Aries, and many others. 
 None of the Gallic ecclesiastical writers, whose works or whose 
 names are still extant, flourished before that time. But in the 
 next or fourth age, Graul became, in appearance at least, ex- 
 clusively Christian. An hereditary, though secret, paganism 
 lingered indeed among the wealthier and more powerful of the 
 provincials ; nor was the religion of the Druids without its ad- 
 
THE ROM AND- GALLIC PROVINCE. 3 
 
 herents among the poorer classes of society, especially in Ar- 
 morica. But neither the courtiers nor the meaner subjects of 
 Constantino and his successors aspired to the crown of martyr- 
 dom in defense of their ancient superstitions, or hazarded any 
 open avowal of them. 
 
 Yet the spirit of martyrdom, if it had existed, would not 
 have died away from the want of active exercise. The offer- 
 ing of sacrifices to idols was prohibited by one Christian em- 
 peror, under the penalty of death. Armed bands under the 
 immediate direction of the prelates of Graul cast down the 
 shrines of the false gods, both of the Roman and the Celtic 
 mythology. Their worship'ers were interdicted from all lu- 
 crative pursuits, and excluded from all honorable stations and 
 employments. In the times in which our lot has fallen, it is 
 easy to condemn these excesses, and to perceive how blind 
 was the zeal in which they originated ; for persecution has no 
 longer any apologists among us ; nor is any one at this day ig- 
 norant of the arguments which have discredited and rebuked 
 it. But even now, how difficult, if not impossible, is it to de- 
 termine with absolute precision the limits and ext6nt of the 
 duty of toleration ? Like all our other duties, indeed, it re- 
 jects the bondage of any peremptory definition ; and the indis- 
 tinctness of our own thoughts on the subject in these enlight- 
 ened days may perhaps suggest good reasons why we should 
 regard with indulgence the errors of the rulers of the Church 
 at that remote period. 
 
 But suppose them 'to have been as unpardonably erroneous 
 as they are esteemed by their modern French censors, still it 
 is simply absurd to compare them (as those censors have done) 
 to the sanguinary missionaries of the creed of Mohammed. To 
 ascribe to the sword the progress of the Christian faith in Graul. 
 is not only to substitute conjecture for proof, but is to depend 
 on a conjecture utterly gratuitous and improbable. Heathen- 
 ism needed no such keen weapon for its overthrow. It had 
 cast no deep roots in the conscience, the affections, or the in- 
 tellect of mankind. It fell in Graul as it has fallen elsewhere 
 It expired among the more zealous few, beneath the genial in- 
 fluences of the Gospel. It expired among the apathetic mul- 
 titude, beneath the worldly influence of fashion, of example, 
 of great names, and of the shiftings of public opinion. Chris- 
 
24 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 tianity was first the consolation of the slave. It at length be- 
 came the boast of the emperor. Thenceforward it advanced, 
 conquering and to conquer, with a power which the sword 
 could not have materially aided, and could not have at all ar- 
 rested. 
 
 It is, however, asserted that the Church extended her do- 
 minion in Graul by other arts, which, if less criminal than 
 those of persecution, were scarcely less unhallowed. From the 
 piety or the fears of the emperor, the clergy extorted (such is 
 the charge) an exemption from the capitation tax which so 
 sorely oppressed the other members of society. By the same 
 means they are said to have obtained the edicts which au- 
 thorized them to accept the testamentary donations of their 
 wealthy penitents ; and they are accused of having taught the 
 dying and the sick that the Deity would be most effectually 
 propitiated by transferring to his ministers the inheritances 
 of their children. It is further imputed to them, that, ad- 
 vancing one step farther in this mercenary career, they pro- 
 cured the enactment of laws which delivered their own lands 
 from the indictions and superindictions to which every other 
 class of proprietors was liable. The triple immunity thus ac- 
 quired from the poll tax, the corvees, and the land tax, is there- 
 fore arraigned as fraudulent, and invidious, and unjust. 
 
 To deny that in the fourth and fifth centuries the priesthood 
 were often chargeable with cupidity, and the laity with super- 
 stition, would indeed be a hopeless task. Let it be assumed 
 that the crafts of the one, and the follies of the other, were as 
 extravagant as they appear in the satirical portraitures of the 
 most bitter of their modern antagonists. Yet there are more 
 forms of bigotry than one. There have been philosophical as 
 well as sacerdotal bigets. The narrowness of mind to which 
 no secular interests but those of churchmen appear of any ac- 
 count, is not more pitiable than the narrowness of mind which 
 refuses to accept, or is unable to appreciate, any secular ad- 
 vantage accruing to society at large, if the clerical order hap- 
 pens to be the channel of it. If it be right to condemn the 
 fiscal tyranny of the Roman rulers of Gaul, it can hardly be 
 also right to condemn those sacerdotal claims, and those im- 
 perial concessions by which the range of that tyranny was nar- 
 rowed. If poverty was the withering curse of the people, it 
 
THE ROMANO-GALLIC PROVINCE. 25 
 
 can scarcely be just to censure rigidly the only laws which 
 promoted the accumulation of capital among them. If the 
 general neglect of agriculture was depopulating Gaul, the cler- 
 gy were not perhaps very culpable in acquiring the wealth, 
 and with it the security, by means of which they were ena- 
 bled to cultivate many large though neglected districts in that 
 province. It is agreed that the policy of the state was deplor- 
 ably short-sighted and oppressive. Why then maintain that, in 
 counteracting it, the policy of the Church was either improvi- 
 dent or unjust ? 
 
 The Church is next arraigned as selfish and ambitious, be- 
 cause it formed itself into -a vast clerical corporation, living 
 under laws and usages peculiar to itself, and not acknowledging 
 the jurisdiction of the temporal tribunals. That the church- 
 men of the fourth century lived beneath a ruthless despotism, 
 no one attempts to deny. That they opposed to it the only 
 barrier by which the imperial tyranny could, in that age, be 
 arrested in its course, is equally indisputable. If they had 
 been laymen, they would have been celebrated as patriots by 
 the very persons who, because they were priests, have de- 
 nounced them as usurpers. If the bishops of the fourth cen- 
 tury had lived under the Republic, they would have been 
 illustrious as tribunes of the people. If the Gracchi had been 
 contemporaries of Theodosius, their names would have taken 
 the places which Ambrose and Martin of Tours at present hold 
 in ecclesiastical history. A brave resistance to despotic au- 
 thority has surely no, less title to our sympathy, if it proceeds 
 from the episcopal throne, than if it be made amid the tumults 
 of the Forum. 
 
 But the association of ideas, so inveterate with some of our 
 contemporaries in France, which regards the mitre as inca- 
 pable of an alliance with the cause of civil liberty, has induced 
 some of them to impute it to the bishops of the fourth century 
 as an offense, that they were so commonly raised to that office 
 by the clamorous suffrages of the people at large. How ex- 
 travagant the prejudice which is thus directed against the one 
 element of popular freedom then extant in the empire, because 
 it ministered to the influence of the priesthood ! How strange 
 the inconsistency which, while it regrets the extinct comitia 
 of the Republic, resents and condemns the new-born comitia 
 of the Church! 
 
26 THE DECLINE AND PALL OP 
 
 It is impossible to ascertain, as indeed it would be superflu- 
 ous to inquire, how far unworthy, or secular, or narrow motives 
 prompted the measures to which the sacerdotal order were 
 indebted for their wealth, their privileges, and their greatness ? 
 Doubtless such impulses actuated the great majority of their 
 number in a greater or less degree, and more or less con- 
 sciously to themselves. The clergy of those times partook of 
 the common infirmities of our nature, and of the faults char- 
 acteristic of their age. But that their evangelical labors 
 were attended with the most beneficent results that the 
 Church became in the Romano-Gallic province, as in all other 
 lands, the very salt of the earth that her genial influence 
 penetrated in many directions to the interior, and was diffused 
 almost universally throughout the surface of the provincial 
 society all this might have seemed too trite and too obvious 
 for any formal assertion of it, if peculiar circumstances had 
 not tended to cast an unmerited shade over the history of that 
 branch of the Church Universal. 
 
 As Saint Augustin in Africa, so Salvian in Graul, denounced, 
 in unmeasured terms, the pollutions, the cruelties, and the 
 crimes of the Christian world, and especially of those among 
 whom they lived. They believed and taught that the Deity 
 had summoned the Barbarians from the North as his scourge 
 to punish the spiritual apostasy of a guilty people. The in 
 vectives of Salvian have recently been quoted, and his gloomy 
 colors reproduced among ourselves, by learned writers, who 
 were pledged by the necessities of their argument to depre- 
 ciate ancient Christianity, as it existed in the third and fourth 
 centuries in Gtaul. If those controversialists had used equal 
 diligence in investigating the moral condition, not of Graul 
 only, but of the Western empire at large, when Christianity 
 first triumphed there, they would probably have attributed less 
 weight to Salvian's charges against the early Church. They 
 would have observed that the Christian converts, portrayed 
 on his canvas, were no other than that thoughtless multitude 
 who followed Julian as they had followed Constantine, and as 
 they would (if necessary) have followed Zoroaster or Budhu. 
 The Roman empire did not lay aside her deformities, or change 
 her real character, because a servile mob had erected the Cross 
 amid the ruined shrines of Ceres or of Pan, "When plunged 
 
THE ROMANO -GALLIC PROVINCE. 27 
 
 into those mepliitic vapors, the lamp of the Gospel could not 
 glow with its true and native "brilliancy. Consider the exhi- 
 bitions of depravity with which, in glancing over the history 
 and the literature of imperial Rome, the eye is every where 
 revolted. Bear in mind the narratives of Suetonius, and the 
 delineations of Juvenal. Reflect on what we know or believe 
 (on too conclusive evidence) of their domestic habits, as illus- 
 trated by the relics of Pompeii. Review the proscriptions of 
 the Triumvirates, the exterminating wars of Caesar and his 
 successors, the slave-markets and Ergastula of Rome, her 
 enervating luxury, the sanguinary exhibitions of the Circus, 
 the iron bondage in which she held the dependent nations, 
 the guilty rites with which so many of her heathen temples 
 were polluted, and the remorseless persecutions of the Chris- 
 tians throughout the Empire, and then judge whether even 
 Christianity itself could have contended, with immediate suc- 
 cess, against such an accumulation of crime and wretchedness. 
 It was no part of the design of the Gospel to change the con- 
 ditions on which we hold our sublunary existence, or to abro- 
 gate the fundamental laws of human society. Those condi- 
 tions and those laws require that the guilt and folly of ages 
 shall be expiated by ages of calamity and distress. It is true, 
 indeed, that as Sin converted the Garden of Eden into a 
 desolate wilderness, so is it the ultimate destination of our 
 holy faith to make that wilderness once more blossom as a 
 garden. But not immediately, abruptly, or as by the working 
 of some magical incantation. The great scheme of Providence 
 is not superseded by the great scheme of Christianity. It is 
 no less true now than it was true before that revelation, that 
 the improvement of nations, and the growth of their social 
 happiness, must be a deliberate and a tardy process, to be 
 pursued through many a painful reverse, and through much 
 purifying affliction. Yet the leaven which is at length to 
 pervade and vivify the whole mass is never altogether inert, 
 impassive, or ineffectual. It never has been so in any land ; 
 it was never really so in Provincial Gaul. When Salvian was 
 deploring her sins and predicting her punishment, the minds 
 of the Gallic people were doubtless really, though silently, 
 imbibing much of the higher and the holier influences of the 
 and of the Church among them. These it was not 
 
28 THE DECLINE AND FALL Of 
 
 given to his or to any human eye to penetrate. Yet we may 
 rejoice to know and to acknowledge, that in Graul the early 
 Church was the one great antagonist of the wrongs which 
 were then done upon the earth that she narrowed the range 
 of fiscal tyranny that she mitigated the overwhelming pov- 
 erty of the people that she promoted the accumulation of 
 capital that she contributed to the restoration of agriculture 
 that she balanced and held in check the imperial despotism 
 that she revived within herself the remembrance and the 
 use of the great franchise of popular election and that the 
 gloomy portraits which have been drawn of her internal or 
 moral state, are the mere exaggerations of those who would 
 render the Church responsible for the crimes with which it is 
 her office to contend, and for the miseries which it is her high 
 commission effectually, though gradually, to relieve. 
 
 I might add that, in the same age and country, the Church 
 commenced her warfare against domestic and prsedial slavery 
 a warfare of which the vicissitudes and the results embrace 
 a field of inquiry on which it will be impossible for me to enter 
 on the present, or, indeed, on any future occasion. I regret 
 this inevitable omission the less, because the influence of the 
 Church in extinguishing slavery has lately been discussed among 
 ourselves with a copiousness and a learning which, while it 
 makes competition needless, would also render it very formi- 
 dable. 
 
 With this very brief and general sketch of the condition of 
 the people of Graul during the period in which, having lost their 
 independence, they became members of a province of the em- 
 pire, I close this lecture. In the next which I shall address to 
 you, I propose to review the state of Gaul and of its inhabitants 
 during the period in which it formed one great member of the 
 empire of the Fra iks. 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 29 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE MEROVINGIAN DYN1STY. 
 
 THE problem which, in my last lecture, I proposed for our 
 consideration to-day, may be stated in the following terms : 
 What were the causes of the transfer of the Franco-Gallic em- 
 pire from the First to the Second Dynasty, from the lineage of 
 Clovis to that of Pepin? The corresponding problem which 
 will hereafter engage our attention is, What were the causes of 
 the transfer of the dominion of France from the Second Dynas- 
 ty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that of Hugues 
 Capet ? With a view to the distinct explanation of the answer 
 which I have to make to each of those questions, it is neces- 
 sary that I should begin by reminding you, however briefly, of 
 the chief of those occurrences which attended the growth, the 
 decline, and the fall of the sovereignty of the Franks in Gaul. 
 
 Toward the end of the fourth century, the great body of the 
 Gothic nation were settled in Thrace as the mercenary defend- 
 ers of the empire of the East. There the Yisigoths, or Western 
 G-oths, elected the terrible Alaric as their king or general, and 
 marched under his guidance to the capture and desolation of 
 Rome. On his death in 412, Ataulph, his successor, entered 
 into an alliance, both domestic and political, with Honorius. 
 who still maintained at Ravenna the faint image of the empire 
 of the Caesars. His sister, Placidia, became the wife of the 
 Gothic chief, who, at her persuasion, condescended to assume 
 the character of a Roman general, to march beneath the im- 
 perial standard into Graul, to crush the rivals of Honorius in 
 that province, and to accept from his hands the investiture of 
 a Gallic kingdom, of which the Mediterranean, the Ocean, the 
 Pyrenees, and the Loire were the boundaries. It was called 
 the kingdom of the Yisigoths, and was governed by Ataulph 
 rather in the spirit of a Roman officer than in that of an inde- 
 pendent sovereign. He acknowledged the authority of Hono- 
 rius, and received from Ravenna edicts establishing laws, tri- 
 
30 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 bunals, and municipal offices among his subjects, whether of 
 Gothic or of Gallic origin. 
 
 At nearly the same time, and by means not dissimilar, an- 
 other kingdom was acquired on the eastern side of the Gallic 
 province by the Burgundians. That name is said to have been 
 given to them by the more nomade tribes of Germany, in scorn 
 of their effeminate taste for towns and settled habitations. If 
 so, it may reasonably be inferred that they were less barbarous 
 than the other Teutonic people ; but they were certainly not less 
 warlike. They had marched from their abodes on the Vistula 
 toward the right bank of the Rhine, and were wandering there 
 in quest of new settlements, when they crossed the river as 
 auxiliaries of Jovinus, one of the Gallic aspirants to the purple. 
 To him it proved a fatal alliance. The Burgundians sent his 
 head to Ravenna as a peace-offering to Honorius, who reward- 
 ed their treachery by a grant of territories extending from the 
 Lake of Geneva to the junction of the Rhine with the Moselle. 
 From them the great province of Burgundy derived its name ; 
 and there they formed a monarchy which was virtually inde- 
 pendent, though they also were content to act as the soldiers, 
 and even as the vassals of Rome, until the latest shadow of the 
 imperial majesty had faded away in the person of Augustulus. 
 
 In the same age, a confederation of Germanic tribes, known 
 collectively by the generic name of Franks, had established 
 themselves along the eastern banks of the Rhine, from its 
 mouths to its junction with the Maine ; and throughout the 
 whole of that region of which the Rhine is the northern, and 
 the Meuse the southern boundary. Of these tribes, the most 
 eminent were the Salian and the Ripuarian. The kings or 
 leaders elf each of them were denominated Meer-wigs (that is, 
 Sea "Warriors), a title which they afterward transmitted to the 
 Merovingian, or First Prankish. Dynasty. 
 
 The earliest of these monarchs who belongs to authentic 
 history is Clovis, who, toward the end of the fifth century, 
 marched from Tournay and the Tournesis at the head of the 
 Salian Franks, to the invasion and conquest of the Gallic 
 province. "With the aid of his confederate Frankish tribes, he 
 subdued it all except Armorica, and the kingdoms of the Visi- 
 goths, and the Burgundians. He was himself subdued by the 
 charms of Clotilda, a Burgundian princess, who became at 
 
MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 31 
 
 once his wife and his chief counselor. At her instance he 
 embraced Christianity, and then plunged into a new and haz- 
 ardous war with the Visigoths, in reliance on what she had 
 taught him to regard as miraculous omens of success. Like 
 so many other conquerors, Clovis found in religion a pretext 
 for the crimes which religion most sternly condemns. The 
 Yisigoths were Arians, and he the single monarch of his age 
 who adhered to the confession of Nicsea. After a great, though 
 incomplete triumph over his heretical neighbors, he died in 
 the year 511, and transmitted to his four sons a sovereignty 
 extending from the Elbe to the Graronne, and embracing all 
 the possessions of the Franks on either bank of the Rhine. 
 
 The Frankish army divided this inheritance among the sons 
 of Clovis, though in such a manner as to give to no one of 
 them a continuous or unbroken territory. But under this di- 
 vided rule, the empire of the Franks grew rapidly, both in 
 power and in extent. Burgundy and Thuringia were con- 
 quered; and Franconia, Saxony, Bavaria, and Suabia were 
 compelled to become members of the Frankish confederation. 
 At the distance of a quarter of a century from the death of 
 Clovis, all his conquests in Graul ,and Burgundy united to 
 Savoy, Switzerland, Belgium, and to nearly the whole of 
 Western Germany constituted one formidable state, which 
 acknowledged the dominion of his sons. 
 
 When another quarter of a century had expired, the family 
 of Clovis was extinct, except in the persons of the four sons of 
 Clotaire, his youngest son. Again the army effected a four- 
 fold apportionment of the Frankish empire. To each of the 
 heirs of Clovis they assigned one of the four kingdoms of Aqui- 
 taine, Burgundy, Neustria, and Austrasia the two last, as 
 the words imply, lying respectively to the west and to the east 
 of each other ; the boundary common to them both consisting 
 of an irregular and imaginary line drawn from Bar-sur-Aube 
 to the mouths of the Scheldt. The confederate states of Grer- 
 many were attached to Austrasia. 
 
 With this second partition commences the decline of the 
 Merovingian Dynasty. A child in his sixth year having been 
 acknowledged by the Austrasians as their king, the Grermans 
 beyond the Rhine indignantly detached themselves from the 
 empire of the Franks ; while an officer, with the title of Ma- 
 
32 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 jor Domus, or Mayor of the Palace, was appointed to govern 
 the Austrasian kingdom during the minority of the infant 
 sovereign. It proved a disastrous innovation and a fatal 
 precedent. 
 
 At the commencement of the seventh century, the only sur- 
 viving descendant of Clotaire was his grandson, Clotaire, the 
 second of that name. Each of the four monarchies of Aqui- 
 taine, Burgundy, Neustria, and Austrasia, therefore, acknowl- 
 edged him for their king. It was, however, a merely nominal 
 allegiance. All real authority had passed to the mayors of the 
 palace, and thenceforward the Merovingian sovereigns were 
 but so many royal phantoms, enjoying the luxuries, and main- 
 taining some of the pomp and pageantry of kings, but power- 
 less alike in the council and in the field. 
 
 This real though disguised revolution gave birth to other 
 changes in the Franco- Gallic government. Many of the chiefs 
 or captains had received either local commands, or extensive 
 grants of land, and constituted an aristocracy strong enough 
 to negotiate, and to contend on equal terms, not only with their 
 feeble monarchs, but also with the mayors, who really governed 
 both the palace and the kingdom. Among these magnates, 
 the most eminent was Pepin of Heristal. Under the modest 
 title of Duke of Austrasia, he had become the real ruler of that 
 kingdom, and progressively added to that dignity, and to his 
 own extensive territories, the office of Mayor of the Palace both 
 in Burgundy and in Neustria. When the aristocracy had thus 
 triumphed in the person of Pepin, not only over the titular 
 sovereign of the Franco-Gallic empire, but also over the mayors 
 of the palace, its real sovereigns, he labored assiduously, and 
 with good success, to confirm his power by aristocratic friend- 
 ships and alliances. From year to year he summoned the no- 
 bles to meet and to deliberate under his own presidency at the 
 Champs de Mars, the Comitia of the Franks. The influence 
 of his wealth, his station, his abilities, and his military renown, 
 continually increased the number and the zeal of his adherents. 
 The offices of Duke of Austrasia and Mayor of the Palace in 
 Neustria and Burgundy were at length acknowledged to be 
 hereditary in his house. Thus, in every thing but the name, 
 Pepin was king of the Frankish tribes ; but the time for as- 
 suming that name was still unripe when he died, leaving his 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 33 
 
 high offices and his vast possessions to an infant and illegiti- 
 mate grandson. 
 
 But he also left a son whose fame and power were destined 
 to eclipse his own. Charles Martel (the name he bears in his- 
 tory) soon fought his way to the inheritance of his father ; and 
 though content, like him, to rule in the name of a nominal Me- 
 rovingian king, he became the idol of the army, and the real 
 and triumphant head of the Frankish monarchy. He compelled 
 Suabia and Bavaria to resume their ancient union with it, and 
 at the great battle of Poitiers in 732, he commenced that de- 
 liverance of Western Europe from the Saracenic yoke which 
 was consummated in the w&rs of many succeeding years. 
 
 To Charles eventually succeeded Pepin, the second of his 
 sons, whose historical name is Pepin-le-Bref. During nearly 
 one hundred years the government of the Franks had been 
 conducted under the veil of a fiction which had now become 
 too transparent for further use. By the advice of Pope Zacha- 
 ry, and by the hands of Boniface, archbishop of Mentz, Chil- 
 deric, the last of the Merovingians, was deposed, and his crown 
 was solemnly placed on the head of Pepin, the last of the may- 
 ors of the Frankish palace, and the first king of the Second or 
 Carlovingian Dynasty. 
 
 For her services to Pepin-le-Bref, the Church received an 
 early and an ample recompense. He assigned to the clergy 
 of his empire not only a place, but a supremacy, in the na- 
 tional councils. He confirmed and enlarged the temporal 
 rights of the sacerdotal body. He bestowed on the Pope and 
 his successors the sovereignty over the exarchate of Ravenna , 
 including what was then called the duchy of Rome. And then, 
 directing the arms of his subjects to foreign conquest, he en- 
 larged the limits of his dominions, and left them on his death, 
 in 768, to be divided between his sons Carloman and Charles. 
 
 Car Ionian survived his father during three years only ; after 
 which Charles, or Charlemagne, became the single sovereign 
 of the empire of the Franks. He extended it over every land 
 in which the languages of Rome or Greijmany, or in which any 
 tongue derived from them, were at that time spoken. Reign- 
 ing the undisputed monarch of Europe, from the Elbe to the 
 Ebro, from the Danube to the Adriatic, from the Alps to Bene- 
 vontum the head of an empire equal in extent and in power 
 
 C 
 
34 , THE DECLINE AND PALL OF 
 
 to that of the later emperors of the West, he received from 
 Pope Leo III. the diadem, and with it the imperial title, which 
 had fallen from the faint hold of Augustulus more than three 
 centuries before. 
 
 Over this vast territory Charlemagne reigned, with an v in- 
 tellect to discern, a soul to desire, and a will to pursue, the 
 highest attainable interests of the nations by whom it was 
 peopled. Perhaps the character of so zealous a patron of men 
 of letters, and of so munificent a benefactor of the papacy, 
 may have been drawn in too brilliant colors by his literary 
 and ecclesiastical eulogists. But what remains of his legisla- 
 tion, and the authentic records of his public acts, give him an 
 indisputable title to the appellation of the Great, which his 
 subjects bestowed upon him after his death, and which the 
 unanimous suffrage of the whole civilized world has subse- 
 quently ratified. 
 
 Yet, obeying the general law of our existence, Charlemagne 
 was the creature of the age in which he lived, imbibing much 
 of its spirit, and in bondage to many of its errors. And hence 
 it happened that the lofty edifice of his power crumbled into 
 dust when his own strong hand and his own plastic genius 
 could no longer be exerted to consolidate and to support it. 
 Perhaps the materials with which he was compelled to work 
 may have been incapable of any more permanent cohesion ; 
 or, perhaps, the enthusiasm of his admirers may have con- 
 cealed from him, as from themselves, the defects of his work- 
 manship. 
 
 To Pepin of Heristal, the author of the greatness of his 
 house ; to Charles Martel, the Miltiades of modern Europe ; 
 to Pepin-le-Bref, the founder of the Carlovingian Dynasty, and 
 of the temporal dominion of the Popes ; and to Charlemagne, 
 the restorer of the "Western empire, succeeded Louis the De- 
 bonnaire, a devout and virtuous man, and even a patriotic 
 prince, but whose personal history is degraded by monastic 
 superstitions, by uxorious fondness, and by imbecility of spir- 
 it, and the history of whose reign is composed of little else 
 than the calamities and crimes of the civil wars which he 
 waged with his own children. His crown devolved first on 
 .his eldest son, Lothaire, the heir of the disasters, though not 
 of the piety of his father ; and then on his youngest son, 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 35 
 
 Charles the Bald, who, without courage, or talents, or conduct, 
 was passively drifted by the current of events to titular dig- 
 nities, and to a nominal extent of empire scarcely inferior to 
 those of which Charlemagne had enjoyed the reality. Charles 
 died in the year 877. Within twelve years from that time, 
 the throne of Charlemagne was occupied and disgraced by 
 Louis the Stammerer, by Louis III., by Carloman, and by 
 Charles the Fat. On the deposition of the last of those princes 
 in 888, the dynasty itself was virtually extinguished. 
 
 A hundred years of anarchy followed, though not without 
 some occasional semblance of a regular government. The 
 history of that age commemorates a multitude of princes who, 
 with various success, and on grounds as various, laid claim 
 to the Carlovingian crown some of them deriving their title 
 through the female, and some through the illegitimate kindred 
 of that royal race some assuming the imperial, and some 
 aspiring only to the royal title ; but no two of them in suc- 
 cession pretending to the same extent of dominion, nor any 
 one of them earning the praise of any eminent personal quali- 
 ties, of any wisdom in civil government, or of any triumph in 
 war. The long and wearisome narrative of their contests and 
 their depositions, of their follies and their guilt, of their weak- 
 ness and their miseries, reaches at length a welcome close in 
 the year 987, when Hugues Capet, being elected by his army 
 to wear the crown of France, laid the foundation of the Third 
 or Capetian Dynasty. He succeeded, however, to a weak and 
 almost titular dominion. "Within the limits of ancient Gaul 
 there had grown up, during the preceding anarchy, four king- 
 doms and fifty-five great fiefs, each acknowledging in form, but 
 denying in substance, the superiority of the nominal head of 
 the Carlovingian empire, and their own subordination to him. 
 
 From the preceding glance, rapid as it is, at the history of 
 the Franco- Gallic empire, it appears that the founders of each 
 of the first two dynasties effected conquests of great extent, 
 rapidity, and duration ; that the dominion so acquired by each 
 of them underwent, in the persons of his descendants, a pre- 
 cipitate and irremediable decline ; that, in either case, the 
 powers of the enfeebled monarchy were usurped by a body of 
 aristocratic chiefs ; that, in both the first and the second races, 
 one of those chiefs at length usurped the crown of his sover- 
 
36 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 jign, and transmitted it to his own descendants ; and that, 
 from the commencement to the close of each of these two 
 successive series of events, there were perceptibly germina- 
 ting both' the seeds of that civil polity which we call the Feudal 
 system, and the seeds of that Ecclesiastical polity which re- 
 stored to Rome her ancient supremacy over the Western world. 
 Now this remarkable coincidence between the fortunes of the 
 two dynasties can not have been fortuitous ; that is, it can not 
 have been referable to causes too recondite for human scruti- 
 ny. During the five centuries over which these phenomena 
 extended, there must have always been at work some forces 
 conducing to this remarkable reproduction of the same results ; 
 some effective agency of which man himself was at one time 
 the unconscious, and at another time the unwilling, instru- 
 ment. What, then, were those enduring springs of action, by 
 the elastic power of which each of the Franco-Gallic monarch- 
 ies arose with such similar promptitude fell into so similar 
 a lifelessness made way for so similar an aristocratic usurp- 
 ation and were so similarly productive of results, ecclesiasti- 
 cal and civil, the unexhausted influence of which we can yet 
 perceive and feel after the lapse of so many ages ? 
 
 Every French writer with whom I am acquainted has la- 
 bored to find the answer to that problem. I shall not attempt 
 to explain, or even to recapitulate, their solutions of it. It 
 may be sufficient to say, that they generally find the causes 
 of these phenomena either in the Germanic institutions in- 
 troduced by the conquerors into Gaul or in the tenures on 
 which land was granted there subsequently to the conquest 
 or in the subordination of ranks and of political privileges then 
 first established between the different classes of the inhabit- 
 ants or in the new codes and judicial tribunals to which 
 they were then subjected or in the personal characters of 
 the monarchs who inherited the crowns of Clovis or of Charle- 
 magne or in the dismemberments of their dominions for the 
 benefit of their sons or in the combination of some two or 
 more of these causes or in other causes similar and analo- 
 gous to these. Now it would be mere folly and arrogance to 
 suppose that men so learned, so laborious, and so acute as 
 those who have advocated these opinions, have one after the 
 other fallen into grave and palpable errors on a subject not 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 37 
 
 perhaps in itself very difficult or obscure. On the contrary, 
 I doubt not that Daniel and Du Bos, and Mably, and Boulain- 
 villiers, and especially MM. Gruizot and Thierry, have rightly 
 deciphered much of the scroll of their nation's remoter history. 
 I venture merely to believe that the love of country, and the 
 love of refinement, and the love of generalization, so charac- 
 teristic of their literature, have rendered them reluctant to 
 perceive, and slow to confess, a more obvious though a less 
 attractive truth the truth, I mean, that, under both the 
 Merovingian and the Carlovingian dynasties, France pursued 
 the same downward path, to the same brink of anarchy, be- 
 cause, under both, a barbaric people were living beneath the 
 rule of barbaric kings. 
 
 So intimate is the alliance between history and romance, 
 between the facts treasured up in the memory, and the pic- 
 tures into which they group or resolve themselves in the 
 imagination, that it is given to no man, however vast his 
 learning, or profound his discernment, to contemplate the 
 events of former times in an aspect absolutely genuine and 
 exempt from all the distortions, and from all the false color- 
 ing, induced by ideal representations of them. Gibbon cer- 
 tainly did not possess that gift when he adorned the wars 
 and policy of Clovis with all the embellishments of his gor- 
 geous eloquence. Even M. Gruizot did not, I think, possess 
 it, when he contemplated them as pregnant at every stage 
 with the deepest lessons of social philosophy. The mind of 
 Tacitus himself (to hazard a far more daring criticism) was 
 not wholly exempt from this kind of dalliance with the beau- 
 tiful to the neglect of the real, when he was delineating the 
 people from whom Clovis and his warriors descended ; for, 
 in his Treatise on the Manners of the Germans, the true though 
 unavowed design of the great historian, as we well know, was 
 to exhibit and to rebuke the degeneracy of the manners of 
 Rome. And hence it happened that the graphic skill with 
 which he sketched the free barbarian of the forest was greater 
 than the pictorial fidelity of the portrait. It better suited his 
 purpose to portray the more striking characteristics of the 
 Teutonic races collectively, than to investigate the more minute 
 peculiarities which distinguished them from each other. Yet 
 we can not doubt that, even in his day, they were far widely 
 
38 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 discriminated in fact, than in his delineation of them, as, be- 
 yond all controversy, they were so in the age of Clovis. 
 
 Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption 
 to Gaul, were remarkable for their skill as artisans ; and in 
 the poems in which, not long after that event, they were de- 
 scribed by Sidonius Apollinaris, we have the best attestation 
 of their resemblance to the kind and simple-hearted German 
 of our own days. Thus also the Gothic people, almost im- 
 mediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a 
 singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization ; for, if St. 
 Jerome was correctly informed, Ataulph, their king, seriously 
 projected the substitution of a new Gothic for the old Roman 
 empire ; a scheme in which the character of Julius was to be 
 ascribed to Alaric, that of Augustus being reserved for the 
 projector himself. Euric, the successor of Ataulph, filled his 
 court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians ; 
 and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of the 
 Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his dispatches. 
 
 The Francs, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, 
 and their history is in fact a barbaric history. At their en- 
 trance into Gaul they were worshipers of Odin, and believed 
 that the gates of the Walhalla rolled back spontaneously on 
 their hinges to admit the warrior who had dyed, with the 
 blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had himself 
 fallen. From their settlements on the Lower Rhine they had 
 sometimes marched to the defense of the Romano-Gallic prov- 
 ince, but more frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. 
 Their appetite for rapine was insatiate, unrestrained, and ir- 
 resistible. In war they were the prototypes of the Norman 
 pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian buccaneers of 
 more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart, 
 of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early trav- 
 elers in Canada ; a comparison which almost every commen- 
 tator on Tacitus has instituted and verified. 
 
 In most of the French writers, however, in Gibbon's His- 
 tory, and even in the lectures of M. Guizot, Clovis and Clotaire 
 sweep across the historic stage in the garb and character of 
 heroes. Their campaigns are depicted in colors brilliant 
 enough to reflect the glories of Napoleon. The doctrines of 
 Aristotle and of Montesquieu are invoked to interpret to us 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. S9 
 
 fche enigmas of their policy ; and the revolutions of their king- 
 dom are announced in terms such as might fitly celebrate the 
 overthrow of the empire of the Caesars. 
 
 "We may respect the national piety which thus desires to 
 embellish the cradle of the monarchy of France, but we can 
 hardly acknowledge the discretion of the attempt. Our own 
 national exultation in the greatness of those Norman dukes 
 who wore the English crown, but were known to England 
 only as conquerors, as aliens, and as oppressors, is sober and 
 rational in comparison-; for our Norman monarchs were at 
 least men of courteous manners, of cultivated minds, and of 
 lofty purposes. Clovis was "an untutored savage. He exhib- 
 ited, in their darkest aspect, the worst vices of savage life. 
 In peace and in war his hands were ever stained with blood. 
 At the close of his reign he assassinated every chief of his 
 tribe from whom his children had any rivalry to apprehend. 
 The most pathetic and heart-subduing motives of the religion 
 which he had embraced were insufficient to tame his ferocity. 
 Even the evangelical narrative of the sacrifice of Calvary drew 
 from him no other than the well-known exclamation, " Si ego 
 ibidem cum Frankis meis fuissem, injurias ejus vindicassem I'" 1 
 His feebler descendants abandoned themselves to intemperance 
 and debauchery, the only amusements of which they were ca- 
 pable. There is no reason to suppose that any of them had ever 
 learned to read ; for even Charlemagne himself (as Mabillon 
 assures us) could not write, but " made a mark like an hon- 
 est and plain-dealing man." War was the single art in which 
 the Merovingian princes ever attained any proficiency, and even 
 their warfare was an exhibition of savage craft and valor, not of 
 any skill in strategy. Sidonius Appollinaris saw and has de- 
 lineated one of their military bands. He describes the host as 
 bareheaded, with masses of long red hair falling between their 
 shoulders, their bodies tightly girt about with raw hides, though 
 naked from the knee downward, carrying neither slings nor 
 bows, nor other missiles, except a hatchet and a short pike, to 
 which was strung a barbed harpoon, marching on foot, and 
 protected by no defensive armor. Occasionally, says Sidonius, 
 one and another warrior, in an excess of martial phrensy, would 
 rush forward to meet inevitable death, fighting to the last with 
 more than human energy, amid the war songs and acclama- 
 tions of their comrades. 
 
40 'I II E DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 Such was the commander and such the followers "by whom 
 the Romano- Gallic province was subdued. If opposed by the 
 legions of Rome, they would have fallen at the first shock of so 
 unequal an encounfer. But the legions had been withdrawn 
 into Italy for the defense of the heart of the empire. If opposed 
 by any national movement of the free inhabitants of Graul, such 
 invaders must have been repelled by the military skill and or- 
 ganization of so comparatively civilized a people. But the na- 
 tional spirit had departed ; and even among that gallant race 
 the mere instinct of animal courage was, for the moment, ex- 
 tinct. In Armorica, and there alone, a warlike and unconquer- 
 ed people of the old Grallic lineage were still to be found. 
 Their progenitors had taken refuge there from the western pen- 
 insula of Britain, in order to escape the oppressions of the Roman 
 conquerors. The descendants of those fugitives opposed an im- 
 penetrable front to Clovis and his hordes. They refused to be 
 the victims, but consented to be the partakers of his spolia- 
 tions ; and, by ally ing -themselves to the conqueror, succeeded 
 in transmitting to their posterity the independence which they 
 maintained during so many following ages under their native 
 dukes. 
 
 But in every other part of Graul, Roman oppression had done 
 its work. The curse of fiscal tyranny had depopulated exten- 
 sive districts, had stricken the land with barrenness, had swept 
 away all the smaller proprietors, had degraded into slaves the 
 actual cultivators of the soil, and had broken asunder the bonds 
 by which the wealthy and the poor had once been united ; and 
 now, when the very name and shadow of the empire was de- 
 parting, the fairest of her former possessions awaited, as a help- 
 less prey, the first formidable arm and resolute will which 
 should assert a sovereignty over it. The people submissively 
 accepted, on his own terms, the shelter of the government, or, 
 rather, the defense of the sword of Clvois. He triumphed over 
 them neither by military skill, nor by extensive resources, nor 
 by sublime audacity, nor by any other of the powers which 
 usually attended the march of conquerors, but simply because, 
 no longer retaining either the means or the desire to assert their 
 national independence, they stood in need of a sovereign on 
 whose protection they might depend, and to whose supremacy 
 they might bow ; and because Clovis, and he alone, presented 
 himself to assume the abdicated diadem of the Csesars, 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 41 
 
 The Frankish conquest of the south and of the east of Gaul, 
 however, presented greater difficulties, and requires some less 
 obvious explanation. The Goths and the Burgundians resist- 
 ed the new invaders with a spirit as resolute as their own. It 
 was a conflict, not of free Germans with enervated Gauls, but 
 of the different Teutonic tribes with each other ; and, in that 
 conflict, the Franks were inferior to their enemies both in me- 
 chanical arts and in mental culture. Yet so complete and so 
 rapid was their triumph, that, within a few years from the 
 death of Clovis, his sons were acknowledged as kings over the 
 whole of what had once formed the Romano-Gallic province. 
 To what cause, then, less imposing than the genius and the 
 power of the Merovingian princes, can this unbroken series 
 of victories be ascribed ? &<* 
 
 It may be ascribed, in part, to the religious enthusiasm which 
 animated the assault of the Franks on those whom they abhor- 
 red as the enemies of Heaven, and whose destruction they re- 
 garded as a sacrifice not less grateful to the Deity than to them- 
 selves. But it is to be ascribed chiefly to those social distinc- 
 tions which separated the aggressive and the defensive belliger 
 ents from each other the Franks, who had recently emerged 
 from their native forests, from the Groths and Burgundians 
 who had long inhabited their Gallic settlements ; the first, a 
 succession of armed bands, whose families and cattle remained 
 iar off and secure in their German fastnesses ; the second, a 
 body of agricultural colonists, who, with their households and 
 their herds, were living in wide dispersion from each other. 
 On the one side were armies, ill equipped indeed, ill organized, 
 and ill commanded ; on the other side, a rural population hast- 
 ily summoned to the use of weapons which they had long laid 
 aside, and to the discharge of military duties with which dis- 
 use had rendered them unfamiliar. The universal experience 
 of mankind sufficiently attests that the issue of war, when 
 waged between such combatants, is never really doubtful. 
 
 But in the wars which Clovis and his sons carried on with 
 the Germanic tribes to the eastward of the Rhine, they are rep- 
 resented by their modern French eulogists as having been gift- 
 ed at once with the wide-ranging sight of great captains and 
 the prophetic sight of great statesmen. They are supposed to 
 Lave engaged in these contests, not from any vulgar cupidity 
 
12 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 for plunder or for power, but in order to subdue the nations 
 from whom they would have otherwise had to apprehend new 
 barbaric irruptions into Gaul. They are therefore described as 
 imitating the policy of Tiberius, and as anticipating that of 
 Charlemagne. I have attempted in vain to verify these discov- 
 eries. The battles fought between the Cis-Rhenane Franks 
 and the Trans-Rhenane Germans were not the conflicts of or- 
 ganized armies so much as the onslaughts of hostile tribes. 
 Even the much celebrated combat of Tolbiac, which repelled 
 the Alemanni and destroyed a multitude of their warriors, was 
 a military achievement to be compared, not with the actions of 
 Conde or Turenne, but rather with the recent victories of the 
 Zooloo chief Dingaan over the forces of the Kaffir tribes in 
 Southern Africa ; for Dingaan brought into the field as many 
 followers as Clovis, equipped in a manner not dissimilar, and 
 commanded with at least equal military skill. 
 
 In the same manner, when we read of treaties by which the 
 Frankish \lominion was extended, by the sons of Clovis, over 
 a large part of Germany, we must not call up the image, or 
 the remembrance, of the congresses and conventions of Utrecht 
 or of Vienna. From the age of Tacitus, the German people 
 had been divided into many petty tribes, which had been ag- 
 gregated into several great confederacies. Allured or alarmed 
 by th- conquest of Gaul, the tribes of Bavaria, of Suabia, and 
 of Franconia consented to become members of the Frankish 
 confederacy by whom that conquest had been achieved. This 
 is the simple and unadorned explanation of the international 
 compacts of which the French historians make their boast. 
 Placed as we are beyond the influence of that antiquarian na- 
 tionality which has converted the founders of the first dynasty 
 of France into heroes and statesmen, diplomatists and philos- 
 ophers, we may venture to regard the German Kyning as but 
 the rude and shapeless germ of the European King, and may 
 own our belief that his wars were but the levying of so much 
 black mail ; that his negotiations were but so many palavers ; 
 and that between the long-haired Merovings and the princes 
 of the house of Bourbon, there was little more in common 
 than between the Indian chief who scalped his enemies on the 
 banks of the Potomac and the President of the "United States 
 of America. 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 43 
 
 These general conclusions do not rest upon the collation of 
 the works of many authors, but chiefly on the testimonies of 
 two of Sidonius (that is) and of Gregory of Tours, to whom 
 alone we are indebted for almost all which is known of the in- 
 ternal condition of Gaul under the dynasty of the Merovings. 
 Of the opinions and portraits of Sidonius we have already 
 seen something, and I shall refer to them again in the sequel. 
 Gregory was elected to be bishop of Tours about the year 566. 
 Seven years after his election, he began the composition of his 
 history. It comprises an account of the remarkable events 
 which occurred in G-aul from the year 395 to the year 591 
 a period embracing about a century and a half from the ear- 
 liest Prankish conquests. Of many of those events the histo- 
 rian was himself an eye-witness. He died in the year 594. 
 
 It is impossible for me at this moment to lay before you 
 any of the many narratives to be found in the nine books of 
 Gregory's history, which might be quoted in support of the 
 general statement that the Frankish conquerors of Gaul held 
 no higher place in the scale of civilization than the savages 
 of the Rocky Mountains or of Caffraria. For any such quo- 
 tations I gladly substitute the following summary of Grego- 
 ry's testimony on the subject, which I borrow from the fifth 
 chapter of the first volume of M. Fauriel's History of the Pro- 
 ven$al Poetry : " Such of the Romano-Gallic people, whether 
 laics or ecclesiastics, as enjoyed any influence from the supe- 
 riority either of their rank or of their intelligence, endeavored 
 to render the Prankish conquest subservient to the welfare 
 both of the conquered and of the conquering people. But the 
 barbarous chiefs of those conquerors exercised their dominion 
 as a mere brute force, concentrated entirely in their own per- 
 sons. They employed it as an instrument for satisfying their 
 unbridled passions, their insatiable cupidity, and their brutal 
 ardor for the sensual enjoyments of life. The chiefs attacked 
 butchered, and despoiled one another. Their Leudes (that is, 
 their officers and agents), abhorring a power opposed to all 
 their Germanic ideas and habits, conspired against them, re- 
 sisted their authority, and made it their constant object to con- 
 vert into an absolute ownership the revocable interest which 
 had been assigned to them in the spoils and honors of the con- 
 quest ; while many of them, making common cause with the 
 
44 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 conquered people placed under their command, werb engaged 
 in ceaseless revolts against the Merovingian kings, until they 
 had entirely thrown off their authority." 
 
 I anticipate the inquiry, To what purpose consume our time- 
 in studying the history of the Frankish dynasties, if they were 
 really conducted by rulers thus barbarous, having for their 
 subjects tribes thus uncivilized ? I answer that the study is 
 important, because, barbarous as they were, they were chosen 
 by the Supreme Ruler of the Nations to lay the basis of that 
 great European commonwealth, to every pulse of which the 
 whole civilized world has been so long accustomed to vibrate ; 
 because they were intermingled with the Grallic races, among 
 whom many remains of the old Roman civilization still lin- 
 gered ; and because, from the vicissitudes of their fortunes 
 and the spirit of their institutions eventually sprang those pol- 
 ities, Feudal and Papal, which have left their indelible impress 
 on the history and condition of the whole Christian world. 1 
 believe, therefore, that we shall do wisely in following the 
 steps of those great historians who have employed themselves 
 in interpreting the causes of the subversion of the dynasty of 
 Clovis, and in that belief I proceed to offer what occurs to my- 
 self as most material in explanation of that much-debated ca- 
 tastrophe. 
 
 First, then, I observe that the Frankish conquest of the 
 Romano-Gallic province was never completely accomplished ; 
 for, in addition to the antipathy which alienated the Franks 
 from the Grauls the dominant from the subject race they 
 were farther divided from each other by the indelible contrast 
 of their characters, national and hereditary. In the Merovin- 
 gian, as in every other age, the Grauls were animated by a 
 courage which (when unchilled by oppression and slavery) was 
 of an almost incomparable ardor. Keenly susceptible of ev- 
 ery kind of impulse, impelled into speech and action by a rest- 
 less constitutional vivacity, fickle of purpose, impatient of the 
 tranquil rule of law, and involved in perpetual disunions with 
 each other, this ingenious, volatile, enthusiastic race might 
 seem to have been molded by the hand of Nature herself, as 
 a living antithesis' to their Teutonic conquerors. The subtle, 
 insinuating, and courteous Graul despised, even while he obey- 
 ed, the sluggish, simple-minded German, and found inexhaust- 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 45 
 
 ible food for ridicule in his blunt speech and phlegmatic de- 
 meanor. The Gaul yielded himself recklessly to every gust 
 of emotion. The German lived under the control of passions 
 as measured in their outward manifestation as they were fer- 
 vent and enduring in reality. The Gaul habitually displayed 
 what, in the more abstruse idiom of the modern French tongue, 
 would be called a strong development of the sense of individ- 
 uality, or, in our homelier English, was egregiously vain. 
 The German neither rendered nor coveted any idolatrous hom- 
 age, but, meditating the interests of his nation or of his tribe, 
 merged his own fame in theirs, and cheerfully abandoned his 
 separate purposes to promote the designs of his associates in 
 policy or in arms. 
 
 Between the mercurial Graul and his saturnine conqueror, 
 amalgamation, whether social or political, was therefore of 
 very tardy growth. The relation between them long resem- 
 bled, and has not seldom been compared to that which the 
 lively Greek bore to his solemn Turkish master. To minister 
 to the luxuries of the victorious barbarian, to play upon his 
 weakness, to supply his lack of learning, and so to creep into 
 all employments demanding a more than common address and 
 mental culture, were arts practiced by the Gallic bondsman 
 at Paris many ages before they were employed by the Greek 
 bondsman at Constantinople. And so it happened that, after 
 the stranger had gained possession of his land, the Gaul insin- 
 uated himself into almost every important office, judicial and 
 ecclesiastical. The 'Meroving thus reigned over a state in 
 which the great mass of the people regarded his rule with aver- 
 sion and his person with contempt, and derided the convenient 
 dullness which gave such ample scope to their own encroach- 
 ing subtlety. 
 
 Secondly. When Clovis became the conqueror of Gaul, he 
 was not considered by himself or by others as having become 
 the monarch of a definite territory, or even as having become, 
 in the proper sense of the word, the Sovereign of the old Ro- 
 mano-Gallic inhabitants. No attempt was made to impose 
 upon the conquered people the laws, the language, or the cus- 
 toms of the conquerors. Sometimes, indeed, the privileges of 
 Prankish birth were granted to individual Gauls, but each of 
 them was free, if so it pleased him, to live under the ancient 
 
46 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 laws of Rome, and to observe the legal customs of the Roman 
 empire ; for in that age law was considered not as a local, 
 but as a personal distinction ; and in respect of the code, penal 
 and civil, under which they lived, the two races were thus sep- 
 arated from each other, after the conquest of Gaul, precisely 
 as they had been separated before. 
 
 Thirdly. There was no system of civil administrative gov- 
 ernment of which the Merovingian Kyning was the head, or to 
 which the provincial Gauls were subordinated. Under the 
 Romans, Graul had been divided into cities and rural prov- 
 inces. In the cities and their suburbs, all local affairs had 
 been conducted by municipalities, bearing no rude analogy to 
 that of Rome herself ; while in each rural province, the impe- 
 rial authority had been represented and administered by a Dux 
 or Comes, or a Vicecomes. After the conquest, the Frank 
 Herizog superseded the duke. The Frank Graf took the place 
 of the count or viscount, and claimed in every city an author- 
 ity co-ordinate with that of the old municipal magistrates. But 
 the Herizog and the Graf did not maintain with the Kyning 
 relations corresponding with those which the duke or count 
 had maintained with the emperor. The German viceroy raised 
 the military recruits for which his district or city was liable, 
 but made no other practical acknowledgment of responsibility 
 or subordination to the Kyning, or to any other human being. 
 Each Herizog and G-raf was regarded as supreme, or at least 
 as independent, within the limits of his own command ; for 
 although in the administration of justice he associated to him- 
 self Rakenburghs, that is, eminent persons of Gallic birth, 
 without whose concurrence no judgment for or against any 
 Gaul could be pronounced, yet from the judgments of the 
 Herizog or Graf, and of the Rakenburghs, there was no ap- 
 peal either to the Merovingian king, or to any officer of his 
 appointment. 
 
 Fourthly. Destitute as the Kyning thus was of all civil and 
 judicial authority, he was equally powerless in the government 
 of the Church. Her bishops and ministers were elected by the 
 people at large, and provincial synods promulgated ecclesias- 
 tical laws without any preceding or retrospective sanction 
 from the temporal sovereign. 
 
 Fifthly. Negotiations and alliances with foreign states were 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 47 
 
 equally beyond his province, for as yet diplomacy and diplo- 
 matic relations were not. Nor was he the conservator of the 
 peace of his people, for he had neither magistrates nor police 
 under his orders. Nor was he the author of public works, for 
 in those ages none such were ever undertaken or projected. 
 
 Sixthly. To these defects of the royal power it must be 
 added, that the Merovingian king was not the legislator for 
 his people ; or, rather, that there was in those ages no Gallo- 
 Frankish Legislature whatever. This is, indeed, to contradict 
 a prevalent opinion. It is usually supposed that each of the 
 German tribes, on its entrance into Gaul, promulgated there 
 the ancient code of their nation, and afterward introduced into 
 that code such amendments as experience suggested. No sup- 
 position, however, can be more erroneous, than that the Gothic, 
 Salian, Ripuarian, and Burgundian codes were ever established 
 (as the Code Napoleon, for example, was established) by the 
 deliberate act of a formal Legislature. They were recapitu- 
 lated, or, in modern phrase, were edited, by aged men, as me- 
 morials of the customs of their father-land ; and in this office 
 they availed themselves of the aid of Gauls, who alone were 
 qualified both to give a permanent form to those unwritten 
 traditions, and to adapt them to the new circumstances in 
 which the Frankish tribes were placed. These compilations 
 seem to have been received very much as our own forefathers 
 received the institutes of Bracton, of Fleta, and of Littleton. 
 
 From the co-operation of Gallic and of German compilers 
 of these codes, it happened that each of them was more or less 
 compounded of two distinct elements the one the barbaric 
 traditions, the other the Roman jurisprudence. Nor is it at 
 all difficult, especially with the aid of the very learned Savig- 
 ny, to perceive how the greater or less predominance of the 
 Roman element coincides with the greater or less civilization 
 of the people for whose use each code was so promulgated. 
 Accordingly, the Gothic drew most copiously, and the Salian 
 code least extensively, from the Corpus Juris Civilis ; while 
 the ideas of savage life pervaded the Salian compilation most 
 completely, and the Gothic in the smallest measure. Yet in 
 all of these collections of laws or customs, those ideas exer- 
 cised a commanding influence. They were all, to a great ex- 
 tent, the barbarous laws of a barbarous people. They all, for 
 
48 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 example, proceed on the assumption that crime is an injury, 
 not to the collective society, hut to the individual sufferer ; that 
 he or his surviving kindred have a natural and indefeasible 
 right to take vengeance on the wrong-doer, and that the proper 
 office of the law-giver is to secure the enforcement of this vin- 
 dictive privilege, subject only to such restraints as may pre- 
 vent the undue exercise or abuse of it. 
 
 In those precious monuments of antiquity we have the 
 most distinct records of the relations which subsisted in Gaul 
 between the conquering and the conquered people. The 
 milder Goths and Burgundians exacted from the homicide a 
 fine of equal amount, whether the victim had been a German 
 or a Gaul. The fiercer Franks doubled the penalty if the 
 person slain had been one of their own nation. Comparatively 
 equitable, the Goths and Burgundians guaranteed to the an- 
 cient proprietors one third of their lands, and two thirds of the 
 slaves attached to them. The less scrupulous Franks imposed 
 no such restraint on their own cupidity. Perhaps, however, 
 the comparative mildness of these more early invaders of Gaul 
 may have been prompted, not by their superior civilization, nor 
 by their greater equity, but by prudence, or even by necessity ; 
 for we know that some of their concessions to the conquered 
 people were extorted from their fears; and it -does not seem 
 unreasonable to conjecture, that, in other cases, the Goths 
 and Burgundians were less oppressive than the Franks, merely 
 because they were less able to practice oppression with im- 
 punity. 
 
 At present, however, I touch on this large subject of the 
 Germanic codes only with a view to the remark that the 
 authorship of them is not due to the Merovingian kings or 
 chieftains. "We might with equal reason ascribe the com- 
 mentaries of Sir Edward Coke to the first British sovereign of 
 the family of Stuart. 
 
 The character of legislators is, however, ascribed to Clovis 
 and his royal descendants on the ground of the enactments 
 which are supposed to have been made at their suggestion at 
 the Champs de Mars, or annual comitia of the Franks. In 
 order to estimate this pretension aright, we must inquire what 
 those assemblies really were ? 
 
 The words of Tacitus are, " De minoribus rebus principes 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 49 
 
 consultant, de majoribus omnes ; ita tamen ut ea quoque, 
 quorum penes plebem arbitrium est, apud principes pertrac- 
 tentur." Perhaps no English word corresponds so nearly to 
 the word " principes" in this passage as our term " chieftain," 
 nor have we any better equivalent for the words "omnes" 
 and " plebem," as here used, than that of " clansmen." But 
 at these gatherings of the patriarchal chieftain and his clan, 
 legislation was neither the single, nor the principal, nor the 
 ordinary, nor perhaps even the occasional object. For in 
 Tacitus again we read, " Licet apud concilium accusare quo- 
 que, et discrimen capitis intendere. Eliguntur in iisdem 
 comitiis et principes qui jura per pagos, vicosque, reddunt." 
 It is, therefore, ascertained that these assemblies tried crimi- 
 nals and elected judges ; but that they ever enacted permanent 
 laws, is little more than a conjecture. Whatever the actual 
 business of such meetings may have been, we know, however, 
 from the same authority, that attendance at them was often 
 rendered tardily and with reluctance. " Illud ex libertate vi- 
 tium, quod non simul, nee, ut jussi, conveniunt, sed et alter 
 et tertius dies, cunctatione coeuntium consumitur." 
 
 Now when this national institute of the German tribes was 
 transplanted into Gaul, it did not strike root and germinate in 
 that foreign soil without abundant indications of having under- 
 gone an unhealthful change ; for, first, the Princeps or chief- 
 tain found himself in a new position. He was no longer 
 dwelling in the secure circle of his own patriarchal family. 
 He had been constrained to receive among them many of the 
 ancient Gallic inhabitants to aid in the cultivation of his iso- 
 lated settlement, and many armed warriors to assist in the 
 defense of it. The obedience of his dependents could, there- 
 fore, no longer be maintained by the unaided bonds of filial 
 or domestic piety. As he ruled over a body far more numer- 
 ous and far more discordant than his ancient sept or clan, so 
 he invoked the aid of other arms than those of duty, reverence, 
 and attachment. As he exercised an authority at once more 
 rigid and more precarious than in his native forest, so the re- 
 luctance with which even there he had attended the comitia 
 of his people continually increased. He was unwilling to in- 
 cur the toil of journeys of such unwonted distance, to expose 
 his home to the hazards of his protracted absence from it, or 
 
 3D 
 
60 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 to exchange the dignity which he enjoyed there for the subor. 
 dination and comparative insignificance which awaited him at 
 the general assembly. 
 
 The comitia, or Champs de Mars, of the Franks in Gaul 
 being thus deserted by the chieftains of the more distant clans, 
 became, in fact, nothing more than councils of war. Sidonius 
 has left us a description of such an assembly, at which he was" 
 himself present at Toulouse. He calls it " concilium seni- 
 orum," and has drawn it in colors deepened probably by the 
 contempt of the polished Roman for these rude barbarians. 
 He paints them as a squalid group, squatting on the bare 
 ground, coarse and dirty in their persons, clad in mean and 
 tight vestments, and shod with sandals of raw hides. Gregory 
 of Tours has preserved a speech delivered by Clovis himself a+ 
 such an assembly. In a few stern and pungent words, the 
 royal orator exhorts the military congress to march to the con- 
 quest of the Gothic Arians. The air rings with acclamations, 
 and the king and his counselors, leaping up, are forthwith on 
 their way to slay or to convert the heretics. 
 
 The presumption that, during the lives of Clovis and his 
 sons, these armed and tumultuous Parliaments did not really 
 assume the grave office of legislation, is confirmed by the silence 
 both of Sidonius and of Gregory on the subject; and the 
 writers of later times seem to be unanimous in the opinion, 
 that after the death of Clovis and his sons, and during the 
 reigns of all the later Merovingians, the Champs de Mars, or 
 ancient Germanic assemblies, ceased to meet for any purpose 
 whatever. On the whole, therefore, I conclude that the Me- 
 rovings were not at any time the legislators for the Gallic 
 people, and that there was not, in fact, in their times, arty 
 general Prankish Legislature. 
 
 Seventhly. The Merovings were not administrators of 
 finance, nor had they, in fact, any national revenue. This 
 statement seems to me to admit of a ready explanation and 
 a sufficient proof, eminent as are the authorities by which it 
 is contradicted. 
 
 Fbr the reasons stated in my former lecture, the Franks, on 
 their invasion of Gaul, found vast territories there desolate and 
 abandoned by the plow. In those tracts of land the conquerors 
 received the reward of their dangers and of their toils. Not 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 51 
 
 apparently they were also rewarded by the assignment 
 to them of farms actually under cultivation. The estates 
 thus acquired were called sortes, "because they had been ap- 
 portioned by lot. They were also called al-ods, because, in 
 the case of each warrior, they constituted the whole of his 
 gain or booty. These sortes, or al-ods, were held free from 
 any rent or service, or other liability to any superior lord an 
 exemption from which the word " allodial" derives that pecu- 
 liar meaning which belongs to it in the French law, as well 
 as in our own. 
 
 After deducting from the entire surface of Graul, first, these 
 allodial lands, and, secondly J the tracts which the ancient in- 
 habitants were permitted to retain, there remained a vast ex- 
 tent of territory which was considered as the share in the gen- 
 eral spoil which belonged to the Merovingian king. In various 
 parts of this royal domain he had residences, to each of which 
 was attached a considerable extent of cultivated land. Passing 
 with his vast household from one of these estates to the other, 
 he consumed, in turn, the harvests of each. 
 
 On each were large bodies of slaves and of petty farmers, 
 called coloni ; that is, serfs, adscripti glebce ; vendible with 
 the soil and inseparable from it, and bound either to render 
 fixed rents in kind, or to repair the houses, to till the lands, to 
 tend the herds, to hunt the forests, and to fish the rivers of the 
 lord. In addition to these resources, the king was accustom- 
 ed, and, as some maintain, was entitled to receive from his 
 principal chieftains annual presents of clothing, cattle, and the 
 like. 
 
 With no marine to maintain, no public works to construct, 
 no stores or arsenals to supply, no judges, embassadors, min- 
 isters, or civil servants to support, and no public debt to pay. 
 a Merovingian king, possessing such ways and means as these, 
 might well esteem himself affluent without a treasury, and rich 
 without the command of a denarius. 
 
 Yet he had to meet one great and still recurring exigency 
 he was the general of a considerable army ; and to ourselves 
 no problem can appear so hopeless and intractable as that of 
 keeping up such a force without the aid of a well-furnished 
 exchequer. This difficulty, however familiar and obvious as 
 it is to us, is of comparatively recent growth in modern Europe. 
 
52 THE DECLINE AND FALL OP 
 
 Our Teutonic ancestors never heeded or acknowledged it. To 
 serve his captain in the field, and to subsist upon the spoils of 
 the enemy, was at once the duty and the delight of every free 
 Grerman. The Frank still confessed the duty, hut ceased to 
 feel the delight, after he had become a settler in Graul. His 
 new sedentary occupations taught him to set a high value on 
 the tranquil enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor. His 
 spontaneous military ardor, therefore, died away. But the 
 Kyning did not the less stand in need of his military services. 
 It therefore became necessary to rekindle his passion for war 
 by new incentives, and to enforce his presence in the camp by 
 new obligations. 
 
 Now, in their ancient Grerman settlements, the Merovingian 
 king, and the principal chiefs subordinate to him, had all been 
 surrounded by those companions who are designated by Taci- 
 tus as Comites, and who called themselves Leudes or Antras- 
 tions. Such companions differed from each other in rank. 
 " Grradus quinetiam et ipsi comitatus habet, judicio ejus quern 
 sectantur." From this relation to their leader they at once re- 
 ceived and imparted dignity: "Magnaque et comitum semnla- 
 tio, quibus, primus, apud principem suum, locus, et principum, 
 cui plurimi et acerrimi comites. Hsec dignitas, hse vires, mag- 
 no semper electorum juvenum globo circumdari ; in pace de- 
 cus in hello presidium." They were also accustomed to ex- 
 pect and to receive military presents from their chieftain. 
 " Exigunt enim principis sui liberalitate, ilium bellatorem 
 equum, ilium cruentam victricemque frameam." But he paid 
 them no military stipend. "Nam epulee, et quanquam in- 
 compti, largi tamen apparatus, pro stipendo cedunt. Materia 
 munificentise per bella et raptus." In his new position, and 
 desirous to provoke and to secure, rather than to reward the 
 services of his companions, the Merovingian king, ceasing to 
 bestow on them war-horses and shields, substituted the more 
 substantial recompense of tracts of land carved out of his royal 
 domain. Instead of absolute gifts, he now made conditional 
 grants. In return for the land, the royal donor stipulated that 
 he should receive, and the military companion bound himself 
 to render warlike services of a prescribed duration and amount. 
 The number of warriors whom each grantee pledged himself 
 to supply and to equip, varied with the extent and the value 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 53 
 
 of the lands conceded to him. Such concessions were called 
 benefaia. 
 
 Volumes of controversy have, been written t'j determine 
 whether such "benefices were resumable at pleasure, or wheth- 
 er they were held for a term of years, for life, or in perpetuity. 
 Into this debate it is beside my immediate purpose to enter, 
 farther than to express my own opinion that such grants were 
 usually made without any distinct apprehension, on either side, 
 as to the period for which they were to endure. It is, how- 
 ever, certain that a protracted strife respecting the tenure of 
 them arose between the Merovingian princes and the grantees 
 The princes maintained their right to resume such lands at 
 their pleasure ; the grantees labored to render the tenure of 
 them hereditary in their own families. In this contest the 
 grantees were generally successful. But they succeeded only 
 so far as to render their estates inheritable by their male heirs ; 
 for in the Salian code was incorporated that memorable tradi- 
 tion of the Franks : " De terra Salica in mulierem nulla portio 
 hereditatus transit sed hoc virilis sexus acquirit ;" a provision 
 which, in the fourteenth century, was successfully, though 
 unreasonably, quoted to exclude all females from the right of 
 succession to the crown of France. 
 
 But whatever may have been the legal tenure of these ben- 
 efices, my present object is to show that the military services 
 due in respect of them gave to the Merovingian kings the 
 means of recruiting, equipping, and maintaining their armies ; 
 and that thus, even to meet the exigencies of war, they had 
 no revenue, in the proper sense of that word, and were not de- 
 pendent on any fiscal resources. 
 
 Some French writers have indeed maintained that the old 
 Roman taxes were levied in G-aul for the benefit of Clovis and 
 his descendants. Of that fact, however, no proof has, I think, 
 ever yet been adduced from any extant records ; and they who 
 have searched the archives of France most diligently assert 
 that no such proofs are to be found there. 
 
 Since, then, the kings of the first or Merovingian race enjoy- 
 ed none of the attributes of sovereignty with which we are 
 familiar, it is difficult to say in what sense, or with what pro- 
 priety the royal title is ascribed to them. We can not transfer 
 our modern words king, reign, royalty, and the like, to their 
 
54 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 oersons, or to such, a dynasty as theirs, without weaving an 
 inextricable web of verbal fallacies. By a king we, in these 
 later ages, mean the head of, a monarchical state, from whom 
 all subordinate powers and dignities emanate, and to whom all 
 other functionaries are amenable. But this complex idea is 
 the tardy growth of time. By the word Kyning, the Franks 
 meant simply the depository of any power, whether military 
 or political. The word itself, as M. Thierry has shown, might 
 be rendered into Latin with equal accuracy by the terms im- 
 perator or consul, or dux or prcefectus, or by any synonym 
 of these. In his native forest, the Merovingian Kyning was 
 distinguished from other men by two attributes. First, he 
 was the chief of a family which, in popular belief, derived then* 
 origin from the Scandinavian deities a descent attested by 
 the length and richness of his unpolled hair ; and, secondly, 
 he was often, though not always, the chosen leader of the war- 
 riors of his tribe. His "prerogatives," so to speak, were there- 
 fore composed of his claim to religious veneration, and of his 
 right to military obedience. He was a heaven-descended gen- 
 eral rather than a king. The camp was his seat of empire. 
 The soldiers quartered there, and they alone were, in the right 
 sense of the word, his subjects. In the division of booty he 
 was entitled to the largest share, in all festivities to the most 
 conspicuous place, in every national assembly to the highest 
 influence, and among the tribes of his confederacy he was the 
 foremost free man ; but he was not, in the modern sense of 
 the word, their sovereign. He was honored, followed, and sup- 
 ported by his people ; he did not reign over them. 
 
 In whom, then, did the power over Graul really reside during 
 that long interval in which the sceptre is usually supposed to 
 have been held by Clovis and his posterity ? I answer that, 
 from the warlike grasp of Clovis himself, all real dominion 
 passed to the aristocracy, which he and his sons called into 
 existence. It was composed, first, of what may be called the 
 Official aristocracy, that is, the Herizogs and Grafs, each rul- 
 ing with an almost independent authority over the city or dis- 
 trict assigned to him* It was composed, secondly, of what 
 may be called the Patriarchal aristocracy ; that is, the chief- 
 tains of clans settled with their families and followers on their 
 sortes or allodial lands. And it was composed, thirdly, of the 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 55 
 
 Military aristocracy; that is, the grantees of benefices, each 
 having under his command a clan or tribe, collected from 
 among his ancient companions in arms ; or, more briefly, Gaul 
 was apportioned among an aristocracy, official and territorial. 
 The power of the territorial lords rested partly on the ancient 
 traditions and patriarchal sentiments of the Grermanic people, 
 and partly on two other main buttresses. First, in each set- 
 tlement was held an assembly called a mallum, which met at 
 short and frequent intervals, to deliberate and to decide on the 
 affairs of the clan. The powers of these local comitia were 
 vast and indefinite, and were employed to reduce the ancient 
 Romano-Gallic inhabitants into a bondage which continually 
 became more and more galling. Secondly, the great territorial 
 lords, imitating the example of the Merovingian kings, granted 
 sub-benefices to their own leudes or companions. Thus each 
 of the greater Prankish colonies in Graul became a kind of im- 
 age in miniature of the Prankish empire itself; that is, every 
 such colony was under the military command of a chieftain, 
 under the guidance of a local assembly, and under the protec- 
 tion of a body of warriors holding benefices on the condition 
 of following their chief to battle. 
 
 To this aristocracy, official and territorial, gradually passed 
 the whole strength of the Merovingian state. Single chiefs 
 combined in their own persons the two conditions of aristo- 
 cratic power governing several cities or districts, and possess- 
 ing at the same time many extensive al-ods or benefices. By 
 these combinations of governments and of territories in the 
 same hands, was laid the basis of a power which, rapidly 
 eclipsing every other, at length reduced the posterity of Clovis 
 to insignificance and contempt. If those princes became rois 
 faineants, it was because they had rien a faire. "When he 
 ceased to be the elected general of his nation, the Meroving 
 became a mere cipher. Having first sacrificed his royal do- 
 main to secure to himself the service of an army, he found 
 himself deprived of the command of that army by the votes of 
 the very grantees whom he had thus enriched. Nothing was 
 then left to him which he could sacrifice, and nothing of which 
 he could be deprived, except a title which had lost its mean- 
 ing, and a homage which had become obsolete. The famous 
 rescript of Pope Zachary, " that he who possessed the royal 
 
56 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 power might properly assume the royal dignity," overthrew 
 not a living power, but a worn-out fiction. It was the con- 
 summation in form of that which the course of events had al- 
 ready accomplished in substance. 
 
 To recur, then, to the question which I proposed at the com- 
 mencement What were those abiding springs of action by the 
 elastic power of which each of the Franco-Gallic dynasties 
 successively arose with such similar energy, declined with 
 such similar promptitude, fell into so similar a lifelessness, and 
 made way for so similar an aristocratic usurpation ? 
 
 The answer, so far, at least, as relates to the Merovingian 
 race, may be comprised in the single word Barbarism ; a 
 word vague and indefinite indeed, yet the only compendious 
 term by which we can designate that condition of human so- 
 ciety in which government is maintained, not by love, or rev- 
 erence, or policy, but, on the side of the ruler, by mere phys- 
 ical force, and, on the side of the people, by abject terror. 
 Under Clovis and his successors, Barbarism, so understood, 
 vainly attempted the work of civilization. The untamed en- 
 ergy of barbaric power subdued the Romano-Gallic province. 
 Barbarian rapacity, regarding that conquest only as the spoil 
 of war, seized and divided it among the strongest as their prey. 
 Barbarian ignorance left untried whatever might have amal- 
 gamated the vanquished Gauls and their victorious invaders 
 into one united people. Barbarian recklessness transferred to 
 a mighty empire the rude polity of an incoherent assemblage 
 of uncivilized clans. The ideas of the forest were transplant- 
 ed into a soil utterly unsuited to their growth. The German 
 pastimes of war and of the chase were abandoned for seden- 
 tary pursuits. The German chieftain became a great propri- 
 etor, and his followers degenerated into mercenary soldiers. 
 The patriarchal government of the tribe could no longer be 
 maintained. The national assemblies could not be brought 
 together. The long-haired Merovings retained no more the 
 hereditary homage of their tribes, but descended first into an 
 unmeaning and then into a contemptible pageant. Guided by 
 no lights from experience, and by no maxims from forethought, 
 the barbarous Frankish society resolved itself into its natural 
 elements ; the strong subjugating the weak, to be themselves 
 in turn brought into subjection by such as were stronger still 
 
THE MEROVINGIAN DYNASTY. 57 
 
 than they. Each duke and count found in his civic or rural 
 government a stronghold for assailing his neighbors and for his 
 own defense. Each proprietor of allodial or of beneficial es- 
 tates multiplied his armed retainers to aid or to oppose the 
 forces of some other territorial lord. From this shock of hos- 
 tile bands emerged at length that kind of peace which follows 
 in every society upon the effective assertion by any one of its 
 members of a strength too great for the successful resistance 
 of the rest. By alliances, by wealth, by prowess, by military 
 skill, and by policy, the house of Pepin gradually attained a 
 power with which no other chief or combination of chiefs could 
 any longer contend. The aristocracy had subverted the do- 
 minion of the Merovingian Kyning, to be themselves subverted 
 by the founder of the Carlo vingian dynasty. France has long 
 been the theatre of experiments to graft new institutions upon 
 a system of government, venerable at least for its antiquity, 
 if for nothing else. The ill success of such experiments, when 
 made by German Barbarism, was but an augury of the result 
 of those similar attempts which in far distant ages were to be 
 made by French Civilization. As we pursue the history of 
 France, no truth will more frequently present itself to our no- 
 tice than this that the healthful growth of good government 
 must be a spontaneous development from within, and not a 
 compulsory envelopment from without. The antithesis is not 
 merely verbal ; it is substantial also. 
 
58 CHARACTER ANf INFLUENCE CP 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 OH THE CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 
 
 IN my last lecture, I endeavored to trace the subversion of 
 the Merovingian Dynasty to the barbarism which character- 
 ized alike the princes of that race and their civil and military 
 institutions. There was, however, nothing barbarous in the 
 agency by which their overthrow was accomplished. We 
 should search the history of mankind in vain for any series of 
 four successive monarchs, following each other in a direct he- 
 reditary lineage, to whom the praise of large capacity, of reso- 
 lute purposes, and of splendid achievements, is so justly due 
 as to Pepin of Heristal and his posterity to the third genera- 
 tion. That the descendants, first of Clovis and then of Char- 
 lemagne, pursued the same disastrous path to the same ulti- 
 mate ruin, is, therefore, a coincidence which we may not as- 
 cribe to any similarity in the views or in the character of their 
 respective progenitors. For it is not without reason that pane- 
 gyric has so exhausted her powers in celebrating the great 
 founder of the Carlo vingian empire ; and that, among the he- 
 roes of former ages, his name alone enjoys .a kind of double 
 immortality : the one, the deliberate award of history ; the 
 other, the prodigal gift of fiction and romance. What, then, 
 were the causes which defeated even the genius of Charle- 
 magne in his attempt to prolong, beyond his own life, either 
 the empire which he restored, the polity which he established, 
 or the code of laws which he promulgated ? To resolve that 
 question, we must bear in mind that, in common with all the 
 great actors on the theatre of the world, he lived, not in obedi- 
 ence to occasional impulses, but under the government of cer- 
 tain fixed rules and maxims of conduct ; that though some of 
 these principles were the indigenous growth of his own mind, 
 the greater part of them had been acquired by tradition from 
 his ancestors ; that his character was far more derivative than 
 original ; and that he himself was much rather the conductor 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 59 
 
 than the author of the influences which he exerted on the ages 
 subsequent to his own. 
 
 To understand aright the reign of Charlemagne, it is neces- 
 sary, therefore, to "begin by inquiring, What were the laws, 
 and what the policy of his house, which descended to him from 
 his forefathers as a patrimonial inheritance ? 
 
 First, then, I observe that Charlemagne was an Australian ; 
 that is, that he and his immediate ancestors belonged to that 
 Gallic kingdom which, on the death of Clotaire I., was as- 
 signed to Sigebert, the youngest of his sons. 
 
 Among the tribes of the great Frankish confederacy which 
 followed Clovis to the conquest of G-aul, the Salian and the 
 Ripuarian were the chief. Being himself a Salian, Clovis 
 placed the warriors of that race in possession of the largest 
 and fairest portion of the conquered territory. Their settle- 
 ments extended from the Meuse to the Loire, and embraced 
 the whole of that part of Northern G-aul in which the ancient 
 Romano-Gallic population were still numerous. In that region, 
 the Salians, withdrawn far away from their native seats, be- 
 came, in each succeeding generation, more and more estranged 
 from the customs of their German ancestors, and more and 
 more familiar with the habits, laws, and language of the sub- 
 jugated people. The conquerors fell into a kind of social 
 thraldom to those over whom they had triumphed, and pro- 
 gressively assumed a semi-Gallic and an unwarlike character. 
 
 Now, even in their native forests, the Salian and the Ripu- 
 arian Franks had been broadly distinguished from each other. 
 They observed many different customs, and made use of dis- 
 similar dialects of the Teutonic tongue. After their migra- 
 .tions to the westward of the Rhine, these varieties were in- 
 creased and multiplied, and at length were exasperated into 
 mutual animosities and distrusts. Dwelling apart between 
 the Meuse and the Rhine, the Ripuarians preserved their prim- 
 itive language from any foreign alloy, revered the traditions 
 of their ancestors, perpetuated their ancient usages, and were 
 constantly forming new relations, pacific or belligerent, with 
 the tribes residing in the interior of Germany. 
 
 On the death of the first Clotaire, and the consequent par- 
 tition of Gaul between his four sons, the contrast and the 
 jealousies between these two chief Frankish tribes induced a 
 
60 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OP 
 
 territorial arrangement, which ultimately brought them into, a 
 hostile attitude toward each other. An imaginary line was 
 rudely drawn from the mouths of the Scheldt to near the 
 sources of the Aube. The country to the west of that line 
 acquired the name of Neustria ; the country to the east of it 
 the name of Austrasia. With no very material inaccuracy, 
 Neustria might have been called Salian Gaul, and Austrasia 
 Ripuarian Graul. Before the end of the sixth century, they 
 had become two distinct states, at once kindred and allied, 
 rival and hostile to each other kindred and allied, as the 
 principal members of the great Prankish confederation rival 
 and hostile, as competitors for superiority over all the tribes 
 of which it was composed. The military and political history 
 of Graul during the seventh century comprises little more than 
 the record of the conflict between Neustria and Austrasia for 
 that pre-eminence. It issued in the triumph of the Austrasi- 
 ans. They vanquished "Western and Southern Graul by the 
 same means which had assured to Clovis and his followers the 
 conquest of the Romano-Gallic province. It was, in fact, a 
 second Germanic invasion. The untamed energy of the Ger- 
 man race, continually recruited by new Gferman auxiliaries, 
 unce again beat down the resistance of a people who, while 
 advancing in the arts of civilized life, had declined in the 
 hardihood, the courage, and the warlike discipline of their un- 
 civilized progenitors. But the Austrasian conquest of Gaul 
 was chiefly effected by the genius of that illustrious family, 
 of which Pepin of Heristal was the first, and Charlemagne the 
 second founder ; nor is it difficult to estimate the nature or the 
 strength of the influence which that circumstance exercised 
 on the whole system of his political life and government. 
 
 Secondly. With such a descent Charlemagne was predis- 
 posed to what, in modern phraseology, would be called a "con- 
 stitutional" policy ; an expression which, however inapt and 
 inappropriate, may stand in the place of a long periphrasis. 
 Pepin of Heristal, though combining in his own person the 
 real government, civil and military, over the whole of the Fran- 
 co-Gallic s^ate, had borne no higher title than that of Duke of 
 Austrasia and Mayor of the Palace in Neustria and Burgundy. 
 He had governed, not by material force, nor by the reverence 
 of ancient superstition, nor by the influence of hereditary right, 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 61 
 
 nor by the fascinations which attend the pomp and majesty of 
 the diadem. On the contrary, in Neustria and Burgundy, his 
 strength consisted in propitiating the Franks by his habitual 
 respect to the empty name, and to the faint shadow of royalty 
 in the race of the long-haired Merovings. But in Austrasia he 
 sustained h.is power by popular arts, and especially by reviving 
 among the people the free assemblies of their German ances- 
 tors. This regard of Pepin of Heristal to what I have ven- 
 tured to call constitutional habits, descended, as one of tho 
 traditions of his house, to Charlemagne. 
 
 Thirdly. Charlemagne inherited from Charles Martel, his 
 grandfather, two other maxims, of what, in modern language, 
 would be called foreign or diplomatic policy. Of these the one 
 was, that the Prankish power could be maintained only by 
 anticipating those invasions with which Gaul was again men- 
 aced by the barbarians who hung upon her frontiers, and by 
 crushing them in their own fastnesses. The other was, that, 
 in order to repel these threatened incursions, and to advance 
 the ambitious prospects of the Carlovingian house, it was ne- 
 cessary to seek the alliance of such civilized states or poten- 
 tates as could, in that age, be conciliated, either in Asia or in 
 Europe. Charles Martel inculcated these lessons, not perhaps 
 as formal precepts, but by a life of unremitting war and nego- 
 tiation. Year after year he carried fire and sword among the 
 Saxon confederacy, from the mouths of the Elbe to those of 
 the Oder ; and then rapidly passing to the south, he again and 
 again encountered, repelled, and destroyed the Saracens. He 
 entered into friendly relations with the King of Lombardy, 
 with Leo the Isaurian and Iconoclast, and with the Pope ; 
 who, in gratitude to him as the deliverer of Europe, transmit- 
 ted to him (so the ecclesiastical historians assure us) the very 
 keys once borne by St. Peter, and the very cords with which 
 the apostle had been bound during his imprisonment at Rome. 
 Yet Charles Martel occupied no enviable place in the estima- 
 tion of the churchmen of his age. In his Saracenic wars, he 
 had maintained his army by a sacrilegious seizure and division 
 of ecclesiastical property among his soldiers ; and we read that, 
 after the death of Charles, St. Eucharius announced that, while 
 rapt into a state of visionary existence, he nad himself been an 
 eye-witness of the sufferings which that great conqueror was 
 
62 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 undergoing, and would never cease to endure, as the punish- 
 ment for his impiety. Other teachers, scarcely less eminent 
 than St. Eucharius, solemnly affirmed the same fact. Nor were 
 these monastic reveries as unimportant as they were idle. For, 
 
 Fourthly, from the experience of his father, and in no small 
 degree, as it seems, from the terror excited by these legends, 
 Pepin-le-Bref, the son of Charles Martel, adopted and transmit- 
 ted to Charlemagne another maxim, still more valuable than 
 any of those which had before been introduced into the heredi- 
 tary code of their family. It was the maxim that the sup- 
 port of the Church was indispensable to the transfer of the 
 Frankish diadem from the Merovingian to the Carlovingian 
 race. Or, it may be said to have been the maxim, that, in 
 order to encounter and subvert the reverence which was still 
 yielded to a merely titular monarch, the supposed descendant 
 of the gods, it was necessary to enlist on their own side relig- 
 ious feelings of a far deeper nature and of a much more sol- 
 emn significance. 
 
 Pepin-le-Bref lived to establish and illustrate the truth of 
 this opinion. Like his forefathers, he still exhibited, for the 
 homage of the Franks, the phantom of a Merovingian king ; 
 though he judiciously selected for that purpose Childeric III., 
 whose personal qualities were precisely those which would 
 most surely provoke, and most completely justify, the con- 
 tempt of his people. Like his father and grandfather, Pepin- 
 le-Bref convened the national assemblies of the Franks with 
 strict punctuality, and attended them with studious respect. 
 Like his progenitors, also, he invaded the Saxons, the Alle- 
 manni, and the Bavarians ; and courted the alliance of Con- 
 stantinople and of Pavia. But in his relations with the Church 
 he far exceeded all the examples of his ancestors. He afforded 
 the most zealous support to Boniface, and to the other Christian 
 missionaries in Grermany. He not merely assigned a place in 
 the national assemblies to the bishops and clergy of Graul, but 
 secured to them the highest rank and authority there. He 
 made such atonement as was in his power for the sacrilegious 
 spoliations of his father. He twice crossed the Alps to rescue 
 Rome from the grasp of the King of Lombardy ; and he con- 
 ferred on the Pope and his successors that territorial dominion 
 which, during one thousand successive years, has been the 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 63 
 
 bulwark of their independence and their power. In grateful 
 acknowledgment of these services, the sentence of Pope Zacha- 
 ry, and the hands of Boniface, placed the crown of Childeric 
 on the brows of Pepin ; and while the last of the Merovingians 
 sought shelter in a monastery, a papal anathema consigned to 
 the most fearful of all punishments any one who should pre- 
 sume to dispute the title of the first of the Carlovingians to 
 the kingdom of Gaul. 
 
 The political maxims which Charlemagne thus acquired by 
 tradition and inheritance had, to a certain extent, become ob- 
 solete when he himself succeeded to the power of his ancestors, 
 and to the crown of his father Pepin. It was then no longer 
 necessary to practice these hereditary arts with a view to the 
 great prize to which they had so long been subservient. But 
 the maxims by which the Carlovingian sceptre had been won, 
 were not less necessary in order to defend and to retain it. 
 They afford the key to more than half of the history of the 
 great conqueror from whom that dynasty derives its name. 
 The cardinal points to which, throughout his long and glorious 
 reign, his mind was directed with an inflexible tenacity of pur- 
 pose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had 
 bent their attention. They were, to conciliate the attachment 
 of his German subjects, by studiously maintaining their old 
 Grermanic institutions ; to anticipate instead of awaiting the 
 invasions of the barbarous nations by whom he was surround- 
 ed : to court the alliance and support of all other secular po- 
 tentates of the East' and "West ; and to strengthen his own 
 power by the most intimate relations with the Church. 
 
 I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had 
 other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous 
 growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing 
 depth and fertility that such maxims could have been nur- 
 tured and made to yield their appropriate fruits ; for, first, 
 he firmly believed that the power of his house could have no 
 secure basis except in the religious, moral, and intellectual 
 and social improvement of his subjects ; and, secondly, he was 
 no less firmly persuaded that, in order to that improvement, 
 it was necessary to consolidate all temporal authority in Eu- 
 rope by the reconstruction of the Caesarian empire that em- 
 pire, beneath the shelter of which, religion, law, and learning 
 
64 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 had so long and so widely flourished throughout the domin- 
 ions of imperial Rome. 
 
 Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the 
 title of " The Great" has heen given, Charlemagne alone has 
 retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason 
 may perhaps he, that in no other man were ever united, in so 
 large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities 
 which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, 
 such as energy, or the love of action ; ambition, or the love of 
 power ; curiosity, or the love of knowledge ; and sensibility, 
 or the love of pleasure not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of 
 unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for 
 those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jad- 
 ed spirits recruit and renovate their powers delights of which 
 none are susceptible in the highest degree but those whose 
 more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives, 
 and directed toward the highest ends ; for the charms of so- 
 cial intercourse, the play of a buoyant fancy, the exhilaration 
 of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, 
 require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute 
 health of body and of mind, which none but the noblest na- 
 tures possess, and in the possession of which Charlemagne ex- 
 ceeded all other men. 
 
 His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brill- 
 iant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head, imparted, 
 as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity 
 which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a 
 practiced warrior. He was still a stranger to every form of 
 bodily disease when he entered on his seventieth year ; and 
 although he was thenceforward constrained to pay the usual 
 tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a 
 contempt for the whole materia medico, , and for the dispensers 
 of it, which Moliere himself, in his gayest mood, might have 
 envied. In defiance of the gout, he still followed the chase, and 
 still provoked his comrades to emulate his feats in swimming ; 
 as though the iron frame which had endured nearly threescore 
 campaigns had been incapabk of lassitude, and exempt from 
 decay. 
 
 In the monastery of St. G-all, near the Lake of Constance, 
 there was living in the ninth century a monk, who relieved 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 65 
 
 the tedium of his monotonous life, and got the better, as he 
 tells us, of much constitutional laziness, by collecting anec- 
 dotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories the 
 world was at that time ringing. In his amusing legend, Charle- 
 magne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of learning, 
 and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne 
 the joyous companion ; amusing himself with the comedy, or 
 rather with the farce, of life, and contributing to it not a few 
 practical jokes, which staad in most whimsical contrast with 
 the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, when he commands 
 a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, plumed, and furred, and 
 silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase through sleet 
 and tempest, mud and brambles ; or constrains an unhappy 
 chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other 
 members of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces ; or 
 concerts with a Jew peddler a scheme for palming off, at an 
 enormous price, on an Episcopal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as 
 an animal till then unknown to any naturalist these, and 
 many similar facetise, which in any other hands might have 
 seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious 
 author of them, that native alacrity of spirit and child-like 
 glee, which neither age, nor cares, nor toil could subdue, and 
 which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to 
 suffocate. 
 
 Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim 
 or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over the inte- 
 rior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had been borne 
 on men's shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, to accompany 
 his father in his wars ; and in later life, he had many a strange 
 tale to tell of his father's achievements. "With his mother 
 Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in an affectionate and rever- 
 end intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occa- 
 sion, which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of 
 filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife 
 against his own consent. His own parental affections were 
 indulged too fondly and too long, and were fatal both to the 
 immediate objects of them and to his own tranquillity. But 
 with Eginhard, and Alcuin, and the other associates of his se- 
 verer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friend- 
 ship, which can be created only on the basis of the most pro- 
 
 E 
 
66 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OP 
 
 found esteem, and which can "be developed only by that free 
 interchange of thought and feeling which implies the tempo- 
 rary forgetfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank 
 and dignity. 
 
 It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform with 
 such revolting obscenities the pages in which he waged his dis- 
 ingenuous warfare against the one great purifying influence of 
 human society. It may also have been a retributive justice 
 which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be overshadowed 
 by the foul and unmerited reproach on which Gibbon dwells 
 with such offensive levity ; for the monarch was habitually re- 
 gardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant, which 
 has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love, and hap- 
 piness, and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, 
 Charlemagne was probably the willing victim of a transparent 
 sophistry. From a nature so singularly constituted as his, 
 sweet waters or bitter might flow with equal promptitude. 
 That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues and his 
 vices found their common root, probably confounded the dis- 
 tinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced 
 him to think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often 
 conducting him to the most noble and magnanimous enter- 
 prises. For such was the revelry of his animal life, so inex- 
 haustible his nervous energies, so intense the vibrations of each 
 successive impulse along the chords of his sensitive nature, so 
 insatiable his thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impa- 
 tience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a 
 chase composed verses or listened to homilies fought or ne- 
 gotiated cast down thrones or built them up studied, con- 
 versed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the 
 one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, 
 visionary, and somnolent generation. 
 
 The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders 
 was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman 
 activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or sci- 
 ence of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action, 
 and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of 
 Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted block- 
 ade. But, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted war- 
 fare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from tho Ebro 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 67 
 
 to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Cap- 
 ua, with such a velocity of movement and such a decision of 
 purpose, that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked 
 his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and 
 irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gribbon has ob- 
 served, that he seldom, if ever, encountered in the field a re- 
 ally formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his 
 military skill, animated by his sleepless energy, the countless 
 assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have 
 become too formidable for resistance. For to Charlemagne is 
 due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which 
 a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own 
 forces to that of his antagonists the art of moving detached 
 bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such 
 mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same 
 moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine 
 marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with 
 greater foresight, or executed with greater precision, than the 
 simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard 
 across the same mountain ranges, and their ultimate union in 
 the vicinity of their Lombard enemies. 
 
 But though many generals have eclipsed the fame of Char- 
 lemagne as a strategist, no one ever rivaled his inflexible per- 
 severance as a conqueror. The Carlovingian crown may in- 
 deed be said to have been worn on the tenure of continual con- 
 quests. It was on that condition alone that the family of Pe- 
 pin of Heristal could vindicate the deposition of the Merovings 
 and the pre-eminence of the Austrasian people ; and each mem- 
 ber of that family, in his turn, gave an example of obedience 
 to that law, or tradition, of their house. But by none of them 
 was it so well observed as by Charlemagne himself. From his 
 first expedition to his last there intervened forty-six years, no 
 one of which he passed in perfect peace, nor without some mil- 
 itary triumph. In six months he reduced into obedience the 
 great province or kingdom of Aquitaine. In less than two 
 years he drove the Lombard king into a monastic exile, placing 
 on his own brows the iron crown, and with it the sovereignty 
 over nearly all the Italian peninsula. During thirty-three suc- 
 cessive summers he invaded the great Saxon confederacy, un- 
 til the deluge of barbarism with which they threatened South- 
 
t>8 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 ern Europe was effectually and forever repressed. It has teen 
 alleged, indeed, that the Saxon wars were waged in the spirit 
 of fanaticism, and that the vicar of Christ placed the sword of 
 Mohammed in the hands of the sovereign of the Franks. It 
 is, I think, an unfounded charge, though sanctioned by Gib- 
 bon and by Warburton, and by names of perhaps even greater 
 authority than theirs. That the alternative, " believe or die," 
 was sometimes proposed by Charlemagne to the Saxons, I shall 
 not, indeed, dispute. But it is not less true that, before these 
 terms were tendered to them, they had again and again reject- 
 ed his less formidable proposal, "be quiet and live." In form 
 and in terms, indeed, their election lay between the Gospel 
 and the sword. In substance and in reality, they had to make 
 their choice between submission and destruction. A long and 
 deplorable experience had already shown that the Frankish peo- 
 ple had neither peace nor security to expect for a single year, 
 so long as their Saxon neighbors retained their heathen rites, 
 and the ferocious barbarism inseparable from them. Fearful 
 as may be the dilemma, " submit or perish," it is that to which 
 every nation, even in our own times, endeavors to reduce a host 
 of invading and desolating foes ; nor, if we ourselves were now 
 exposed to similar inroads, should we offer to our assailants con- 
 ditions more gentle or less peremptory. 
 
 He must be a resolute student of history who, on investi- 
 gating the progress of the conquests of Charlemagne, is neither 
 deterred nor discouraged by the incoherence of the narrative, 
 the complexity of the details, or the difficulties, both of geog- 
 raphy and chronology, which beset his way. The labyrinth 
 can, indeed, be rightly understood only by those who have pa- 
 tiently trodden it ; yet some clew to the apparently inextrica- 
 ble maze may be found in a brief review of the causes which 
 were constantly working out the success of the conqueror. 
 
 First. Not only each of his wars, but each of his campaigns, 
 was a national act. At Easter in every year he held a great 
 council of war, at which all the Austrasian, and many of the 
 Neustrian bishops, counts, viscounts, barons, and leudes attend- 
 ed. They followed their king into the field with confidence and 
 enthusiasm, because it was always in prosecution of an enter- 
 prise which, though suggested by his foresight, had been adopt, 
 ed with their consent, and sanctioned by their acclamations. 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 69 
 
 Secondly. In all his wars, Graul afforded to Charles an in- 
 vulnerable basis for his military operations. From Gaul he 
 invaded every part of Europe, leaving behind him both an ex- 
 haustless magazine of men and arms, and, in case of disaster, 
 a secure and accessible retreat. 
 
 Thirdly. Availing himself of the knowledge of his Gallic 
 and Lombard subjects, Charlemagne had effected great im- 
 provements in the mere material of war. His Franks were 
 no longer a bare-legged and bare-headed horde, armed with 
 the old barbaric lance and short sword, or defended by a 
 round, wicker- worked shield, fenced by skins. They now bore 
 the long Roman buckler and* a visored helmet, and were armed 
 with the pilum, with a long-pointed, two-handed sword, and 
 with that heavy club shod with iron knots, which, if we be- 
 lieve the romance of Turpin, was in special favor among cleri- 
 cal combatants, because it enabled them to slay their enemies 
 without contracting the guilt of shedding blood. The Paladins, 
 celebrated by the same warlike prelate, divided, as we know, 
 with their steeds the glory of their achievements, the two be- 
 ing reputed to be almost as inseparable as in the Centaur ; a 
 legend which had its basis in Charlemagne's habit of mounting 
 his cavalry on horses of prodigious power, bred in the pastures 
 of the Lower Rhine. 
 
 Fourthly. If not a master of the art of war, he was far re- 
 moved in this respect from the barbaric chiefs who first led the 
 Salian and Ripuarian hordes into Graul. "With Rome and Ro- 
 man examples ever before his eyes, he knew, as I have indeed 
 already observed, how to move his armies in separate corps, at 
 once detached and connected ; and with unerring geographical 
 knowledge was able always to direct his blows at the vulnerable 
 points of the various countries which he successively invaded. 
 
 Fifthly. Imitating the policy of Caesar, and anticipating 
 that of Napoleon, Charlemagne made war support itself. Nei- 
 ther in his capitularies, nor in the chronicles of his reign, is 
 there any proof or suggestion that his troops ever received or 
 expected any pay or military allowances. War was at once 
 their duty, their passion, and their emolument. In that age 
 every proprietor of land, allodial or beneficial, equipped, armed, 
 and mounted his own followers ; and companies, regiments, or 
 battalions were but so many gatherings on the field of those 
 
70 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OP 
 
 who were accustomed to live in the immediate vicinity of each 
 other as leudes, as free husbandmen, or as coloni. 
 
 Sixthly. Charlemagne borrowed from Rome, and transmit- 
 ted to the modern Emperor of the French, the example of mak- 
 ing each new conquest the basis for a farther acquisition. He 
 constrained the vanquished Lombards to march under his 
 standard against the Saxons and the Bavarians, and to assist 
 at the sieges of Barcelona and Pampeluna, In every nation 
 which he subdued, he found or made recruits for the subjuga- 
 tion of some yet unconquered people ; and taught more than 
 half the European world to exult in the successes of a mon- 
 arch who had first triumphed over themselves. 
 
 Seventhly. In his campaigns in Spain, in Lombardy, and 
 in Aquitaine, Charlemagne may be said to have contended 
 with the superstratum of society, and to have availed himself 
 of the alliance of the substratum. The old Iberian, Gothic, 
 and Italian populations regarded him as the antagonist of the 
 dominant Saracens in the one peninsula, and of dominant 
 Lombards in the other. To divide and conquer was, indeed, 
 his unfailing maxim in whatever country he invaded, as often 
 as he found the inhabitants of it already separated from each 
 other by religion, language, or traditions ; by public, social, or 
 domestic customs ; in short, by any of the distinctions which 
 promote and exasperate international animosities. In this re- 
 spect, Charlemagne at Barcelona or Pavia was the exact pro- 
 totype of Napoleon at Milan or at Warsaw. 
 
 Eighthly. Charlemagne is among the most memorable ex- 
 amples of the union in the same mind of the most absolute 
 reliance on its own powers, and of the most generous confi- 
 dence in the powers of his subordinate officers. Such was the 
 continuity and the promptitude of his own military movements, 
 that, in studying them, one is tempted to assign to the rail- 
 road an existence a thousand years earlier than the birth of 
 Greorge Stephenson. So important were the commands which 
 he intrusted to his lieutenants, that, on reviewing them, one 
 is tempted to imagine that the great conqueror himself was 
 accustomed to luxuriate in the repose and enjoyments of his 
 palace at Aix-la-Chapelle. It is difficult to say which of the 
 two suppositions would be the more erroneous. 
 
 Finally. The establishment of the vast empire over which 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 71 
 
 Charlemagne reigned during almost half a century is to be as- 
 cribed chiefly, and beyond all other causes, to the character he 
 sustained as the ally and champion of the Church. I will not 
 now anticipate the subject of a future lecture, but, waiving 
 for the present all higher and all more recondite considera- 
 tions, I limit myself to the remark that, in an age in which 
 all the other elements of human society were in discord, the 
 Church, and the Church alone, maintained- a unity of opinion, 
 of sentiment, of habits, and of authority. On that unity, the 
 great basis of her own spiritual dominion, the Church enabled 
 Charlemagne to erect the edifice of his temporal power ; while 
 he, in turn, employed that -power in the defense of her rights 
 and in the extension of her authority. Disastrous as that al- 
 liance may have been to some of his successors in the German 
 empire, it was to himself the main pillar and buttress of his 
 state ; as it might have remained to future ages, if the heirs 
 of his crown had also been the heirs of his wisdom. 
 
 The marvelous series of events of which I thus recapitulate 
 the main causes, may be studied in the Annals of Eginhard 
 and in his Life of Charlemagne, in the Chronicle of St. Denys, 
 and in the Saxon poet published by the Benedictines ; or, if 
 that labor be too repulsive, they may be read (though not with 
 equal interest) in the history of our own countryman and con- 
 temporary, Mr. James. But, to be seen in all the vivid color- 
 ing in which former ages contemplated them, they must be 
 surveyed in the works of a much more amusing, though far 
 less authentic series of writers in the romance of Lancelot, 
 in the Gresta of William the Short-nosed, in the legend called 
 Philomela, in Turpin's Chronicle, in Pulci, in Boyardo, and, 
 above all, in the Orlando Furioso, where genius, in the exer- 
 cise of her legitimate despotism, has inverted the whole cur- 
 rent of history, changing Charles, the Glorious and the Wise, 
 into an enchanted knight, surrounded by his paladins, and ele- 
 vating to the seventh heaven of chivalry his kinsman Rolando, 
 of whom history knows only that he fell before the treacherous 
 Gascons at the pass of Roncesvalles. Yet Poetry, amid all her 
 wildest fictions, has in these legends perpetuated the record 
 of one great and memorable truth the truth, I mean, that the 
 contemporaries of the great conqueror and their descendants, 
 to remote generations, cherished the traditions of his mighty 
 
72 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 deeds with enthusiastic delight, and lavished on his memory 
 every tribute which either history could pay or imagination 
 offer. 
 
 And yet they who lived in his own age appear to have been 
 impressed by the grandeur of his foreign and domestic policy 
 even yet more than by the magnitude of his warlike achieve- 
 ments. The sources of this illusion (for such I conceive it to 
 have been) may be discovered with no great difficulty. At 
 that period the imagination of mankind was in bondage to the 
 three venerable or splendid thrones which represented the Pa- 
 pal, the Imperial, and the Mohammedan dynasties. The suc- 
 cessors of Peter, of Caesar, and of Mohammed divided between 
 them the homage of the world ; and Charlemagne aspired to 
 wear the united diadems of Rome and Constantinople, to gov- 
 ern the papacy, and to obtain the alliance and support of the 
 Califate. He thus sought to combine, in his own person, all 
 the titles to all the reverence which the men of his generation 
 yielded to power, whether royal or sacerdotal ; and though the 
 enterprise was not really successful, the magnitude and au- 
 dacity of the attempt was not unrewarded by a large share of 
 the admiration for which he thirsted. 
 
 Pope Stephen I. had crowned and anointed Pepin-le-Bref. 
 The second pope of that name was indebted to the son of Pepin 
 for his personal safety, and for the extension of the papal do- 
 minions. Adrian, who sat in the apostolic chair during twen- 
 ty-two years, received from Charlemagne a renewal and an ex- 
 tension of the same benefits, and manifested his gratitude by 
 placing the Lombard crown on the brows of his benefactor. 
 Thenceforward the Frankish king and the successor of St. Peter 
 lived together rather as personal friends than as political allies. 
 Charles became the protector of Adrian against all his enemies, 
 whether Greek, or Saracen, or Italian. Adrian became the 
 zealous guardian of the rights of Charles within the Italian 
 peninsula. The letters of the pope to the king are such as in 
 our days an embassador or a viceroy might address to the sov- 
 ereign whom he represents in some distant state or province. 
 At one time he congratulates the conqueror on his victories ; 
 at another, he transmits to him martyrs' bones and consecrated 
 banners, or invokes his aid against the invaders of the papal 
 territory, or solicits his personal presence at Rome, or entreats 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 73" 
 
 that delegates may be sent to represent him there, or asks an 
 augmentation of the ecclesiastical territories, or requests that 
 materials may be sent to him for reconstructing the Cathedral 
 of St. Peter ; but, whatever may be the occasion, the language 
 of the pontiff is still that either of a subject addressing his 
 prince, or of a patriarch accosting a much-loved disciple and 
 much-honored friend. That the attachment was sincere and 
 mutual, it would be a gratuitous skepticism to doubt. Though 
 he could not write his own language, Charles could dictate 
 Latin verse ; and, on the death of Adrian, he composed for him 
 an epitaph, which was engraven in letters of gold on his tomb, 
 and long attested the remembrance and the regrets of his sur- 
 viving associate. For the following extract from this imperial 
 elegy, I am responsible only so far as relates to the accuracy 
 of the quotation. 
 
 Post patrem lacrymans, Carolus hsec carmina scrips! ; 
 Tu mihi dulcis amor, te modd plango pater. 
 Nomina jungo simul, titulis clarissima, nostra 
 Adrianus, Carolus ; rex ego, tuque pater. 
 
 Leo, the successor of Adrian, was exposed to the ill will and 
 the persecution of the Roman populace, and he therefore riv- 
 eted yet more strongly the bonds which united the papal and 
 the Frankish powers. Crossing the Alps, he sought and obtain- 
 ed the protection of Charlemagne against the turbulence of the 
 city ; and requited his protector by hailing him with the titles 
 of CsBsar, and Imperator semper Augustus titles so long un- 
 heard, but so indelibly engraven on the memory and the im- 
 agination of mankind. 
 
 Nor was this the unforeseen result of any sudden impulse. 
 The elevation of the Frankish king to the imperial dignity 
 must have been preconcerted with Leo during his residence in 
 Germany, if not with Adrian, at an earlier period. M. Gruizot, 
 indeed, regards it as the step at which Charlemagne first de- 
 viated from a patriotic into a selfish policy, and, therefore, as 
 the step from which commenced the decline of the Carlo vin- 
 gian power. The apologist of the monarch might answer, and 
 perhaps justly answer, that though conquest was the inevi- 
 table basis of the Austrasian throne, it is a basis on which no 
 throne can be long securely rested ; that it therefore behooved 
 Charles to sustain his material power by those moral powers 
 
74 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 which are the indispensable condition of all enduring dominion ; 
 that the moral powers within his reach were imagination and 
 reverence imagination to be enthralled "by the reviving image 
 of the Csesars, reverence to be conciliated by the combination 
 of whatever was most illustrious in secular history with what- 
 ever was most sacred in ecclesiastical traditions ; that the un- 
 ion which he formed between the Church and the State seem- 
 ed, therefore, to promise to the crown the support of the holi- 
 est sanctions, and to the tiara the aid of the firmest political 
 power ; that, so long as that union endured, this promise was 
 actually fulfilled ; that when it was at length dissolved, both 
 the Church and the State were plunged into an anarchy, which, 
 at the end of more than a hundred years, issued in the Feudal 
 and the Papal despotisms ; and that, however much the hope? 
 with which the empire was revived were frustrated, it was on 
 that revival alone that any foundation of hope could, in that 
 age, have been discovered by the most penetrating foresight, 
 animated by the most ardent philanthropy. 
 
 The apologist 'of Leo and of Charles, if he be discreet, will 
 not, however, deny that hope sometimes elevated them into 
 that visionary world, into which perhaps all of us too often 
 seek to escape from the tame possibilities of our actual exist- 
 ence. We may, indeed, receive with some distrust the story 
 of the intended marriage of the Western emperor and of Irene, 
 the empress of the East a marriage by which all the domin- 
 ions of Constantino and all the fold of St. Peter were to be once 
 more united under their respective heads, secular and eccle- 
 siastical. But it can hardly be doubted that such a restoration 
 of the imperial and of the papal dynasties to their original ex- 
 tent of authority was the subject of solemn and even of serious 
 debate between the Roman, the German, and the Byzantine 
 courts ; and that the betrothment of Constantino Porphyro- 
 genitus, the son of Irene, to Bertha, the daughter of Charles, 
 was intended to lay the foundation of it. 
 
 The embassy on this subject, which was dispatched to Aix- 
 la-Chapelle by Nicephorus, who deposed and succeeded Irene, 
 has supplied the Monk of St. Grail with some of the amusing 
 incidents which it is his delight to describe, and which would 
 be ill exchanged for much of the information with which graver 
 historians so often instruct and fatigue their readers. Envoys 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 75 
 
 from the Prankish monarch had, it seems, received a cold and 
 discourteous entertainment from Nicephorus at Constantino- 
 ple. Charles, therefore (if we may believe the garrulous monk) , 
 avenged his injured dignity "by providing the Greek embassa- 
 dors with guides through the Alps, who were, directed to con- 
 duct them along the wildest passes and the most tedious routes. 
 The Greeks, accordingly, reached Germany with their persons, 
 dress, and equipage in the sorriest plight imaginable. On their 
 arrival, Charles is said to have had them introduced to four of 
 his chief officers in succession, each arrayed in such splendid 
 apparel, and attended by so large a retinue, as to induce the 
 bewildered envoys to render four times over to his servants a 
 homage which they could not pay, except to his own imperial 
 person, without a great loss of dignity ; until at length (so 
 runs the chronicle) they stood in the presence " of the most il- 
 lustrious of kings, resplendent as the rising sun, glittering 
 with gold and jewels, and leaning on the arm of the very man 
 whom their master had presumed to treat with disrespect." 
 
 It happened to be the festival of the Circumcision ; and the 
 Greeks had brought with them (says the monk), as a present, 
 a musical instrument which, by means of brazen tubes and 
 bellows of ox hides, produced sounds alternately as solemn as 
 the thunder and as gentle as the lyre. Singing in their own 
 language the psalms appropriated to that holy season, they 
 were overheard by Charles, who, enraptured by the sacred 
 harmonies, commanded his chaplains to eat no bread till they 
 had laid before him a Latin version of those beautiful anthems. 
 He had mortified the effeminacy and retaliated the rudeness 
 of his Greek allies, but he enthusiastically felt and acknowl- 
 edged the charms of their superior civilization. Nor was their 
 embassy ineffectual. The dreams of reuniting the East and 
 the "West had indeed fled with the deposition of Irene ; but 
 her successor formally acknowledged the Austrasian monarch 
 not merely as Rex, or Basileus, but as Imperator also ; and 
 concurred with him in tracing the line which separated their 
 respective empires in Italy, on the banks of the Danube, and 
 on the shores of the Adriatic. 
 
 A sovereign of far wider renown than Nicephorus, even Ha- 
 roun al Raschid, the hero of so many of the thousand and one 
 iiights, had, during his war with the Byzantine empire, sought 
 
76 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 the alliance of the Franks, who were then in arms against the 
 same power. The Monk of St. G-all is again the entertaining 
 historian of the embassy which explored the almost unknown 
 world interposed between the calif in Persia and the emperor 
 at Aix-la-Chapelle. The reception of his Mussulman guests, 
 the banquet, and the chase provided for their amusement, 
 their hyperbolical raptures and compliments, and the amenity 
 with which Charles received the indiscreet freedoms into which 
 good cheer betrayed them, are all delineated with the hand of 
 a painter. From less amusing authors we learn that the calif 
 bound himself to succor all Christian pilgrims resorting to the 
 Holy Sepulchre, and to protect all Frankish merchants in the 
 prosecution of their affairs in Syria. The alliance between 
 Charlemagne and the commander of the Faithful was, indeed, 
 opposed by no very serious impediments. Their empires were 
 nowhere conterminous ; nor, except on the ground of their 
 religious differences, had those sovereigns any motive for mu- 
 tual hostility. And, even in that remote and superstitious 
 age, sympathy of character and a palpable identity of interests 
 were of more power to unite the rulers of the world than con- 
 flicting creeds were of power to alienate them from each other. 
 To the sentiment of mutual admiration, Charles and Haroun 
 added the knowledge that, to curb the Greeks in the East, 
 and to weaken the Saracens in the West of Europe, were the 
 common objects of the policy of each ; and on that basis they 
 entered into friendly relations, which, cemented by an occa- 
 sional interchange of diplomatic courtesies, and disturbed by 
 no jealousies on either side, continued in force until both the 
 Arabian and the Frankish sceptres had passed into other hands 
 than theirs. 
 
 Of that inevitable change, as indeed of the other limits 
 which must circumscribe all human greatness, Charlemagne 
 seems to have been habitually forgetful. It was not enough 
 to have established peace in his hereditary states to have in- 
 vented a new art or system of war to have acquired an em- 
 pire as extensive as that of Honorius to have triumphed in 
 sixty campaigns over all its enemies to have formed alliances 
 extending throughout the whole civilized world and to have 
 made the Catholic Church herself his tributary. He must 
 enter into a conflict with the nature of man himself, concen- 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 77 
 
 trating all power in his own person, and ruling all the prov- 
 inces of his vast dominion in the spirit of an indiscriminating 
 and inflexible uniformity. The same impatience of the tardy 
 growth of national institutions, the same desire to produce at 
 once magnificent and harmonious results, and the same pride 
 of conscious superiority which animated Charlemagne, has 
 taken possession of almost each in turn of the great founders 
 of the dynasties of our world. In each of them it has been 
 ineffectual. The passion to concentrate and to assimilate has 
 ever been opposed by the same insuperable obstacles ; and the 
 mightiest human authority has at last been compelled to obey 
 that public will, of which itself is, in reality, but the creature 
 and the agent. 
 
 Thus Charlemagne was an Austrasian, and consequently 
 could not extricate himself from the bonds by which the tra- 
 ditionary maxims of Germany restrained the powers of the 
 German monarch. They regarded him as a Kyning, not as an 
 Autocrat ; and, therefore, he could not enact laws for their 
 government without the concurrence of the national assembly. 
 Even ivith their concurrence it was not really in his power to 
 legislate in any other than the Teutonic spirit. It was under 
 the coercion of these fetters, and of many others such as these, 
 that Charlemagne promulgated his vast collection of Capitu- 
 laries ; the imperishable monument of his stupendous activity, 
 and the yet living picture of society, whether ecclesiastical, 
 political, military, civil, or moral, of the age which gave them 
 birth. M. Gruizot has" analyzed the contents, and explained the 
 structure and principles of this code with such a compass of 
 learning, and with such an affluence and profundity of thought, 
 as might seem to render any farther elucidation of it super- 
 fluous, if not impossible. I shall venture, however, to touch 
 on some of those more important details, for which no proper 
 place could have been found in a survey made from the com- 
 manding heights of political philosophy on which that great 
 writer is accustomed to take his stand, and from whence the 
 lower world is contemplated in a light which occasionally loses 
 in distinctness what it gains in breadth and brilliancy. 
 
 In a celebrated passage from Hincmar, which is transcribed 
 at length by M. G-uizot, and referred to by all the other author, 
 'ties, we have the authentic record of the constitution and of 
 
78 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 the habitual proceedings of the Legislature of the Franks. It 
 describes the gatherings of the bishops, dukes, counts, vis- 
 counts, and leudes at each autumn to consider, and at each 
 spring time to adopt, such measures as the exigencies of the 
 state required. From the same source we learn that, though 
 Charles himself seldom assisted in person at these delibera- 
 tions, he possessed and exercised at them all the real initiative, 
 and that these synods, courts, parliaments, or councils of war 
 (for they were each in turn) had thus much in common with 
 the parliaments held in far distant times in Paris ; that, like 
 them, they met rather to accept and record the decisions of the 
 sovereign, than to anticipate or suggest measures of their own. 
 
 All the French commentators on the history of their own 
 country are amazed at the incoherence of the Carlovingian 
 capitularies, where enactments on every imaginable subject 
 follow each other in a succession so arbitrary, that it might 
 seem to have been suggested by caprice, or dictated by chance. 
 "He, however, who is conversant with the early volumes of -our 
 own statutes at large, is familiar with a similar phenomenon, 
 and with the cause of it. In the times of our Plantagenets, 
 all the petitions of Parliament to the sovereign were presented 
 to him at the end of each session in their chronological order ; 
 and, when his assent was obtained, they became collectively 
 what was, and is still, regarded as a single statute. Now, 
 suppose the same course to have been followed with the three 
 or four hundred acts of Parliament of the year 1849, and far- 
 ther suppose them to have been published without the typo- 
 graphical aid of chapters, numerals, titles, sections, marginal 
 abbreviations, and so on ; and then the statute 11 and 12 Vic- 
 toria would rival in incongruity and incoherence any of the 
 statutes of Edward I., or any of the capitularies of Charle- 
 magne. 
 
 The Legislature of England, however, was not accustomed 
 to confound the province of the law-giver with that of the mor- 
 alist in the same manner, or to the same extent, as those clerks 
 in holy orders who drew up the enactments of the Champs de 
 Mai, and who took the opportunity of infusing into them va- 
 rious maxims of virtue, and no less frequent exhortation to the 
 practice of it. Yet some trace of a similar habit still lingers 
 in the dogmatic preambles which so often introduce our acts 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 79 
 
 of Parliament ; and the Frankish custom had at least the ad- 
 vantage of keeping alive the remembrance of the union which 
 ought to be indissoluble between the eternal principles of mo- 
 rality and the fluctuating exigencies of positive law. 
 
 To reduce the Carlovingian code to any digested form, like 
 that of Justinian or Theodosius, is abandoned as a hopeless 
 task by all commentators, and especially by M. G-uizot, whoj 
 of all of them, has most strenuously wrestled with the diffi- 
 culty. For our immediate purpose it will be enough to say, 
 that all the more important of the capitularies of Charlemagne 
 may be classed under the five heads of ecclesiastical, military, 
 penal, administrative, or organic laws ; and that, under each 
 of those heads, they exhibit the same propensity to centralize 
 and assimilate a propensity e/er active, but ever kept in 
 check by the combined powers of public opinion and of na- 
 tional customs. 
 
 First. The capitularies of 769 and of 779 are wholly or 
 chiefly composed of ecclesiastical canons ; and the assemblies 
 by which they were enacted are accordingly enumerated by 
 the Benedictines among the councils of the Grallican Church. 
 Yet these laws purport to be promulgated by " Carolus, Dei 
 gratia rex regnique Francorum rector, et devotus Sanctse Ec- 
 clesiae defensor ; atque adjutor (in omnibus) Apostolicse Sedis." 
 He is, indeed, represented as acting on the advice of the coun- 
 cil of the bishops and the other clergy, but also as acting on 
 the advice of his "fideles" also. To be legislator for the 
 Church as well as for the State was essential to the unity and 
 universality of his power ; and, as the papal monarchy was 
 still only in embryo, the Church would seem to have acquies- 
 ced, or, rather, to have rejoiced in the usurpation. 
 
 Secondly. In the capitularies of the year 807 occur the 
 most memorable of the military laws of Charlemagne. They 
 required every owner of a benefice to march against the enemy ; 
 they enjoined the attendance on the army of every man pos- 
 sessed of not less than three mansi ; but of two men, each 
 possessing only two mansi, or of three men, each possessing a 
 single mansus, one only was to serve. The counts were re- 
 quired to present themselves at the Champs de Mai, with their 
 vassals and their chariots. Each defaulter was to pay a fine 
 or esouage of sixty sous. If the offender held any dignity or 
 
80 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE OF 
 
 office under the crown, a fast of a certain number of days was 
 to be the penalty of his absence or delay ; and, finally, each 
 soldier was to provide himself with rations, arms, and clothing 
 for three months. From these enactments, it appears therefore, 
 first, that the conscription was not a novelty of the age of Car- 
 not and Napoleon ; and, secondly, that military service did 
 not become the condition of the tenure of lands, for the first 
 time, under the feudal system ; and, lastly, that the same vig- 
 orous arm which held in subjection the depositaries of religious 
 and moral power, was able to control, with at least equal en- 
 ergy, the physical or material forces of the empire. 
 
 Thirdly. But when Charlemagne would regulate the state 
 of his people in relation to their property, and their obligations 
 to himself or to each other, the spirit of centralization and 
 uniformity was opposed by an antagonistic spirit, with which 
 not even he could successfully contend. Each of the nations 
 over whom he ruled possessed its own code, and each of his 
 subjects could, at his pleasure, transfer his allegiance fromtme 
 to another of those systems of national law. The invasion of 
 this privilege would have been made at the imminent haz- 
 ard, or rather at the -certain sacrifice, of the dominion of the 
 innovator. In the penal capitularies of 803 may therefore 
 be traced at once the endeavor to amend the Frankish, Gral- 
 lie, Lombard, and Saxon laws, and the impediments which 
 rendered that attempt ineffectual. Though aided by all the 
 knowledge, religious and secular, of his learned associates, 
 Charlemagne was constrained to legislate for his people in the 
 spirit of his Salian and Ripuarian ancestors ; not superseding 
 their codes, but completing them ; leaving the law personal, not 
 local ; and adhering to the barbarous system of regarding 
 crime, not as a wrong to society at large, but as an injury to 
 the individual sufferer ; not as an offense to be punished by 
 the state, but as a damage to be compensated by pecuniary 
 composition. 
 
 Fourthly. In his administrative capitularies, Charles com- 
 bined the imperial spirit, which acknowledges no division of 
 authority, and tolerates no departure from a prescribed model, 
 with the barbaric spirit which governs an empire and a private 
 household with the same microscopic vision. Gibbon has de- 
 rided the Carlo vingian legislation about the royal eggs and 
 
CHARLEMAGNE. 81 
 
 poultry. Nor is it possible to deny, or easy to exaggerate, the 
 whimsical contrast which the great capitulary de VilUs, of the 
 year 800, presents to the usual style of the edicts of sovereign 
 princes. Yet the critic ought not to have concealed that thia 
 capitulary was a great fiscal law, regulating, in the most 
 minute details, the management of the estates from which the 
 charges of government were principally defrayed, and the 
 splendor of royalty was chiefly supported. A barbaric splen- 
 dor, it is true ; a splendor like that of some Homeric chief pre- 
 siding at a table which a whole battalion of cooks had supplied 
 for a host of voracious guests, as indomitable at the board as 
 in the field. But no document of that age exhibits with equal 
 clearness either the habits of social life, or the exactness of 
 the care with which Charlemagne surveyed the whole com- 
 pass of his administration, domestic as well as public ; or 
 the solicitude with which he labored to reduce to one uni- 
 form system the most insignificant, as well as the most im- 
 portant, of the functions which he confided to his subordinate 
 officers. 
 
 Fifthly. Two years later, that is, in the year 802, he pro- 
 mulgated the most remarkable of all his capitularies. It is 
 that which regulates the functions of the officers called missi 
 dominii, and which, therefore, belongs to that class of laws 
 which I have distinguished as organic. The duty, or rather 
 the prescribed duty, of the missi dominii was to traverse every 
 province of the empire, to represent the person and to wield 
 the delegated authority of the emperor, to redress all griev- 
 ances, and to punish all offenders in his name, and annually 
 to report to him what were the wants and what the condition 
 of every class of his people. They were to be the organs and the 
 ministers of a great central power, of which the sovereign 
 himself was to be the one superintendent. They were to in- 
 fuse unity of spirit and of system into the disjointed members 
 of an empire of vast extent, peopled by nations in every grada- 
 tion, from the barbarism of Saxony to the comparative civili- 
 zation of Southern Italy. No interest was so extensive, none 
 so minute, as to lie beyond the range of their inquiry and in- 
 tervention. The law itself, and the instructions issued in 
 pursuance of it, remain as a monument of unrivaled vigilance, 
 circumspection, and jealousy, and indicate a strange impa- 
 
 F 
 
82 CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE, ETC 
 
 tience of the narrow limits of the human understanding, and 
 an insatiable thirst for powers more than human. 
 
 It is only when regarded in this light that this celebrated 
 law appears to me to merit its celebrity. I am aware of nc 
 proof that it was ever reduced into practice, except in a very 
 few particular cases ; nor do I perceive any reason for believ- 
 ing that it was even really practicable. It presupposes a fa- 
 cility of internal communication and intercourse between dif- 
 ferent parts of the empire an organization of the various 
 departments of the government a distribution of forces civil 
 or military an habitual obedience to the royal or imperial 
 authority and a central establishment for the revision of the 
 reports of the commissioners, and for giving effect to their ad- 
 vice, such as scarcely exists at the present moment in any of 
 the great commonwealths of modern Europe. That such a 
 law should have been really executed would have been little 
 less than a miracle. That in the days of Charlemagne there 
 should have been found counselors to devise, and a prince to 
 promulgate, so complex and comprehensive a scheme of inter- 
 nal administration, is, however, a fact of very deep interest, as 
 exhibiting the progress which, even in that age, had been made 
 by statesmen in the art destined to so strange a perfection in 
 future ages the art of E Utopian legislation. 
 
 And wonderful, indeed, was the assemblage, and marvelous 
 the intellectual culture of the great men to whom, without 
 any injustice to Charlemagne, we may ascribe the conception 
 as well as the compilation of those voluminous laws which 
 bear his name. Eginhard, Hincmar, Alcuin, John Erigena, 
 and many others, not unworthy to be associated with them, 
 had, in fact, converted the court of Aix-la-Chapelle into an 
 academy, the seat of many noble studies, and among them of 
 the study of civil polity. Plato and Aristotle had hardly reached 
 them except in the faint reflection of their Latin imitators. 
 But those great scholars of the eighth and ninth centuries, like 
 the great scholars of earlier and of later ages, delighted in ideal 
 reconstructions of human society ; yet with this peculiarity, 
 that they inscribed their day-dreams, not on fugitive leaves foi 
 the amusement of the studious, but in solemn enactments for 
 the government of mankind. They were, however, the grand 
 conceptions of the noblest intellects which then occupied them- 
 
THE DECLINE AND PALL, ETC. 83 
 
 selves about human affairs. Their political philosophy may 
 have been visionary ; but in their own more appropriate sphere 
 of diffusing literature, science, art, morals, and religion among 
 their contemporaries, they received from Charlemagne such 
 aids, and have conferred upon his reign and his memory such 
 glories, as it has severely taxed the learning even of the Bene- 
 dictines to illustrate. "With their aid, I hope on some future, 
 though perhaps distant, occasion to bring under your notice an 
 outline of those labors. When we next meet, I propose, how- 
 ever, to inquire into the causes which so rapidly subverted that 
 splendid imperial edifice, of the foundation of which I have 
 thus attempted to lay before* you a rapid and most imperfect 
 outline. 
 
 LECTURE IY. 
 
 ON THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 
 
 IN pursuance of the plan which I announced at the com- 
 mencement of these lectures, I proceed to inquire, "What were 
 the causes of the transfer of the dominion of France from the 
 Second Dynasty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that 
 of Hugues Capet ? 
 
 The great aim and glory of the life of Charlemagne had been 
 the revival of the empire of Rome in an intimate alliance with 
 the Church of Rome. ' This was still the dominant idea of his 
 mind at the approach and in the contemplation of his death. 
 It was, indeed, an illusion to believe that the world was ripe 
 for such a design. It was perhaps a still greater illusion to 
 suppose that his own children were qualified to accomplish it. 
 But it was a conviction worthy of his foresight, that his re- 
 stored empire, at once Roman and Catholic, could be main- 
 tained (if at all) only by making great sacrifices, and by in- 
 curring still greater risks ; that dominions so vast and inco- 
 herent could be governed (if at all) only by the intervention 
 of viceroys, acting in his name and representing his person ; 
 and that a trust so critical would be most safely reposed in 
 those who were bound to him by the strongest ties of interest 
 and of nature. In the undiminished vigor of his mental and 
 
84 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 bodily health, Charlemagne therefore raised his three sons to 
 the royal dignity ; committing the kingdom of Aquitaine to 
 Louis, the kingdom of Germany to Charles, and the kingdom 
 of Italy to Pepin. The word " King," in that age, however, 
 corresponded not so much with the same word in our modern 
 use of it, as with the title of general or commander-in-chief 
 The three royal sons of Charlemagne acknowledged their sub- 
 ordination to himself as their emperor, bowed to his commands 
 as their father, and silently acquiesced in the rebukes which, 
 in the one or the other capacity, he not seldom addressed tc 
 them. 
 
 Having survived both Charles and Pepin, Charlemagne trans- 
 ferred the Italian crown to Bernard, the son of Pepin, and as 
 sociated to himself, as his colleague in the empire, Louis, king 
 of Aquitaine, better known in history by his title of Louis le 
 Debonnaire. When, on the death of Charlemagne, Louis suc- 
 ceeded to the undivided possession of the Carlovingian empire, 
 Bernard, the son of his elder brother, took up arms in defense 
 of his title (perhaps his superior title) to that splendid inher- 
 itance, and perished in the attempt. 
 
 Following the example of his father, Louis le Debonnaire 
 made three successive partitions of the empire among his chil- 
 dren. To Louis, known in history as Louis the Grermanic, he 
 assigned the kingdom of Bavaria ; to Pepin, the kingdom of 
 Aquitaine ; and to Lothaire, first, the kingdoms of Italy and 
 Graul, secondly, the whole of Germany (except Bavaria), and, 
 thirdly, a participation in his own imperial crown and dignity. 
 On the subsequent birth of Charles, his fourth son (afterward 
 called Charles the Bald), by Judith, his second wife, Louis le 
 Debonnaire created in his favor, and at the expense of Lothaire , 
 a kingdom composed of Suabia, of Switzerland, and of the 
 Orisons, which was called "the kingdom of Germany." 
 
 I do not affect to state these territorial divisions with pre- 
 cise accuracy ; nor with a view to my immediate purpose is 
 such exactness necessary. It is enough to have explained the 
 general nature of the measures by which Louis le Debonnaire 
 attempted at once to retain to himself a supremacy over the 
 whole empire, and to place each of the four great component 
 members of it under the government of a distinct, though 
 subordinate sovereign. The military and political history of 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 85 
 
 .France during the rest of his reign records little else than the 
 civil wars to which these partitions gave the occasion or the 
 pretext. If we advert only to the motives of the belligerent 
 princes, this protracted contest will appear a merely selfish 
 struggle for power, originating in the jealousy with which the 
 fortunes of Charles the Bald were regarded by his brothers. 
 If we advert to the motives which animated the Gallic, the 
 German, and the Italian nations to follow their standards, this 
 long and sanguinary warfare will assume a higher and more 
 enduring interest. 
 
 During the reign of Charlemagne, the relations between 
 Gaul and Germany had undergone a silent, but a total change. 
 He was himself, in the fullest sense of the word, a German. 
 His habits, tastes, and pursuits, his favorite associates, his 
 chosen residences, and his imperial policy, were all Teutonic. 
 His house was indebted to German warriors for its elevation. 
 From the German race he selected his chief officers, civil, 
 military, and ecclesiastical. Germany was thus at once the 
 basis and the seat of his empire. 
 
 During the same period, Gaul had descended from metro- 
 politan to provincial rank. The Gallic people no longer con- 
 stituted the military strength of their sovereign; they no 
 longer exercised a predominant influence in his councils ; 
 they ceased to receive the principal, or even an equal share, 
 in the honors and emoluments at his disposal. The ancient 
 conflicts between the Neustrian and the Austrasian kingdoms 
 were falling rapidly into oblivion. They were superseded by 
 other, by more important, and more enduring rivalries. The 
 Rhine now separated two nations who were . united to each 
 other only by their common subjection to the same crown, 
 but were disunited by conflicting interests, prejudices, and 
 opinions. As if at once to indicate and to increase this dis- 
 union, either people accepted or assumed new national desig- 
 nations. Hitherto they had both borne the common name of 
 Franks. To the inhabitants of Gaul, north of the Loire, it 
 was a name which the traditions of three centuries had ren- 
 dered venerable and attractive. They therefore gave to that 
 territory the title of Francia, and to themselves the name of 
 Francois or Frenchmen. But the Franks on the right bank 
 of the river regarded themselves only as one of those many 
 
86 THE DECLINE AND PALL OP 
 
 nations comprised within the dominions of Charlemagne, 
 which were collectively designated by the comprehensive and 
 appropriate name of Grermans. Louis le Debonnaire was not 
 the emperor of the Franco- Grallic people, that is, of Franks 
 and of Grauls united by national sympathies. He was the 
 emperor of the French and of the Grermans ; that is, of two 
 populations alienated from each other by national antipathies, 
 
 When, therefore, the three eldest of the sons of Louis 
 plunged into a series of civil wars with their father and with 
 each other, to gratify their selfish ambition, they were able to 
 rouse their subjects to arms by. appealing to motives both 
 more profound and more elevated than their own. The com- 
 ponent members of the empire of Charlemagne had become 
 impatient of the bonds which held them together. The French, 
 the Italians, the Aquitanians, and the Burgundians, resented 
 their subordination to a remote and foreign metropolitan pow- 
 er, and saw in the banners of their youthful kings the stand- 
 ards of their national independence. On the other hand, 
 Louis, the son and heir of Charlemagne, appeared to the Grer- 
 manic people as the champion of German ascendency; and 
 that people gathered round him to maintain his dominion over 
 provinces which they had so long considered as tributary to 
 his crown, and as standing in a kind of inferior relation to 
 their own father-land. 
 
 The nations of Europe, therefore, drew the sword, not to 
 promote the selfish purposes of their respective sovereigns, but 
 to maintain a great general principle. No spectacle can be 
 more revolting than the civil wars of Louis and his sons, if 
 viewed in the .light in which those princes regarded them. 
 No conflict can be imagined in which the magnitude of the 
 object better atoned for the fearful sacrifices by which it was 
 accomplished, if viewed in the light in which the actual com- 
 batants regarded them. The French and the Italians may 
 be said to have composed two patriotic hosts, under the com- 
 mand of two parricidal leaders. 
 
 After rending asunder the dominions of Charlemagne into 
 their three chief component parts, these centrifugal forces, 
 still retaining their activity, though changing their direction, 
 began to resolve each of those three divisions into the elements 
 of which it was mainly composed. Thus, in the territories 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 87 
 
 comprised within the limits of ancient Graul, the Bretons, the 
 Aquitanians, the Provencjaux, the Burgundians, and the peo- 
 ple of Lorraine, each in turn extorted from Charles the Bald, 
 or from his successors, the recognition of the royal character 
 and authority of their respective kings or dukes. It was not, 
 indeed, an authority which rejected all dependence on the 
 King of France. In some indefinite sense he was still regard- 
 ed as the superior and liege lord of such of those provincial 
 monarchs as reigned within the limits of his kingdom. But 
 his own proper and undisputed dominion lay within that re- 
 gion of which the Meuse is the northern, and the Loire the 
 southern boundary. There,' surrounded by these new Gallic 
 states, at once subordinate and hostile to him, at the same 
 time his allies and his rivals, he ruled over the territory which 
 was even then regarded as the seat and centre of the Gallic 
 power, and which was destined to ascend through long ages of 
 toil, of disaster, and of war, to an absolute supremacy over all 
 the states among which Graul was for the present dismem- 
 bered. 
 
 I formerly observed, that the coincidence between the for- 
 tunes of the two first French dynasties was too remarkable to 
 have been fortuitous ; that, during the five centuries over 
 which these phenomena extended, there must always have 
 been at work some forces conducing to this reproduction of 
 the same results some effective agency, of which man him- 
 self was at one time the unconscious, and another time even 
 the unwilling, instrument and I proposed to inquire what 
 were those enduring springs of action, by the elastic force of 
 which each of the Franco- G-allic monarchies arose with such 
 similar energy, declined with such similar promptitude, fell 
 into so similar a lifelessness, made way for so similar an aris- 
 tocratic usurpation, and were so similarly productive of re- 
 sults, the unexhausted influence of which we can yet perceive 
 and feel after the lapse of so many years ? 
 
 To this question, so far as it respects the Merovingian Dy. 
 nasty, I answered by ascribing this agency and these springs 
 of action to the barbarism of the Frankish monarchs and of 
 their Frankish subjects ; or, in other words, to the energy, the 
 rapacity, the ignorance, and the recklessness of the barbaric 
 conquerors of Graul I may, however, seem to have been hith- 
 
88 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 erto engaged in tracing the decline and fall of the Carlovingi- 
 an Dynasty to a cause the most remote from these. I have 
 thus far ascribed that catastrophe to a long series of success- 
 ful struggles for national independence. Now, it is no bar- 
 barous triumph to achieve deliverance from a foreign yoke by 
 force of arms, that so a solid basis may be laid for a domestic 
 government. It is rather among the most sublime efforts of 
 human daring, in the highest state of man's social advance- 
 ment. Scotland, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, and Amer- 
 ica, point with just exultation to those pages of their history 
 which record their successful revolt against a metropolitan 
 power. With what reason, then, can we stigmatize, by re- 
 proachful or injurious terms, the corresponding passage in the 
 history of the Franco-Grallic people ? If it was glorious for the 
 nations of Europe to break the yoke of Napoleon, can it have 
 been inglorious, or a proof of barbarism, for their remote an- 
 cestors to have broken the yoke of the descendants of Charle- 
 magne ? 
 
 Such problems as these can never receive their correct solu- 
 tion until they have been correctly stated. The question, as 
 I have proposed it, assumes that they by whom the independ- 
 ence of Graul on the Grermanio or Carlovingian empire was es- 
 tablished were themselves really identical with the Grallic peo- 
 ple. That assumption is, however, erroneous. Between those 
 patriotic hosts and the mass of the population of Graul there 
 existed, throughout the whole of this protracted struggle, the 
 broadest possible distinction. 
 
 Man, in his barbarous state, is gregarious. He does not be- 
 come social till he is civilized. He does not reach the highest 
 attainment of all, which is the right use and enjoyment of sol- 
 itude, until after the choicest culture of his moral and intel- 
 lectual powers. Thus the German invaders of Graul were 
 gregarious. They had dwelt together in their native forests 
 rather as herds of men than as societies. When they settled 
 themselves in the conquered country, and abandoned their mi- 
 gratory life for sedentary pursuits, they found the exchange in 
 the highest degree wearisome and oppressive. To have become 
 solitary husbandmen, shepherds, or tillers of the ground, would 
 have been to counteract all their natural propensities and ac- 
 quired habits. They therefore formed themselves, not, indeed, 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 89 
 
 as before, into transient encampments, but into the nearest 
 practicable resemblance to them. Gathering round their chief 
 and holding the land in a kind of partnership with him, his 
 leudes or companions divided their time between the excite- 
 ments of the chase, the pleasures of a rude carousal, and the 
 repose of protracted slumbers. The slaves, whom they either 
 found or made, tended their flocks, and, under the charge of 
 a manager or villicus, bestowed on their lands such rude hus- 
 bandry as was then in use ; sometimes rendering a stipulated 
 rent in kind, and at other times laying up the produce in store 
 for their masters, after deducting only what was necessary for 
 their own bare subsistence. - 
 
 Thus the rural society of Graul, after the Prankish conquest, 
 came to be composed of three great classes, the lords, the vas- 
 sals, and the slaves. How each of those classes was subdi- 
 vided has been explained by M. Gruizot, in the fourth of his 
 Essays on the History of France, in so luminous a method, 
 and with such a prodigality of learning, as to leave his read- 
 ers nothing to regret except that their teacher has permitted 
 to them no scope for the unprompted exercise of their own 
 powers of reflection. 
 
 There were, however, in constant operation, causes tending 
 to detach the second of these classes that is, the free vassals 
 from their rural settlements. "When brought within the influ- 
 ence of the manners of imperial Rome, as still prevailing with- 
 in the Romano- Grallic province, the German Kyning, and each 
 of his greater chieftains, sought to surround himself with a 
 court resembling that of a praetorian prefect. To such a court 
 the vassals in his vicinity thronged with eagerness. As the 
 power of every great seigneur consisted in the wealth and num- 
 ber of his dependents, he welcomed all who resorted to him in 
 that character. And such retainers were never wanting at the 
 residence of any such seigneur, for there alone were to be ob- 
 tained the* substantial benefits of grants of land and of civil 
 and military offices, the imaginary benefits of titular distinc- 
 tions, or the social benefits of more plentiful cheer, of ioudex 
 revelry, of keener debate, and of a nobler chase than that of 
 the sequestered village where the German horde had fixed 
 their Grallic settlements. 
 
 If these innovations on the habits of Germany were sub 
 
90 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 of the ancient Grerman equality of all free men, they 
 tended still more strongly to the extinction of personal free- 
 dom among the cultivators of the soil throughout the conquer- 
 ed country. 
 
 In the yet extant capitularies of Charlemagne may he found 
 ample proofs of the social revolution which was thus produced 
 hy this aggregation of the free vassals at the courts of their 
 lords or sovereign. That revolution consisted in their aban- 
 donment not merely of rural life, but of all interest in the cul- 
 ture, and even in the ownership of the soil. Such pursuits 
 were at all times unwelcome to the Grerman warriors, repug- 
 nant to their national tastes, and hostile to their gregarious 
 habits ; hut they became absolutely intolerable when contrast- 
 ed with the festivities, the excitement, and the indolence of the 
 royal or seignorial courts, or with the yet keener delights of 
 war, of which they shared the dangers and the triumphs with 
 their king. They therefore ceased to consider their estates 
 in Graul as their homes, and learned to regard them only as so 
 many remote sources of revenue. But to derive from such 
 property any revenue for the maintenance of the absent own- 
 er was no easy undertaking. It would be accomplished only 
 by the use of servile and compulsory labor a mode of hus- 
 bandry at all times so unprofitable, that, by the operation of a 
 general law of human society, a large proportion of all such 
 lands and of the slaves attached to them were continually 
 passing through a rapid succession of sales, forfeitures, and 
 confiscations. They thus, at length, reverted to the crown, 
 and were again included within the royal domain. 
 
 Such is the only intelligible explanation of the extent and 
 number of the grants of land which, as appears from his yet 
 extant charters, were made by Charlemagne in every part of 
 the Gallic territory. In such grants the "inhabitants' houses, 
 slaves, movables and immovables," on the land, are said to 
 be always expressly included. The learned Alcuih acquired 
 by one of these concessions no less than 20,000 slaves from the 
 bounty of his friend and sovereign ; and it is not probable that 
 he fared so well in this respect as any one of the dukes or 
 counts by whose aid the conquests of Charlemagne were ac- 
 complished. Vast indeed, therefore, must have been the amount 
 of the servile as compared with the free population of Gaul, 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 91 
 
 The great Capitulary de Yillis affords a still more impress- 
 ive proof of the same fact. The royal farms, to the manage- 
 ment of which that law relates, were obviously extended over 
 a large proportion of the whole surface of the country. They 
 have, indeed, been estimated at a fourth of the whole, and 
 though this is probably an exaggeration, yet the error can 
 hardly be very considerable, since it was from this source that 
 Charlemagne defrayed the greater part of the civil and mili- 
 tary expenses of his government during almost half a century. 
 Now the Capitulary de Yillis is framed on the assumption that 
 this vast domain was to be cultivated by slaves, under the 
 superintendence of managers, to be appointed for that purpose 
 by the emperor himself, or by his officers. It follows that at 
 that period the immense majority of the inhabitants of Graul 
 were of servile condition ; that is, that they were bound to 
 render to their employers a life-long labor, enforced, not by the 
 hope of reward, but by the fear of punishment, and regulated, 
 not according to the laws of the divine providence (ever equi- 
 table, though often mysterious), but according to the arbitrary 
 will of man. 
 
 When, therefore, we speak of the Grallic people as engaged 
 in a patriotic struggle for national independence, we refer to 
 the myriads of free vassals. When we speak of the G-allic 
 people of the same era as barbarous, we refer to the millions 
 of slaves ; or rather we refer, though not with equal emphasis, 
 both to the one and the other ; because a divine law, as uni- 
 versal as it is just, has decreed that they who impose on their 
 fellow-men the yoke of slavery, shall themselves be partakers 
 of the degradation which they inflict. 
 
 The term " barbarism" is, indeed, vague and equivocal. I 
 employ it as designating that condition of society in which 
 government is not and can not be maintained by moral re- 
 straints and influences, such as love, reverence, and policy, but 
 is and can be maintained only by physical power on the side of 
 the rulers, and by abject terror on the side of the people. The 
 government of the Mansus being, in this sense of the word, 
 barbaric under the Carlovingian princes, such also, by a nat- 
 ural and inevitable consequence, became the government of 
 the state. The degradation of the commonwealth kept pace 
 with the degradation of the households of which it was com- 
 
92 THE DECLINE AND 1 ALL OF 
 
 posed. The Aristocratic oligarchy was the legitimate off- 
 spring of the domestic oligarchy. 
 
 To establish yet more clearly this pedigree of despotism, 
 let it he borne in mind that the Frankish conquerors of Gaul 
 apportioned it among the chief warriors of their tribes on the 
 tenure of military service, excluding females from the line of 
 inheritance, that there might never be any diminution in the 
 number of the military tenants. But the Salian law-givers 
 took no security against the risk of such a diminution from 
 the transfer of many such tenements to a single person. Ex- 
 perience at length proved the reality of this danger, and show- 
 ed that, by means of it, the number of free proprietors might 
 become insufficient to recruit the armies and to supply the 
 waste of war. Charles Martel, therefore, and his success- 
 ors, invented what they thought an effectual remedy. They 
 made numerous and extensive grants of land, on the condition 
 that the grantee should always be liable to serve in his own 
 person in the field, and that on his death the land should re- 
 vert to the king. It was easy to make such a reservation, 
 but the common feelings of mankind revolted against the en- 
 forcement of it. The son was, therefore, in fact permitted, 
 though he was not in strictness entitled, to retain the benefice 
 which his father had inhabited, cultivated, or improved. 
 
 These benefices thus became heritable ; and that result teem- 
 ed with consequences far more important than that of intro- 
 ducing a new tenure of so much property. To every such ben- 
 efice were attached, as we have seen, great bodies of slaves, 
 and over them the beneficiary exercised, not merely the rights 
 of an owner, but also the authority of a magistrate. His mag- 
 isterial or judicial power gradually but surely extended itself 
 from the servile to the free inhabitants of the Mansus. His 
 jurisdiction came to embrace all persons, of whatever condi- 
 tion, within that locality. The proprietor of the benefice was 
 at the same time its domestic judge ; and when the estate it- 
 self passed to the heir, he inherited with it the judgment-seat 
 of his ancestor. 
 
 When the minds of men had become familiarized with the 
 anomaly of a son administering justice by mere descent from 
 his father, it was easy to advance another step, and to include 
 within the domestic patrimony jurisdictions which v r ere not 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY 3 
 
 territorial. The magistracy of the count or viscount thus came 
 to be regarded, not as a public trust, or as a mere personal em- 
 ployment, but as a right or property transmissible to his male 
 heirs. As early as the reign of Charles the Bald, a custom 
 hardly distinguishable from law had taught the holder of ev- 
 ery such office to consider it as the future inheritance of his 
 descendants. 
 
 At the Diet of Kiersey, in the year 877, Charles gave to that 
 custom the sanction of a positive edict. It pledged the king 
 himself, and his successors, to confer the jurisdiction, or, as it 
 was called, the " honor" of the county, on the son of any de- 
 ceased count ; and it bound every count to observe the same 
 rule with regard to all persons holding any jurisdictions, terri- 
 torial or personal, within their respective counties. 
 
 The impulse given by this edict to the growth of the Aristo- 
 cratic Oligarchy was great and irresistible. The followers of 
 Clovis had, indeed, brought from their native seat in Germa- 
 ny a strong predilection for that form of government ; and that 
 tendency, though for the moment arrested by the strong hand 
 of Charlemagne, had never been destroyed. The Frank settled 
 in Graul had retained, from generation to generation, much of 
 the spirit of a clansman. He had, indeed, witnessed and un- 
 dergone many and great political changes. His tribe, ceasing 
 to migrate, had become stationary. He had himself exchanged 
 the character of a warrior for that of a vassal. His military 
 leader had assumed the title and the authority of a count or 
 seigneur. His patriarchal Kyning had become a monarch. 
 His ancient confederacy had been converted into a kingdom. 
 But in the midst of all these vicissitudes he had cherished the 
 hereditary traditions of the forest, and had continued to ac- 
 knowledge his ancestral dependence on his immediate chief- 
 tain, and his ancestral subjection to a superior and ultimate 
 sovereign. When, therefore, the Edict of Kiersey gave a for- 
 mal and legal existence to hereditary landships and jurisdic- 
 tions in any part of France, it was supported rather than encoun- 
 tered by the prejudices and prepossessions of the free Frankish 
 inhabitants of the country. It was, indeed, the extension to 
 them of a power which might be traced to a servile origin, and 
 which had grown out of a servile relation ; but to the free vas- 
 sal of that age, as to the lower rank of free men in all ages, 
 
94 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 the deprestion of the slaves, and the arbitrary rule under which 
 they lived, were subjects, not of regret, but of exultation. In 
 those bondmen, toiling for the maintenance of the whole soci- 
 ety, they recognized a caste whose dependence and subjection 
 were far more absolute than their own, and whose sufferings 
 and humiliations elevated them in the social scale, by render- 
 ing their own freedom not merely an inestimable advantage, 
 but a high and honorable distinction also. 
 
 To the domestic slavery which, in the age of Charlemagne, 
 had overspread nearly the whole of Graul, may thus be ascrib- 
 ed, not merely much of the origin of the Aristocratic Oligarchy, 
 but the welcome acquiescence in that dominion by that class 
 from whom alone any resistance to such an encroachment could 
 with any reason have been anticipated. 
 
 When the barbarism of the domestic government had thus 
 succeeded the barbarism of the government of the state, one 
 of the most remarkable results of that political change was the 
 disappearance of the laws and institutions by which Charle- 
 magne had endeavored to elevate and to civilize his subjects. 
 Before the close of the century in which he died, the whole 
 body of his laws had fallen into utter disuse throughout the 
 whole extent of his Grallic dominions. They who have studied 
 the charters, laws, and chronicles of the later Carlo vingian 
 princes most diligently, are unanimous in declaring, that they 
 indicate either an absolute ignorance or an entire forgetful- 
 ness of the legislation of Charlemagne. 
 
 The decretals of the Popes superseded the capitularies of 
 the new Emperor of the West over the whole of that debatable 
 land which lies between the provinces of the ecclesiastical and 
 the secular law-giver. Still more fatal to the authority of his 
 code were those local customs, Grallic, Frank, Roman, and 
 Celtic, which he had labored in vain to eradicate. As the cen- 
 tral power declined and fell, so also disappeared all uniformity 
 of judicial and fiscal administration. The Grallic people, ceas- 
 ing to think of themselves as members of a great state, or as 
 the subjects of a great king, narrowed their thoughts and their 
 affections to the canton of which they were inhabitants, to the 
 seigneury of which they were vassals, or to the town of which 
 they were citizens. In the exercise of his local jurisdiction, 
 the lord of every such canton, seigneury, or town took for his 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 95 
 
 guide the maxims and the usages most familiar to his vassals 
 and to himself; and when he called on them to aid him in 
 warfare with his neighbors, he led them to the field, not with 
 the observance of imperial capitularies formerly enacted at Aix- 
 la-Chapelle, but by the assertion of such rights as the people 
 most readily acknowledged, and by the assumption of such 
 powers as his enemies most habitually feared. 
 
 Charlemagne had been accustomed to convoke his people 
 (that is, his free people or military retainers) at the Champs 
 de Mai, and there were exhibited some occasional imitations 
 of the freedom of speech which had awakened the echoes of 
 the Forum in the yet unclouded days of Roman liberty . The 
 habit of grandiloquence on such subjects survived even to the 
 reign of his grandson, Charles the Bald ; for we read that it 
 was proclaimed as a maxim at one of his assemblies, that 
 " Lex consensu populi fit, constitutione regis." And yet, from 
 that time forward, neither the initiative of the king, nor the 
 consent of the people, was ever invoked either to enlarge the 
 law or to amend it ; for in his weakness the king was unable 
 to enforce, and in their disunion and revolt the people were 
 unwilling to render, obedience to the Carlovingian code, or to 
 any additions to it. 
 
 By the ministry of subordinate kings, Charlemagne had 
 reigned in Italy and in Aquitaine. His grandson saw both 
 of those kingdoms crumble into their elements : the first re- 
 solving itself into a group of civic republics ; the second break- 
 ing up into the sovereign duchies, or counties of Aquitaine, 
 Grascony, Toulouse, and Auvergne. 
 
 . Under Charlemagne the imperial power had been adminis- 
 tered by dukes and margraves, his military chiefs ; by counts, 
 his civil governors ; and, in theory at least, by the missi do- 
 minii, as the general superintendents of his realm. Under 
 his grandson, those dukes, margraves, and counts successfully 
 asserted their independence, became the real sovereigns of the 
 territories over which they had been viceroys, and rendered 
 that power hereditary in their families. The missi dominii, 
 who, if you look to the paper constitutic/n only, were the piv- 
 ots of the whole imperial administration the agents by whom 
 the eye of the emperor traversed, and his hand reached, every 
 oart of his vast dominions silently abdicated their obsolete 
 
J>t> THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 offices, and disappear, one knows not how, from all the public 
 acts and chronicles of his successors. 
 
 While Charlemagne reigned, the lands in Graul were still 
 distinguished from each other as allodial or as beneficiary ; 
 both indeed held on the condition of rendering military services 
 to the emperor, but the beneficia binding the owner to many 
 other services from which the proprietor of allodial lands was 
 exempt. But, under his descendants, the holders of the great- 
 er estates, allodial or beneficiary, refused to perform the con- 
 ditions of their tenures. Their resistance was successful. In 
 some cases they became independent lords, acknowledging 
 only the superiority of the king himself, which was then lit- 
 tle more than nominal. Far more commonly, the estates thus 
 emancipated from their duties to the crown became subject, 
 either willingly or by force, to some of the greater dukes, 
 counts, or margraves ; for in that age, such was the fear of 
 /domestic tyrants and of foreign enemies, that the weaker land- 
 holders gladly acquiesced in assuming feudal obligations to 
 their more powerful neighbors in, return for their promised 
 protection, although by the acceptance of it allodial estates 
 were burdened with heavy obligations, from which, till then, 
 they had been free. 
 
 Under the rigorous rule of Charlemagne, the Church had 
 enjoyed her estates and privileges in undisturbed security. 
 His grandsons and their descendants were totally unable to 
 protect the monasteries from pillage, or the sacred edifices 
 from sacrilege. The advocate, or vidame, of an ecclesiastical 
 corporation was usually some powerful count, who, in return 
 for his defense of their temporalities, received from them ben- 
 efits, temporal as well as spiritual. They rendered him an- 
 nual money payments, or acknowledged him as their feudal 
 lord, or prayed for his prosperity while living, or promised 
 masses for his soul when dead, and a tomb within the abbey 
 or cathedral walls for the reception of his body. 
 
 While the sceptre was still in the hands of Charlemagne, 
 the barbarians who menaced the frontiers of his empire were 
 vigorously repelled, if not pursued, into their own retreats. 
 But, within a few years from his death, the whole of the Gal- 
 lic people, from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, were agitated by 
 the unceasing inroads of Scandinavian or Norman pirates. 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 97 
 
 Not only had the mighty conqueror departed, but his people 
 seemed to have lost every trace of their ancient heroism. The 
 French of the ninth and tenth centuries trembled before the 
 northern invaders with the same abject despair with which, 
 in a then distant age, the natives of Peru and Mexico witnessed 
 the incursions of their Spanish conquerors. Nor did the fol- 
 lowers of Cortez bear a smaller proportion to the armies of 
 Montezuma, than the Norman pirates bore to the male popu- 
 lation of France. To such a people, the imperial visions of 
 Charles the Great were just as ill suited as the imperial vis- 
 ions of Charles Y. 
 
 Charlemagne had extended his hereditary kingdom into a 
 mighty empire. His early descendants contracted that same 
 kingdom into what may be called an inconsiderable province. 
 In addition to all the other dismemberments of it was the 
 abandonment to the Normans of that great district which had 
 ever since borne their name. Eventually, indeed, the cession 
 of Normandy contributed more than any other single cause to 
 the growth and consolidation of the kingdom of France. But 
 at that time it indicated, more clearly than any other event, 
 the decay into which that kingdom had fallen under the Car- 
 lovingian Dynasty. 
 
 The progress of barbarism, in the sense in which I use and 
 have explained that word, is, however, most distinctly illus- 
 trated by what we may gather from Mabillon's Acts of the 
 Saints of the Benedictine Order, and from the other hagiolo- 
 gies of that age. From those legends we learn that large dis- 
 tricts of France had, under the later Carlovingian princes, 
 been either converted into extensive sheep-walks, or given up 
 to the natural growth of the forest. The saint is described in 
 them sometimes as inhabiting, and sometimes as traversing, 
 these desolate regions ; and as reaching, at frequent intervals, 
 either hermitages or oratories, where he pauses, either to wor- 
 ship or to seek repose and shelter, on his way to some cele- 
 brated shrine. The monastery appears there as no longer em- 
 bellished by any of the decorative arts, nor as surrounded by 
 its once smiling gardens, nor as thronged as before by pious 
 worshipers, but as converted into a kind of fortress with deep 
 ditches, massive gates, and heavy portcullises, the necessary, 
 though often the ineffectual, ramparts against Norman or do- 
 
 O 
 
9S THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 mestic invaders. The town and village also, as depicted in 
 these religious biographies, is surrounded by a ditch and. pali- 
 sades, and defended by a tower or castle. The baronial resi- 
 dence has been transformed from the mansion of a chieftain 
 into the fastness of a robber. The burgher, the pilgrim, the 
 peddler, the Benedictine monk, and the husbandman, are rep- 
 resented as perishing, sometimes by want, sometimes by the 
 sword of the foreign marauder, and sometimes by that of the 
 neighboring lord ; while, audacious by impunity, the chate- 
 lain, followed by a long line of lances, is exhibited as falling 
 on the helpless traveler, or as extorting by the torch, the sword, 
 or the scourge, a ransom from some unprotected monastery. 
 Scarcely more attractive is the glance we occasionally obtain 
 of the domestic life of this formidable seigneur. When not 
 engaged in the chase, he is portrayed as amusing himself in 
 his fortified dwelling, either with boon companions in an in- 
 temperate debauch, or as .listening to legends of freebooters of 
 a yet older time, still more ferocious than himself, or as yield- 
 ing to the blandishments of the courtesans by whom such fast- 
 nesses were thronged, or as finding, in the daily masses and 
 absolutions of his domestic chaplain, relief from the reproaches 
 of his unquiet conscience for the crimes which the succeeding 
 day was destined to renew. Even the most populous and 
 powerful of the G-allic cities were impotent to resist the spoil- 
 ers who thus ravaged the devoted land. Each considerable 
 town placed itself under the protection of some military chief- 
 tain, who thenceforward became at once the occasional pro- 
 tector and the habitual oppressor of the helpless inhabitants. 
 Every monastery, in the same manner, sought shelter beneath 
 the arms of some warlike seigneur, who, under the title of its 
 vidame, afforded the monks protection, on such terms as re- 
 duced his monastic clients to a state of continual poverty and 
 alarm. 
 
 If, from the aspect of the material and social world thus 
 presented to us in the Acta Sanctorum, we turn to the chron- 
 iclers of the ninth and tenth centuries, we shall learn that 
 while the village, the convent, and the city were thus the prey 
 of unrestrained violence, the minds of men were living under 
 the despotism of superstitious terrors. I do not refer to the 
 errors with which Rome had already debased the purity of the 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 99 
 
 Chi istian faith, but to the belief which had been adopted and 
 diffused by the interpreters of the Apocalypse, that the destruc- 
 tion of the world was to be coincident with the lapse of a 
 thousand years from the birth of Christ. To what an extent 
 this opinion prevailed, and of what strange results it was pro- 
 ductive, may be seen in any of those chronicles. Preachers 
 came forth announcing that, in the visions of the night, they 
 had received from the Savior himself an intimation that his 
 second coming was immediately at hand. Mysterious voices 
 were heard to mingle with the winds. Mailed combatants 
 were seen to encounter in the clouds. Monstrous births inti- 
 mated the dislocation of the whole system of nature. Men 
 sought to propitiate the approaching judge, by giving to the 
 Church the lands which were about to perish in the general 
 conflagration. In many yet extant charters of that age, 
 " mundi termino adpropinquante" is recited as the inducement 
 of such donations. The alarm, though of course transitory, 
 was yet sufficiently deep and enduring to depress the spirits 
 of more than one generation, and to enhance the gloom of that 
 disastrous age. So dismal, indeed, is the description which 
 we every where encounter of the state of Graul during the 
 century which immediately preceded the accession of Hugues 
 Capet, that we might imagine it to have been immersed in a 
 darkness like that of Egypt a darkness which might be felt 
 if experience had not taught us how many of man's dearest 
 interests, how much placid enjoyment, mental activity, do- 
 mestic peace, and spiritual repose may flourish in those count- 
 less retirements which no historian's eye can penetrate, and 
 which no historian's pencil can depict. 
 
 From this barbarism of domestic slavery of aristocratic oli- 
 garchy of departing laws and institutions of internal rapac- 
 ity, and of superstitious terror, was, however, to emerge the 
 Feudal Confederation, beneath the shelter of which many so- 
 cial calamities were indeed to be fostered, but from which, 
 also, was to arise, in the fullness of time, the august monarchy 
 of the houses of Valois and of Bourbon. This transition is 
 among the most curious passages in human history. 
 
 Charlemagne had substituted the unity of royal dominion 
 for the plurality of aristocratic chiefs. Under his feeble de- 
 scendants, as we have seen, that unity of power was dissolved, 
 
100 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 and the aristocracy resumed and enlarged their domination , 
 until at length, amid the multitude of the armed baronial oli- 
 garchs, the power of the monarchy itself expired. Yet the 
 people of Gaul never ceased to revere the name and the mem- 
 ory of their great king, the hero of so many authentic narra- 
 tives, popular ballads, and romantic legends. His sovereignty 
 had, indeed, been reduced to little more than a shadow and a 
 form. In the main line, all his legitimate posterity were ex- 
 tinct. Of his descendants in the female or illegitimate lines, 
 no one had any personal claim to respect, or even to endur- 
 ance. Yet, first, Charles the Foolish, then Louis From-be- 
 yond-Sea, then another Lothaire, and then Louis the Fifth and 
 Faineant, were successively permitted to inscribe their worth- 
 less names on the French annals as kings of France, during 
 the century which elapsed from the deposition of Charles the 
 Fat to the accession of the Third or Capetian Dynasty. 
 
 During that century, however, another house was gradually 
 rising into influence and authority, and was even invested 
 with the royal rank and title. Robert the Strong, count of 
 Paris, was the founder of it. Otho or Eudes, his eldest son ; 
 Robert, the brother of Otho ; and Raoul, the grandson of the 
 first Robert, were one after another invested, by the suffrages 
 or acclamations of the people, with the title, though not with 
 the power of kings ; for at that time, as I have already noticed, 
 that title was not seldom given or assumed as a synonym of 
 that of commander-in-chief. Hugues, count of Paris, the son 
 of the second and the grandson of the first Robert, became the 
 guardian of Louis the Fifth and Faineant ; and, during his 
 life, administered the government in his name. But on the 
 death of Louis V., no obstacle any longer opposed the gratifi- 
 cation of the hope which had animated Hugues himself, and 
 each of his progenitors, during more than a hundred years. By 
 the choice of the army, and the assent of the nobles, he ex- 
 changed the titles of Count of Paris and Duke of the Duchy 
 of France for the title of King of the French people. 
 , Seldom has any monarch borne a more inappropriate title. 
 At the accession of Hugues Capet the French people can hardly 
 be said to have existed, and France itself was not a single 
 state, but an assemblage of many distinct countries. It was 
 peopled by many different races of men, who still regarded 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 101 
 
 each other rather as aliens than as fellow-countrymen. The 
 following is a brief enumeration of them. 
 
 Occupying the territories between the Meuse and the Seine, 
 the Austrasian Franks retained the fair complexion, the flow- 
 ing hair, and the imperious spirit of their ancestors. "War was 
 still the one serious business or cherished pastime of the chiefs. 
 But they no longer waged war under the command of their 
 Kyning, or their emperor, against foreign nations, but on their 
 own behalf, and for their own gain or glory, against the other 
 counts and seigneurs their neighbors. Their lands were still 
 cultivated by the descendants of the ancient Gallic people as 
 serfs, adscripti glebce ; while, by the aid of their free vassals, 
 they at one time defended their manors and castles, and at an- 
 other assailed the towers, or made a foray over the lands of 
 the chatelains near whom they dwelt. 
 
 The Neustrian Franks, on the other hand, living between 
 the Seine and the Loire, had become amalgamated with the 
 remains of the ancient Romano-Gallic population ; and with 
 enervated minds and softened manners, had betaken themselves 
 to the culture of the soil, to an abode in fortified cities, to the 
 practice of civic arts, and to the erection of churches, abbeys, 
 and other ecclesiastical edifices. To their Norman invaders 
 they opposed neither courage nor policy, but submitted to their 
 ferocious ravages with the tame pusillanimity which had char- 
 acterized the inhabitants of the same territories when invaded, 
 five centuries before, by Clovis and his warriors. 
 
 The Burgundians, dwelling in the province which still bears 
 their name, but which then extended southward as far as the 
 city of Aries, had made greater advances in civilization. They 
 had adopted many of the traditions of the old Roman law ; they 
 had admired and imitated some of the remains of the ancient 
 Roman architecture ; and the Sacerdotal Order was held in 
 far high-r reverence among them than in Austrasian and 
 Neustrian France. 
 
 The Aquitanians, settled in the country between the Loire 
 and the Pyrenees, differed widely from the Frankish people of 
 a more purely Germanic origin. Descended partly from the 
 Visigoths, but far more from the Gallic aborigines and the 
 ancient Roman colonists of Narbonese Gaul, they were distin- 
 guished by habits more luxurious and licentious, by a spirit 
 
J02 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 more democratic and independent, by greater subtlety of mind, 
 and by a far more assiduous culture of poetry and of music, 
 than belonged to any other of the great families among which 
 Gaul was at that time divided. Yet, even in those southern 
 and softer regions, the counts and seigneurs had adopted the 
 half-savage modes of life, and indulged themselves in the rapa- 
 cious tyranny of the feudal lords who inhabited the plains of 
 Alsace or Champagne. 
 
 The Gascons, the Navarrese, and the Basques, though living 
 within the limits of France, were a wild race of mountaineers, 
 whose language was totally distinct from that of any other of 
 the various French populations, and who had, in fact, no in- 
 terests, habits, or prejudices in common with theirs. 
 
 The Bretons, also, inhabiting the peninsula which still re- 
 tains their name, formed a foreign and independent settlement 
 in the centre of Neustrian France, retaining the language, with 
 many of the habits and superstitions of their Celtic ancestors ; 
 and acknowledging a consanguinity rather with the natives of 
 "Wales and Cornwall,'than with the continental people in whose 
 immediate vicinity they dwelt. 
 
 Adjacent to them, the Norman pirates, converted at last into 
 a sedentary tribe, occupied, by the concession of Charles the 
 Foolish, a large part of what had once constituted the kingdom 
 of Neustria, and infused not only a nobler spirit, but a higher 
 civilization also, into the degenerate race over which they had 
 triumphed. 
 
 The preceding review of the various people among whom 
 ancient Graul was distributed at the close of the tenth century, 
 has little or no correspondence with the political divisions of 
 France in the same and in some following ages. Without af- 
 fecting minute accuracy, it may be said to have been parcel- 
 ed out into eighteen principal fiefs or feudal sovereignties. 
 
 Of these, the duchy of France, combined with the county 
 of Paris, may be considered as having been the chief. They 
 had formed the patrimonial estates of Hugues Capet and his 
 ancestors. They constituted his royal domain when he was 
 elevated to the crown of France. Through that domain flowed 
 the Seine, the Oise, and the Marne. Within it lay the city 
 of Paris. It was, however, under the dominion, rather than 
 in the, possession, of Hugues and his descendants ; for it was 
 
THE CARLOVINGIAN DYNASTY. 103 
 
 divided into a multitude of petty seigneuries, the lords of which 
 acknowledged him as at once their king and their feudal su 
 perior. 
 
 In the east, the duchy or province of Burgundy was held 
 by the descendants of Hugues the Great, who himself had re- 
 ceived the investiture of it from Louis-d'Outre-Mer. In the 
 north, the race of Hollo the Dane ruled in Normandy. Allain, 
 a native Breton, celebrated for the enormous length of his 
 beard, and for his successful revolt against the Normans, gov- 
 erned Bretagne. The county of Anjou belonged to Foulques 
 the Black, renowned for his pillage, his murders, and his peni- 
 tence. Flanders was the fief of the descendants of Baldwin 
 of the Iron Arm, the son-in-law of Charles the Bald. It sur- 
 rounded a large part of the counties of Hainault and Verman- 
 dois ; of which, at the close of the tenth century, Reynier the 
 Long-necked was the feudal lord. Robert of Yermandois, who, 
 not long before, had expelled the Bishop of Troyes from his 
 episcopal church and feudal superiority in that city, was, in 
 right of that conquest, acknowledged as Count of Champagne ; 
 and Thibault, the son-in-law of Robert the Strong, had trans- 
 mitted to his descendants the county of Blois. In the south, 
 the duchy of Aquitaine and the county of Poictiers were united 
 to the county of Auvergne, in the person of William III., known 
 by the strange title of Tete d'Etoupe. Gascony was divided 
 into the duchy of that name and the county of Fesenzac. 
 Toulouse, with the marquisate of Septimaiiia, already belong- 
 ed to the house of Raymond, afterward so renowned for their tri- 
 umphs in the Crusades, and for their disasters in the war of the 
 Albigenses. The kingdom of Aries, embracing Provence and 
 Burgundy, east of the Jura (that is, Switzerland and Savoy), 
 was at that period a fief rather of the German than of the 
 French suzerain. 
 
 So indeterminate and fluctuating, however, were the divi- 
 sions of the ancient Gallic territory at the time of which I 
 speak (that is, at the accession of Hugues Capet), that the 
 preceding enumeration of them is to be considered only as an 
 approach to accuracy. It is, however, sufficiently accurate to 
 justify the following general conclusions. 
 
 First. It shows that the central power of the monarchy was 
 now dissipated among the multitude of the greater feudatories. 
 
104 THE DECLINE AND FALL OF 
 
 By pursuing the analysis farther, we should ascertain the mi- 
 nuteness with which each of those fiefs was itself apportioned 
 among a multitude of inferior seigneurs, all of whom again 
 subdivided their seigneuries among a yet lower and far more 
 numerous race of vassals, and so on indefinitely. Yet, in the 
 midst of all this attrition of the state, one principle pervaded 
 every member of it. Each tenant owed fealty and homage to 
 his immediate superior, from the lowest link of the chain to 
 that last and highest link which connected the grand feuda- 
 tory with the king himself, as suzerain of the whole of this de- 
 scending and ascending series of vassals and of lords. 
 
 Secondly. This enumeration of the chief feudatories of 
 France under the first Capetians indicates that great character- 
 istic of the age, that is, its barbarism, or the subjugation of man- 
 kind to arbitrary will sustained by material power. Allain 
 with the long Beard, Foulkes the Audacious and the Black, 
 Baldwin of the Iron Arm, Reynier with the long Neck, and 
 Robert the Strong, had those titles ascribed to them in the spir- 
 it of a barbarous courtesy, which attributed to the rulers of the 
 earth those rude endowments on which they prided themselves, 
 and for which alone their subjects valued them. And this sig- 
 nificant, though vague indication of the real basis and charac- 
 ter of those feudal governments is curiously confirmed and illus- 
 trated by the lives and legends of the saints which the Bene- 
 dictines and the Bollandists have so laboriously compiled. We 
 smile, and not unreasonably, at tales which so often rival in 
 extravagance, without ever rivaling in fancy, the marvels of 
 the Thousand and One Nights, or the revels of Oberon and 
 Titania. But there is a deep significance in these seemingly 
 unmeaning fables. "With every appearance of good faith, 
 though but with little semblance of good sense, they describe 
 visions, and ecstasies, and heavenly visitants of earth, and 
 grotesque miracles, and the discovery of relics and their heal- 
 ing virtue, and, above all, the intervention in sublunary affairs 
 of her who " was blessed above women," and of the saints who 
 are supposed to encircle her celestial throne. But these fic- 
 tions, however puerile, are not without a meaning. They at- 
 test that their authors were living at a period when the ideal 
 of human existence, the very poetry of life, consisted in meek 
 suffering, in patient endurance, in pouring oil into the 1 leed- 
 
THE CAR LOVING I AN DYNASTY. 105 
 
 ing wounds of a groaning world, and in escaping from its "bond- 
 age and oppression, its lust and cruelty, into communion with 
 more than female tenderness, and with more than angelic pu- 
 rity. 
 
 The third inference from the catalogue of the chief feuda- 
 tories of France is, that the duchy of that name possessed pe- 
 culiar advantages in the long struggle in which it was about 
 to engage for a real as well as a nominal supremacy over the 
 realm at large. Lying in the centre of so many fiefs, more 
 warlike, populous, and extensive than itself, it detached and 
 separated them from each other. It was thus prepared to make 
 hostile aggressions on each of them in turn, and to find in all 
 of them, successively, so many shields to avert from itself the 
 inroads of foreign invaders. As duke of the duchy of France 
 and count of Paris, Hugues Capet assumed the title of king, 
 and transmitted it to his descendants with a prestige and a 
 propriety which could not have been emulated by any of the 
 lords of any of the surrounding states ; for, under the two first 
 dynasties, Paris had been the capital of the whole Grallic king- 
 dom. The duchy in which it lay had, therefore, been regard- 
 ed as metropolitan. There Hugues and his ancestors had long, 
 and not ingloriously, struggled in the national cause against 
 both the Norman and the G-erman standards. And there he 
 had received, by the acclamations of his army, a crown in 
 which the other feudatories saw, or thought they saw, the 
 keystone of the arch of their own baronial power ; for their 
 dominion over their vassals rested on a theory of tenures and 
 dependencies which supposed the existence of some ultimate 
 suzerain from whom their own fiefs were holden, and in whom 
 the whole feudal hierarchy had their common head, and stay. 
 and centre. And, therefore, the dukes of Normandy and 
 Aquitaine, the counts of Flanders and of Toulouse, potent as 
 they were, and exempt, as they conceived themselves to be, 
 from any authority or control of Hugues Capet within their 
 own duchies and counties, were prompt to render to him the 
 formal homage due to the author, or, rather, to the imaginary 
 author, of their own local dominion. They were not aware of 
 the mighty force of names and titles, of fictions and of forms ; 
 and especially of their force when shadowing out any of the 
 real substrata of the peace, and order, and social prosperity of 
 
106 THE DECLINE AND PALL, ETC. 
 
 mankind. They knelt down with, closed hands, and recited 
 solemn vows hefore a titular sovereign, and did not perceive 6r 
 foresee that they were thus gradually elevating that empty 
 pageant of royalty into an effective sovereign, destined, at no 
 remote period, to attain prerogatives by which their own states 
 would be subjugated, and their posterity reduced to insignif- 
 icance and want. 
 
 And now, reverting to the question with which I commenced 
 this lecture, it remains for me to gather, from the preceding 
 statements, the answer to the inquiry- 1 What were the causes 
 of the transfer of the dominion of France from the Second Dy- 
 nasty to the Third, from the lineage of Pepin to that of Hugues 
 Capet ? My answer is the same as that which I returned to 
 the question What were the causes of the transfer of the 
 Franco- Grallic empire from the First Dynasty to the Second ? 
 In either case the cause was " Barbarism," in the sense in 
 which I have already explained that word. In each case so- 
 ciety was in a condition in which government wss not and 
 could not have been maintained by moral restraints and influ- 
 ences, but was and could have been maintained only by phys- 
 ical force on the side of the rulers, and by abject terror on the 
 side of the people. But in these two cases there was a ma- 
 terial distinction. Though barbarism was the active cause in 
 both, it worked in each in a different way and in an opposite 
 direction. The barbarism of Clovis and his descendants ren- 
 dered them incapable of establishing a moral dominion, and 
 therefore incapable of establishing an enduring dominion. The 
 barbarism of the Franco-Gallic people rendered them incapa- 
 ble of enduring the moral dominion of Charlemagne and his 
 successors, and therefore brought that dominion to an abrupt 
 and untimely end. Barbarism was the aggressive power in 
 the first case, and the resisting power in the second case. In 
 either case it was the successful power. Such at least is the 
 best conclusion which I have been able to draw from .such 
 study as it has been in my power to bestow on these much 
 controverted passages of the history of France. 
 
THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE, ETC. 107 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 
 
 BEARING in mind M. G-uizot's remark, that the progress and 
 true character of a nation can never be studied successfully 
 except by ascending to the origin of its laws, habits, and in- 
 stitutions, I have hitherto lingered at the earlier stages of the 
 history of France. But now, when I have reached the period 
 at which the Feudal Confederation had become organized into 
 a settled form of political government, I am unable any lon- 
 ger to adhere to that maxim, incontrovertible though it be; 
 for if I should still continue to be guided by it, and should 
 undertake any complete survey of that system, the whole of 
 the time which the laws of the University have placed at my 
 disposal during our academical year would be insufficient for 
 the purpose. But M. Gruizot himself, and our fellow-country- 
 men, Dr. Robertson and Mr. Hallam, have happily provided 
 me with an effectual escape from this difficulty. In their re- 
 searches into the origin, the progress, and the tendencies of 
 Feudalism in France, they have left unexplained no question 
 connected with it, whether considered as a body of laws, as a 
 social polity, or as a code of moral sentiments, but have laid 
 bare all the more recondite, as well as all the more obvious 
 springs of human action by which, under each of those aspects, 
 it was either nurtured, or mitigated, or developed. Futile as 
 would be the attempt to emulate those illustrious authors, it 
 would be almost equally superfluous to follow and to repeat 
 them. Assuming, then, that their writings on this subject 
 will receive from you the attention to which they have so pre- 
 eminent a title, I pass on, in pursuance of the design which I 
 have already intimated, to inquire in what manner the French 
 municipalities contributed to conduct France from the state of 
 a Feudal Confederation to that of an absolute Monarchy ? 
 
 And here again I must begin by referring you to the guid- 
 ance of M, G-uizot, in the first of whose essays you will find 
 
108 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 an incomparable review of the relations between imperial 
 Rome and her civic dependencies in Graul ; and of the effect 
 of those relations in hastening the ruin of the province and the 
 dismemberment of the empire. Wonderful indeed was the 
 vital power of those municipal communities. Five centuries 
 had passed away after Grenseric and Odoacer had swept the 
 capital of the "Western world with the besom of destruction. 
 The Groths, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Saracens, and 
 the Normans, had each in turn conquered and pillaged Graul. 
 Amid the anarchy of the later Carlovingian kingdom, brute 
 force had assumed the dominion of France, and Feudalism 
 had then arisen to give to oppression all the systematic energy 
 of law. But while one billow after another had thus obliter- 
 ated the other remains of civilization in the Romano- Grallic 
 province, the eleventh century still found surviving there the 
 municipia which Rome had founded, cherishing the traditions, 
 and maintaining not a few of the customs transmitted to them 
 from their predecessors through the long lapse of more than a 
 thousand years. 
 
 Those customs had, indeed, undergone many essential alter- 
 ations, some affecting their outward forms, and others relating 
 to their inward principle ; and, among those changes, the lat- 
 est and most remarkable was the progressive substitution of a 
 democratic spirit for that aristocratic character by which the 
 civic governments of Graul had been distinguished under the 
 dynasty of the Csesars. 
 
 The curia of a Romano-Grallic city was what, in our mod- 
 ern phraseology, would be called a self-electing body. All va- 
 cancies, as they occurred, were filled up by nominations made 
 by the Curiales themselves, and it was their habit to nominate 
 to that office only the members of the chief families of the place. 
 Every such city was therefore, in effect, a commonwealth, 
 governed by an oligarchy at once elective and hereditary. 
 But as each of them in turn became the seat of an episco- 
 pal diocese, the bishop of each added to his spiritual power a 
 great and direct secular authority, and yet a greater, though 
 indirect, secular influence, within its precincts. When, pro- 
 gressively, the feudal hierarchy extended their dominion over 
 these cities, the bishop himself sometimes became the seigneur 
 of the metropolis of his own diocese. In other cases he made 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 109 
 
 i subinfeudation of it to an inferior seigneur, to whom he 
 thenceforward bore the relation of immediate suzerain. Some- 
 times the supreme suzerain (that is, the king) was represent- 
 ed in such a civic fief by the count or viscount as his deputy ; 
 but more commonly some great neighboring lord claimed the 
 protectorate of the city, and with it a feudal superiority over 
 the inhabitants. But whatever might be the variations of out- 
 ward form under which the seignorial rule extended itself over 
 the ancient Roman municipalities, the remembrance of their 
 ancestral franchises still animated the citizens to resent the 
 degradation to which such encroachments subjected them, and 
 to regret and exaggerate the evils consequent on the loss of 
 their former independence. 
 
 The popular mind, when so agitated, habitually addressed 
 itself, for support and encouragement, to the bishop ; not mere- 
 ly because in that age, as in all ages, the Church was the 
 firmest bulwark of the rights of the feebler many against the 
 usurpations of the stronger few, but because, in those times 
 and places, the bishop had strong and peculiar motives for the 
 advocacy of their cause. The local aristocracy of the city were, 
 for the most part, the vassals of the count or of the seigneur, 
 and were, therefore, his partisans in assailing the political and 
 proprietary rights of the diocesan himself. The local common- 
 alty were, on the other hand, the usual supporters of the bish- 
 op in the defense of his secular privileges, and were therefore, 
 in turn, supported by him in the resumption of their own. 
 He thus became the -habitual antagonist of the civic aristoc- 
 racy, and the habitual protector of the great body of the citi- 
 zens against them. And thus it happened that, before the end 
 of the eleventh century, the choice of the municipal officers 
 had been silently but effectually transferred, under the shelter 
 of the crosier, from the privileged minority to the great bulk 
 of the townsmen, whose zeal for the conservation of their new- 
 ly-acquired elective franchise induced them to call it from year 
 to year into active exercise. 
 
 At about the same period, the contest between Pope Grego- 
 ry VII. and the Emperor Henry IV., and their respective suc- 
 cessors, enabled the chief cities of Tuscany and Lombardy to 
 erect themselves into free republics, which were essentially in- 
 dependent of both the contending powers, terrporal and eccle- 
 
110 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 siastical, though, they acknowledged a remote and almost norcu 
 inal subordination to the emperor as their supreme suzerain. 
 In the exercise of that independence, they elected their own 
 civic rulers, and bestowed on them the once venerated title 
 of consuls. Now, so intimate were the commercial relations 
 which united these new Italian republics to the great French 
 cities in their vicinity, that the spirit of revolt and of imita- 
 tion spread rapidly from the southward to the northward of the 
 Alps ; from Grenoa, Milan, Pisa, and Florence, to Marseilles, 
 Aries, Montauban, and Toulouse. And thus municipal free- 
 dom was yet more firmly established, and consuls were elect- 
 ed, in the south of France also ; and thus a complete though 
 pacific revolution was accomplished, which left to the Cape- 
 tian monarchs little more than a nominal sovereignty within 
 the walls of the principal towns of that part of their dominions. 
 Of the actual progress of this change little account has been 
 transmitted to us by the chroniclers of those times, though, in 
 the reign of Louis VI., it seems to have been fully established 
 throughout nearly one third of the territories comprised within 
 what we now call the French Republic. To the north of the 
 Loire the towns were at that time nothing more than so many 
 urban seigneur ies, the lords of which were dwelling in fast- 
 nesses either within the walls or in their immediate vicinity. 
 Many of those towns were, indeed, also episcopal sees ; but as 
 the inhabitants possessed no municipal constitutions or fran- 
 chises, so neither did they contract with their bishops any such 
 alliances as those which the bishops in the south had formed 
 with the inhabitants of their respective metropolitan cities. 
 That these northern and unprivileged towns would regard with 
 discontent the contrast between their own condition and that 
 of the ancient municipia might well have been anticipated, 
 even if that unfavorable distinction had affected merely the 
 sentiment of honor or of self-importance ; but it really extend- 
 ed to the most substantial and weighty concerns of life. The 
 seigneur claimed the right to subject his ignoble vassals, civic 
 as well as rural, to tolls and other vexatious imposts. With- 
 out his license, a widow might not contract a second nuptials, 
 nor a father bestow his daughter in marriage. Immovable 
 property could not be disposed of by testamentary donation, 
 nor even by an alienation inter viv^s, except with his concur- 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OP FRANCE. Ill 
 
 rence. He might seize to his own use the goods of his de- 
 ceased tenant, unless, within a prescribed and brief period, the 
 next of kin made good their claim to the inheritance. All free- 
 dom of trade within the town was dependent on his pleasure ; 
 and by him in effect, if not in form, all the local magistracy 
 were appointed. Vast and arbitrary as were these powers, 
 even according to the mere letter of the law, they were still 
 more oppressive in practice ; and when Louis le Grros ascend- 
 ed the French throne, the people of these seignorial cities had 
 begun to assemble in the markets and other places of public re- 
 sort to debate their grievances to compare their own phys- 
 ical strength with that of their oppressors to agitate for 
 change and to devise the methods by which it might be most 
 effectually accomplished. 
 
 The French historians, ever anxious, and ever subtle to de- 
 tect the more secret springs by which either the mere surface 
 or the depths of human affairs are agitated, have adopted two 
 antagonist theories for explaining the events which followed. 
 Yelly and the monarchical writers maintain that Louis le Grros 
 perceived in the popular excitement which was spreading from 
 one town or city to another, a force which might be employed 
 to undermine the feudal, and to enlarge the royal authority. 
 They suppose him to have entered into a tacit alliance with 
 the discontented citizens throughout the realm, on the basis 
 that he should bestow on them acts of incorporation or en- 
 franchisement, and that they should acknowledge him, not 
 merely as their suzerain, but as their seigneur. From this 
 union of the commonalty with royalty, the far-sighted king, 
 according to this theory, anticipated the gradual decline and 
 the ultimate disappearance of that feudal dominion, in the 
 presence of which his own sovereignty existed rather as a 
 pageant and a fiction than as a reality and a truth. 
 
 Nor does the title of Louis VI. to the glory of having thus 
 enfranchised the civic population of France, rest on the suf- 
 frages of literary historians alone. His successor, Louis 
 XVIII., in the constitutional charter which he promulgated 
 on his restoration in the year 1814, wrote as follows: "We 
 have considered that although, in France, all authority re 
 sided in the person of the king, yet our predecessors have not 
 hesitated to modify the exercise of it according to the differ- 
 
THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 ences of successive times ; and that thus it happened that the 
 communes owed their enfranchisement to Louis le Gros ; and 
 to Saint Louis and Philippe le Bel, the confirmation and exten- 
 sion of their privileges." To this hypothesis, and to the royal 
 authority thus pledged to the support of it, the French writers 
 since the Restoration, and especially MM. Sismondi and Thi- 
 erry, have opposed another theory. They maintain that the 
 share actually taken by Louis le Grros in the enfranchisement 
 of the communes was inconsiderable in its effect, and was dic- 
 tated by none but the most obvious motives of immediate pe- 
 cuniary interest. But they ascribe to the civic population of 
 France, in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, a 
 revolutionary spirit, and a series of revolutionary achievements, 
 differing from those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
 in nothing except in the narrowness of the theatre on which 
 they were exhibited. In this correspondence in the spirit and 
 designs of the popular movements in ages so distant from each 
 other, those writers find proof of a certain indestructible iden- 
 tity of the national character from the earliest to the most re- 
 cent times ; a tradition which, while it imparts a kind of ret- 
 rospective dignity to the civic commotions of their remote an- 
 cestors, suggests also an apology for those convulsive move- 
 ments of France which, during the last threescore years, have 
 refused to Europe more than a few short and precarious inter- 
 vals of repose. 
 
 Each of these accounts of the origin of the civil liberties of 
 the French people may, with little hazard, be regarded as 
 nothing more than one of the attempts to generalize with un- 
 due rapidity, to which their philosophical historians are so 
 much addicted. That Louis le Grros anticipated the remote 
 results of his alliance with the communes against the feudal 
 lords of his kingdom, and that his actual policy was dictated 
 by that anticipation, is an hypothesis contradicted, not only 
 by the common experience of mankind, and by all that we 
 know of his personal character, but by the incontestable facts 
 of the case ; for we have neither any record nor any tradition 
 of his having enfranchised more than eight cities in all. In 
 every one of those cases he interfered, not as an ally of the 
 citizens against their oppressors, but as an arliter between the 
 people and two or more of their seigneurs, who were themselves 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 
 
 at variance with each other about the recognition of the popu- 
 lar claims. Each of the eight cities in favor of which Louis 
 thus exercised his authority was within the confines of the 
 Somme, the Oise, and the Seine ; that is, within the royal do- 
 main or old hereditary sovereignty of Hugues Capet and his 
 ancestors. The seigneurs of those cities were, moreover, all 
 of them petty chiefs, holding immediately of Louis himself. 
 To have interposed in the same manner against his grand 
 feudatories, such as the Dukes or Counts of Normandy, of 
 Flanders, of Yermandois, of Anjou, or of Toulouse, would have 
 appeared to him, and to them, as a wild and audacious ex- 
 travagance. His views, whether more or less profound, were 
 confined to the duchy of France, and did not extend to the 
 kingdom of France. And, finally, a reference to such of his 
 grants as are still extant will show how large ah influence 
 was exercised over him by a motive of all others the least rec- 
 ondite and capacious ; that is, by his want of ready money, a 
 round sum of which he obtained in return for every enfran- 
 chisement to which he set his seal. 
 
 On the other hand, the theory that the communes of France 
 were wrested from the rulers of the land, royal or feudal, by 
 a series of popular revolts, shadowing forth in miniature and 
 dim perspective those gigantic struggles which, since the year 
 1789, have overthrown so many successive French dynasties, 
 is an opinion which could never have been seriously propound- 
 ed by men illustrious for ability and for learning, if they had 
 not also been men pledged to discover some theory for every 
 fact, and some facts for every theory; for, first, there is no 
 reason to conclude, or even to conjecture, that popular violence 
 either induced or preceded the acts by which Louis le Grros 
 established the communes of Noyon or of St. Q,uentin, al- 
 though these were the earliest of his concessions of that nature, 
 and became the precedents for those which followed ; and, 
 secondly, as the enfranchisement of the communes was in 
 progress during the reigns of the twelve immediate successors 
 of the sixth Louis, we can not acquiesce in the revolutionary 
 explanation of that phenomenon, unless we suppose that the 
 sacred right of insurrection was a right had in honor and exer- 
 cised in France during more than three successive centuries ; 
 and, thirdly, amid the multitude of royal acts confirming coin- 
 
 H 
 
114 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 munes which have come down to us (there are, if my compu- 
 tation be accurate, no less than seventy-five in the eleventh 
 volume of " Les Ordonnances des Rois de France"), the pro- 
 portion is enormously great of those which no evidence, in- 
 trinsic or extrinsic, connects with any popular insurrection, 
 revolt, or disturbance whatever. 
 
 In this case, as in many others, the admiration with which 
 we at first contemplate an apophthegm or an epigram which 
 grasps, or seems to grasp, within its narrow limits, the con- 
 densed history of a great people, gives way to disappointment 
 when such an analytical expression is employed to resolve the 
 obstinate problems which chronicles and chronology will throw 
 in our way, as we descend from the elevated regions of his- 
 torical philosophy to the humbler level of historical narrative. 
 To understand what the communes really were, what was the 
 nature, what the design, what the method, and what the re- 
 sults of their enfranchisement, we must inevitably pursue an 
 obscure and a tedious path. 
 
 To the advocates of the insurrectionary theory it must, 
 however, be conceded, that the charters by which the kings 
 or the grand feudatories of France effected this great social 
 innovation do emphatically attest that, in many cases, it orig- 
 inated in the popular resentment for intolerable wrongs. 
 Some familiarity with the origin and growth of royal charters, 
 in which the king in person is made to interpret the motives 
 of his own administrative acts, may perhaps have indisposed 
 me to attach to such prefatory language the weight which 
 others have ascribed to it. Yet, even on the supposition that, 
 from the days of Louis VI. to those of Charles VI., there was 
 in France a succession of such legal fabricators of grants of 
 the crown as at the present day are in attendance on the min- 
 isters of an English sovereign, it must be concluded that 
 those erudite persons had some motive for ringing the changes 
 on the popular complaints with which their productions are 
 so frequently introduced. Sometimes the confirmatory grant 
 is made " pro nimia oppressione pauperum" or " ob enormi- 
 tates clericorum" or "de pace conservanda" or "ut cives 
 sua propria jura melius defender e possint, et magis integre 
 custodire" or "propter injurias et molestias, a potentibus 
 terrse, burgensibus frequenter illatas" or (in one case) 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OP PRANCE. 115 
 
 " quod alter alter! auxiliabitur et quod nullatenus patientur 
 quod aliquis alicui aliquid auferat." 
 
 Whimsical as is this phraseology, it was probably the ve- 
 hicle for much sound sense and substantial justice. That, 
 however, was not the opinion of such of the seigneurs of the 
 age of Louis le Grros as were learned enough to commit their 
 thoughts to writing. There was living, at that time, Gruibert, 
 abbot of Nogent, whose autobiography still exists to attest his 
 abhorrence of the civic innovations of which he was the reluc- 
 tant, but inquisitive eye-witness. " The object (as he indig- 
 nantly remarks) of a commune (novum et funestum nomen) 
 is to emancipate all censitaires from servitude, in return for a 
 fixed annual payment ; to prevent any punishment for a viola- 
 tion of the law except a penalty of which the amount has been 
 determined and prescribed beforehand ; and to deliver the serfs 
 from all the other imposts to which they are lawfully subject." 
 Nor was Guibert singular in his resentment at the regard thus 
 shown for the servile or plebeian orders of society. " Yene- 
 rabilis et sapiens Archiepiscopus Rhemensis," he informs us 
 in another place, " inter missas sermonem habuit de execra- 
 bilibus communiis illis." 
 
 We must not, however, hastily or very sternly condemn this 
 aristocratic jealousy ; for although (as I have said) many of 
 the communes were enfranchised without any insurrectionary 
 movement, yet Gruibert has delineated some of the reformers 
 of his day in attitudes which might seem to reduce the re- 
 forming Frenchmen of our own times to the character of hum- 
 ble parodists. His narratives would supply excellent materials 
 for many a historical romance. The following specimen of 
 them has been repeatedly made to answer the ends of histori- 
 cal inquiry. 
 
 In the reign of Louis le Grros, Laon was a place of great 
 dignity and importance ; and, among those cities of France 
 which were not holden of any of the greater feudatories of the 
 crown, Paris alone exceeded it in population and wealth. In 
 the year 1108, Naudrie, a Norman, who was engaged in the 
 service of our Henry I., became the bishop of the see, and, in 
 that capacity, the seigneur of the episcopal fief and city of 
 Laon. Regardless of the sanctity of his office, Naudrie was a 
 huntsman, a warrior, and a freebooter. Regardless of the feel- 
 
116 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 ings of society, he gave in to the military fashion of his age, 
 by entertaining in his suite a negro, whose turban and cym- 
 bals designated him, in all ceremonies, as part of the spoils 
 brought by the first Crusaders to Europe. At other times the 
 Saracen (for so he was called) was employed in executing his 
 master's sentences of death or of torture on the objects of his 
 judicial or of his personal displeasure. 
 
 It was one of the habits of this marshal-prelate to make oc- 
 casional visits to England, that he might secure to himself a 
 share in the plunder of the conquered islanders ; and, during 
 one of those journeys, the citizens of Laon, emulous of the 
 success of their neighbors at Noyon and St. Quentin, met to- 
 gether, agreed upon a scheme of municipal government, pledged 
 themselves to each other by oaths to the observance of it, and 
 induced the nobles and clergy of the city to swear that they 
 also would acknowledge and respect it. On his return from 
 his English raid, Naudrie found himself, to his equal surprise 
 and indignation, surrounded, not, as formerly, by mere serfs 
 and censitaires, his unresisting subjects, but by a body of cit- 
 izens, asserting their right to the free and independent exer- 
 cise of the most ample municipal franchises. The prompt offer 
 of a large sum of money, however, soothed his resentment, and 
 persuaded him to renounce, in favor of the new commune, all 
 his own seignorial rights, and to bind himself by oath to re- 
 spect and maintain their privileges. A similar offering to 
 Louis le Grros procured from him letters patent confirmatory 
 of the civil constitution, and peace and freedom ^seemed for a 
 while to be firmly established at Laon. 
 
 Ere long, however, the want of money and the loss of power 
 awakened the bishop and the nobles to a painful sense of the 
 sacrifice they had made, and to a keen desire to regain their 
 former authority. The king having, on their invitation, come 
 to Laon to celebrate the festival of Easter, the bishop offered 
 him 700 livres as the price of revoking his recent charter. The 
 oitizens offered him 400 as the price of confirming it. The 
 higher bidding fyeing accepted, the letters patent were solemnly 
 recalled. A storm of retributive vengeance followed. The cry 
 of "Commune!" "Commune!" became the constant watch- 
 word of conspiracies and civic tumults. The bishop's person 
 was repeatedly assailed, his, mansion besieged, his church con- 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 117 
 
 verted into a barrack and an arsenal ; and the nobles who came 
 to his rescue were massacred without distinction, or pity, or 
 remorse. As his last chance of escape from his incensed ene- 
 mies, the bishop took refuge in his own cellar, and concealed 
 himself there in an empty wine-cask. One Thiegaud, a man 
 to whom, for his brutal appearance and manners, the bishop 
 had given the sobriquet of Isengrin, or Master Wolf, raised the 
 lid of the cask and drew him out of it by the hair of the head, 
 exclaiming, " So this, Master Wolf, is your den !" The un- 
 happy man was dragged along the streets, overwhelmed at 
 every step with filth, and blows, and the vilest insults ; till one 
 of his persecutors, more merciful than the rest, clove his skull 
 with an ax, when the implacable Thiegaud mutilated and 
 stripped his body. It remained a whole day naked and ex- 
 posed, a mark at which every passer-by (says Gruibert) direct- 
 ed mud and stones, accompanied by insults, by ridicule, and 
 by execrations. 
 
 The fury of the people was then directed against the sur- 
 viving nobles, and against the wives and daughters of all whom 
 they regarded as their enemies. Murder, conflagration, and 
 crime in every form reigned without control through the de- 
 voted city. Houses, churches, and monasteries disappeared 
 in the flames, till, wearied with their own excesses, and dread- 
 ing their well-merited punishments, a large body of the towns- 
 men abandoned the place, and sought beyond its precincts for 
 alliances to defend them against the expected vengeance of 
 the king. They found such a defender in Thomas de Marie, 
 the lord of Crecy. But while the negotiations with him were 
 in progress, the inhabitants of the neighboring towns and vil- 
 lages were conducted by the nobles into Laon, and under their 
 orders commenced a new series of massacres and plunder on 
 the persons and the property of the townsmen. At the same 
 time the king, marching against Thomas de Marie, besieged 
 and took the town or castle of Crecy, and having put to death 
 all the fugitive insurgents who were found there, left their 
 bodies a prey to the wolves and vultures. A warfare of six- 
 teen years' continuance between the contending factions fol- 
 lowed. It reduced Laon to utter ruin, but not to peace ; and, 
 after a succession of perjuries, murders, cruelties, and abomi- 
 nations, to which the French Revolution alone can supply a 
 
118 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 parallel, the strife at last ended just where it had commenced ; 
 that is, by a formal acknowledgment and confirmation, l>y 
 Louis le Grros, of the commune of this indomitable city. 
 
 Now, although I can not subscribe tc the inference so often 
 drawn from this narrative, that insurrection and bloodshed 
 have in France a prescriptive claim to be regarded as the le- 
 gitimate basis of civil liberty, there are some other conclusions, 
 at once more important and more indisputable, which it seems 
 to me to illustrate, if not to establish. To explain those con- 
 clusions, it is necessary to define some words which, in the 
 discussion of this subject, are not unfrequently used in an 
 improper or in an equivocal sense. 
 
 In France, the word " Bourg" originally meant any aggre- 
 gation of houses, from the greatest city to the smallest ham- 
 let. But when, in consequence of the anarchy of the tenth 
 and eleventh centuries, every town, and almost every village, 
 was fortified, the word shifted its meaning, and came to sig- 
 nify an assemblage of houses surrounded with walls. Sec- 
 ondly, the word " Bourgeois" also was at first used as synony- 
 mous with the inhabitant of a bourg. Afterward, when cor- 
 porate franchises were bestowed on particular bourgs, the word 
 acquired a sense corresponding with that of the English des- 
 ignation Burgess ; that is, a person entitled to the privileges 
 of a municipal corporation. Finally, the word " Bourgeoisie/* 
 in its primitive sense, was the description of the burgesses 
 when spoken of collectively. But, in its later use, the word 
 would be best rendered into English by our term citizenship ; 
 that is, the privilege or franchise of being a burgess. It is in 
 these secondary or acquired senses of the words, bourg, bour- 
 geois, and bourgeoisie, that I shall employ them in the sequel. 
 
 The history of the birth of the commune of Laon, darkened 
 though it be by folly and by crime, yet shows that, even then, 
 the rude feudal lords and their still ruder vassals respected 
 those maxims of law on this subject which were so solemnly 
 recognized during the three immediately succeeding centuries ; 
 for, first, they acted on the rule that the legal effect of estab- 
 lishing a commune was not to extinguish the seigneurie, but 
 to transfer it to the citizens themselves. The bourgeois did 
 not cease to be feudal tenants. They merely ceased to bo 
 tenants to their former lord, becoming tenants to a new lord, 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 119 
 
 that is, the corporate body of which they were themselves 
 members. The lordship was held by the bourgeois in trust 
 for the bourgeois. Succeeding to the legislative powers of 
 the seigneur, the commune made by-laws ; succeeding to his 
 judicial powers, they elected magistrates for the effective ex- 
 ercise of them. The great communal franchise of self-govern- 
 ment, legislative and judicial, was, in fact, the acquisition and 
 the use by the local democracy, for democratic purposes, of the 
 powers formerly enjoyed and abused by the local despotism 
 for despotic purposes. 
 
 Secondly. The people of Laon acted on the rule that the 
 only legal basis of a commune was a conjuratio, that is, a 
 compact of the inhabitants confirmed by their oaths to each 
 other. The principle of that rule was, that the renunciation 
 of the feudal dependence of the citizens on their lord, and 
 their acceptance of the fief with all its attendant duties, were 
 acts which supposed the free exercise of their own free choice ; 
 for no man, or body of men, could be lawfully constrained 
 either to renounce the benefits of vassalage, or to assume the 
 obligations of lordship. These were chains which were at 
 least supposed to be worn voluntarily. Feudality always ren- 
 dered this kind of formal tribute to the freedom which it sub- 
 stantially violated. 
 
 Thirdly. The civic revolution of Laon illustrates the rule 
 that no such conjuratio was valid merely by the act of the 
 citizens themselves who were to be enfranchised, but that it 
 was also necessary that the clergy and the nobles should sig- 
 nify their acquiescence in the change, and should guarantee 
 the maintenance of it ; and that it should be farther sanctioned 
 by the seigneur, whose feudal superiority was to be renounced. 
 The meaning of this rule was, simply, that no one whose rights 
 would be diminished or affected by the contemplated innova- 
 tion, should sustain any such loss or detriment, until it had 
 been clearly established that his consent had been first asked 
 and given. " Non licet Burgensibus communiam facere sine 
 senioris consensu," is a maxim to be found in some of the 
 confirmatory acts of Louis VII. Thus Bishop Naudrie was 
 not deposed from the seigneurie of Laon. He expressly abdi- 
 cated it. 
 
 Fourthly. The confirmation of the king as suzerain was 
 
120 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 considered essential to the creation of the commune at Laon ; 
 as it was, in later times, to the lawful establishment of any 
 other commune ; for the rights of the supreme lord might not 
 be abridged without his own express permission. Such royal 
 confirmations were often repeated in consideration of money 
 payments, and in many cases at intervals so short and so 
 regular, that the crown obtained from this source a revenue 
 effectually replacing that which, if the seigneurie had not 
 been transferred to the commune, would have been payable 
 on the deaths or alienations of the tenants. It should be 
 observed, however, that before the confirmation of the king 
 had been actually pronounced, a commune might exist by suf- 
 ferance. Yet, when resting on sufferance merely, it might 
 also be suppressed by the suzerain at his pleasure ; for, until 
 he had converted the usurped power into a legal right, it was 
 considered in point of law as a mere revolt. 
 
 Lastly. It seems fit to notice that in early times the sov- 
 ereign did not interfere for the creation or confirmation of com- 
 munes, except within the limits of the royal domain. The 
 power of confirming communes created by a conjuratio was 
 exercised by each of the greater feudatories within his own 
 duchy or county, and not by the king. Yet, with the gradual 
 increase of the power of the crown, this distinction fell into 
 disuse, so that, as early as the year 1183, the duke of so great 
 a fief as that of Burgundy obtained from Philippe Auguste the 
 confirmation of a commune, granted by himself to the citizens 
 of Dijon. 
 
 Quitting now the particular case of Laon, I observe that, at 
 the time of the conjuratio at that place, there were existing, 
 in many parts of France, bourgs of yet another species. These 
 were in the enjoyment of civic franchises more or less ample, 
 not by a traditionary right as in the South, nor by a revolt as 
 in the communal towns, but by charters granted to them by 
 their royal, or noble, or episcopal seigneurs. Such charters 
 ascertained what were the customs by which the citizens were 
 to be governed, and by which the rights and duties of the 
 grantor as their lord, and of themselves as his vassals, were to 
 be determined. To insure the due observance of those cus- 
 tomary laws, the lord delegated his own seignorial authority 
 to an officer called a Prevot. From that circumstance such 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 121 
 
 bourgs acquired the name of Prevotal cities. To this class be- 
 longed Paris, and many other places of great importance. 
 
 The liberties of the Prevotal cities were generally less ex- 
 tensive and absolute than those of the ancient municipia, or 
 than those of the communes. They rested, however, on a 
 firmer basis, and were defended by more powerful guarantees. 
 Holding those liberties, not by usurpation, but by the free will 
 of the seigneur, or at least by his deliberate and unconstrained 
 choice, the citizens had nothing to fear from his vindictive re- 
 sentment, and not much from his avarice. The main prin- 
 ciple of their urban polity was, that they were not the inher- 
 itors nor the conquerors, but the grantees of their privileges. 
 The fundamental maxim of their urban policy was, therefore, 
 to multiply and to strengthen the bands which connected them 
 with the author of their corporate existence. 
 
 But the king as seigneur, or as supreme suzerain, was in 
 all cases either the direct and immediate, or the indirect and 
 more remote author of it. The Prevotal cities were thus drawn 
 into an early and intimate alliance with him, and were always 
 found among the most active supporters of the authority of 
 the crown. 
 
 Three important consequences followed. First, as the in- 
 ternal constitution of the Prevotal cities was the most secure 
 and beneficial of all the forms of French civic government, so 
 it became the normal type, toward which every other form was 
 drawn into a welcome and continually-increasing resemblance. 
 Secondly, as the Prevotal cities were attached to the royal 
 power, and courted its alliance and support, so the same roy- 
 alist tendency was gradually developed in the other munici- 
 palities, traditional or communal, which were emulous of their 
 advantages. And, thirdly, by the plastic influence of that royal 
 power on the institutions of all those bourgs (its willing sub- 
 jects), the various elements of the municipal system of France 
 were at length brought, if not into an absolute uniformity, at 
 least into a general similitude and correspondence with each 
 other. 
 
 I will not pause to indicate the steps of ,this gradual and 
 perhaps unheeded revolution, which, however, may be traced 
 in the "Ordonnances des Rois de France," from the age of 
 Philippe Auguste, when it commenced, till the end of the tif- 
 
122 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 teentli century, when it was completed. For my present pur- 
 pose it is enough to say, that, with the disappearance of the 
 distinctions "between the three different classes of bourgs, there 
 also disappeared most of the ancient differences between the 
 rights enjoyed by the bourgeois of each. Throughout the 
 whole of France the bourgeoisie became, if not exactly iden- 
 tical, yet so much and so nearly so as to enable us to disregard 
 those minor variations, which belong rather to the history of 
 particular cities than of the whole kingdom. I proceed, then, 
 to inquire, in whom the bourgeoisie was vested ; what were 
 the privileges it conferred ; what were the obligations which 
 it imposed ; how it impaired the strength of the Feudal Con- 
 federation ; and by what methods the power of the bourgs them- 
 selves was at length subverted ? 
 
 First, then, no man could be a bourgeois unless he were free ; 
 that is, no serf could acquire that franchise so long as he re- 
 tained his servile character. For this rule the lawyers as- 
 signed a technical reason. No serf, they observed, could hold 
 any seignorial rights ; and therefore no such person could be 
 one of those citizens in whom, collectively, the seigneurie of 
 the bourg was vested. The broader and more solid foundation 
 of the doctrine was, that these municipal communities favored 
 and promoted personal liberty. In all of them, every serf, after 
 a short residence within the walls, was enabled, by a prompt 
 and easy process, to acquire his enfranchisement, and when so 
 enfranchised, he was entitled to become a bourgeois. His tem- 
 porary exclusion from that advantage had, therefore, the effect 
 of conducting him to the early and complete enjoyment of it. 
 Thus that impatience of the presence of slavery, for which the 
 soil of England has been extolled by judges, by poets, and by 
 orators, and that impatience of inequality in the eye of the law 
 for which the English Constitution has been celebrated by phi- 
 losophers and statesmen, flourished more than six centuries 
 ago in primaeval vigor in the emancipated communes of Feudal 
 France. 
 
 Secondly. Originally, at least, every bourgeois was a rotu- 
 rier; that is, he- was neither a noble nor a clergyman. The 
 members of those orders were excluded from the bourgeoisie, 
 because they had rights to assert in the bourg, and duties to 
 perform there, which were regarded as incompatible with the 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 123 
 
 rights and the duties of bourgeois. Many proofs might, how- 
 ever, be adduced, to show that this rule was soon and often re- 
 laxed ; that nobles frequently acquired and exercised the bour- 
 geoisie ; and that the clerical office was no effectual impedi- 
 ment in any case in which a clerk in holy orders happened to 
 possess, within a bourg, property holden, not in right of his 
 church, but in his own personal capacity. 
 
 Thirdly. Criminals, also, and the king's enemies, and the 
 enemies of the bourg, were disqualified from becoming bour- 
 geois. The same rule originally applied to persons not born 
 in wedlock, and to leprous persons, and to their descendants. 
 But the disappearance of the leprosy from Europe, and the le- 
 gitimation of bastards, abolished, in process of time, each of 
 these latter grounds of incompetency. 
 
 Fourthly. The bourgeoisie might be acquired by birth, by 
 marriage, or by prescription. Thus the children, or the wife, 
 or the husband of a bourgeois were themselves bourgeois. A 
 continued residence in a bourg for a year and a day conferred 
 the same advantage. The bourgeoisie in any city might also 
 be acquired by a special grant from the king in favor of any per- 
 son who, in virtue of it, became what was called Bourgeois du 
 Roi or du Royaume. This concession was usually purchased 
 with money. It bound the grantee to a residence in the bourg 
 during a few days, at one of the greater festivals of the Church, 
 unless he should obtain a dispensation. It required him to pay 
 a rate or tax from which the other bourgeois of the town were 
 exempt, and either to buy or to build within its precincts a 
 house of a certain prescribed value, which was to serve as a 
 security for the payment of that impost. 
 
 When this personal right of bourgeoisie had been once firmly 
 established, it became the subject of a most lucrative royal 
 patronage. By means of it, a vassal, though continuing to live 
 on the lands of his lord, might rescue himself from subjection 
 to his lord's authority, because, between a bourgeois du roi and 
 the king, there could be no intermediate seigneur. After the 
 reunion of the province of Champagne to the royal domain, in 
 the year 1285, these invasions of the crown on the property 
 and powers of the lords rapidly increased. The privilege of 
 becoming a bourgeois du roi then began to be asserted and ad- 
 mitted in favor of any vassal, on the simple condition of his 
 
124 THE A.NTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 disclaiming subjection to his seigneur, and doing fealty and 
 homage to the supreme suzerain. In 1372, Charles V. formal- 
 ly declared that to impart to any one the right of bourgeoisie 
 was the exclusive and inalienable prerogative of the crown. 
 
 Such having been, in general, the methods by which the 
 bourgeoisie might be acquired, we are next to consider, "What 
 were the privileges which it conferred ? 
 
 First, then, the bourgeois of a French bourg could not be 
 taxed, without their own consent, beyond a certain maximum, 
 the amount of which was ascertained by the charter of the 
 place. Those charters usually provided for the commutation 
 of tributes in kind for fixed money payments. On the same 
 terms the corvees were abolished in the bourgs, and there also 
 quit rents were substituted for those feudal dues, which were 
 elsewhere exigible, on so many occasions, for the benefit of the 
 lord. The bourgeois were farther exempt from the obligation 
 of finding lodging and purveyance for the king, or for any of 
 his officers or feudatories, and from many other vexatious bur- 
 dens to which the ignoble vassals of a rural fief were liable. 
 
 Secondly. When extraordinary imposts were to be raised 
 within a bourg for the service of the suzerain, the bourg claim- 
 ed and exercised the right of granting or of withholding such 
 supplies at its pleasure. 
 
 Thirdly. To every bourg was conceded, to some extent, and 
 to most bourgs to a very great extent, the right of self-govern- 
 ment. It was a right which, in all legislative and administra- 
 tive affairs, was exercised by a mayor and aldermen (echevins), 
 and in all judicial affairs by judges freely chosen by the bour- 
 geois themselves. The bourgeois having succeeded to the leg- 
 islative powers of the seigneur and his feudal court, made by- 
 laws ; and, having succeeded to his judicial powers, they elect- 
 ed magistrates for the effective enforcement of them. This 
 great burgher franchise of self-government was, in fact, as I 
 have already observed with reference to the communes, the use 
 and improvement by the local democracy, for democratic pur- 
 poses, of the powers which had formerly been enjoyed and 
 abused by the local despotism for despotic purposes. By shift- 
 ing hands, the sceptre was converted into an aegis. Freedom 
 was rendered secure by the acquisition of the very same instru- 
 ment which had before rendered tyranny formidable. 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF PRANCE. 125 
 
 You will, however, understand that the perfect freedom of 
 this elective franchise was peculiar to the communes ; and 
 that, as the three forms of municipal government were progress- 
 ively drawn into correspondence and harmony with each oth- 
 er, it gave place, even in the communes, to a more restricted 
 system. The choice of the people and the nomination of the 
 crown were then, by various compromises, combined and rec- 
 onciled with each other. Thus, in some bourgs, each Quar- 
 tier voted a list of eligible candidates, and from those lists the 
 royal officer or Prevot made his choice of the corporate officers. 
 Fn other bourgs, again, one half of the governing body were 
 freely chosen by the bourgeois, the other half being appointed 
 by the king. In many the people chose, not the municipal of- 
 ficers themselves, but electors, by whom they were to be nom- 
 inated. Recourse was had in some instances to the lot, to de- 
 cide between the various selected candidates ; or the number 
 of the voters was reduced by requiring peculiar and high qual- 
 ifications. Ultimately, indeed, the electoral franchise of the 
 bourgeois was reduced to insignificance throughout the whole 
 of France ; but, during the period of which I now speak, that 
 is, from the time of Philippe Auguste to the end of the fifteenth 
 century, it existed in nearly all the bourgs in more or less vi- 
 tality, and under more or less restraint from these or similar 
 interventions of the royal authority. 
 
 Fourthly. The Penal Law, established in the bourgs by 
 their charters, was in many respects more lenient and more 
 wise than the corresponding law as it prevailed in the kingdom 
 at large. Thus, for example, the liablity to damages was sub- 
 stituted for the Lex Talionis, the trial by battle was abolished, 
 and capital sentences in a bourg did not involve the confisca- 
 tion of the estate and goods of the offender. 
 
 Fifthly. The bourgeois enjoyed the protection of a local 
 police long before the establishment of any such institution in 
 the kingdom at large. They had open fairs and markets to 
 which all traders resorted, under the protection of the king, 
 and the members of every trade were associated in separate 
 guilds for their mutual defense, and (as it was then believed) 
 for their mutual benefit, and for the improvement of their re- 
 spective crafts. 
 
 Sixthly. Among the ordinary, though not the invariable 
 
126 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 privileges of a bourg, were the right of fortifying and defend- 
 ing the town; the right of excluding from its precincts any 
 money of new weight and value, even though struck at the 
 royal mint ; and the right of having an hotel de ville, a belfry, 
 a town clerk, and a common seal. 
 
 These municipal privileges were not, however, unconditional. 
 The citizens bought their franchises at a price. It remains, 
 therefore, to inquire, however briefly, "What were the obliga- 
 tions to which the privileged bourgs were generally subject ? 
 
 First, then, the bourgeois were bound to guard the town 
 walls, to maintain the fortifications, to keep the public places 
 and thoroughfares in good order, to keep watch and ward in 
 the streets, and to provide for all the duties and expenses of 
 the local police. 
 
 Secondly. They were required to raise funds to meet all 
 civil expenditure. 
 
 Thirdly. They were bound, sometimes in direct terms, and 
 sometimes indirectly, to pay to the king a periodical tribute, 
 which was, in fact, the price of the liberties for which they 
 Avere indebted to him. 
 
 Fourthly. They were originally required to serve the king 
 in his wars during some definite period, with some prescribed 
 number of men-at-arms ; for the bourgeois, when considered 
 as seigneurs of the urban fief, were, like all other seigneurs, 
 bound to render to the king military services. But the con- 
 tinuance and other conditions of that service were very dis- 
 similar in different bourgs, and at length this obligation was 
 commuted almost in them all for money payments ; for the 
 civic militia of course fell into disesteem as soon as the use of 
 well-disciplined and regular armies had been introduced and 
 firmly established. 
 
 I may thus far seem to have been forgetful of the question 
 which I proposed at the commencement of this lecture the 
 question, that is, In what manner the French municipalities 
 contributed to conduct France from the state of a Feudal Con- 
 federation to that of an absolute Monarchy ? Whatever I have 
 hitherto said must, however, be considered as preparatory, and 
 as subservient to the answer to that inquiry. It is, indeed, a 
 very brief and imperfect introduction, but may perhaps be suf- 
 ficient to render the following solution of it intelligible. 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 127 
 
 First, then, in proportion as the bourgs obtained the transfer 
 of the seignorial power from the feudal lords to the bourgeois 
 collectively, they narrowed the range of that power, and im- 
 paired its energy. "When fiefs so numerous and so consider- 
 able had passed from the territorial aristocracy to the civic 
 democracy, the external form of that despotic system ceased 
 to be animated by its primitive and living spirit. Until then 
 the population of France had been composed of two great an- 
 tagonistic powers the nobles and the roturiers ; the one en- 
 joying all the privileges of freedom, and the other sustaining 
 all the burdens of servitude. But when at length the bour- 
 geois were interposed between the two as a mediating body, 
 combining in their own persons the rights and obligations of 
 each, they at once mitigated the sternness of the dominant 
 authority and the sufferings of the subject multitude. 
 
 Secondly. Each bourg formed a species of independent 
 commonwealth within the realm ; and such commonwealths, 
 when extended throughout the whole compass of it, acted 
 every where as germs from which the national government 
 was to derive its growth, or as molds by which it was to re- 
 ceive its future form and character. As the monarchs of 
 France at first nourished and defended the privileges of the 
 free cities, so the free cities at length contributed to mature 
 and to develop the absolute sovereignty of those monarchs. 
 
 Thirdly. Though the municipalities enervated the spirit, 
 and undermined the strength of the feudal confederation, they 
 were too widely dispersed, too little connected with each other, 
 and too unwarlike to enter into any direct conflict with it, 
 They could wage such a war successfully only from beneath 
 the shield of the indefinite, but constantly increasing prerog- 
 ative of the king. In that contest they found in him an 
 effective protector, and he in them effective subjects, who 
 rendered to him a regular revenue, an undivided allegiance, 
 and the services of a militia which, if not very formidable, 
 was at least numerous, and exempt from the control of seig- 
 norial arrogance and caprice. 
 
 Fourthly. The bourgs extended their own anti-feudal spirit 
 and policy to the rural populations in their respective vicin- 
 ities. Not only towns, but villages, and sometimes groups of 
 villages, imitated the revolts of the greater communes, and 
 
128 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 acquired the communal franchises. "When such villages did 
 not already exist in the vicinity of a great agricultural fiel, it 
 became customary for the king to encourage and to authorize 
 the erection of them, in order that, when converted into bourgs, 
 they might serve as an asylum to ignoble vassals disaffected 
 to their lords. Hence arose those Yilleneuves, or Yilleneuves 
 le Roi, which are to be met in every part of modern France, 
 and which, in their origin, were so many additions made to the 
 royal at the expense of the seignorial resources. 
 
 Fifthly. In the immediate presence of the political liber- 
 ties enjoyed in these rural bourgs, personal slavery was daily 
 felt as a more oppressive and hateful burden, and therefore 
 daily advanced with a swifter pace to its complete and final 
 dissolution. To afford the amplest scope for the gratification 
 of this just and still increasing resentment, each municipality 
 adopted and propagated those legal doctrines, to which I have 
 already referred, respecting the personal freedom of every bour- 
 geois, and respecting the right of every slave within its walls 
 to a prompt and easy enfranchisement. Each bourg in France 
 thus became a city of refuge for the serfs in its vicinity. 
 
 Sixthly. Even yet more fatal to the predominance of the 
 seignorial power was the legal fiction which extended the 
 Bourgeoisie to the Bourgeois du Roi, that is, to free men not 
 really inhabiting any bourg. In this class of bourgeois, free- 
 dom (that is, the substitution of the character of a subject to 
 the crown for the character of a vassal to a lord) first exhib- 
 ited itself, not as a local, but as a personal privilege. It was 
 a change which introduced, not merely a new status of soci- 
 ety into France, but also a new and prolific idea into the 
 minds of Frenchmen. The Bourgeois du Roi were the first 
 persons in that kingdom who, in the full and proper sense of 
 the term, became members of the Tiers Etat. 
 
 Seventhly. The municipalities established throughout 
 France, slowly indeed and imperfectly, but yet surely, that 
 aristocracy of commerce, which is every where the inveterate 
 and the fatal enemy of the aristocracy of hereditary descent 
 and territorial possessors. In all the greater bourgs, and un- 
 der the shelter of their peculiar privileges, labor and capital 
 each began to be employed in those methods, and to be dis- 
 tributed according to those principles, by which eich is ren- 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 129 
 
 dered most effective as an instrument of reproduction. Wealth 
 increased, and industry, and security ; and, in many of the 
 most important offices of life, the townsmen were thus daily 
 taught to feel their individual worth and their collective 
 power. 
 
 Eighthly. The feudal dominion rested chiefly on unwrit- 
 ten or traditional customs, of which the court or parliament 
 of the seigneur were the judicial expositors. The municipal- 
 ities, on the contrary, were governed to a great extent by the 
 Droit ecrit, and the gradual dominion of the written over the 
 unwritten law was alternately the cause and the effect of a 
 corresponding subordination of the seignorial to the municipal 
 authority. 
 
 The Droit ecrit was established in the bourgs in several 
 methods. For, first, the charters or royal grants invariably 
 ascertained what were the customs to which the bourg was to 
 be subject, and under which the inhabitants of it were to live. 
 They were, in general, the ancient customs of the place, or of 
 the immediate vicinage ; and these customs were recited in 
 the charters with more or less of copiousness, to exclude, as 
 far as possible, the arbitrary exercise of that judicial discretion, 
 which is more or less inevitable when the judges have at once 
 to declare and to enforce rules, not expressly prescribed by the 
 Legislature, but gathered from the recorded usages or decisions 
 of their predecessors. 
 
 In each municipality, also, the written code was, from year 
 to year, rendered at once more copious and more precise by 
 the promulgation of those by-laws which each was authorized 
 to establish. Such by-laws echoed and reflected the spirit of 
 the institutions which gave them birth. They had, for their 
 basis, natural equity, especially in whatever related to the 
 various relations of domestic life, and to the acquisition, alien- 
 ation, and descent of property. 
 
 And, as the cities of France originally caught from those of 
 Tuscany and Lombardy the spirit of municipal independence, 
 so they derived from the same source the study and the ad- 
 miration of the ancient Roman jurisprudence. It was quoted, 
 followed, and adopted in many of the more considerable bourgs, 
 and especially in the South. It supplied the judges who ad- 
 ministered, and the lawyers who commented on it, in those 
 
 I 
 
130 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 local tribunals, with -principles and with analogies drawn from 
 the imperial constitution ; and, therefore, hostile to the pre- 
 tensions of the seigneurs, and favorable to those of the rnon- 
 archs of France. From one end of the kingdom to the other, 
 it thus became more or less recognized (according to the dis- 
 tinction of the French lawyers), either as the Droit ecrit, or 
 as the Raison ecrite. It was recognized as the Droit ecrit in 
 those places where the Roman law had till then prevailed as 
 a traditionary local custom. It was recognized as the Raison 
 ecrite in those places where hereditary traditions, and the re- 
 mains of the barbaric codes, had more or less superseded the 
 old Roman jurisprudence. Thus either the corpus juris civilis, 
 or the coustumiers or local codes as illustrated by it, gradually 
 overspread every municipality of the kingdom, subverting in 
 their progress no inconsiderable part of the feudal maxims and 
 institutions. 
 
 To these various causes is chiefly, though not exclusively, 
 to be attributed the victory of the municipal over the feudal 
 system of France, and the appearance of that great element of 
 French society which we call Tiers Etat. It was the imme- 
 diate offspring of the Bourgeoisie understanding that word as 
 expressive, not of the right of citizenship, but of the whole 
 mass of the French people, among whom that right was dif- 
 fused ; and, therefore, as comprising the bourgeois of all the 
 old Roman municipia, of the Prevotal cities, of the communes, 
 and of the villages possessing the communal franchise, and add- 
 ing to these the Bourgeois du Roi or du Royaume. When we 
 reflect on the inherent energy of this member of the social 
 economy of France, we are tempted to wonder rather that its 
 strength was so long dormant, than that it at length awoke 
 with such terrific vitality. The explanation of their prolong- 
 ed inaction is, however, neither obscure nor difficult. As the 
 bourgs defeated the seignorial dominion in favor of the mo- 
 narchical power, so were they themselves destined to yield to 
 the power which they had so largely contributed to elevate. 
 The principal causes of .this vicissitude of fortune were, I 
 think, as follows : 
 
 First. The Bourg became a petty and democratic repub- 
 lic in the centre of a vast and absolute monarchy. The spirit 
 of the one was antagonistic to the spirit of the other. Laws 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 131 
 
 as immutable as the nature of man and of human society de- 
 cieed that this inherent hostility should at last ripen into a 
 mortal conflict. To that conflict the royal power advanced 
 with overwhelming advantages. 
 
 For, secondly, when the Bourg had succeeded in wresting 
 from the lord his seigneurie, the Bourg itself, as I have before 
 remarked, became, by that very act, a seigneur. The feudal 
 rights, and with them the feudal obligations of the lord, were 
 not extinguished, but were transferred to the Bourgeois. Now 
 those obligations were numerous, and burdensome, and indef- 
 inite. In every contest between the commune and the king, 
 he successfully asserted his privileges as their suzerain, and 
 they inevitably acknowledged their liabilities as his vassals, 
 The privileges were continually extended the liabilities as 
 continually increased. 
 
 Thirdly. The burden of military service pressed on the 
 bourgs with extreme severity at all times ; but during the 
 wars between the kings of France and England, those burdens 
 became so oppressive, that, in many cases, the cities surren- 
 dered their charters and franchises, in order to escape so in- 
 tolerable a liability. This took place, for example, at Roye 
 in 1373, and in Neuville le Roi in 1370. xjjjjp 
 
 Fourthly. "When the Parliaments of France, and especially 
 that of Paris (as I shall hereafter have occasion to explain), 
 acquired a supreme jurisdiction over all civil and penal caus- 
 es, they employed it in subverting or undermining every mu- 
 nicipal privilege which was opposed to the royal will, or which 
 abridged the royal authority. For those Parliaments were 
 originally composed of nominees and dependents of the king, 
 who usually employed all their judicial astuteness in promot- 
 ing what they regarded as his interest ; except, indeed, when 
 the prerogatives of the crown came into competition with their 
 own powers, dignity, and emoluments. 
 
 Fifthly. In the exercise of their judicial power, the Parlia- 
 ments established it as a principle of law that municipal char- 
 ters were revocable at the royal pleasure a principle which 
 was not announced as a mere barren doctrine, but which was 
 continually reduced to practice, as often as any municipality 
 provoked the displeasure or jealousy of the sovereign. 
 
 Sixthly. By assisting the king to annihilate the seignorial 
 
l THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 or aristocratic power, the bourgs had deprived themselves of 
 any alliances in their future contentions with him. The 
 Bourgeois were thenceforward brought into a direct and un- 
 aided collision with the power of the crown, enhanced as that 
 power was by the adhesion to it of that new nobility, which 
 had taken the place of the ancient feudal seigneurs. 
 
 Seventhly. The bourgs were isolated bodies, whom the 
 king could attack and conquer in detail not confederate bod- 
 ies, like the great Italian cities, or the Hanse Towns in the 
 north of Germany. The strength of the king consisted in the 
 concentration of his resources ; the weakness of the bourgs, in 
 the wide dispersion and incoherence of the powers which they 
 separately possessed. 
 
 Eighthly. In the contest with their sovereign, the French 
 cities did not possess the advantage which, in that age, was 
 enjoyed by the greater cities in Spain, Italy, Germany, and 
 England the advantage of commercial wealth and enterprise 
 There was not a single mercantile city in France which could 
 have competed, in wealth, in manufactures, or in navigation, 
 with Barcelona, Genoa, Yenice, Bremen, Norwich, or Bristol. 
 They could not oppose the power of the purse to the power of 
 the s,word. 
 
 Ninthly. But, of all the causes of their weakness and of 
 their fall, the most important was, that their functions and 
 powers were exclusively municipal, and were not at all polit- 
 ical. At Florence, and Pisa, and in the other Italian repub- 
 lics, the government of the commonwealth was inseparable 
 from the government of the corporation. Those municipali- 
 ties waged war and made treaties with foreign states, and ren- 
 dered to their nominal suzerain little more than a formal hom- 
 age. The incorporated municipalities of England have, from 
 the earliest times, assumed a large share in the political gov- 
 ernment of the kingdom, and, as early as the reign of Henry 
 III., appeared by their representatives in the House of Com- 
 mons. Their local rights were from the first regarded as in- 
 separably connected with the national liberties, and, in the 
 strength of their confederacy with the nobles and the people 
 at large, they have ever maintained their own corporate fran- 
 chises. Such, also, was the condition of all the municipali- 
 ties which enjoyed the freedom of the city under the Roman 
 
THE MUNICIPALITIES OF FRANCE. 133 
 
 Republic. But it was otherwise in France. The subversion 
 of the privileges of any particular French bourg did not appear 
 to violate the rights of any of the constituted authorities be- 
 yond the walls of the city itself, and was, therefore, not resent- 
 ed as an injury to society at large. 
 
 Tenthly. These privileges were, therefore, one after anoth- 
 er, overthrown by acts of the royal authority, which, though 
 sometimes resisted, and especially by the city of Paris, result- 
 ed at length in a complete, though progressive social revolu- 
 tion. The detail of those acts belongs rather to the provincial 
 than to the general history of France. I will attempt nothing 
 more than to indicate some Tew of the more considerable steps 
 of this retrograde movement. 
 
 The financial independence of the municipalities was the 
 earliest object of attack. Their revenues were chiefly derived 
 from tolls, from fines and forfeitures, from the octrois, and oc- 
 casionally from tailles. Saint Louis and his successors forbade 
 the imposition of octrois or of tailles without their own previ- 
 ous and express license. The same condition was subsequent- 
 ly imposed upon the resort to every other extraordinary meas- 
 ure by which the wants of the local treasuries could be sup- 
 plied. "When, to escape these restrictions, the bourgs borrowed 
 money, the king again interposed to fix the time and the other 
 conditions of the repayment of their debts. Sometimes he pro- 
 vided for the increase of the local ways and means by himself 
 raising the scale of some existing impost ; and sometimes he 
 made orders for retrenching what he considered as a useless or 
 an improvident expenditure. 
 
 These were, however, isolated measures. Their operation 
 was limited to any particular place or places which seemed to 
 the monarch to stand peculiarly in need of his superintending 
 care. But, in the sixteenth century, this royal authority was 
 exercised on a more comprehensive scale. Ordinances then 
 appeared, diminishing the number and abridging the freedom 
 of the members both of the constituent and of the elective mu- 
 nicipal colleges. Those ordinances ascertained and enlarged 
 the powers of the king over the finances of the bourgs, over the 
 choice of their public functionaries, and over their administra- 
 tive conduct in the discharge of their several functions. 
 
 In pursuance of those laws, and in the exercise of those ab- 
 
J.34 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 solute and unlimited prerogatives with which he considered 
 himself invested, Louis XIV. assumed the patronage of the 
 various offices in the bourgs of France, which had till then 
 been always filled up by popular elections, and sold his nomi- 
 nation of them to the highest bidder. To augment the number 
 and the productiveness of such sales, he created many new 
 civic offices, which were to be holden either in alternate years, 
 or biennially, or for life, or as inheritances transmissible to the 
 male heirs of the purchasers. 
 
 After these and similar invasions of the financial and official 
 independence of the municipalities, the kings of France next 
 made war on their judicial privileges. The Ordonnances of 
 Orleans, of Moulins, of Blois, and of St. Maur, were success- 
 ively passed for this, among other purposes, between 1561 and 
 1580 ; and, within that brief space of nineteen years, those 
 enactments successively despoiled the civic tribunals of their 
 jurisdiction, first in all commercial causes, then in all civil 
 suits, and, lastly, in all cases of crime. Their competency 
 was thus narrowed within the limits which circumscribe the 
 powers of a magistrate of police, or of a court of requests ; 
 and even in those questions of police which immediately con- 
 cern the health and the beauty of towns, the central power 
 superseded the local authority in many essential respects ; as, 
 for example, by prescribing general rules to be observed in all 
 bourgs as to the laying out of streets and the mode of building 
 houses, and by appointing royal officers to superintend the 
 sewers, the public thoroughfares, the markets, the weights, 
 and the measures. 
 
 The general principle regulating the relations between the 
 royal government and the privileged cities of France thus came 
 at length to be, that they were to be regarded as in a perpet- 
 ual pupilage, and the king as their guardian. Thus they were 
 forbidden either to alienate or to mortgage their property with- 
 out his license. To detect their past extravagance, they were 
 required to send to the Royal Intendants of then* respective 
 provinces accounts of their receipts and expenditure during the 
 ten years preceding the year 1669. To prevent their future 
 waste, Louis XIV., in 1673, required that they should annually 
 lay before the intendants, for their previous sanction, budgets 
 of their exuected income and of their intended cutlay for the 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 135 
 
 ensuing twelve months ; and the intendants were not at lib- 
 erty to give that sanction without the express license of the 
 royal council, if in any case the contemplated outgoings of the 
 year should exceed a certain maximum, which was fixed for 
 the annual expenditure of every such city. 
 
 Thus, one by one, all the powers of the municipalities were 
 extinguished, with the exception only of such as afforded to 
 the Bourgeois no exercise for ability, and no stimulus to am- 
 bition. From the position of independent commonwealths they 
 had fallen to the state of parochial vestries. Originally they 
 had enjoyed privileges which menaced the breaking up of 
 France into a multitude of petty urban oligarchies, and which 
 were actually fatal to the rural oligarchies of feudalism. Ul- 
 timately those privileges were destroyed by the monarchical 
 ally with whom they had conducted their long and successful 
 struggle against the seigneurs. They were then absorbed in 
 the great and progressive centralization of all political power 
 in France. During more than a century they remained help- 
 less and impotent within its grasp ; the least dreaded, but not 
 the least formidable, of those springs the rebound of which 
 was at length to rend asunder, with such terrific violence, the 
 bands by which they had all so long been comoressed. 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 
 
 WHEN Peter the Venerable proclaimed to indignant multi- 
 tudes the profanations of the city of the Great King and 
 when St. Bernard announced to breathless crowds that " the 
 Lord stood in need of their aid" (such were his own words), 
 " or, rather, feigned to stand in need of it, that he might ap- 
 pear in their defense," " graciously willing to become their 
 debtor, that so he might bestow pardon of sin and eternal life 
 on them who should fight manfully in his cause" both the 
 impassioned hermit and the half-inspired saint were giving 
 utterance to fears and to resentments by which the Christian 
 world had been agitated during the six preceding centuries, 
 
136 THE ANTI- FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 for so long had the dominion of the Mussulmans been attain- 
 ing to its full growth and development. Though not without 
 many vicissitudes, they had, throughout that long period, been 
 still, on the whole, advancing. They had possessed themselves 
 of Syria ; they had subdued Egypt, and the Roman province 
 of Africa ; they had conquered Spain, and all the islands of the 
 Mediterranean ; they had ravaged the coasts of Italy ; they 
 had invaded France ; and, notwithstanding the victories of 
 Charles Martel and his successors, they had effected a settle- 
 ment in Septimania ; and now they were menacing the safety 
 of Constantinople, the great outwork and rampart of Western 
 Europe. To the statesmen of that age the farther progress of 
 the Saracenic arms must have appeared as the most formida- 
 ble of all dangers. To the great body of the people, the indig- 
 nities offered by the Saracens to the Holy Sepulchre and to the 
 pilgrims resorting thither, must have appeared the most re- 
 volting of all injuries. The enthusiastic many were then, of 
 course, as at all other times, the unconscious instruments of 
 the politic few. But it is not less a matter of course that the 
 politic few became, in turn, the victims of their own spells, 
 and themselves at length imbibed the passions which they 
 excited. 
 
 Nothing is more easy than to detect the worldly motives 
 which impelled the ruder population of the "Western world to 
 roll in eight successive and desolating torrents toward the 
 shores of Africa and the East. The Crusader received a plen- 
 ary indulgence, that is, the remission of all the penances by 
 which, as he believed, his sins must otherwise have been ex- 
 piated, either in the present life or in purgatory. During his 
 absence, the Church became the protector of his wife, his 
 children, and his estate. Whoever might injure them was 
 declared excommunicate, ipso facto,- and without any farther 
 sentence. His debts ceased to bear interest from the day of 
 his departure, even though he had bound himself by an oath 
 to the payment of them. He was authorized to postpone, till 
 the lapse of three years, the full payment of any debt which 
 was then actually due. If his estate had been mortgaged, he 
 was entitled to receive the whole produce of it, during the first 
 year of his crusade, without any deduction for the benefit ot 
 hits creditor. He was exempted from the payment of any 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 137 
 
 taille which, might be imposed on his lands during his ab- 
 sence ; and, finally, he might insist on receiving from his 
 parents a tenth of their income for his own support. 
 
 Strong inducements these to a dissolute and necessitous 
 multitude to abandon their homes for the excitements of an 
 unknown, and, as it was supposed, a lucrative warfare. But 
 it would be a libel on our common nature to ascribe to such 
 causes alone, or chiefly, a movement which, during one hund- 
 red and fifty successive years, agitated every state and al- 
 most every family in Christendom. The dark mysteries of 
 our existence, though little heeded in our own luxurious and 
 mechanical age, pressed heavily on the spirits of those who 
 lived beneath the tyranny and gloom of the feudal domination. 
 In their struggle with those inscrutable enigmas of our mortal 
 being, they yielded up their minds to a long succession of su- 
 perstitious terrors, and the legends of those ages abound with 
 prodigies far more strange than those with which Livy has 
 made us familiar. Men were gazing anxiously on the stars, 
 which were ready to fall and crush this antiquated globe. 
 They saw on their own bodies the miraculous impression of 
 the holy cross. Nuns and hermits, returning from their cells, 
 alarmed the world with fearful anticipations. The saints, 
 quitting their celestial abodes, reappeared on earth, to dis- 
 close to trembling man the awful behests of his Creator, 
 Throughout the whole of Eastern Europe, Flagellants exhib- 
 ited to admiring crowds their self-lacerated bodies. Yast mul- 
 titudes of children assembled together, not for childish sports, 
 but to pursue what- they imagined to be the way to Jerusalem. 
 Nay, Innocent III. himself announced, in a papal bull, that 
 little more than sixty were yet to elapse of the six hundred and 
 sixty-six years which the Apocalypse had assigned as the limit 
 of the reign of Mohammed. In was an age in which all might 
 observe, though perhaps but few could interpret those heav- 
 ings and swellings of the popular mind which invariably indi- 
 cate the approach of some great innovation in human affairs. 
 
 When, therefore, enraptured voices summoned the Western 
 world to throw its accumulated forces on the followers of the 
 False Prophet, they sounded to an incalculable host of listen- 
 ,ers but as the audible expression of those vehement but in- 
 definite emotions under which their own bosoms were already 
 
138 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE? OF 
 
 laboring That summons was re-echoed from one extremity 
 of the European continent to the other. Monks exchanged 
 their cowls for coats of mail. Aged men pressed onward in 
 the hope of at least laying their bones in the Holy City. At the 
 head of several ladies of high degree, the Countesses of Flanders 
 and of Blois, and a daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, joined 
 the sacred armament. Each prince, as he assumed the cross, 
 found himself at the head of bands of devoted followers. 
 There were not, indeed, wanting jesters in those days to enjoy 
 the comedy, nor thrifty men to grow rich in the market thrown 
 open to them by this strange excitement ; but in the words of 
 an eye-witness, " ii plerumque quos nulla adhuc eundi volun- 
 tas attigerat, dum hodie, super omnimoda aliorum venditione 
 cachinnant, dum eos misere ituros, miseriusque redituros af- 
 firmant, in crastinum, repentino instinctu, pro paucis num- 
 mulis sua tota tradentes, cum eis proficisebantur quos riser- 
 ant." So ardent and so universal was this enthusiasm, that 
 Anna Comnena declares that it would have been easier to 
 reckon the leaves of the forest, the sands of the sea, or the stars 
 of the firmament, than to count the Crusaders who rolled in 
 interminable waves toward the shores of the Bosporus. 
 
 In more measured terms it may be stated, that, in the ear- 
 liest of these expeditions, the Crusaders might have been cal- 
 culated by millions, and very far exceeded the number of the 
 followers of Xerxes, or any other invading army of which 
 either the Western or the Eastern world retains an authentic 
 tradition. - 
 
 From the mysterious, the romantic, and the picturesque 
 aspect of this passage in the history of mankind, we must, 
 however, pass to investigate (as far as our time will allow) 
 what was the effect of the Crusades in depressing the Feudal 
 and elevating the Monarchical power in France. And, with a 
 view to perspicuity (of all objects the most important in dis- 
 cussions of this nature), I will arrange the remarks I have to 
 offer on that subject under twelve different heads, hoping that 
 I may thus escape the confusion incident to the immediate 
 juxtaposition of many topics, which are connected with each 
 other by no logical sequence or natural arrangement, and may 
 so be able to diminish the demand I must otherwise have 
 made on your attention now and your recollection hereafter. 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 139 
 
 First, then, I will advert to the tendency of the Crusades to 
 abridge the feudal power by diminishing the number of the 
 serfs attached to the various seigneuries in Fiance. 
 
 Slavery and feudality were inseparable concomitants. The 
 wealth of a seigneur was composed of two elements, the land, 
 and the laborers who cultivated the land ; or, rather, his capi- 
 tal may be said to have consisted almost wholly in the com- 
 mand of compulsory and ill-requited labor, for land was then 
 of little exchangeable value ; whereas labor was deficient and 
 of high price. According, therefore, to what may be received 
 as a universal law, the spontaneous manumission of the feudal 
 slaves was at that time impossible. It could be accomplished 
 only by the intervention and the constraint of some external 
 and superior power. 
 
 Feudal slavery was, however, mild and gentle in France, 
 when compared with the state of slavery in ancient Rome, or 
 in the European settlements in America. The French feudal 
 slave was for the most part praedial, and attached to the soil ; 
 or, as our own law expresses it, was a villain regardant. There, 
 indeed, he was bound to live and to labor throughout his whole 
 life. But in many cases he was, in some sense of the word, 
 the owner of the land on which he wrought. He rendered to 
 the lord a stipulated rent in money or in kind ; and though 
 the property was continually liable to forfeiture by escheats, 
 and could not be either abandoned or alienated by the serf 
 without the lord's consent, yet, on the whole, the servile con- 
 dition of such cultivators bore a much stronger resemblance to 
 that of the present serfs in Russia, or to that of the ryots in 
 Hindostan, than to that of a modern slave in Alabama or in 
 Brazil. 
 
 The legal impediments to the manumission of the French 
 serf were, however, many and formidable. An ecclesiastical 
 seigneur was unable to enfranchise his serf, because such an 
 act would have alienated a part of the property of the Church, 
 which the canon law declared to be inalienable. A lay seign- 
 eur was unable to enfranchise the serf without the concurrence 
 of each in turn of the various other lords, who, in the long 
 chain of feudal dependence, might have an interest, mediate 
 or immediate, or more or less remote, in the fief to which the 
 serf belonged, 
 
140 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 But the Crusades introduced, if not a new law, yet at least 
 a new custom of enfranchisement. According to the Roman, 
 and perhaps every other code, the military character was in- 
 compatible with the servile condition ; especially it was so in 
 the case of one whom they called Miles Dei. If, then, the 
 serf could join the standard of a Crusader, and himself assume 
 the Cross, he became free. No positive law, indeed, forbade 
 the lord to reclaim him ; but the universal sentiment of soci- 
 ety was at once the source and the sanction of a tacit law of 
 that kind. 
 
 To have withdrawn a soldier of the Cross from his high and 
 holy calling, in order that he might resume his former menial 
 employment, would have been to outrage the common feelings 
 of mankind, and to provoke from them an insuperable resist- 
 ance. Thus the murmurs of the seigneur, the legal objections 
 of the canonists, and the claims of the suzerain, were all alike 
 silenced by this military emancipation. 
 
 The Droit d'Aubaine gave to the seigneur a right to the serv- 
 ices of any vagrant found on his fief after the lapse of a year 
 and a day, unless, within that period, the vagrant had ac- 
 knowledged himself to be the serf of some other lord ; that is, 
 the legal presumption in the case of all strangers was in favor 
 of their slavery and against their freedom. But the effect of 
 the Crusades was to reverse this presumption, and therefore to 
 diminish the supply and the number of serfs ; for those wars 
 threw the whole population of France into unwonted habits 
 of change of place. When Crusaders were wandering over 
 the whole surface of the kingdom, it became no longer possible 
 to consider, and to deal with, all wanderers as presumably 
 slaves. Such persons were thus permitted to answer the usual 
 challenge to name their owner, by declaring themselves vas- 
 sals of the king. But a vassal of the king was necessarily free. 
 
 These new habits of locomotion also gave additional import- 
 ance to another law, which eminently favored personal freedom. 
 It was the law which presumed a valid title to liberty in any 
 man who had passed a year and a day in any commune. The 
 gates of such cities, as we have already had occasion to ob- 
 serve, were always wide open to those who fled to them as 
 places of refuge, for thus establishing or acquiring their free- 
 dom, "With the general dispersion of the people during the 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 141 
 
 assemblage of the crusading armies, the number of such fugi- 
 tives continually increased, and the roll of the citizens was 
 thus constantly augmented at the expense of the seigneurs and 
 their fiefs. 
 
 Thus the Crusades tended indirectly to abridge the supply 
 of rural labor, and to dimmish the wealth and the power of 
 the lords. They tended directly to the same end, because, to 
 escape this otherwise inevitable loss, the lords voluntarily pro- 
 moted the manumission of their bondsmen, and then allured 
 them to remain on their estates, by assigning to them land to 
 be hold en on low and unalterable money rents. 
 
 Secondly. The Crusades tended to increase the strength 
 and the number of the communes, which (as I have shown in 
 my last lecture) were the natural foes and inveterate antago- 
 nists of the feudal power. 
 
 The communes were the great emporiums of commercial 
 enterprise and capital in France. Now the Crusades created 
 an enormous and fictitious demand for such capital; or, in 
 other terms, they enhanced the value of money, and depressed 
 the price of all other exchangeable commodities, to an extent 
 never before or since known in the world. They therefore 
 placed the Crusaders, who were every where anxious to raise 
 money by the sale of what they possessed, at the mercy of the 
 citizens, who alone had at their command the funds requisite 
 for purchasing such possessions. Conceive of the effect, in 
 that uncommercial age, of a simultaneous demand for money 
 in every part of Europe, by tens of thousands of persons en- 
 gaged in equipping themselves and their followers for the holy 
 war. A well-filled purse could, at such a crisis, command 
 bargains which the wildest imagination of the most unscru- 
 pulous extortioner would in other times have regarded as fab- 
 ulous. In the first volume of Robertson's History of Charles 
 V., you will find many curious examples of this state of the 
 money market during the two first Crusades. The Counts of 
 Foix and of HainauU actually sold their sovereignties. Rich- 
 ard I. put up to sale even the office of grand justiciary ; and 
 is said to have declared that he would sell London itself if he 
 could find a purchaser. Many of the French seigneurs reck- 
 lessly alienated the only means of their future subsistence 
 their lands, houses, furniture, and castles ; anc in the midst 
 
142 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 of this general ferment the calm and wealthy Bourgeois mad* 
 their purchases. They bought many things of the distressed 
 but enthusiastic warriors of the Cross, but especially civic 
 rights, which (as an author of that day declares) the seigneurs 
 would at any other time have died rather than have conferred. 
 
 But it was not merely by the science of the counting-house 
 that these associated merchants at this period acquired or in- 
 creased their corporate franchises. During the absence in Pal- 
 estine of many a gallant knight, lawless encroachments on his 
 seignorial privileges were in progress, and were gradually, but 
 securely, ripening into indestructible liberties. The king will- 
 ingly lent his aid and his authority to such usurpations ; for 
 to multiply communes was to increase his own powers, be- 
 cause in every commune he was the immediate and the only 
 seigneur. Royal letters patent were therefore easily obtained 
 for the creation of them, when the seigneur was not at hand 
 to resist the grant. Returning from the camp before Acre or 
 Constantinople, he found, to his dismay, in the centre of his 
 own feudal territories, a camp of another kind an intrenched 
 position over which the royal standard waved, and in which 
 his own dominion was no longer acknowledged, but where 
 many of those had taken refuge on whose allegiance and fidel- 
 ity his station, rank, and fortunes were dependent. 
 
 Thirdly. The Crusades tended to terminate those private 
 wars by which the seigneurs asserted and maintained their 
 powers. 
 
 In those wars, the lords commanded not merely their feudal 
 retainers, but bands who, like the Condottieri of Italy, followed 
 any chief whose reputation allured and whose wealth could 
 maintain them. "When the military power of France was 
 directed against the Eastern world, these bands swelled the 
 trains of their former seignorial leaders. It is difficult to 
 doubt that, when the French kings plunged with such seem- 
 ing recklessness into the holy war, they really foresaw and 
 designed this advantage to themselves and to their more peace- 
 able subjects. No policy could be more obvious or more at- 
 tractive than that of thus delivering France from the scourge 
 of private wars, and of the ferocious and undisciplined troops 
 by whose aid they were so often conducted. Sixty years be 
 fore the earliest Crusade, the Church had, with the same be- 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 143 
 
 neficent purpose, proclaimed the Treve de Dieu. But the Cru- 
 sades themselves promised a much more effectual remedy ; nor 
 was that promise unfulfilled. In the words of an historian of 
 that age, "Innumeris populis ac nationibus ad sumendam cru- 
 cem commotis, repente sic totus pene occidens siluit, ut non 
 solum bella movere, sect et arma quempiam in publico portare, 
 nefas haberetur." 
 
 The same writer (Otto of Friesland) has a whole chapter 
 on the various wars which were composed by the expedition 
 to Palestine. There may, perhaps, have been some tendency 
 in that age to exaggerate the benefits of the Crusades ; but it 
 is at least certain that, with the close of them, both the prac- 
 tice and the right of undertaking private wars were brought 
 to an end. In a future lecture, I propose to explain how such 
 wars were finally prohibited by St. Louis, whose ordinances 
 on that subject owed much of their vitality to the new modes 
 of thought and action which the Crusades had nurtured. It 
 was an innovation dictated by the piety and the humanity of 
 that illustrious prince, but which tended strongly, though per- 
 haps undesignedly, to destroy one of the powers which had 
 made the seigneurs most formidable to subordinate their au- 
 thority to that of their sovereign and to bring them under the 
 wholesome control of public opinion. 
 
 Fourthly. The Crusades contributed largely to restore the 
 Roman law in France, and therefore to subvert the customs 
 on which, as on its basis, the Feudal power rested. During 
 many years after the reign of Theodosius, the code which bears 
 his name was received and prevailed both in the Grreek and in 
 the Latin empire. It was afterward superseded in the East 
 by the code of Justinian ; in the West by the Barbaric codes, 
 and especially by those of the Franks, the Goths, and the Bur- 
 gundians. But there always lingered deep traces of the Roman 
 jurisprudence to the southward of the Loire. When, there- 
 fore, the Crusaders returned from Constantinople, and brought 
 back with them the attachment and reverence which they had 
 there acquired for the code of Justinian, they found in Gruienne, 
 Languedoc, and Provence, a soil ready for the reception and 
 nourishment of the seeds of this new jurisprudence. Bologna, 
 indeed, enjoyed for a long time a species of monopoly of this 
 kind of knowledge and instruction : but it spread progressively 
 
144 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 over France, and eventually stifled the growth there of the le- 
 gal maxims which, during three centuries, had maintained and 
 consecrated that which may "be termed the political code of 
 Feudalism. 
 
 Fifthly. The Crusades contributed directly to change the 
 judicial institutions by which the law was administered, and 
 so to favor the introduction of the laws of Rome. 
 
 The courts of justice in that age in France, as I shall here- 
 after have occasion to explain, were either royal, or seignorial, 
 or communal. The court of the seigneur was holden by him- 
 self, or by a judge of his appointment, assisted by the chief 
 vassals, knights, and squires of the fief. But, during the Cru- 
 sades, these courts fell into neglect or desuetude, partly be- 
 cause the lord himself, and a large proportion of his vassals, 
 were absent in the East, and partly because the Bourgeois, 
 who, as has been shown, had become the purchasers of large 
 numbers of the baronial fiefs, were always prompt to enlarge 
 the communal at the expense of the feudal jurisdiction. In 
 those populous and wealthy cities were usually to be found 
 men of leisure and of studious habits men well disposed to 
 exalt the authority of the Roman law, favorable, as it was, to 
 municipal privileges, and opposed, as it was, to the barbaric 
 or feudal institutions and men perhaps yet more disposed to 
 advance the authority of a code which afforded such abundant 
 exercise for the astuteness of the legal profession, and such am- 
 ple scope for elevating the rank of its members and augment- 
 ing their emoluments. The progress of our own tribunals in 
 the work of covert, though real legislation ; in the enactment 
 of laws under the form and pretext of interpreting law ; and 
 in the usurpation of powers foreign to the original objects of 
 their existence, will readily illustrate the mode in which the 
 communal courts of France succeeded (to borrow one of our 
 own legal phrases) in ousting the baronial courts from their 
 traditionary and admitted functions. The motives in either 
 case may not have been sublime ; but in each, the general re- 
 sult was eminently beneficial. "Westminster Hall did not 
 wage a more determined or more successful war against the 
 ecclesiastical judges, than was carried on by the communal 
 against the feudal jurisdiction in France. Eventually, in- 
 deed, the royal courts subdued and superseded the conquerors 
 
THE EASTERN CLUSADES 145 
 
 themselves ; and then, among other less momentous victories, 
 they abolished the old feudal trial by wager of battle. Thus, 
 while the crusading seigneurs were erecting royal thrones at Je- 
 rusalem and Cyprus, they were forfeiting the judicial thrones, 
 which had long been the main buttress of their strength, both 
 in Southern and Northern France. 
 
 Sixthly. The Crusades were fatal in many cases to the 
 maintenance of the ancient relations of the feudatories and the 
 royal suzerains to each other. The numerous sales of fiefs by 
 their owners to raise funds for the service of the holy war had 
 frequently the effect of consolidating many such possessions 
 in the same hands. Thus 'two or more smaller fiefs were in 
 those times often thrown into one large fief; and yet, more 
 often still, the numerous links of the chain which connected 
 the actual possessor of the soil with the ultimate suzerain 
 were annihilated. The wealthy commune, or the rich mer- 
 chant, bought out, as we should say, the whole line of seign- 
 eurs to whom fealty and homage were successively due ; and 
 the king became the immediate and the only suzerain of lands 
 to which his title had before been far more remote and im- 
 perfect. 
 
 Till the Crusades it was an established principle of the feu- 
 dal law, that no roturier could acquire or hold a fief. But the 
 citizens of the Bourgs, who belonged to that class, were the 
 only persons rich enough to purchase such properties. What 
 was then to be done to reconcile their absolute inability in? 
 point of law, with their exclusive ability in point of fact, to 
 make such purchases ? Philippe Auguste solved this difficulty 
 by a law, which declared that the royal investiture of any 
 man with a fief raised him from the rank of a roturier to that 
 of a noble. Thenceforward, therefore, the plebeian citizen, on 
 buying such an estate, and on obtaining from the king the in- 
 vestiture of it, became a patrician. No more deadly blow could 
 have been aimed at one of the vital principles of Feudalism. 
 The jurisdiction, the powers, and the dignities of a chieftain 
 ceased to be the inalienable attributes of an hereditary caste. 
 To the great scandal, no doubt, of many whose ancestral le- 
 gends boasted of deeds done at Tours or at Roncesvalles, there 
 appeared a new class of seigneurs, Goldsmiths perhaps, or 
 Mercers, or even Vintners, who continued to live in the cities 
 
 K 
 
146 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 where they had grown rich, preferring the profits of the ex 
 change, or the pleasures of a civic "banquet, to the unwonted 
 solitude and the hazardous duties of a chatelain. 
 
 Now the coincidence of these three circumstances first, the 
 consolidation of fiefs ; secondly, the immediate approximation 
 of the king to the seigneur in possession as his only suzerain ; 
 and, thirdly, the transfer of many such estates from military 
 chieftains to mercantile men tended at once to exalt the 
 monarchical, and to depress the feudal authority. The king 
 had less rivalry to encounter from his new feudatories. The 
 new or commercial seigneur had less disposition to contend 
 with his royal superior. An increased aggressive force was 
 opposed to a diminished defensive resistance. 
 
 Seventhly. The Crusades tended to impair the power of the 
 feudal chiefs by changing the whole military system of Europe. 
 The structure of feudal armies was essentially defensive. 
 They were unfit for foreign conquest, or for any prolonged or 
 extended "belligerent operations. As a general rule, a chief was 
 entitled to the service of his retainers in the field only during 
 forty successive days ; but, in the invasion of the Holy Land, 
 it was impossible to adhere to this, or to any other definite 
 limitation of time. The leaders of those expeditions, therefore, 
 claimed and received the submission of their followers for pe- 
 riods indeterminate, but far exceeding the extent of their strict 
 legal liability ; and in this, as in other cases, the unopposed 
 encroachments of power gradually, though silently, ripened on 
 the one side into the right to exact, and on the other side into 
 the obligation to render, similar obedience in all future and 
 analogous cases. 
 
 Besides,, to the safe conduct of so vast an enterprise, unity 
 of command, strictness of discipline, and the prompt obedience 
 of all inferior officers to the leader of the host, were so mani- 
 festly indispensable, that not even the pride and the prejudices 
 of the feudal lords who followed in the train of Godfrey, or of 
 Boniface of Montserrat, could withhold from those great cap- 
 tains that supreme and absolute power. This practice of 
 moving armed men in vast masses, and on distant enterprises, 
 under the guidance of one all-controlling will, soon became 
 habitual in all the states of Europe. It was, however, the 
 very antithesis and contradiction to the feudal principle, which 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 147 
 
 till then had been recognized in them all. That principle re- 
 quired the division of all such forces under a "body of military 
 aristocrats or oligarchs ; submitting, indeed, during a few 
 weeks, to the same commander-in-chief, but rejecting, even 
 during that brief period, the superiority in the field of any 
 officer subordinate to him. When the object of European 
 warfare ceased to be the conservation, and came to be the ac- 
 quisition of power, Feudalism began to take its place among 
 obsolete and antiquated institutions. 
 
 Eighthly. That result was yet farther expedited by novel- 
 ties which the Crusades introduced, not merely into the science 
 of strategy, but also into 'the composition, the support, and 
 the conveyance of armies ; for from the time of those expe- 
 ditions may be dated the first appearance of the four great 
 military departments, which have ever since been considered 
 not less essential to the successful conduct of a war, than even 
 the office of the general himself. A feudal force marched 
 without a commissary to provide the requisite supplies of food 
 and clothing ; or a quarter-master to superintend the execu- 
 tion in detail of the movements which the leader had directed ; 
 or an ordnance officer to furnish and conduct the necessary 
 weapons and munitions of war ; or an engineer to baffle the 
 natural or artificial obstacles which might impede the progress 
 of the invading host. But when vast bodies of men were to 
 march across distant territories, whether allied or unfriendly ; 
 and still more, when they were to be embarked on long and 
 remote voyages, then' these parts of the mechanism or organ- 
 ization of regular armies became evidently indispensable. 
 Then, also, was first brought into use the function of the pro- 
 vost-marshal, the executive officer by whom strict discipline 
 is maintained, and who, whether on shipboard or ashore, su- 
 perintends the military police. Now these innovations were 
 not only incompatible with the belligerent system of the Feu- 
 dal Dynasty, but were eventually destructive of that system ; 
 for no one nation could ever return to those ruder arts of feu- 
 dal warfare, when all nations had been taught these more 
 comprehensive arrangements of a scientific campaign. 
 
 Even yet more effective in the same direction was the 
 change which the Crusades introduced in the comparative esti- 
 mation in which horse and foot soldiers had till then been held. 
 
148 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 You have only to open Monstrelet or Froissart to see with 
 what contempt the feudal lords and their favored followers re- 
 garded that arm of the service which we now distinguish as 
 the Infantry. The "best titles they get from the aristocratic 
 writers are those of Roturiers, Paysans, and even Brigands, to 
 which are added a thick fire of contumelious, though to my- 
 self unintelligible, nicknames. On the other hand, the seign- 
 eurs, the nobles, the knights, and esquires, with their admir- 
 ing chroniclers, bestrode well-bred and well-managed steeds, 
 covered like themselves with coats of mail or chain armor ; 
 and rode up and down the field like so many movable forts, 
 against which the swords and missiles of the plebeian footmen 
 were directed in vain. But when these gallant cavaliers Were 
 to embark for Acre or for Tunis, their horses proved most un- 
 manageable encumbrances in the transports of those days. 
 When they landed there, they had to encounter troops far better 
 mounted than themselves, and still more expert in all equestrian 
 exercises. But as often as they were constrained, by these and 
 other causes, to quit the saddle, the knights and seigneurs found 
 to their own surprise that, when drawn up on foot in line of bat- 
 tle, they could resist the charge of the best appointed cavalry 
 with a far greater steadiness and success than when fighting 
 in what had at first seemed more advantageous terms. Thus, 
 therefore, the infantry gradually rose in favor and considera- 
 tion, and the Venetian Sanutus (an eye-witness and historian 
 of some of those campaigns) is quoted by modern writers for 
 the statement, that it had passed in his times into a maxim, 
 that an army in the East ought to be composed of fifteen foot 
 soldiers for every horseman. The quotation may perhaps be 
 inaccurate (for I have not verified it) ; but it is at least cer- 
 tain that the Crusades greatly abridged (though they did not 
 annihilate) the wide chasm which till then had separated the 
 rank of the mounted cavalier from that of the more humble 
 Fantassin ; and that with the fall of this social distinction be- 
 tween the two classes, fell also much of the political distinc- 
 tion which had so long and so highly elevated the feudal seign- 
 eur above the free men whom he held in vassalage and led 
 to battle. 
 
 Ninthly. I pass over without comment the effect of the Cru- 
 sades in augmenting the wealth and power of the Papacy, and 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 140 
 
 in calling into existence the new or Mendicant orders : the first, 
 the head of all monarchical authority ; the second, the leaders 
 of all democratic power in the then European world. A more 
 convenient place for these topics will occur in the lecture which 
 I hope hereafter to address to you, On the action and reaction 
 of the Ecclesiastical and the Civil states in France on each 
 other. For the present I confine myself to the remark, that 
 monarchy in all its forms (and therefore in the papal form), 
 and democracy in all its developments (and therefore in the 
 Franciscan and Dominican developments), were the irreconcila- 
 ble, and at length the triumphant, antagonists of that stern 
 aristocracy which the feudal chieftains had maintained in 
 France during three successive centuries. 
 
 But, tenthly, the growth and the influence of the great mil- 
 itary orders during the same era falls more immediately within 
 the range of the inquiry in which we are at present engaged. 
 Whatever may be the truth or the falsehood of the frightful 
 imputations by which those orders were at length overwhelmed, 
 it would be an idle prejudice to doubt that their original de- 
 signs were noble, humane, and pious. When the Christian 
 cavalier was about to abandon the home of his ancestors, and 
 the scene of his own youthful sports and studies, for the de- 
 fense or conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, he not seldom sum- 
 moned to his aid all the profound hopes and recollections which 
 kindle the self-devotion of the martyr and the zeal of the mis- 
 sionary. He often began his perilous enterprise by passing 
 through what he and others regarded as a religious and an aw- 
 ful ceremonial. The bath in which the knight was plunged 
 was suggestive of a retrospect to a far more sacred and mys- 
 terious baptism. The white robes in which he was arrayed 
 symbolized the personal purity to which he pledged his honor 
 and his faith. The kiss which greeted his admission into an 
 order of chivalry reminded him that he was a member of that 
 Holy Church, in which an apostle had enjoined the observance 
 of the same emblem of a spiritual brotherhood. The society, 
 at once warlike and religious, into which he passed, was em- 
 blematic of the Church Militant here on earth. Becoming a 
 knight companion of St. John of Jerusalem, of the Templars, 
 of the Teutonic Order, or of the Hospitallers, he was bound to 
 do battle to the death against the Infidels to combat the world 
 
150 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 also, and the flesh and the devil to support the weak to min- 
 ister to the sick and to protect the pilgrim. How well these 
 vows were sometimes performed is attested by the histories of 
 Rhodes and of Malta. But for my immediate purpose it is 
 more material to observe, that these devoted champions of the 
 faith gave to the kings of France the command of a new and 
 formidable militia ; a militia not dependent on the caprice or 
 on the aids of his feudal lords, but animated by an undying 
 zeal, and prompted into ceaseless activity ; waging war some- 
 times as 'the followers and sometimes as the allies of their sov- 
 ereign, but in either case diminishing the royal dependence on 
 the feudal seigneurs, and in the same proportion diminishing 
 the strength which those seigneurs had so long derived from 
 holding their king in the bonds of that dependence. 
 
 Eleventhly. The Crusades, more than any or than all other 
 causes, laid the foundations of those commercial enterprises, 
 which, since that period, have never ceased to occupy the atten- 
 tion, or to increase the wealth and to secure the liberties of the 
 maritime powers of Europe. Though not among the most per- 
 severing, France was among the earliest of the competitors for 
 these advantages. But in France, as elsewhere, there was and 
 could be no reconcilement or compromise between the free 
 spirit of commerce and the despotic spirit of feudalism. Every 
 where, and at all times, the merchant has been the successful 
 antagonist of the seigneur. 
 
 Before the discovery of America, the great trade of the world 
 consisted in the interchange of the products of the Asiatic with 
 those of the European continent. It was conducted through 
 two routes, the northern and the southern. The northern route 
 lay through the Caspian Sea, thence to the Wolga, so overland 
 to the Don, and then down that stream to Trebizond and Con- 
 stantinople. The southern route lay through the Red Sea to 
 Suez, and so to Cairo, and then down the Nile to Damietta and 
 Alexandria. Thus the capitals of the Greek empire and of an- 
 cient Egypt became the two great emporiums for the supply 
 of Europe with the merchandise of the East. At the period 
 of the Crusades, that merchandise was chiefly composed of silks 
 wrought and unwrought, of fine linens and cotton fabrics, of 
 sugar, of drugs, of spices, of diamonds, pearls, and other pre- 
 cious stones, of silver and of gold. The temporary conquest 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 151 
 
 and occupation of these great marts by the Crusaders awakened 
 in them, and through them in the inhabitants of "Western and 
 Northern Europe, a taste, till then scarcely known there, for 
 these luxuries. The natural, or rather the inevitable, conse- 
 quences promptly followed. The most solemn vows to rescue 
 or to defend the Holy Sepulchre were forgotten by many a 
 champion of the Cross in his too diligent search for pepper, 
 nutmegs, and cinnamon. Disguised in Oriental robes and tur- 
 bans, many a once ardent pilgrim undertook the exploration 
 of new routes to Cashmere or G-olconda. Returning home- 
 ward, they concerted, and especially with the merchants of 
 Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, the establishments of Eastern entre- 
 pots of trade as rivals to Constantinople and Alexandria. Ere 
 long the Pisans had formed factories at Tyre, at Antioch, and 
 at Acre. The Grenoese founded a flourishing colony at Jaffa. 
 The Venetians actually put up to auction the islands of the 
 Archipelago which had fallen to their share in their victories 
 over the Greek empire ; and thus the city of Grallipoli on tKe 
 Hellespont, Naxos, Paros, Milo, Lemnos, and Herinea, became 
 commercial establishments of the Dandolos, the Viaris, and the 
 other senators of the Palazzo di Santo Marco. Stranger still, 
 the Marseillois and other French citizens obtained a possession, 
 half warlike, half mercantile, of the Morea, of which "William 
 de Champlette became the nominal prince. Louis, count of 
 Blois, assumed a feudal sovereignty at Nicaea in Bithynia, with 
 the title of Duke. One Regnier de Trit, a gentleman of Hai- 
 nault, appeared at Philipopolis in Thrace in a similar character ; 
 and that these trading principalities might attain to their com- 
 plete anti-classical climax, Otho de la Roche, a Burgundian 
 seigneur, erected his throne beneath the shadow of the Par- 
 thenon ; and, rejoicing in a title which Alcibiades might have 
 envied, was hailed as Duke of Athens and great Lord of Thebes : 
 " Due d'Athenes et grand Sire de Thebes." Those French set- 
 tlements were, indeed, formed rather to gratify the ambition 
 of the military chiefs who commanded them, than to promote 
 the speculations of the traders who settled there, for the wor- 
 ship of the goddess Giory is no modern form of idolatry in 
 France. In fact, however, they promoted the commercial much 
 more than the political or the military views of the settlers ; 
 and when the French were eventually expelled from these Greek 
 
T II JS A N TI - 1 E U D A L INFLUENCE OP 
 
 and Asiatic conquests, they still answered the more vulgar 
 purposes of the Lombards in the South, and of the Hanseatic 
 confederacy in the North, by whom Faros, and Mcaea, and 
 Philipopolis, and Thebes, and Athens were reasonably, though 
 perhaps not very poetically, regarded as so many admirable sta- 
 tions for the counting-house. 
 
 France did not ultimately participate to any great extent in 
 the commerce with the Fast which her arms had thus thrown 
 open to the Italian and the German speculators. The genius 
 of her people has never been eminently commercial. But she 
 felt deeply and lastingly the influence of the great innovation 
 in the trade of the world of which the Crusades were at once 
 the commencement and the cause. For the first time in her 
 history she then became a maritime power. Till the return 
 of Philippe Auguste from the Holy Land, France had been 
 accustomed to hire from the Genoese and Pisans the tonnage 
 required for the conveyance of her armaments to the East ; 
 but, taught by the observations which they had made during 
 those voyages, the French studied the arts of naval architec- 
 ture and navigation, and became ship-builders on their own 
 account. They at the same time adopted the use of the mar- 
 iner's compass, and claim to have been the authors of that 
 maritime code called the Laws of Oleron, of which England 
 acknowledged the authority, and which, if the text writers of 
 our own law may be trusted, were first formed and promul- 
 gated by Richard I. 
 
 "While pursuits such as these grew in popular estimation, 
 the feudal lords insensibly, though rapidly, descended from the 
 social eminence on which they had hitherto stood. They ceased 
 to be the great depositories of the national wealth. Their es- 
 tates, and even their dignities, gradually passed into the hands 
 of men enriched, not by royal grants or by military plunder, 
 but ly the sale of wine, and oil, and silk, by money-lending 
 and brokerage, by invoices and bills of lading. In the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, when genealogy was still a 
 favorite study in France, few if any of her illustrious families 
 could really trace back the nobility of their ancestors beyond 
 the Crusades ; for those families which had been noble at a yet 
 earlier period had, under the silent influence of these changes 
 of fortune, given place to houses which had till then beou 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 153 
 
 merely roturier. It is not in England that we shall seek in 
 vain either for an explanation or for examples of a similar rise 
 of plebeian and fall of patrician families. But it is in En- 
 gland that we shall "best find proof of the wisdom of continu- 
 ally recruiting the political aristocracy from all those ranks of 
 men to whom the popular mind will ever ascribe an aristo- 
 cratic dignity ; from the foremost in arms, in senatorial emi- 
 nence, in forensic triumphs, in territorial or in commercial 
 wealth. The ancient French seigneurs despised and rejected 
 such alliances, until they were themselves despised and re- 
 jected as allies by the noblesse who had superseded them. 
 The same error was committed again by the nobles of modern 
 France, and with the same disastrous results. If the court > 
 iers of Louis XV. had well pondered the history of their coun- 
 try, both before and after the Crusades, they might have fore- 
 seen that just as the novi homines of the fourteenth century 
 had usurped and crushed the Feudal power, so the Bourgeois 
 of the eighteenth were about to usurp and to crush their own. 
 
 Twelfthly. The Crusades contributed to diffuse over Weg<? 
 ern Europe an intellectual light fatal to that barbaric dark- 
 ness which had first nourished the germs, and had then fosterec 1 
 the growth of the Feudal power. 
 
 It was the boast of Rome that she civilized those whom she 
 conquered. It was at once the better founded and the noble' 
 boast of Greece, that she civilized her conquerors, and subju 
 gated, by her superior wisdom, those who had subdued herself 
 by their superior force. Degenerate as were the Greeks at 
 Constantinople in the Middle Ages, they might still assert 
 their hereditary title to this species of intellectual triumph 
 They still spoke the language of Homer, and of Plato, and oJ 
 Chry sos torn. They still preserved and admired the Olympian 
 Jupiter of Phidias, the Yenus of Praxiteles, and the Juno of 
 Lysippus. The Corinthian Horses, which now stand before 
 the Church of St. Marc, and which once stood between the 
 Louvre and the Tuilleries, were then among the embellish- 
 ments of the capital of the East. To their Saracenic invaders 
 they imparted the knowledge of Aristotle, and of many other 
 less illustrious Greek philosophers. Availing themselves of 
 these new lights, the Arabs established at Cairo, at Bassora, 
 at Fez, at Tunis, at Alexandria, and in many other cities, 
 
154 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 schools for translating and teaching the treatises on medicme s 
 astronomy, geometry, and chemistry which they had demand- 
 ed and obtained from the Byzantine emperor. They founded 
 for the same purpose a still more celebrated college at Salerno, 
 which supplied the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Ca- 
 sino with at least one of its most eminent scholars. When, 
 in their turn, the crusading Franks laid siege to Constantino- 
 ple, they also, in turn, drew instruction from the ever salient 
 fountains of Grecian learning. In that age of tardy and diffi- 
 cult communication between remote countries, as in the times 
 of Pythagoras and Herodotus, knowledge was to be acquired 
 chiefly by toilsome foreign travel, and by the personal inter- 
 course with each other of learned and inquisitive men of dif- 
 ferent and distant nations. And as in the eighteenth and 
 nineteenth, so in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a French 
 invading force was seldom unattended by savans skillful to 
 scrutinize, and prompt to appropriate, the literary wealth of 
 the lands through which they passed. Traversing the Greek 
 empire, and many of the Saracenic provinces, those half mili- 
 tary scholars gathered, in each, the learning and the arts 
 which, originally issuing from Athens and Corinth, had been 
 cherished at Constantinople, and had thence been transplanted 
 by the Moslem into Syria, and Africa, and Egypt. 
 
 In imparting these stores of knowledge to Western Europe, 
 the Arabs proved themselves more zealous and more success- 
 ful than the Greeks. The moral and the physical sciences 
 were in that age far better cultivated and understood on the 
 banks of the Nile than on the shores of the Hellespont ; and, 
 amid the disasters of his Egyptian crusade, St. Louis found 
 the leisure to examine, as he had the candor to admire, the 
 noble collections of books formed by the care of the later 
 Emirs. The library of La Sainte Chapelle, at Paris, though 
 the germ of the Bibliotheque du Roi, was . originally nothing 
 more than an imitation, by that great man, of the treasury of 
 learning which the Calif Almamon Abdallah, and his success- 
 ors, had extorted from the fears of the Byzantine court. The 
 French universities caught and propagated the flame which 
 thus, even amid the shock of arms, was kindled in the bosoms 
 of some studious men. The morals, the logic, the politics, 
 .and the physics of Aristotle took possession of the schools of 
 
THE EASTERN CRUSADES. 155 
 
 Paris ; and though, at first, they were placed by a provinc lal 
 council holden there among heretical Looks, and sentenced to 
 the flames, yet, in the lifetime of St. Louis himself, they had 
 found in his friend, St. Thomas Aquinas, a commentator who 
 devoted five volumes to the reconcilement of the doctrines of 
 the Stagyrite with those of the Evangelists. And then came 
 forth, and especially from our own land, that wonderful race 
 of men, the seraphic and irrefragable doctors, whose peculiar 
 office it was to exercise and educate those faculties of the hu- 
 man mind which were destined in a later age diligently to in- 
 terrogate nature, and humbly and faithfully to record her an- 
 swers. 
 
 Philosophy was not the only intellectual conquest achieved 
 by the Crusaders. They opened to the European world a far 
 more exact and comprehensive insight than it had before pos- 
 sessed into the science of geography ; and then, for the first 
 time, since the rise of the Crescent in the East, Armenia, 
 Tartary, and India were explored by missionaries of the Cross. 
 Thus St. Louis dispatched to the Grand Khan of Tartary the 
 friar William de Rubruquis, or Ruystrock (for he was a na- 
 tive of Brabant), and the Venetian Sanutus prepared, for the 
 use of the Crusaders, a series of maps of the Asiatic shores of 
 the Mediterranean. Jacques de Yitry also composed a history 
 of the East, which he is said to have illustrated by a map of 
 the world. 
 
 But to the Crusades, history is even yet more indebted than 
 geography, for they 'gave birth to a new and admirable race 
 of historians. Till then the political and military events of 
 the world had been chronicled exclusively by monks, most of 
 whom were as credulous as they were ignorant. There were 
 not wanting such monkish narratives of the holy wars. Many 
 have been published, and there is reason to suppose that many 
 more even yet remain in MS. But in those great movements 
 of the world, two French knights, Yillehardouin and Joinville, 
 were happily prompted by religion, by patriotism, and by loy- 
 alty, to record for the information of future ages the actions 
 which they had themselves shared or witnessed. They might 
 have found successful rivals in the Cardinal de Yitry and the 
 Archbishop of Tyre, if, unfortunately, both of those church- 
 men had not been too learned to employ their mother tongue 
 
156 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 on so solemn an occasion. The Latin of the ecclesiastics is 
 reserved for the curious few. The antique and picturesque 
 French of the military annalist is for all readers and for all 
 generations. It is their peculiar honor to have been the found- 
 ers of that literary school in whose works France is so pre- 
 eminently rich a school of which Froissart, Philip de Co- 
 mines, Sully, D'Aubigne, Be Retz, and St. Simon are the most 
 illustrious ornaments and whose characteristic distinction it 
 is at once to inlay the field of history with the most amusing 
 and pathetic biographical incidents, and to cast over it all the 
 warm glow of dramatic action. 
 
 It would be easy to prolong the examination of the various 
 impulses which the Crusades gave to the growth and develop- 
 ment of sound knowledge ; but enough may have been said to 
 indicate the general relation which subsisted between those ex- 
 peditions and that result ; nor can it be necessary to enter at all 
 into either the proof or the illustration of the fact, that as art, 
 and science, and poetry, and philosophy, and geography, and 
 history flourished, Feudalism declined. Each new ray of light 
 which shot across the gloom, disclosed more and more clearly 
 to the seigneurs the instability of their tenure of power, and to 
 their serfs and free vassals the means by which they might vin- 
 dicate their freedom ; for of all the varieties of political insti- 
 tutes under which the nations of the earth have ever lived, 
 the Feudal system is perhaps the only one which, during its 
 existence, was sustained by no popular enthusiasm, and which, 
 after its overthrow, was followed by no popular regrets. It 
 was a protracted reign of terror ; and, so far as I am aware, 
 no trace exists, either in the lighter or in the more serious 
 literature of the Middle Ages, of any sentiments having been 
 entertained by the people at large toward the chatelains, the 
 barons, and the seigneurs, under whom they lived, but such 
 as terror invariably inspires. The writers of romance and 
 poetry in our own age have found their account in depicting 
 the brilliant spectacles which the society of Europe is sup- 
 posed to have exhibited in those warlike times, and in giving 
 utterance to the patriarchal attachment and to the loyal rever- 
 ence by which they have imagined the actors in those scenes 
 to have been animated. When we deliberately enter Fairy 
 Land, we of course expect to be greeted with fairv tales ; bat 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 157 
 
 if we are willing to quit the world of fiction for the world of 
 realities, we must acknowledge that Feudalism was nothing 
 better than a stern, relentless, and unmitigated tyranny ; the 
 nearest approach which has ever been made in the Western 
 world, and in the lands which Christianity has claimed for her 
 own, to the blighting and heartless cruelty which divides and 
 governs the nations of the East by the institution of separate 
 and indelible castes. Feudalism, indeed, had its appointed 
 office in the history and progress of Christendom. It was the 
 discipline through which it was necessary for mankind to pass 
 in their progress to social improvement and civilization. The 
 Crusades, guilty, insane, and wasteful as they were, had also 
 their destined purposes to serve. Among them, not the least 
 important was that of bringing the feudal discipline to a 
 close as soon as the office assigned to it had been accom- 
 plished. 
 
 But during the invasion of Africa and the East by the Eu- 
 ropean world, there arose in the bosom of France itself another 
 Crusade, teeming with results even yet more momentous in 
 the constitutional history of that country. I refer to the war 
 of the Albigenses, which issued in the conquest of Southern 
 by Northern France, and in the addition to the domain of the 
 French kings of all the sea-coast and of all the rich territories 
 which connect the Alps with the Pyrenees. On that subject 
 T propose to enter when we next meet. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 ON THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 
 
 HAVING in my last lecture considered the influence of the 
 Crusades in elevating the French Monarchy on the ruins of the 
 Feudal Confederation of France, I proceed to inquire how far 
 the war against the Albigenses contributed to the same result. 
 It was no common contest. It was a prolonged tragedy, enact- 
 ed in a conspicuous theatre by characters boldly contrasted 
 with each other, and closing in a catastrophe which revealed, 
 even to the most heedless spectators, the controlling presence 
 
158 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 of that divine agency which alone imparts to human affairs 
 their true though mysterious significance. 
 
 In passing from one epoch of the history of France to 
 another, I have thus far chiefly, if not exclusively, endeavored 
 to throw light on each by commentaries rather than by nar- 
 rative, assuming that they whom I have had the honor to ad- 
 dress as my pupils were already well apprised of those histor- 
 ical events to which I have had occasion to refer. But at the 
 present stage of my progress I do not venture to rely on that 
 assumption ; for in most, if not in all the histories of France, 
 the Crusade against the Albigeois appears and reappears at 
 intervals, so frequent yet so remote from each other, as to be 
 destructive of all continuity of thought and of all distinctness 
 of recollection on the subject ; nor have I happened to meet 
 with any unbroken account of those wars which gives a clear, 
 exact, and compendious view of their origin, their progress, 
 and their results. The following very rapid summary will not, 
 indeed, supply that defect ; but it will (I trust) enable me to 
 render intelligible to all my audience remarks which might 
 otherwise convey no very definite meaning to some of the 
 younger members of it. 
 
 At the accession of Philippe Auguste, the greater part of the 
 south of France was holden, not of him, but of Pedro of Arra- 
 gon, as the supreme suzerain. To the Arragonese king belong- 
 ed especially the counties of Provence, Forcalquier, Narbonne, 
 Beziers, and Carcassonne. His supremacy was acknowledged 
 by the Counts of Beam, of Armagnac, of Bigorre, of Commin- 
 ges, of Foix, of Roussillon, and of Montpellier ; while the pow- 
 erful Count of Toulouse, surrounded by his estates and vassals, 
 maintained with difficulty his independence against him. 
 
 To these extensive territories were given the names some- 
 times of Provence, in the larger and less exact use of that word, 
 and sometimes of Languedoc, in allusion to the rich, harmoni- 
 ous, picturesque, and flexible language which was then vernac- 
 ular there. They who used it called themselves Proven<;aux or 
 Aquitanians, to indicate that they were not Frenchmen, but 
 members of a different and indeed of a hostile nation. 
 
 Tracing their descent to the ancient Roman colonists and to 
 the Gfothic invaders of Southern Graul, the Provemjaux regard- 
 ed with a mixture of contempt, of fear, and ill will, the inhab- 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 159 
 
 itants of the country north of the Loire, who had made far less 
 progress than themselves, either in civil liberty, or in the arts 
 and refinements of social life. 
 
 For the traditions of their ancient Roman franchises had 
 never entirely died away among the people of Southern Graul 
 Though often overrun by the Franks, under the two first dy- 
 nasties, they had never been effectually subjugated ; and Tou 
 louse, Marseilles, Aries, Beziers, and many other of their greater 
 cities, emulous of the Italian republics, with whom they traded 
 and formed alliances, were themselves living under a govern 
 ment which was virtually republican. 
 
 Each of these free cities being, however, the capital of one 
 of the greater lords among whom the whole of Aquitaine was 
 parceled out, became the seat of a princely and luxurious 
 court. A genial climate, a fertile soil, and an active com- 
 merce, rendered the means of subsistence abundant even to 
 the poor, and gave to the rich ample resources for indulging 
 in all the gratifications which wealth can purchase. The en- 
 joyments thus brought within their reach were eagerly seized 
 and recklessly abused. They lived as if life had been one pro- 
 tracted holiday. Theirs was the land of feasting, of gallantry, 
 and of mirth. Bat they were too great adepts in the joyous 
 science they professed, to be satisfied with the delights of sense 
 in their coarser and less sublimated forms. They refined and 
 enhanced the pleasures of appetite by the pleasures of the ima- 
 gination. They played with the stern features of war in nightly 
 tournaments. They parodied the severe toils of justice in their 
 courts of love. They transferred the poet's sacred office and 
 high vocation to the Troubadours, whose amatory and artifi- 
 cial effusions posterity has willingly let die, notwithstanding 
 the recent labors of MM. Raynouard and Fauriel to revive 
 them. Nor is any one who has looked into the works of those 
 learned commentators ignorant that the Chansons and Sirven- 
 tes which charmed the courts of Toulouse and St. Grilles indi- 
 cated a state of society such as never has existed and never 
 can exist among men, except as the herald of great and of 
 swiftly approaching calamities. 
 
 The imputations of irreligion, heresy, and shameless debauch- 
 eries, which have been cast with so much bitterness on the 
 Albigenses by their persecutors, and which have been so zsal- 
 
160 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 ously denied by their apologists, are probably not ill founded, 
 if the word "Albigenses" be employed as synonymous with 
 the words Proven^aux or Languedocians ; for they were appar- 
 ently a race among whom the hallowed charities of domestic 
 life, and the reverence due to divine ordinances, and the hom- 
 age due to divine truth, were often impaired, and not seldom 
 extinguished, by ribald jests, by infidel scoffings, and by heart- 
 hardening impurities. Like other voluptuaries, the Provenqaux 
 (as their remaining literature attests) were accustomed to find 
 matter for merriment in vices which would have moved wise 
 men to tears. 
 
 But if by the word "Albigenses" be meant the Yaudois, or 
 those followers (or associates) of Peter Waldo who revived the 
 doctrines against which the Church of Rome directed her cen- 
 sures, then the accusation of dissoluteness of manners may be 
 safely rejected as altogether calumnious, and the charge of 
 heresy may be considered, if not as entirely unfounded, yet as 
 a cruel and injurious exaggeration. 
 
 In the unrestrained license of speculation which invariably 
 succeeds to such a revolt as theirs from ancient authority, many 
 rash and dangerous theories have, as we too well know, been 
 always hazarded ; and it is, therefore, not reasonable to refuse 
 all credit to the statement of the historians hostile to them, that, 
 among the Albigenses, there were not wanting some who gave 
 such scope to their fancy as almost to destroy the whole sys- 
 tem of revealed truth. But' from the same testimony we may 
 infer, that these were the few exceptions, and that, in general, 
 they anticipated and held the same doctrines which, after the 
 lapse of three centuries, were to be promulgated by the Re- 
 formers of Germany and of England. Unless we will argue 
 and agree with Bossuet, we must believe that the extravagan- 
 cies of opinion which freedom of religious thought will infalli- 
 bly generate in feeble or presumptuous minds, derogate noth- 
 ing from the conclusions which, in the exercise of the same 
 freedom, have been established by the more wise, devout, and 
 teachable Reformers of the Church. 
 
 It was with deep foresight and anxious forebodings that 
 Innocent III. was at this time watching the progress of the 
 new-born spirit of intellectual independence among mankind. 
 His immediate predecessors, in their struggle with the two 
 
THE ALJJIUENSIAN CRUSADES. 161 
 
 Henrys and with Frederic Barbarossa, had disregarded, if 
 they had not encouraged it. But Innocent was incapable of 
 temporizing. Called in the vigor of his age to wield that un- 
 limited empire over the minds of men, of which Hildebrand 
 had laid the foundations, he was conducted by a remorseless 
 logic to consequences from which his heart must have revolt- 
 ed if it had not been hardened by the possession of absolute 
 power, and inflamed by the indulgence of a morose fanaticism ; 
 for Grod had given him a mind not incapable of generous 
 emotions, with an intellect large enough to comprehend, and 
 a will sufficiently energetic to control, the widest system of 
 human policy. While destroying the balance of power in Grer- 
 many and Italy, menacing and contending with all the sov- 
 ereigns of Europe by turns, directing the march of the Crusad- 
 ers, overturning by their means the Greek empire at Constan- 
 tinople, and pouring himself out in countless letters, of which 
 nearly two thousand remain to us, he was still observing and 
 punishing every dissent from the tenets of the Church of Rome, 
 and, indeed, every exercise of the thinking faculty on religious 
 subjects, with that boundless reliance on his own infallibility, 
 which is the common basis of all persecution, and with that 
 utter recklessness of human suffering, into which any man 
 may be plunged by his malignant passions, when they assume 
 the veil and the pretext of a seeming piety. 
 
 In the year 1207, Innocent had sent into Languedoc Peter 
 of Castelnau as his apostolic legate. Twice had Castelnau 
 required Raymond, count of Toulouse, the sixth of that name, 
 to exterminate his heretical subjects with sword and fire ; and 
 twice, when dissatisfied with his zeal in that atrocious office, 
 had he excommunicated him, and laid his dominions under an 
 interdict. The wrong was aggravated by insults such as a 
 feudal prince could not but regard with lively indignation, and 
 such as the legate would not have hazarded except in the con- 
 fidence inspired by the immunities of his sacred character. 
 Yielding at last to the impulse of his wrath, Raymond, in 
 an unhappy moment, exclaimed that he would make Castel- 
 nau answer for his insolence with his life. The menace was 
 heard by one of his attendants, who, following the legate to a 
 little inn on the right bank of the Rhone, entered into a new 
 
 L 
 
162 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 and angry debate with him there, and at length plunged a 
 poniard into his heart. 
 
 The victim was not a Thomas a Becket ; the offender was 
 not a Henry Plantagenet ; but neither was the avenger an Al- 
 exander the Third. From the Papal chancery issued one bull 
 after another, absolving the subjects of Raymond from their 
 oaths of allegiance ; permitting every Catholic to assail his per- 
 son ; exhorting all men to assist in his destruction, and in the 
 extermination of his heretical subjects ; and promising to those 
 who should take the cross against the Prove^aux the utmost 
 indulgence which had ever been granted to the champions of 
 the Holy Sepulchre. 
 
 To that ignorant and superstitious generation, no summons 
 could have been more welcome. Danger, privations, and fa- 
 tigue, in their direst forms, had beset the rugged path by which 
 the Crusaders in the East had fought their way to the prom- 
 ised paradise. But in the war against the Albigenses, the same 
 inestimable recompense was to be won, not by self-denial, but 
 by self-indulgence. Every debt owing to man was to be can- 
 celed, every offense already committed against the law of G-od 
 was to be pardoned, and an eternity of blessedness was to be 
 won, not by a life of future sanctity, but by a life of future 
 crime ; not by the restraint, but by the gratification, of their 
 foulest passions ; by satiating their cruelty, their avarice, and 
 their lust, at the expense of a people whose wealth excited 
 their covetousness, and whose superiority provoked then* re- 
 sentment. ; ''X*., 
 
 From one end of Europe to another, but especially in the 
 immediate neighborhood of Languedoc, was therefore heard 
 the din of martial preparation. Some of the writers of that 
 age raise to half a million the number of the host which, in 
 obedience to the voice of Innocent, gathered in three great 
 armies, over each of which presided either an archbishop, a 
 bishop, or a mitered abbot. The more reasonable estimate of 
 Peter de Yaux Cernay reduces it to fifty thousand. Among 
 the secular leaders of this sacred war were the Duke of Bur- 
 gundy and the Counts of Nevers, St. Pol, Auxerre, and Gene- 
 va. But eminent above all the rest, for well-proved courage 
 and skill in arms, was Simon de Montfort, the lord of a petty 
 fief near Paris, and earl of Leicester in right of his mother, ar 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 163 
 
 English or Anglo-Norman lady. It would be a kind oi trea- 
 son against our common humanity to doubt that there were 
 still some links which attached to it the heart even of this 
 cruel and perfidious Crusader ; but in history he is depicted, 
 even by his eulogists, as if existing among his fellow-men for 
 no end but to excite their terror and to justify their abhor- 
 rence. Of the ecclesiastical chiefs, by whose counsels or com- 
 mands he was guided, the most conspicuous were St. Dominic 
 and his brethren, who traversed the devoted land as the mis- 
 sionaries and the spies of Rome ; and Arnold Amalric, the pa- 
 pal legate ; and the monks of Citeaux, or Bernardins, whose 
 peculiar province it was to 'preach the duty of engaging in this 
 holy war ; and Foulques, or Fouquet, a monk, who ultimate- 
 ly rose to become the bishop of Toulouse. This man, who 
 had earned in his youth a shameful celebrity by profligate 
 amours, which he has himself celebrated in his still extant and 
 most licentious verse, passed the evening of his life in stimu- 
 lating and conducting the massacre of the people whose un- 
 happy doom it was to have received him as the chief pastor 
 of their spiritual fold. 
 
 Under the conduct of these captains and of these ecclesias- 
 tics, the mighty armament advanced along the valley of the 
 Rhine. But the heart of Raymond quailed at the gathering 
 tempest. He seems to have been a man of gentle, kindly, and 
 indolent disposition, whose unambitious aim it was to float 
 quietly down the stream of life, receiving and imparting such 
 pleasures as were to 'be had without any painful or perilous 
 sacrifice, and yet really gifted with nobler powers with cour- 
 age, force, and elevation of mind, which, though dormant un- 
 der the enervating influence of his luxurious habits, were at 
 length revealed for the first time to the world, and probably to 
 himself, under the stern discipline of prolonged calamity. To 
 avert the impending storm of papal indignation, he now hum- 
 bled himself before Innocent, and his penitence seemed to be 
 accepted ; but Raymond was soon to learn how cruel are the 
 tender mercies of a persecutor. 
 
 The conditions of his pardon were, that he should surren- 
 der seven of his best castles as a pledge of his fidelity: that 
 he should submit himself to the future judgment of the papal 
 legate on the charge of heresy ; that he should do public pen- 
 
164 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 ance for his past offenses ; and that he should then, in his own 
 person, become a Crusader against his own subjects. Each 
 part of this humiliating compact was fulfilled rigorously and 
 to the letter. The count appeared in the Cathedral of St. 
 Griles with naked shoulders, and bearing round his neck a cord, 
 either end of which was carried by a bishop. By their hands 
 the scourge was laid upon his person, not as a mere humili- 
 ating ceremony, but with hearty good will to the task, till, 
 covered with blood, ^nd in an agony of distress and shame, the 
 unhappy Count of Toulouse was permitted to escape from his 
 tormentors, and from the vast crowd which had gathered to 
 witness this almost incredible degradation of their suzerain 
 lord. Nor was the vindictive soul of Innocent to be really 
 propitiated even by this abasement of his enemy. ""We coun- 
 sel you with the Apostle Paul (I quote from a letter from the 
 pontiff to his agents in Provence, written at this time) to em- 
 ploy guile with regard to this count ; for in this case it ought 
 to be called prudence. "We must attack separately those who 
 are separated from unity. Leave for a time this Count* of 
 Toulouse, employing toward him a wise dissimulation, that 
 the other heretics may be the more easily defeated, and that 
 afterward we may crush him when he shall be left alone." 
 
 In obedience to this atrocious policy, Raymond was, for the 
 moment, left in such peace as could consist with such igno- 
 minies and with such sacrifices as his ; and the tide of war, 
 diverted from himself, was directed against his young and 
 gallant kinsman, Roger, the viscount of Beziers. One after 
 another the castles of Roger were abandoned, burned, or captur- 
 ed ; and then, at the bidding of the Legate Amalric, and amid 
 the acclamations of the ferocious Crusaders, such suspected 
 heretics as were found there were cast headlong into the flames. 
 The chief strength of Roger consisted in his two great cities of 
 Beziers and Carcassonne ; but Beziers fell at the first assault 
 Pausing at the open gates, the knights inquired of Amalric 
 how they should distinguish the Catholics from the heretics. 
 " Kill them all," replied the legate. " The Lord will know 
 those who are his." Fearfully was the injunction obeyed. In 
 the great church of St. Mcaise had assembled a vast multitude, 
 in hope of finding a sanctuary within those hallowed walls. 
 Not one of them survived the carnage. Another trembling 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 165 
 
 Jrowd had sought protection in the church of the Magdalen. 
 Seven thousand of their dead bodies were afterward counted 
 on the spot. The slaughter ceased at length from the m?re 
 want of new victims. Not one human "being of those who so 
 lately had thronged the marts and streets of Beziers remained 
 alive. When the booty had been withdrawn, the Crusaders 
 set fire to the city, and the blackened ruins of Beziers alone 
 long stood there a dismal monument to the memory of her 
 former inhabitants. 
 
 From Beziers the triumphant host advanced to Carcassonne. 
 There Roger commanded in person, and sustained the siege 
 with admirable constancy, until, in reliance on a safe-conduct 
 from the legate and lords of the army, confirmed by their oaths, 
 he visited their camp, proposing there to enter into a confer- 
 ence and negotiation with them. But with so formidable a 
 heretic faith was not to be kept. Amalric caused him to be 
 arrested and given into the charge of De Montfort. From that 
 custody he was not long afterward delivered by death; nor 
 did any one doubt that he died by violence. Carcassonne, 
 abandoned by her garrison, was then entered by the Crusaders, 
 and the princely heritage of the Yiscount of Beziers remained 
 at the mercy of the conquerors. By the legate, and two bish- 
 ops, and as many knights whom he associated with them, it 
 was conferred on Simon de Montfort, on the condition of his 
 rendering an annual tribute to the Pope, as liege lord of tho 
 conquered territories. The curtain then fell on the first act of 
 this sanguinary drama. 
 
 The conquest of the viscounty of Beziers had rather inflamed 
 than satiated the cupidity of De Montfort, and the fanaticism 
 of Amalric and of the monks of Citeaux. Raymond, count of 
 Toulouse, still possessed the fairest part of Languedoc, and 
 was still suspected or accused of affording shelter, if not coun- 
 tenance, to his heretical subjects. To escape the power cf his 
 terrible accusers, he took refuge in Rome itself, and there im- 
 plored the protection and favor of the sovereign pontiff. His 
 reception was encouraging and even gracious. Innocent ab- 
 solved him provisionally, but referred him to a council to be 
 holden in Provence by the legates, who, with the aid of that 
 synod, were finally to hear and decide the charges still im- 
 pending over him, of heresy, and of participation in the murder 
 
166 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 of the legate, Castelnau. To assist at that council, the Pope 
 dispatched Theodise, a Genoese monk, of whom, in the history 
 of Peter de Yaux Cernay, the panegyrist and vassal of De 
 Montfort, we read as follows : " He was a circumspect man, 
 prudent, and very zealous for the affairs of Grod ; and he de- 
 sired above all things to find some pretext of right to refuse 
 the count that opportunity of justifying himself which Inno- 
 cent had granted him." Such a pretext was easily found; 
 and the count was informed by his judges that his defense 
 could not be received. On hearing this ominous intelligence, 
 he burst into tears ; when, in imitation of the words, though 
 neither in the meaning nor the spirit of the Psalmist, Theodise 
 contemptuously exclaimed, " Thy tears extend not unto the 
 Lord." The unhappy Raymond was then again excommuni 
 cated from the Christian Church, and his dominions offered as 
 a reward to the champions whs should execute her sentence 
 against him. 
 
 To earn that reward, De Montfort, at the head of a new host 
 of Crusaders, attracted by the promise of earthly spoils and of 
 heavenly blessedness, once more marched through the devoted 
 land, and with him advanced Amalric. At each successive 
 conquest, slaughter, rapine, and woes, such as may not be de- 
 scribed, tracked and polluted their steps. Heretics, or those 
 suspected of heresy, wherever they were found, were compell- 
 ed by the legate to ascend vast piles of burning fagots, and, 
 in the name of the Redeemer of mankind, were presented to 
 him who is Love, sacrifices infinitely more atrocious than had 
 ever been offered on the foulest altars of Moloch. At length 
 the Crusaders reached and laid siege to the city of Toulouse. 
 It was already the scene of intestine war. Fouquet, who was 
 now the bishop of it, had organized there a band called the 
 .White Company, who were pledged to the destruction of their 
 heretical fellow-citizens. To them had been opposed another 
 band, called the Black Company, composed of the adherents 
 of the count. Throwing himself into the place, Raymond 
 united both the hostile companies in his own service, and by 
 their aid succeeded in repulsing De Montfort and Amalric. It 
 was, however, but a temporary respite, and the prelude to a 
 fearful destruction. From beyond the Pyrenees, at the head 
 of 1000 knights, Pedro of Arragon had marched to the rescue 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 1C? 
 
 of Raymond his kinsman, and of the Counts of Foix and of 
 Gomminges, and of the Yiscount of Beam, his vassaly ; and 
 their united forces came into communication with each other 
 at Muret, a little town which is about three leagues distant 
 from Toulouse. There also, on the 12th of September, at the 
 head of the champions of the Cross, and attended by seven 
 bishops, appeared Simon de Montfort in full military array. 
 The battle which followed was fierce, short, and decisive. 
 A Spanish knight, who on that day wore the armor of his 
 king, was bending beneath the blows of his assailants, who 
 were heard to cry out, " This can not be the gallant knight, 
 Don Pedro of Arragon." < r Don Pedro is here !" exclaimed the 
 generous monarch, as, flying to the rescue of his officer, he 
 threw himself into the thickest of the fight. Closing round 
 him, his enemies bore him to the earth, and Don Pedro was 
 numbered with the slain. His army, deprived of his command, 
 broke and dispersed, and the whole of the infantry of Raymond 
 and his allies were either put to the sword, or swept away by 
 the current of the Graronne. Toulouse immediately surrender- 
 ed, and the whole of the dominions of Raymond submitted to 
 the conquerors. At a council subsequently held at Montpellier, 
 composed of five archbishops and twenty-eight bishops, De 
 Montfort was unanimously acknowledged as prince of the fief 
 and city of Toulouse, and of the other counties conquered by 
 the Crusaders under his command. Overwhelmed by his mis- 
 fortunes and by the censures of the Church, Raymond offered 
 no opposition to this sentence. Having resigned the palace of 
 his ancestors to Fouquet, who came with an armed force to 
 take possession of it, he retired into an obscure, and, as he 
 vainly hoped, an unmolested privacy. And thus terminated 
 the second stage of the war of the Albigenses. 
 
 The conquest appeared to be complete, but the conquerors 
 were now to reap the bitter fruits of a triumphant injustice 
 Amalric and De Montfort each claimed the dukedom of Nar- 
 bonne ; the legate insisting that the ducal crown was insep- 
 arable from the archiepiscopal mitre ; the new Count of Tou- 
 louse asserting that the feudal sovereignty of Narbonne had 
 become a forfeiture to himself, as the suzerain lord of that 
 province. The crusader, therefore, invaded the prelate, and 
 the prelate excommunicated the crusader. Though not di- 
 
168 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 rectly interposing in this strife, the Pope had learned to regard* 
 with jealousy the formidable power which he had so largely 
 contributed to create ; and, in the year 1215, he convened the 
 twelfth of the oecumenical, and the fourth of the Lateran 
 councils, in order to bring to an end the Crusade against the 
 Albigenses, and finally to dispose of the conquered territories. 
 At that great synod appeared Count Raymond, attended by 
 his son, who was afterward distinguished by the title of Ray- 
 mond VII. Prostrating themselves before the assembled fa- 
 thers of the Church, the princes recounted the wrongs which 
 had been inflicted on them by De Montfort, and the enormous 
 cruelties of Fouquet, whom they denounced as the destroyer 
 of more than ten thousand of the flock intrusted to his pastoral 
 care. Nor were their complaints unheeded. Some pity seems 
 to have touched the heart of Innocent, who not only absolved 
 Raymond VI., but (if some of the writers of that age be well 
 informed) privately encouraged the younger Raymond to at- 
 tempt the recovery by arms of the heritage of his house. Some 
 remorse seems also to have visited the members of the council, 
 who reserved for Raymond VII. the countship of Venaissin 
 and the marquisate of Provence, and replaced the Counts of 
 Foix and of Comminges provisionally in possession of their 
 estates. But neither the Council nor the Pope could resist the 
 other claims of De Montfort. They assigned to him the rest 
 of the countries he had conquered ; and Philippe Auguste, ac- 
 quiescing in this sentence, granted to him the investiture of 
 the countships of Toulouse, of Beziers, and of Carcassonne, 
 and of the dukedom of Narbonne. And thus, for a moment 
 Simon de Montfort reposed in seeming security on the throne 
 to which he had waded through seas of blood. This repose, 
 however, was but momentary. 
 
 The termination of the Crusade by the sentence of the Lat- 
 eran Council had deprived De Montfort of all support, except 
 from his own unaided resources. But the abhorrence of his 
 cruelties, and the attachment to their hereditary sovereigns, 
 which animated the whole population of Languedoc, threw 
 resources of far greater importance into the hands of the two 
 Raymonds. One revolt of the citizens of Toulouse had been 
 detected by the perfidious falsehood of Fouquet, and punished 
 with all his relentless cruelty. But on the appearance beneath 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 169 
 
 their walls of some recruits from Spain, commanded by the 
 "Raymonds, fear and every other emotion gave way to the en- 
 thusiastic joy with which the people welcomed "back their an- 
 cient lords to the house and the dominion of their ancestors. 
 A sudden insurrection overwhelmed the soldiers and partisans 
 of De Montfort, and again the standard of the house of St. G-il- 
 les waved above the palace and the ramparts of Toulouse. 
 The knights and commons of Languedoc eagerly rallied under 
 it, and De Montfort was now once more to undertake the con- 
 quest of the territories which he had so dearly won and so 
 unexpectedly lost. He commenced it by laying siege to Tou- 
 louse. On the 25th of June, 1218, he knelt at the high mass 
 which the priests in attendance on him were celebrating, in a 
 church in the suburbs of the city. At the moment of the ele- 
 vation of the host, a loud shout announced that the besieged 
 had made a sally, and were attacking an enormous wooden 
 tower which he had erected for their destruction. Vaulting 
 on his feet, De Montfort, in the words of Simeon, exclaimed, 
 " Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine 
 eyes have seen thy salvation ;" and flying toward the tower, 
 placed himself at the head of his veterans, and with all his 
 former gallantry repulsed the assailants. At that moment a 
 fragment of a rock, launched from a machine on the city walls, 
 stretched him lifeless on the ground. The siege was raised. 
 In tumults of exultation, Toulouse hailed Raymond as her 
 lawful, and now her undisputed sovereign ; and the third act 
 of this eventful drama was completed. 
 
 Innocent III. was now dead, and the papal throne was oc- 
 cupied by the third Honorius, who ill brooked the triumph of 
 those whom he had so long abhorred as the enemies of the true 
 faith, and as outcasts from the Church. Louis, the son of 
 Philippe Auguste, had once already labored to insure his eter- 
 nal welfare by conducting a crusade against the Albigenses. 
 To him, therefore, Honorius assigned half of the funds which 
 had been raised for the support of the Eastern Crusade, on 
 condition of his renewing the same sanguinary, but too wel- 
 come warfare. Assisted by Amaury de Montfort, the son and 
 heir of Simon, Louis accordingly invaded Languedoc, and, at 
 the head of a large army, once more laid siege to Toulouse. 
 But the leaguer even of the heir to the crown of France 
 
170 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 proved unequal to so arduous an enterprise. The city \*as 
 T -aliantly defended by the younger Raymond. The faith in the 
 saving efficacy of the slaughter of heretics was dying away in 
 those parts of France from which the monks of Citeaux had 
 hitherto drawn their most effective levies, and the new papal 
 legate could discover no other resource than that of creating a 
 new fraternity, called the Order of the Holy Faith, the mem- 
 bers of which were bound by solemn vows to employ their ut- 
 most powers for the destruction of all heretics rebelling against 
 the Church and against Amaury de Montfort. Even this de- 
 vice proved ineffectual. The war languished. Louis returned 
 to France. The elder Raymond died, leaving the defense of 
 his states to his son, then in the vigor of his age and hopes. 
 Philippe Auguste also died, leaving his crown to Louis, who 
 in vain contributed supplies of men and money for the subju- 
 gation of Raymond VII. In the month of January, 1224, the 
 younger De Montfort, despairing of success, finally abandoned 
 Languedoc, and bartered his hereditary rights to his father's 
 conquests there for the office of Constable of France, which 
 was granted to him by Louis VIII. as the price or equivalent 
 for them. And thus, at the close of several campaigns, sig- 
 nalized by no martial achievements, and memorable for no 
 signal occurrences, Raymond, the seventh count of Toulouse, 
 of the family of St. Grilles, found himself in possession of the 
 dominions of his ancestors, with no antagonists to dread ex- 
 cept the monarch to whom he was eager to do homage as his 
 suzerain, and the pontiff to whom he was resolved to refuse- 
 no concession which might propitiate the offended majesty of 
 papal Rome. And thus, at the end of the fourth act of this 
 protracted strife, the scene presented an unwonted prospect of 
 approaching repose. 
 
 It was, however, an illusive prospect. In the year 1225, 
 Honorius convened at Bourges a provincial council, which en- 
 joined Louis VIII. to purge the land of heretics, and assigned 
 to him for that purpose one tenth of the whole ecclesiastical 
 revenues of France during the next five years. Louis accord- 
 ingly took the cross, and, attended by a large number of his 
 barons and their followers, advanced once again to devastate 
 the territories of the Languedocians, and to exterminate all 
 heretics among them, This was the first time that the ban- 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 171 
 
 tier of a king of France had been unfurled in these Crusades. 
 The hearts of the people sunk within them. They were sc 
 worn out by repeated invasions, their country had so frequent- 
 ly been laid desolate, the bonds of society among them had so 
 often been torn asunder, and they had so repeatedly endured 
 all the horrors of war in all their most fearful forms, that the 
 barons, knights, and communes of Languedoc, with one accora, 
 hastened to avert, by timely concessions, the threatened renew- 
 al of these intolerable calamities. All seemed lost to the cause 
 of Raymond, when again the mighty innovator, Death, inter- 
 posed to postpone the impending ruin of that princely house. 
 In November, 1226, Louis* VIII. fell a victim to a contagious 
 disease, which had swept away 30,000 of his soldiers. His 
 son was yet an infant, and the regent of France was a woman. 
 But that infant was, under the title of Louis IX., to become 
 the most illustrious of all the kings and of all the saints of 
 France ; and that woman, Blanche of Castile, was alone, of all 
 the females who have been called to the regency of that king- 
 dom, to vindicate by her policy her title to so high and ardu- 
 ous a trust. By her orders the siege of Toulouse was re- 
 sumed. 
 
 Fouquet, the evil genius of the place, suggested to the be- 
 siegers the only means of a successful attack on the people 
 over whom he had been appointed to be overseer. By his ad- 
 vice, the whole of the adjacent country was converted into a 
 desolate wilderness, till Toulouse remained in the centre of a 
 desert, from which no supplies of any kind could be procured. 
 The spirit of Raymond himself gave way when this new vial 
 of wrath was poured out on his devoted country ; and in April, 
 1229, he signed the treaty of Paris, by which he abdicated all 
 his feudal sovereignty to the King of France, a small territory 
 only being excepted as a dowry for his daughter, the heiress 
 and last representative of his race. 
 
 The unhappy father himself was conducted to the Church 
 of Notre Dame, at Paris, and there underwent, from priestly 
 hands, the same public and ignominious discipline which the 
 sixth Raymond had endured at the Church of St. Grilles. 
 
 Yet another woe, and the chronicle of these tribulations 
 closes. In little more than six months from the cession of 
 Languedoc, a council held at Toulouse established tho Inqui- 
 
172 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 sition, for the conservation of the true faith and the punish- 
 ment of heresy among the Languedocians. 
 
 Gradually bowing the neck to this foreign yoke and to this 
 judicial despotism, they at length submitted to their fate. In 
 the year 1242, Louis and Raymond VII. formally ratified the 
 treaty of 1229, and the kings of France saw their domain ex- 
 tended over all the Mediterranean shores, and along the fertile 
 regions which connect the western declivities of the Alps with 
 the eastern slopes of the Pyrenean range. 
 
 The Church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. 
 Those supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of 
 France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been over- 
 whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The es- 
 timates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and 
 of the slain are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither 
 verify nor correct them ; but we certainly know that, during 
 a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by 
 armies more numerous than had ever before been brought to- 
 gether in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. 
 We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by 
 bigotry and unrestrained by discipline ; that they had neither 
 military pay nor magazines ; that they provided for all their 
 wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and 
 seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and 
 the merchandise of the citizens. More than three fourths of 
 the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and 
 castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been 
 massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some mem- 
 ber had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort's soldiers 
 or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome 
 by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over 
 a national disaster so wide in its extent or so fearful in its 
 character. 
 
 Yet they by whom these crimes were committed were not 
 demons, but men. They were children of our common father 
 members of the great human family to which we belong 
 our very brethren but brethren destitute of the advantages 
 which we possess, and exposed to temptations from which we 
 are exempt. In their actual guilt we have the measure of our 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 173 
 
 own possible criminality. As long as the records of our race 
 shall exist, so long will De Montfort and his followers remain 
 as a beacon admonishing mankind of the depth of the iniqui- 
 ties into which they may be plunged by the indulgence of the 
 spirit of fanaticism. 
 
 Theirs was no common illusion. They could not perceive 
 the deformity of their own evil passions, because they had been 
 kindled by what they regarded as praiseworthy and as holy 
 purposes. Their rancorous hatred of a rival nation passed with 
 them for patriotism. Their extermination of an heretical peo- 
 ple appeared to them but as the outbreak of a devout zeal. 
 They persuaded themselves that they were securing the divine 
 favor by habitually violating the most sacred of the divine com- 
 mands. They thought that they were ripening for the beat- 
 itudes of heaven by doing on earth the. very work of hell. 
 They knew not, or heeded not, the canon which requires us, 
 on all questions of duty, to try our conclusions, not less than 
 our premises, by the law of our Creator. They blindly pur- 
 sued to all its most revolting consequences a solitary and ill- 
 apprehended principle, trampling down in their progress every 
 other conflicting principle which (rod has written in his word, 
 or has inscribed in the hearts of his rational creatures. 
 
 In that word, for the warning of mankind in all ages, in- 
 spired historians and prophets have traced and interpreted the 
 connection which subsisted between the offenses of the chosen 
 people and the calamities which from time to time over- 
 whelmed them. No such voice has been raised to solve the 
 corresponding enigmas of the history of the world in modern 
 times. But the march of a retributive providence among men 
 has not really been arrested. That our world rose into being 
 by the volition of an omnipotent Creator, is scarcely -more evi- 
 dent than that the events of it are controlled by the wisdom 
 of an omniscient Ruler. Reverently to trace out his steps by 
 the lights which He has himself afforded us is no presumptu- 
 ous attempt. It is assuredly not the least important of the 
 ends which a wise man proposes to himself in reviewing the 
 annals of our race. Such judgments, indeed, it is not permit- 
 ted to us to form with regard to particular men, because their 
 responsibility reaches beyond the grave. The indignation 
 which swells the bosom against the leaders of the Albigensian 
 
174 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 Crusades is subdued "by the remembrance that their sentence 
 is with their judge. But we may more safely decipher the 
 scroll of Providence in its dealings with communities or na- 
 tions, whose corporate existence is confined within the narrow 
 precincts of this sublunary state. The abhorrence with which 
 we contemplate the conduct of the powers and populations who 
 carried on these atrocious wars, and the satisfaction with which 
 we regard their righteous punishment, are feelings which we 
 may reasonably indulge. 
 
 The fearful visitation fell, indeed, with the most withering 
 severity on the Proven^aux themselves. The flood swept away 
 the princely house to which their allegiance had so long been 
 rendered, and with it their national independence, their civic 
 franchises, their commercial prosperity, their gallant chivalry, 
 their tournaments, their courts of love, their minstrels, and 
 their troubadours. The tabret, the viol, and the lute were no 
 longer in their feasts. The voluptuous dance was ended. 
 Wealth was no more tributary to the refinements of art, nor 
 art to the embellishment of social life among them. They 
 hung up their harps, and sat down and wept over the departed 
 glories of their native land. If, when those glories were in 
 their noontide splendor, there had arisen up among them a 
 seer, gifted by his knowledge of the annals of mankind to di- 
 vine the approaching dispensations of the Supreme Ruler of 
 men, he would assuredly have foretold the coming desolation. 
 He would have remembered that neither in sacred nor in pro- 
 fane history neither in the monarchies of the East, nor in 
 the free commonwealths of the "Western world neither in 
 Egyptian, Grrecian, Roman, Italian, Saracenic, or any other 
 chronicles, could an exception be found to the law which dooms 
 to ruin any people who, abandoning the duties for the delights 
 of this transitory state, live only in the frivolities of life, and 
 find only the means of a dissolute and emasculate self-indulg- 
 ence in Grod's best gifts to man in wealth, and leisure, and 
 society in erudition, and art, and science in literature, and 
 philosophy, and eloquence in the domestic affections which 
 should bless our existence and in the worship by which it 
 should be consecrated. From the voluptuousness of the intel- 
 lect, the transition has ever been short and certain to the tyran- 
 ny of the appetites. They to whom the education of the young 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 175 
 
 is intrusted will seldom be unobservant or unconscious of this 
 danger ; nor in our own land and age will they, I trust, ever 
 be wanting in efforts to counteract it. Among the many titles 
 of this our own illustrious seat of learning to our reverence 
 and our love, there are few , if any, higher than the resistance 
 she opposes to all luxurious trifling with the great subjects of 
 her academical instruction, and the habitual elevation of her 
 standards of excellence to heights which can be scaled only by 
 men of lofty purposes and of strenuous self-denial. 
 
 But in the ruin of that rich and self-indulgent people fell 
 also those who had raised the earliest protest which modern 
 Europe has heard against the superstitions, the errors, and the 
 spiritual despotism of Papal Rome. Their fate may, perhaps, 
 seem to raise a more perplexing problem. The natural regret 
 that the Reformation was thus postponed till after the lapse 
 of three more centuries of mental darkness, may possibly not 
 be quite unmixed with surprise that such should have been 
 the decree, or such the permission, of the Divine Providence. 
 But " the Holy Church throughout all the world" has ever con- 
 templated the sufferings of her noble army of martyrs, not 
 with repining, but with gratitude and exultation. In implicit 
 faith she has ever committed the times and the seasons to Him 
 to whom alone their maturity can be known. Yet even to our 
 contracted vision it is evident that, without a miraculous change 
 in the whole economy of the world, and in the entire system 
 of human life, the reformation of the Church could not have 
 been successfully accomplished by the ministry of the Albi- 
 genses. The mind of man had not as yet passed through the 
 indispensable preliminary education. The Scholastic philoso- 
 phy, extravagant as may have been some of its premises and 
 some of its purposes, had yet a great task to accomplish the 
 task of training the instructors of the Church in the athletic 
 use of all their mental faculties. Philology, and criticism, and 
 ecclesiastical antiquity, were still uncultivated. The Holy 
 Scriptures, in their original tongues, were almost a sealed vol- 
 ume to the scholars of the "West. The vernacular languages 
 of Europe were unformed. The arts of printing and of paper 
 making were undiscovered. Such an age could neither have 
 produced or appreciated a Wickliffe or a Huss. Still less could 
 Melancthon, or Luther, or Calvin, or Beza have borne theii 
 
176 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 fruit in such times, if such men had then been living. Above 
 all, the world, as it then was, could no more have fostered 
 minds like those of Cranmer or Ridley, of Jewell or Hooker, 
 than it could have trained up chemists to rival Cavendish, or 
 mechanists to anticipate "Watt. If the Albigenses had suc- 
 ceeded in their designs if they had reclaimed the nations 
 from the errors of Rome, they must infallibly have substituted 
 for her despotism an anarchy breaking loose from all restraints, 
 divine and human an anarchy far exceeding, in presumptu- 
 ous ignorance and audacious self-will, the wildest of the sects 
 which perplexed and disgraced the Reformation of the six 
 teenth century. 
 
 That despotism had then reached its noontide splendor, 
 and, bewildered by the infatuation of that giddy height, was 
 about to fulfill an immutable law of human society, by rapidly 
 falling from it. The Papacy had risen to more than imperial 
 power. It had attained a dignity eclipsing that of the proud- 
 est of the Csesars. It enjoyed a wealth which could be emu- 
 lated only in the fabulous East. To avenge the assassination 
 of her legate Castelnau, to assert her own insulted majesty, 
 and to arrest the growing revolt of mankind from her author- 
 ity, she had desolated the fairest regions of France by every 
 plague which tyranny can inflict, or which the victims of it 
 can undergo. Blinded by revenge, by haughtiness, and by 
 fear, she forgot that, by crushing the Provenqaux, she was 
 raising up to herself an antagonist with whom she could 
 neither live in peace nor contend on equal terms. Scarcely 
 had the Church of Rome brought the great province of Lan- 
 guedoc under the allegiance of the King of France, when he 
 promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction, which established what 
 have ever since been called the " liberties of the G-allican 
 Church." During the two succeeding centuries the bishops 
 of Rome had to sustain, from the successors of St. Louis, a 
 series of indignities fatal to their moral influence, and a suc- 
 cession of open hostilities which menaced the entire destruc- 
 tion of their political power. In the person of Boniface VIII. 
 the Papacy was compelled, by Philippe le Bel, to drink deeply 
 of the cup of humiliation which it had so often mixed for the 
 secular powers of Europe. From 1305 to 1377 the Popes 
 were little more than vassals of the French monarchs at Avig 
 
THE AL BIG EN SI AN CRUSADES. 177 
 
 non ; and from that time till 1417, the Papacy itself was rent 
 asunder by the great schism. The edifice of their greatness 
 then received at Constance, Basil, and Pisa those rude shocks 
 under which the Reformation of the sixteenth century found 
 it still trembling. From the days of Hildebrand to the end 
 of the war against the Albigenses, the dominion of the Papacy 
 had been progressively acquiring consistency and strength. 
 From the end of that war to the days of Luther, it was pro- 
 gressively losing its hold on the affections and reverence of 
 the world. It crushed a feeble antagonist in Raymond and 
 his house, but it raised up irresistible adversaries in Louis IX. 
 and his successors. It exiled from Languedoc all the Wai- 
 dens es who escaped the sword, but it drove them to testify 
 through every part of Christendom against the cruelties, the 
 superstitions, and the errors of their persecutors. It silenced 
 the open avowal of dissent from the creeds and the pretensions 
 of Rome, but it sent to the utmost limits of Europe men 
 whose hearts burned with an unquenchable indignation against 
 her falsehoods and her tyranny. As was her crime, such was 
 her punishment. 
 
 In that crime the barons and the commonalty of France 
 were the chief agents ; but in the perpetration of it, they 
 were also the destroyers of their own personal, political, and 
 social privileges. The dominions of the Count of Toulouse 
 and of the King of Arragon, north of the Pyrenees, were add-~ 
 ed to the French crown immediately after the conquest by 
 Philippe Auguste of the continental dominions of the sons of 
 our Henry II. The coasts of the Mediterranean and the At- 
 lantic simultaneously acknowledged the sovereignty of the 
 Capetian race. Strong in this great accession of power, they 
 rapidly overthrew the Feudal Confederation, at whose cost 
 and by whose arms they had acquired it. The great, but now 
 helpless Feudatories were subjected by Louis IX. to the judi- 
 cial supremacy of the crown. Philippe le Bel imposed on 
 them those fiscal burdens which soon ripened into legal dues. 
 The consequent substitution of hired armies for the military 
 service of the feudal vassals completed the extinction of the 
 baronial power. The fall of it commenced with the improv- 
 ident and short-sighted animosity, national and religious, 
 which, thirsting for the extermination of a rival people, ele* 
 
 M 
 
178 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 vated over the conquerors themselves an irresponsible domes- 
 tic tyranny. They were the eager executioners of the mur- 
 derous decrees of Rome against the Albigenses, and thus be- 
 came the suicidal destroyers of their own fortunes, powers, 
 and independence. They grievously abused the trust com- 
 mitted to them by the Supreme Ruler of the world, and, by 
 his equitable retribution, that abuse was rendered the instru- 
 ment of their own ruin. 
 
 The kings of France regarded the destruction of the counts 
 and other feudal lords of Languedoc and Provence first with 
 indifference, and then with complacency ; for the more pow- 
 erful of them were Arragonese, and not French subjects, and 
 the allegiance to the crown of France which the Count of 
 Toulouse acknowledged was at best equivocal and precarious 
 When the war at length finally transferred all those great fiefs 
 to St. Louis, that prince, upright and magnanimous as he 
 was, could not but exult in so vast an increase of the domin- 
 ion which he was to transmit to his posterity. That augment- 
 ed power conducted them, it is true, to a despotism, which, 
 without it, they could probably never have attained. But if 
 some prophetic intimation could have disclosed to St. Louis 
 the long succession of woes which both the sovereigns and the 
 people of France were to reap from that despotic authority, 
 his exultation would have been checked by that fearful pros- 
 pect, and his piety would have deprecated a gift at once so 
 brilliant and so calamitous. 
 
 I have neither found nor sought the guidance of philosophy, 
 moral or political, in this brief attempt to trace out the retrib- 
 utive march of Providence in this melancholy episode of the 
 history of France. I have been dwelling on truths familiar to 
 the youngest of my hearers, and familiar, it may be, even to 
 satiety. Perhaps I have been encroaching on the province of 
 those from whom, and from whom alone, it is the common 
 duty and privilege of us all in this place to receive any public 
 lessons on the obligations which religion inculcates, or on the 
 doctrines which she reveals. If so, I hope to be forgiven an 
 error into which I have been almost irresistibly drawn, and 
 which I am not likely to repeat. But having to address my- 
 self to many who did not see the first dawn of life till long 
 after I had reached .the meridian of it, I have been unable to 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 179 
 
 decline the opportunity which this hasty review of the Crusade 
 against the Albigenses has afforded me, of reminding them of 
 a truth as weighty as it is familiar. It is the truth that, in 
 the whole system of human affairs, " the Lord Grod omnipo- 
 tent reigneth ;" that our free will is the inevitable, because 
 it is the appointed minister of the Divine will ; that to render 
 that ministration cheerfully and with a ready mind is our 
 highest attainable good ; and that to render it in opposition to 
 our desires and purposes is too often at once our unhappy 
 doom and our well-merited punishment. 
 
 The modern science of Sociology, however, entirely rejects 
 and overrules this, or any similar interpretation of the sequen- 
 ces of historical events. If it be conceivable that any accident 
 has this morning brought into this Hall any one of the doctors 
 of that school, I shall have been provoking, and must endure 
 the contempt in which it is their habit so largely to indulge 
 toward those who are less " advanced" than themselves. They 
 divide their fellow-men into two classes, to one of which the 
 Sociologists they appropriate the distinctive name of "think- 
 ers," leaving to the rest their choice of any title which shall 
 exclude and negative that enviable designation. The dissent 
 from their doctrines of any one who does not sociologize that 
 is, who does not " think" must of course, therefore, appear 
 to them utterly unimportant, whether his. voice be raised in 
 the university of Francis Bacon, or in the academies of Tim- 
 buctoo. Now, although the superciliousness of men of genius 
 may occasionally exp'ose them to some dislike, they are always 
 safe from retaliation. No man unarmed with the triple brass 
 of ignorance, of presumption, and of self-conceit, would sup- 
 pose himself entitled to speak, or to think lightly of a science 
 invented by M. Comte, expounded by Mr. Mill, and adopted 
 and illustrated by Mr. Grrote. It is with profound respect for 
 those great names, and with a corresponding anxiety for my 
 own credit in dissenting from them, that I request your atten- 
 tion to the motives which have forbidden me to enlist under 
 their banners. And, first, let us endeavor to ascertain what 
 this new doctrine really is. 
 
 M. Comte, as translated or interpreted by Mr. Mill, informs 
 us that, " on every subject of human inquiry, speculation has 
 three successive stages ; in the first of which it tends to explain 
 
180 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 the phenomena by supernatural agencies ; in the second, ~by 
 metaphysical abstractions ; and in the third or final stage, con- 
 fines itself to ascertaining their laws of succession or simili- 
 tude." Those conclusions at which man arrives in his third, 
 or final stage of the progress of his inquiries, are designated as 
 " positive," in contradistinction from those speculative or hy- 
 pothetical views to which alone man can attain in his road 
 thither. By thus pointing out the way of ascent to the ''posi- 
 tive," M. Comte arid his disciples have, as we are farther in- 
 formed, " let in a flood of light upon the whole course of his- 
 'tory." 
 
 It much concerns us, therefore, in all our historical inqui- 
 ries, to know what the " positive" really is, and to learn how 
 we may ascertain, by means of it, " the laws of succession 
 and similitude," as they obtain among the political or social 
 occurrences of the world through which we are passing. For 
 our assistance in those inquiries, Mr. Mill has supplied us with 
 some comprehensive canons. 
 
 First. We learn that " all phenomena of society are phe- 
 nomena of human nature, generated by the action of outward 
 circumstances upon the mass of human beings." 
 
 Secondly. "We are instructed that, as the phenomena of 
 human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed laws, 
 the phenomena of society also can not but conform to fixed 
 laws, the consequences of the preceding. 
 
 Thirdly. The reason why the operation of the fixed- laws 
 of human nature on man as a member of society can not be 
 ascertained with absolute precision, or announced with perfect 
 confidence, is, it appears, not that the laws themselves are fluc- 
 tuating, but that the circumstances under which they act are 
 indefinitely numerous, complicated, and dissimilar. The as- 
 tronomer can predict coming sidereal events with certainty, 
 because he reasons upon fixed laws and upon but few data. 
 The Sociologist can pronounce no such political predictions, not 
 because the laws of his science are unfixed, but because the 
 multitude of the causes to be taken into his account disturb 
 and defeat all his calculations. But, though he can not attain 
 to an amount and distinctness of knowledge sufficient to make 
 him a prophet, he may, we are told, attain to knowledge enough 
 to make him a trustworthy guide. It may, therefore, be in 
 
THE ^LBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 181 
 
 teresting to you to know, that it is " a notion current among 
 the more advanced thinkers" that, under such guidance, we 
 may " proceed, on Baconian principles," to " look forward into 
 the history of the human race, and to determine what artificial 
 means may be used to accelerate the natural progress, as far 
 as it is beneficial, and to compensate for whatever may be its 
 inherent inconveniences or disadvantages." 
 
 It appears, however, that " Baconian principles," when 
 grasped at by the unskillful or the unwary, are apt to conduct 
 them, not to the terra firma of sound knowledge, but to the 
 fog-banks of empiricism. Some, as we are admonished, wish 
 to deal with the history of the past, in order to infer from it 
 the events of the future, as the chemist deals with the sub- 
 stances in his retort or crucible. But such inquirers forget 
 that they can make no artificial experiments on society like 
 those to which he subjects his metals or gases. They can not 
 interrogate nature as he does. They can reason only from in- 
 stances presenting themselves spontaneously ; and no two such 
 instances make any such approach to identity as to enable the 
 Sociologist to ascertain from the comparison of them what are 
 the real and active causes 51 of the similarity or the dissimilari- 
 ty of the results which he observes. 
 
 The Baconian investigator, as we are farther reminded, will 
 not less surely lose his trouble if he applies himself to his task 
 in the spirit of a mechanical philosopher, when calculating the 
 lines which will be described on any given area by a body im- 
 pelled in certain directions by one or more known forces, 
 whether opposed or unopposed by counteracting forces of the 
 same kind. For example, he will miss his way if he shall as- 
 sume the existence of any " universal precepts," according to 
 the breach or observance of which will be the future develop- 
 ment of the fortunes of any people. Or if he should undertake 
 to divine what is about to happen from the accordance, or the 
 want of accordance, of the members of any commonwealth 
 to any theory of human society such as that of an original 
 contract his divinations will be nothing worth. Neither will 
 he speculate with any truth or plausibility on coming events, 
 if he proceeds on the hypothesis that any social polity is actu- 
 ated by some solitary principle, whether, according to Hobbes, 
 that principle be fear, or whether, according to Bentham, it be 
 
182 THE ANTI-TEUDAL INPLUENCEOP 
 
 the desire which animates every man to the pursuit of what he 
 esteems as his highest private and worldly interests. All these 
 are merely empirical or conjectural laws, not the laws of na- 
 ture, which are identical with the laws of human society. 
 They are but so many vain attempts to compress the infinite 
 variations of things, as they really exist, within the narrow 
 grasp of a premature and gratuitous generalization. 
 
 How, then, are we to rise to the region of the "positive," 
 and thence to survey the approaching future ? That great task, 
 as we learn, is to be accomplished by the use of what, in the 
 logical style, is called " the concrete deductive method." The 
 Sociologist studies the nature of man. He investigates human 
 motives, psychological and ethological. He examines the tend- 
 encies of such motives as they are in themselves. He exam- 
 ines those tendencies as they have actually manifested them- 
 selves in social life. Having thus studied the nature of man, 
 of his motives, and of his past history, he next informs him- 
 self of the actual condition of any given state of human soci- 
 ety. He then applies himself to estimate and anticipate the 
 probable results of any contemplated measure on that state of 
 society, as such results may be expected to flow from the work- 
 ing of those motives the tendencies of which he has so studied. 
 He does not, however, rush to any premature conclusion as to 
 any such anticipated results. Awaiting the actual catastro- 
 phe, he observes how far there is any real " consilience" be- 
 tween his expectation and the event. If there be no such agree- 
 ment between them, he modestly infers that there was some 
 fatal error either in his reasoning or in the premises on which 
 he reasoned. But if there be the anticipated " consilience," 
 then he rejoices in the consciousness of having grasped one of 
 those positive laws according to which the earlier of two given 
 states of society produces the later state, which succeeds to it 
 and takes its place. 
 
 Now if, as I believe, this is substantially an accurate ac- 
 count of the system of historical inquiry which is distinguished, 
 from all others as the " positive," it seems to me to provoke 
 some censures, which not even the profound respect I have 
 most sincerely avowed for its most eminent patrons will in- 
 duce me to suppress. 
 
 First, then, one is constrained to marvel at the zeal which. 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 
 
 celebrates the discovery of that system in such lavish terms 
 of applause. Instead of being inclosed within the royal do- 
 main of science, for the use and glory of a little knot of philos- 
 ophers, might it not as well have been left, where assuredly it 
 was found, in the open fields of speculation, for the behoof of 
 all who have right of common there ? There were brave men 
 before Agamemnon ; and a countless host of " thinkers" about 
 history were making use of the "concrete deductive method" 
 before the appearance of M. Comte to inculcate, or of Mr. Mill 
 to explain, the practice of it. "We have not far to look for ex- 
 amples. Open any speculative treatise on government, from 
 the days of Aristotle to those of Montesquieu, and you will find 
 innumerable instances of that modest wisdom which advises 
 the adaptation of the measures of the law-giver to the general 
 tendencies of human motives, and which suggests a careful 
 inquiry into the actual coincidence of the theory and the re- 
 sult. Take down anyone, at hazard, of the ponderous vol- 
 umes of our statutes at large, and you will find our English 
 legislators declaring it expedient to frame one enactment after 
 another, by each of which they at least designed to introduce 
 such innovations as, according to the supposed tendencies of 
 men's nature, would, as they believed, produce beneficial ef- 
 fects on the social state of the people of England. Nay, in 
 many of those statutes, our Parliament (speaking prose with- 
 out being aware of it) made the operation of the new law tem- 
 porary and experimental, that, before they advanced farther, 
 they might see how far there was any real " consilience" be- 
 tween their expectation and the event. It is one thing to in- 
 terpret, another to invent. He who first interpreted the law ac- 
 cording to which arches sustain a vast superincumbent weight, 
 did good service ; but he was not the inventor of the arch. 
 That praise belonged to the stone-mason. M. Comte may be the 
 first didactic writer about the " positive ;" but it was among 
 the most established of all intellectual crafts long before he 
 arose to take his seat on the dialectic throne. 
 
 The " positive" system of historical investigation is, there- 
 fore (as it seems to me), far more important on account of 
 what it interdicts than on account of what it prescribes. But 
 its prohibitions rest on a basis which itself demands no little 
 support. For, 
 
184 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 Secondly, it may readily be admitted that aU. the phenome- 
 na of human thought, feeling, and action are subject to fixed 
 laws ; and, if so, it may consequently be admitted that all the 
 phenomena of society must conform to such laws ; for law and 
 order are of the very essence of Him in whom, collectively as 
 well as individually, we live, and move, and have our being. 
 But it is not readily admitted that the chief difficulty of fore- 
 telling the operation of those laws in any particular cases re- 
 sults from the vast number and the endless variety of the cir- 
 cumstances and the aspects under which the members of any 
 society are always acting, and must at any given time be con- 
 templated. The difficulty is, in my own judgment, far more 
 to be ascribed to our inability to ascertain what many of the 
 most important of the laws of our common nature actually are. 
 
 In the words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, " There be four 
 things which are little upon the earth, but they are exceeding 
 wise. The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their 
 meat in the summer. The conies are but a feeble folk, yet 
 they make their houses in the rocks. The locusts have no 
 king, yet they go forth all of them by bands. The spider tak- 
 eth hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces." If we 
 study the polity of any of these " exceeding wise" people, we 
 can attain to a prophetic vision of their course of conduct in 
 any conceivable contingencies of their respective common- 
 wealths. The almighty Author of their being has laid bare 
 to our inspection the laws by which it is governed, and we cal- 
 culate with certainty on the operation of them. Has any such 
 disclosure been made to men of the laws which govern them- 
 selves collectively, or to any individual man of the laws by 
 which he himself is governed ? 
 
 What is this ceaseless and almost irresistible influence of 
 our material organism upon the soul, which thinks, and feels, 
 and wills within us ? "What is this fatal predominance of the 
 worthless present over the inestimable future ? What mean 
 and whence come all these gradations from the phrensy of the 
 maniac to the absolute mental health of the most gifted of the 
 children of men ? Whence and what is this strange inequal- 
 ity and contrariety between different men ? What is this ante- 
 natal predestination, which confers on one, and denies to anoth- 
 er, the far.ility for every attainment,- and the aptitude for every 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 185 
 
 virtue ? What is this transmission, in almost each particular 
 family, from one generation to another, of peculiar gifts, mor- 
 al and intellectual, and of corresponding responsibilities, with 
 their attendant rewards or punishments ? And yet why do 
 two children, twins of the same womb, inmates of the same 
 home, and pupils of the same preceptors, occasionally exhibit, 
 from the cradle, moral and intellectual characters as dissimilar 
 as their physical structure is alike ? "What is life, and what 
 is death ? When these questions, and such as these, are re- 
 solved, then we may boast our knowledge of the laws of hu- 
 man nature, but not till then. But, 
 
 Thirdly ; though not kiiowing those laws sufficiently for 
 prediction, may we not know them enough for guidance ? I 
 answer, that if it had really pleased the Author of our exist- 
 ence to make our Reason the sole guide of our conduct, then 
 that which our Reason infers from the observation of life 
 would doubtless afford a sufficient rule of our conduct. But 
 such is not the condition of our mortal being. The first, the 
 most impressive, and the most frequent of the lessons of our 
 individual Reason is, that we are in the presence of teachers 
 of higher authority than herself. Humility is her appropriate 
 handmaid ; and to bow down our own judgment to the judg- 
 ments of those who are wiser than we, or in lawful command 
 over us, is her daily and hourly precept. 
 
 If there were not at hand redundant proofs from experience 
 that such are the terms on which we live, simple Theism 
 would assure us of it.- It can not be that He who has so stu- 
 diously provided for the conservation of the meanest member 
 of His animated creation, should have left us to pursue our 
 path through the dangers, temptations, and intricacies of our 
 moral and social life, with no readier or surer aid than is to be 
 derived from the slow and precarious process of " concrete de- 
 duction." If from simple Theism we pass to revealed religion, 
 the assurance that we have many such readier and surer aids 
 is explicit and unambiguous. But) 
 
 Fourthly ; "all the phenomena of society being generated 
 by the action of outward circumstances upon the mass of hu- 
 man beings," why may we not calculate beforehand on the 
 recurrence or appearance of those phenomena by a careful es- 
 timate of the force and tendencies of those outward circum- 
 
186 THE ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OP 
 
 stances ? I answer by denying that all the phenomena of so- 
 ciety are thus generated. I refer the great number and the 
 more important of those phenomena, not to the action of any 
 outward circumstances, but to the antagonistic influences of 
 those two internal principles to which theology gives the names 
 of Natural Corruption and of Divine Grace. Now what hu- 
 man prescience can make the right allowance for such influ- 
 ences as these on individual man, and therefore on collective 
 man, that is, on Human Society ? Regarding the corruption 
 of our nature, we are bidden to believe that " the Heart of 
 man is deceitful above all things," and to inquire, " "Who can 
 know it?" Regarding the influence of the Divine Grace, we 
 are taught that, "like the wind, it bio we th where it listeth, 
 but that no man can say whence it cometh or whither it 
 goeth." 
 
 Fifthly; this, however, is petitio principii. I am assum- 
 ing the truth of Christianity, and that truth is neither admit- 
 ted nor denied by Sociology, but passed by in studied silence. 
 As one of the " less advanced," I regard that silence as a just 
 subject of serious complaint. Christianity may be (as we be- 
 lieve) the greatest of all truths, or it may be (as some have 
 maintained) the greatest of all falsehoods. But that it should 
 be true, and yet irrelevant to any system of social science, is 
 utterly inconceivable. That the teachers of any such science 
 should think themselves at liberty to abstain from so much as 
 one passing allusion to it, is therefore, at least, very marvelous. 
 
 For Christianity at least claims to answer many of the most 
 intricate and arduous of their inquiries. It claims to supply 
 us with some of those " universal precepts," against which, 
 as guides on such subjects, Sociology has given us her most 
 emphatic warning. Are these claims ill founded ? If so, let 
 their futility be unambiguously asserted and plainly exposed ; 
 for, if they are indeed fallacious, it is a fallacy diffused over 
 a far greater multitude, and casting far deeper roots, than any 
 of those errors with which the " positive" has hitherto wrestled. 
 
 I anticipate the answer. No man is really free among us 
 to avow his disbelief of the religion of his age and country ; 
 nay, hardly of any one of the commonly received articles of it. 
 With whatever seriousness, decorum, and integrity of purpose 
 such an avowal may be made, he who makes it must sustain 
 
THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADES. 187 
 
 the full force of all those penalties, civil and social, which more 
 or less attend upon all dissent, or supposed dissent, from the 
 recognized standard of orthodoxy. I acknowledge and lament 
 that this is so. I think that they who inflict such penalties 
 are entitled to no praise and to no gratitude. They give to 
 disbelief a motive and an apology for a dishonest self-conceal- 
 ment. They give to the "believing a painful mistrust that there 
 may possibly he existing, and yet concealed, some potent rea- 
 sons which, if men could speak their minds with real impu- 
 nity, would be alleged against their own most cherished con- 
 victions. No infidel ever did, or can do, so much prejudice to 
 our faith as has been done by those zealous adherents of it 
 who labor so strenuously, and so often with such unfortunate 
 success, to terrify all objectors into silence. The early Chris- 
 tians were but too successful in destroying all the writings of 
 the early infidels. Yet, for the confirmation of our faith in 
 the present age, a complete copy of Celsus would be of far 
 more value than the whole of the volumes of Origen. 
 
 I, therefore, should not venture to condemn, much as I might 
 regret, the silent passing over by Sociologists of any reference 
 to the scriptural solutions of so many social problems, even if 
 I were entitled (as I am not) or disposed (which I am still 
 less) to ascribe that silence to a real, though unavowed rejec- 
 tion by any of them of the authority of what Christians regard 
 as an inspired canon. But, be the reason of their taciturnity 
 what it may, it at least leaves those who do acknowledge in 
 that canon the voice of a more than human wisdom, unre- 
 buked in their attempts to draw from it other lessons than 
 those which the " positive" has to teach, or than those which 
 the " concrete deductive method" can discover. 
 
 Sixthly ; in reliance, therefore, upon that canon, I venture 
 to think that, when we speculate on the phenomena of human 
 society, it is not a mark of infantine weakness, but is rather 
 the indication of the maturity of our strength to seek the solu- 
 tion of them by referring to " supernatural agencies." Sure 
 at least I am, that from the Pentateuch to the Apocalypse 
 those phenomena are thus interpreted. Such, beyond all dis- 
 pute, is the unbroken tenor of the writings of all and of each 
 of the prophets. It is utterly impossible to reconcile those 
 writings with the doctrine that he who would foretell the in- 
 
188 TI:E ANTI-FEUDAL INFLUENCE OF 
 
 fluence on any society of any contemplated measure, has to 
 embrace only two elements in his calculation : the one, the 
 laws of human nature ; the other, the circumstances in which 
 the society in question is placed. A third and yet more mo- 
 mentous element is invariably introduced in the intimations 
 of Holy Scripture. That element is the nature of Him with 
 whom we have to do, so far as He has been pleased to make 
 His nature known to us. 
 
 Seventhly ; I do not think that any student of the Bible 
 will be able to adjust the language of it to the dogma that 
 we are not at liberty to assume the existence of any " uni- 
 versal precepts," according to the breach or the observance of 
 which will be the future development of the fortunes of any 
 people. If this be, indeed, one of the dictates of the modern 
 social science, then is that science in the most direct and ab- 
 solute conflict with the dictates of what we accept and rever- 
 ence as the "Word of Grod. Every sentence of that "Word lays 
 down, or refers to, some "universal precepts," the sanctions 
 of which, so far as communities of men are concerned, are 
 either their temporal welfare or their temporal misery. 
 
 Finally. "Whoever shall attempt to interpret the past se- 
 quences of human history, or to 'anticipate those which are 
 still to come, if he shall make that attempt by the aid of such 
 lights as he can derive from revelation, must make a large 
 allowance for one consideration, which Sociology entirely over- 
 looks. I refer to the doctrine of a particular providence. 
 
 I can not conceive that any man whose mind is deeply im- 
 bued with scriptural studies, and especially with the study of 
 the historical and prophetical scriptures, should also adopt that 
 philosophy of our times which transfers to the movements of 
 the human will, and to the consequent condition of the mem- 
 bers of the human family, laws borrowed from the statics and 
 the dynamics of mechanical science. The language of the 
 Bible is, doubtless, to a great extent, rhetorical and poetical ; 
 but, after making every possible deduction from its precise lit- 
 eral meaning on that ground, there still remains in it an over- 
 whelming weight of concurring testimony to the fact that 
 what may be called the natural sequences of events in the af- 
 fairs of men are continually broken by the Divine interposition 
 Every where, and in every conceivable variety of expression, 
 
THE ALBIOENSIAN C.RUSADES. 189 
 
 we meet, for example, with assertions and illustrations of the 
 fact that Grod is continually raising up individual men, who, 
 from their peculiar characters, are designed and made to serve 
 as pivots, upon which the whole circuit of human affairs is to 
 revolve. It is superfluous to quote from the sacred story ex- 
 amples so familiar to us all of these divine dispensations. Take 
 an instance far more near to our own times. Suppose a Soci- 
 ologist a very long-lived one indeed studious of the nature 
 of man, and of the tendencies of his motives of action, to have 
 contemplated the circumstances of human society as they ex- 
 isted in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
 and as they existed in France in the middle of the eighteenth. 
 He might, in either case, have foreseen an approaching increase 
 of popular franchises at the expense of monarchical preroga- 
 tives. But it would have been utterly beyond his power to 
 foresee that the English throne would be filled by a prince 
 distinguished for stubborn audacity, and that the throne of 
 France would be filled by a prince not less distinguished by 
 timid irresolution. Yet on those their personal characters, 
 every thing was in reality to depend. If Charles and Louis 
 had changed places, there would have been a reform in either 
 country, but a revolution in neither. The Supreme Disposer 
 of events, and He alone, could foresee, that in that crisis of 
 the history of each of those states, the moral temperament of 
 an individual man would work out such results. But, fore- 
 seeing it, His particular providence ordained that the .crown 
 should, in either case, be worn by such a man as was neces- 
 sary for bringing about the predestined catastrophe. 
 
 In thus adhering to the revealed "Word of Grod not, indeed, 
 to supersede the social science, but continually to control its 
 authority, to supply its deficiencies and correct its errors we 
 are, of course, subject to that kind and degree of liability to 
 mistake which we incur in receiving Holy Scripture as the 
 authentic disclosure to man of the will and the dealings of his 
 Creator. If, in so receiving Holy 'Scripture, we are really mis- 
 taken, let the error be distinctly pointed out, and, if possible, 
 established. But by merely pretermitting the subject, our 
 teachers point out nothing, and establish nothing respecting it. 
 Unaided by them, we must therefore needs cling to our bap- 
 tismal faith and to the confessions of our maturer years, and 
 
190 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 in that faith, reverently attempt to gather from our Bibles a 
 higher and a surer social science than we can derive from any 
 other source. 
 
 In that spirit I have, in the commencement of the present 
 lecture, attempted to indicate the providential results of the 
 war of the Albigenses. For the long sequel which I have thus 
 added to that inquiry, my apology must be found in the bound- 
 less importance of the subject to which it refers. Among the 
 most profound reasoners, and the most learned writers of our 
 times, are to be found those from whose vital principles on the 
 subject of historical investigation I am thus constrained to dis- 
 sent. I have not gone out of my way to create an opportunity 
 of encountering such opponents. No man of common prudence 
 would do so. But neither have I turned aside from the path 
 before me to avoid that encounter. No man of common in- 
 tegrity would consult his ease and credit by so abandoning, in 
 deference to any names however great, or any genius however 
 eminent, that which he supposes to be the cause of truth. 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 WE are now to inquire Vow far the elevation of the Mon- 
 archy of France, at the expense of the Feudal Confederation, 
 was promoted by the System established 'for the administra- 
 tion of Justice in that kingdom. 
 
 The reign of Louis IX. is memorable as the era at which 
 the French kings first assumed that legislative power, and the 
 French Parliaments that judicial power, which they respect- 
 ively retained till toward the close of the eighteenth century. 
 The nature, the causes, and the effects of these innovations, and 
 especially of the last, must, therefore, be embraced in our pres- 
 ent inquiry. But at the very entrance into it the eye is ir- 
 resistibly arrested by the monument which the learned and 
 the wise of every age, subsequent to his own, have concurred 
 in raising to the illustrious author of them. In that long suc- 
 cession of eulogists on the Royal Saint, none have been more 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 191 
 
 emphatic than Hume, and none more enthusiastic than Vol- 
 taire, Yet it was impossible, even to their subtle intellects, 
 as it has been difficult to many students in a far nobler school 
 than theirs, to trace the movements of that benignant Provi- 
 dence which planted and brought to a prolific maturity in the 
 mind of Louis, as in a genial soil, the seeds of an habitual 
 holiness, and of a wisdom which, if not always unclouded, 
 was so often at once elevated and profound. It is perhaps an 
 enigma refusing any complete solution. Yet the more dili- 
 gently his life is studied, the more distinctly will it, I think, 
 appear, that his natural dispositions received from the associ- 
 ates and the teachers of his youth the training which rendered 
 them fruitful of so many virtues. Exquisitely alive to every 
 domestic affection often oppressed by a constitutional melan- 
 choly, which laid bare to him the illusions of life, yet occa- 
 sionally animated by a constitutional gayety, which enabled 
 him for a while to cherish and to play with those illusions 
 enamored of the beautiful, and revering the sublime his tem- 
 per, though thus sympathetic, pensive, and imaginative, was 
 allied (it is no common alliance) to a courage which rose and 
 exulted in the presence of danger, and to a fortitude which was 
 unshaken in the lowest depths of calamity. Yet his genius 
 was more imitative than original, his spirit ductile rather than 
 decisive, and his whole character not self-sustained, but des- 
 tined to derive its ultimate form and color from the habits, the 
 tastes, and the opinions of those with whom he might be as- 
 sociated. 
 
 Grreat, therefore, were the obligations of Louis to the com- 
 panions and guardians of his youth. His mother, Blanche of 
 Castile, watched over the royal boy (for he had not completed 
 his thirteenth year when he ascended the throne of France) 
 with all a mother's tenderness, united to a discipline more in- 
 flexible, and perhaps more stern, than most fathers have the 
 courage to exercise. In Isabella of France, his sister, who had 
 preferred the cloister to the imperial crown, he had another 
 kinswoman who bestowed on him all the thoughts, the time, 
 and the affection which she ventured to divert from the object 
 of. her almost ceaseless worship. In his eighteenth year he 
 married Marguerite of Provence, who, after having been the 
 idol of the Troubadours of her native land, herself became 
 
192 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 almost an idolater of him, cleaving to him with the same con- 
 stancy of love in their quiet home at Poissy, and amid his dis- 
 asters at Massourah and Damietta. 
 
 But the sagacity of Blanche foresaw that these filial, frater- 
 nal, and conjugal affections might enervate, even while they 
 purified, the spirit of her son, and she therefore selected for his 
 tutor a man possessing, as she judged, the qualifications "best 
 adapted to counteract that danger. His name was Pacifico. 
 He was an Italian gentleman, who, having been one of the 
 first followers of St. Francis of Assisi, was. animated by the 
 profound and fervent devotion which characterized his master. 
 From Pacifico, Louis derived those religious convictions which 
 thenceforward formed the basis of his whole exterior and in- 
 terior life. So deeply, indeed, were those devout habits in- 
 wrought into his mind, that the desire to abdicate his crown 
 and to assume the monastic vows attended him to the last. 
 Nor was this a mere day-dream ; for, when occasion offered, 
 he would for a while adopt the dark tunic of the Mendicants, 
 and pass whole days in the performance of their sacred offices. 
 
 But Pacifico was too wise a man to train up a king in the 
 spirit and practices of a monk. He instructed his pupil in 
 ancient and in more recent history, caused him to ride boldly 
 in the chase, and required him to cultivate every martial ex- 
 ercise and courtly grace, which was then regarded as indis- 
 pensable in a gentleman and a cavalier. Nor did the lowliness 
 of the Franciscan institute prevent the friar from instilling 
 into the soul of Louis the loftiest conceptions of his own royal 
 dignity. The noblest of his falcons, it is said, having attack- 
 ed and slain an eagle, was welcomed with rapturous applause 
 by his brother sportsmen, but was dismissed from all farther 
 service by the royal boy, with the indignant remark that he 
 should not have presumed to pounce on the monarch of the 
 skies. 
 
 Other and far different associates contributed to form the 
 character of the pupil of Pacifico. In the halls of the Louvre, 
 then a fortress rather than a palace, veteran captains described 
 to him the battles which they had fought with Saladin, and 
 the victories which had expelled the English from Normandy. 
 Beneath the same royal roof, gray-headed counselors of Phil- 
 ippe Auguste explained to him the methods by which that 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 193 
 
 prince had enlarged the domains and the powers of the kings 
 of France ; and there also civic bailiffs and provincial senes- 
 chals interpreted to their young sovereign the motives which 
 had induced his ancestors to increase the number and to ex- 
 tend the franchises of the communes. Thus imbibing from 
 aged men the hereditary maxims of his house, he learned to 
 adopt them as the laws by which his future reign was to be 
 directed. 
 
 But the yet higher laws by which his own personal conduct 
 was to be governed seem to have been derived from a far 
 more eminent teacher than any of these. St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 who had migrated from his "native Italy into Northern France, 
 was passing there a life which may be said to have been one 
 deep and unintermitted meditation ; for the results of which 
 he found utterance sometimes in acts of public or of solitary 
 worship, and at other times in interpreting to mankind the 
 mysteries and the duties of their relations to the Deity and to 
 each other. To the inquiry of Bonaventura as to the sources 
 of his stupendous learning, he answered by pointing to the 
 crucifix which stood upon his table ; and, when seated at the 
 table of the king, or introduced into his closet, he still direct- 
 ed him to the same inexhaustible fountain of divine and hu- 
 man wisdom. From his intercourse with St. Thomas, Louis 
 seems to have acquired his acquaintance with that science 
 which the devout Pacifico could not have taught the sacred 
 science of Christian morality, in all the amplitude and in all 
 the minuteness of its -application to the offices of a legislator 
 and a king. 
 
 Though contrasted with this seraphic doctor as strongly as 
 the Chronique de St. Louis is contrasted with the Summa 
 Theologise, the Sire de Joinville had Ms lessons also to im- 
 part to his sovereign. Joinville, the grand seneschal of Cham- 
 pagne, was the living impersonation of the beau ideal of 
 his age the preux chevalier the mirror of courtesy con- 
 cealing a tender heart beneath a stoical demeanor rejoicing 
 in all the good things of life, while braving death and pain in 
 all their ghastliest forms clinging to his religion as a point 
 of honor, and guarding his honor as a religious obligation 
 the most loyal of vassals, the most frank and plain-spoken of 
 courtiers ; and writing with so much natural vivacity and 
 
 N 
 
194 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 ease, that the ordinary authorship even of the times of Mon- 
 taigne is rebuked "by the great essayist himself, as constrained 
 and artificial when compared to that of the gallant chronicler. 
 To Joinville more than to any one else Louis was probably in- 
 debted for the cordiality, the graciousness, and the freedom of 
 address which, in his case, may be said to have risen into a 
 virtue, since without it his other virtues would have lost much 
 of their influence. No other writer has depicted the Royal 
 Saint, and perhaps no other ever saw him, in his moments of 
 social exhilaration ; nor are there many stories more charming 
 than those in which the good seneschal describes himself as 
 amusing his devout sovereign, at one time by provoking the 
 orthodox anger of Robert, the chanter of Cambray, and at an- 
 other by dragging into daylight the superfine linen concealed 
 beneath his cassock ; so hearty is the pleasure of the honest 
 narrator at having made a luxurious monk ridiculous, and so 
 graceful the kindness with which the king soothes the pain of 
 the mortified priest at the expense of the thicker skinned 
 soldier. 
 
 But I anticipate and bow to the censure, that we have not 
 met here this morning to recreate ourselves with facetious 
 tales, however dignified may have been the heroes of them ; 
 and I therefore desist from the farther prosecution of a favor- 
 ite theme. But even this slight sketch of the formation of the 
 character of St. Louis will not be altogether useless if it shall 
 induce any of my hearers to study the writers, and Joinville 
 above all the rest, to whom we are indebted for our knowledge 
 of him ; for St. Louis occupies in history a place apart from 
 that of all the other moral heroes of our race. It is his pe- 
 culiar praise to have combined in his own person the virtues 
 which are apparently the most incompatible with each other, 
 and with the state and trials of a king. Seated on the noblest 
 of the thrones of Europe, and justly jealous of his high prerog- 
 atives, he was as meek and gentle as if he had been undistin- 
 guished from the meanest of his brethren of mankind. En- 
 dowed from his boyhood, by the lavish bounties of nature, with 
 rank, wealth, power, health, and personal beauty, he was as 
 compassionate as if sorrow had been his daily companion from 
 his youth. An enthusiast in music, architecture, and polite 
 learning, he applied himself to all the details of public busi- 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 195 
 
 ness with the assiduity of one who had no other means of sub- 
 sistence. Though glowing with all the ardor of an Homeric 
 hero on the field of battle, he purchased and maintained peace 
 by sacrifices which might have appeared humiliating to the 
 faintest heart which ever throbbed beneath the diadem. Sur- 
 passed by no monarch in modern Europe in the munificence 
 of his bounties or in the splendor of his public works, those 
 purest and most sumptuous of the luxuries of royalty were in 
 no single instance defrayed from any tributes levied from his 
 people. Passionately attached to his kindred, he never en- 
 riched or exalted one of them at the public expense. Regard- 
 ing the aggrandizement of the crown by the subjection of the 
 greater feudatories, as a king in all times, and as a patriot in 
 his times must have regarded that policy, he yet respected 
 their legal rights, not only with rigid justice, but even with 
 the most delicate and generous courtesy. The heir of con- 
 quests and territorial acquisitions of which the responsibility 
 rested with his grandfather, the inestimable advantage with 
 himself, he restored to his rivals and his adversaries every fief 
 and province which, upon the strictest scrutiny by the most 
 impartial umpires, appeared to have been added to the royal 
 domain by unjust, or even by questionable means. With a 
 soul knit to the Church, and entirely devoted to her real in- 
 terests, he opposed a firmer resistance and a more enduring 
 barrier to sacerdotal rapacity and ambition than had been con- 
 templated by the most audacious and worldly-minded of his 
 predecessors. 
 
 What, then, was the basis of this sacred harmony in the char- 
 acter of Louis ? I answer, or rather every page of his history 
 answers, that it flowed from his constant devotion to that holy 
 canon, and to that divine model, in which every utterance and 
 every action are harmonious. His eye was continually turned 
 to the eternal fountain of light with all the docility of child- 
 hood. He had early attained to that maturity of the moral 
 stature in which the abdication of self-will to the supreme will 
 becomes at once a habit and a delight. In the service of his 
 Creator he found and enjoyed a perfect freedom. It was a 
 service often rendered in pain, in toil, in sickness, and in dan- 
 ger, but ever rendered with a heart full of cheerfulness, and 
 confidence, and hope. It was a life illustrious neither by any 
 
196 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 extraordinary talents nor "by any brilliant achievements, but 
 by virtues which the humblest may emulate, and by disposi- 
 tions which may gladden the meanest cottage, and ennoble the 
 least powerful understanding. But I must add that it was 
 also a life scarcely less fertile in warning than in example. In 
 blind obedience to human authority, supposed to be divine, 
 Louis, abandoning the duties of a king for those of a crusader, 
 led to destruction in Egypt and at Tunis the two most gallant 
 armies which France had ever sent into the field. In defer- 
 ence to an unfounded scruple of conscience, he surrendered to 
 the Plantagenets territories which laid open France to the wars 
 under which she groaned during several successive generations. 
 With the most simple purpose of fulfilling what he supposed 
 to be the will of (rod, he laid the foundations of the absolute 
 powers, judicial and legislative, by which his successors on the 
 French throne crushed successively the feudal powers of the 
 seigneurs and the constitutional franchise of their people. To 
 explain and justify this last statement is the object which I 
 more immediately propose to myself in the present lecture ; a 
 subject too technical and tedious to be rendered interesting to 
 any but the resolute students of history, yet too important to 
 be passed over by any excepting those with whom study is but 
 another name for pastime. 
 
 In the Feudal age, the whole of France was divided into 
 seignorial fiefs and enfranchised municipalities. In every fief 
 the seigneur exercised an hereditary jurisdiction, both civil 
 and penal. According to the language of those times, the jus- 
 tice of each seigneur was either Haute, Moyenne, or Basse 
 a gradation depending on the extent of the damages, and on 
 the nature of the penalties which his court was competent to 
 award. 
 
 Every enfranchised municipality also possessed a local tri- 
 bunal, which, within the corporate limits, administered jus- 
 tice, either Haute, Moyenne, or Basse, according to the terms 
 of the traditional privileges, or of the charter of enfranchise- 
 ment of each. 
 
 In the Seignorial Court, the seigneur himself presided, his 
 vassals attending him as judicial assessors. They were called 
 peers ; the equals, that is, those who were to come before them 
 in judgment ; for the principle that no man could be tried ex- 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF V RANGE. 197 
 
 cept by his peers was as ancient and as fully established in 
 France as in England. 
 
 Of all the fiefs of the realm, the greatest was that of which 
 the king himself was the immediate seigneur. It was called 
 the Royal Domain. The Feudal Court of the Royal Domain 
 resembled that of the other seigneuries, except that it was 
 holden, not by the king in person, but by his Seneschal as his 
 representative. 
 
 The seignorial courts could take cognizance only of cases 
 arising out of feudal rights or feudal obligations ; for it was in 
 respect of such cases alone that the vassals of the fief stood in 
 the relation of peers to the suitors in those tribunals. To pro- 
 vide for the decision of judicial questions arising within the 
 royal domain, but not falling within the range of the feudal 
 law and jurisprudence, the king appointed there other judges, 
 called Prevots. 
 
 Toward the end of the twelfth century, the progressive en- 
 largement of the royal domain had rendered the courts of the 
 seneschal and prevots inadequate to the discharge of their ap- 
 propriate duties. The progressive increase of the royal au- 
 thority had also, at that period, attracted to the crown many 
 petitions for the redress of grievances, and especially of griev- 
 ances arising from the abuse of the powers, both of the king's 
 greater feudatories and of his inferior officers. To meet these 
 new exigencies, therefore, the king reverted to one of the Car- 
 lovingian institutions. He appointed missi dominici, or mi- 
 gratory commissioners,' to perform circuits through his domain, 
 and there to adjudicate on matters to which the ordinary courts 
 were either inadequate or incompetent. Those commissioners 
 soon became permanent judges, under the name of Baillis. 
 Those circuits soon became determinate and well-defined dis- 
 tricts, under the name of Bailliages. 
 
 Beyond the limits of the royal domain, the competency of 
 the baillis extended, first, to all cases of haute justice, arising 
 within any fief or municipality, the seigneur or corporation of 
 which did not themselves possess that high jurisdiction ; sec- 
 ondly, to what were called cas royaux, that is, all cases in 
 which the rights of the king, as suzerain of the whole realm, 
 might be drawn into question ; and, thirdly, to cases of appeal, 
 that is, to cases in which a suitor (as the phrase was) faussoU 
 
198 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 jugement, lay denouncing the judge of the seignorial or muni- 
 cipal court, or any witness there, as false, fraudulent, anil 
 perjured, and by demanding wager of battle against him. 
 
 The introduction by the king of a seneschal, of prevots, and 
 of baillis into the judicial system of the royal domain, awak- 
 ened the jealousy of the great vassals of the French crown, 
 Emulous of the power of their sovereign, and as yet little dis- 
 posed to ascribe to him any superiority to themselves, except 
 in rank, those grandees imitated his example by appointing, 
 in their several fiefs also, seneschals, prevots, and baillis. The 
 resemblance was, indeed, imperfect. The royal baillis could, 
 as has just been noticed, take cognizance of many questions 
 arising beyond the precincts of the royal domain. The seign- 
 orial baillis, on the other hand, could take cognizance of no 
 question arising beyond the precincts of the particular fief for 
 which they acted. Nevertheless, these imitations conduced to 
 an important result. As one great fief after another was suc- 
 cessively absorbed into the royal domain, the uniformity which 
 had thus been previously effected in their legal institutions 
 reconciled the change to the habits and feelings of the inhab- 
 itants. The political union of all the fiefs of the kingdom was 
 preceded and facilitated by this correspondence between the 
 judicial systems of them all. 
 
 The reign of Louis IX. was, as I have said, a most mo- 
 mentous era in the history of the French law and of the French 
 tribunals. I had lately occasion to explain how, in conse- 
 quence of the Eastern Crusades, the Roman jurisprudence be* 
 came a favorite study in the universities of Italy and France. 
 In that code the thoughtful men of those times discovered the 
 means of providing for the great exigency of their age that 
 is, for an equitable, systematic, and uniform administration of 
 justice. Their earlier studies as divines and canonists enabled 
 them not only to appreciate the importance of that discovery, 
 but also to turn it to the best account. To those clerical law- 
 yers France was accordingly indebted, first, for compilations 
 of the legal customs of the several greater provinces of the 
 kingdom, such as Burgundy, Champagne, Normandy, and 
 Anjou ; secondly, for treatises explanatory of those customs, 
 among which those of Beaumanoir and De Fontaines were the 
 most celebrated ; thirdly, for essays toward the consolidation 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 19 J 
 
 ot them all into one general code, to be called " Consuetu dines 
 Patriae ;" and, finally, for the actual preparation of one such 
 code, which, under the title of Etablissements de Saint Louis, 
 was promulgated by that monarch in the year 1270. It was 
 a body of law regulating the mode of procedure in all feudal 
 cases, and illustrated by comments and analogies drawn from 
 the Corpus Juris Civilis. Though originally confined to the 
 royal domain, the Etablissements were ere long extended tc 
 the whole of France, and are among the earliest examples of 
 any law having so extensive a scope and operation under the 
 Capetian Dynasty. 
 
 Science having thus been introduced into legislation, it be- 
 came indispensable in the judgment-seat also. The rude bar- 
 on and his martial assessors had not encountered much diffi- 
 culty in adjudicating in the seignorial courts. When engaged 
 in inquiries too subtle for the prompt award of an untutored 
 common sense, they tried the point at issue between the liti- 
 gants by an appeal to the Omniscient Judge. That appeal 
 was supposed to be made either by. the ordeal or by mortal 
 combat, and the result of it was not to be mistaken by the 
 least learned of the spectators. But to the devout and enlight- 
 ened mind of St. Louis, it appeared irreverent and profane 
 thus to invoke the miraculous intervention of the Deity on an 
 occasion on which no divine promise had given assurance of 
 any such aid. Though addressed in words and form to the 
 Omniscient Judge, that appeal was, as he perceived, really 
 made in reliance on the personal prowess of the appellant, and 
 was effectual only to the strong and the rich, at the expense 
 of the feeble and the poor. For these reasons, St. Louis, in 
 the year 1260, promulgated an ordinance forbidding the resort 
 to that species of judicial proof within the limits of the royal 
 domain. 
 
 Deprived of the martial test on which they had hitherto re- 
 iied, the courts of every seigneur within the domain were com- 
 pelled to resort to those more delicate criteria of truth which 
 are afforded by the language of the litigants, and by their evi- 
 dence, whether oral or documentary. It thus became neces- 
 sary to ascertain, in all such cases, what were the facts alleged, 
 admitted, or denied by the respective disputants ; what were 
 the precise matters of fact or points of law controverted be- 
 
200 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 tween them ; what, as to any such matter of fact, was me 
 balance of conflicting testimonies ; and what, as to any such 
 points of law, were the legal rules or customs according to 
 which they must be decided. 
 
 Thus the stout baron and his vassals had no longer to pre- 
 side at judicial combats, but at judicial processes a change 
 most unwelcome and embarrassing to judges, most of whom 
 were unable to read. They had to listen to prolix and con- 
 tentious suitors contradicting the assertions, refuting the ar- 
 guments, impugning the witnesses, and repelling the proofs of 
 each other. Advocates and proctors quoted to them the newly- 
 discovered Institutes of Justinian, which those learned persons 
 were already accustomed to call " the perfection of wisdom." 
 Partly from its inherent merits, and partly from the absence 
 of any rational system of jurisprudence of native or of Euro- 
 pean origin, this code of the Eastern empire soon attained a 
 great authority, and at length took possession of all the tri- 
 bunals of France. As it gradually substituted the written de- 
 positions of witnesses for. their oral testimony, it enhanced the 
 difficulties of the seigneurs in their administration of justice, 
 by adding another stratum of obscure and wearisome docu- 
 ments to the vast deposits of that kind beneath which they 
 were already overwhelmed. The fatigued and perplexed bar- 
 onage had but one resource left to them. It was that of ad- 
 mitting to the audience some of those who were called " lit- 
 erate" persons, and of charging them with the care of unravel- 
 ing the interminable web of written controversy. Beneath 
 the stately sedilia of the lord and his chief vassals were there- 
 fore placed a range of low stools, on which were seated men 
 of modest, quiet, and submissive demeanor clerks in or out; 
 of holy orders, as it might happen roturiers of base birth, and 
 not seldom of mean pursuits, yet curiously gifted with the art 
 of methodizing, digesting, and explaining those formidable 
 piles of legal instruments. A discerning eye might have traced 
 in the calm and pallid looks of the drudges who dispatched 
 these toils, some suppressed scorn for the unlettered superiors 
 at whose feet they sat, not unmixed, probably, with some as- 
 piring hopes that ere long those stately seats might be their 
 own. 
 
 That such hopes wore cherished may be well conjectured 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 201 
 
 from the fact that they were speedily fulfilled. Ere long, the 
 literate assessors fairly (or perhaps unfairly) wore out the pa- 
 tience of the illiterate barons. To listen to an incomprehen- 
 sible legal jargon day after day, through long hours due to 
 the raid, the tournament, or the chase, had been provocation 
 enough. But to discover, at the close of every such tedious 
 session, that those mean men in serge gowns and black bon- 
 nets really dictated, while affecting only to suggest the decis- 
 ions of the court, and were making passive tools of the seign- 
 eurs who had believed that they were about to make tools of 
 them, was too much for baronial endurance. Exhausted with 
 unprofitable fatigue, and exasperated with the irretrievable 
 loss of all their real importance and dignity as judges, the 
 lords first became remiss in their attendance, and at last en- 
 tirely abandoned the tribunal to the humble, but shrewd and 
 painstaking clerks. In due time they exchanged their low 
 stools for the vacant bench, and obtained or assumed a title 
 more commensurate with the real importance of their office. 
 Becoming at length the recognized judges of the seignorial 
 court, they thenceforward indulged themselves without re- 
 straint or hinderance in all the legal subtleties to which they 
 owed their elevation. 
 
 By means not dissimilar, a corresponding victory was gain- 
 ed by the lettered clerks over the unlettered barons of those 
 fiefs which lay beyond the limits of the royal domain. I have 
 already observed that, in every part of France, the royal baillis 
 could take cognizance, first, of cases of haute justice arising 
 within any fief, the seigneur of which did not himself possess 
 that high jurisdiction; secondly, of cas royaux, that is, of 
 cases in which the rights of the king as suzerain might be 
 drawn into question ; and, thirdly, of appeals, that is, of cases 
 in which a witness, being accused of perjury, or a judge of 
 willful injustice, battle was waged against either of them. 
 
 Now the baillis of the royal courts beyond the royal domain, 
 being chosen by St. Louis on the ground of their education 
 and knowledge as lawyers, were, like all other members of 
 that profession, ardent admirers and followers of precedent and 
 of ancient authority. Like the " literate" assessors of the bar- 
 ons within the royal domain, and in imitation of them, the 
 royal baillis began, in all case? arising beyond the limits of 
 
202 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 that domain, to study and to quote the Institutes of Justinian 
 and the Pandects ; nor had they ever to seek there in vain for 
 analogies by which to enlarge the judicial powers which they 
 exercised in the name of their sovereign ; for, 
 
 First. Observing that every imperial rescript had been bind- 
 ing and in force throughout all the limits of the Roman em- 
 pire, they maintained that every sentence pronounced in the 
 courts of the King of Prance must be binding and in force in 
 every part of the French kingdom. 
 
 Secondly. Having learned that the emperor had been ac- 
 customed to withdraw from all local tribunals to his own those 
 causes which were called Causse Majestatis, they taught that, 
 by parity of reason, the king was entitled to evoke all the cas 
 royaux from the seignorial to the royal courts. And as the 
 emperor had left the words " causse majestatis" in a certain 
 flexible indistinctness of meaning, so they held that it was not 
 necessary (as to the king it obviously was not desirable) to de- 
 prive the words " cas royaux" of their convenient elasticity by 
 any precise definition of them. They discovered (but little in- 
 vention was requisite for such a discovery) that few cases 
 could arise in a seignorial court which might not affect the 
 king in his character of suzerain, and consequently there were 
 few which might not be drawn within their own cognizance. 
 Thus, continually enlarging his own sphere of action, the bailli 
 as continually contracted that of the seignorial judges. 
 
 Thirdly. To multiply still farther the number of cas roy- 
 aux, it became first a maxim, and then a law, that every free 
 man who was a party in a legal process might, at his own 
 pleasure, as it was expressed, " declare his domicile ;" that is, 
 he might determine for himself whether, for the purpose of the 
 suit, he should be considered as a liegeman of the baron on 
 whose fief he was found, or as a liegeman of the king. If he 
 made the latter choice (and there were many motives inducing 
 him to make it), the king's judges claimed an exclusive cog- 
 nizance of the matter in debate. 
 
 Fourthly. The justice of the seigneurs was yet more con- 
 siderably narrowed by another legal doctrine which was in- 
 vented and enforced by the judges of the royal courts. As the 
 ordinance of 1260, forbidding trial by battle, was confined to 
 the royal domain, the judge of a seignorial court was still, in 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 203 
 
 strictness of law, bound to vindicate his innocence by the 
 sword, if a suitor brought an appeal of false (that is, of will- 
 fully unjust) judgment against him in the court of the royal 
 bailli. To avoid this consequence, the baillis discovered or un- 
 veiled the doctrine that, even beyond the royal domain, the 
 ordinance of 1260 was, by a certain analogy, to be adopted as 
 the rule of judgment of all royal courts. Therefore, when a 
 suitor in any part of France brought an appeal of false judg- 
 ment against the judge, the bailli did not require the judge ap- 
 pealed against to enter into a combat with his accuser, but 
 they required the accuser to prove by arguments, or by evi- 
 dence, that his judgment was opposed to the principles of just- 
 ice. Now this was, in effect, to receive from the seignorial 
 courts appeals, in the strict and proper sense of the word. 
 Any unsuccessful suitor in any such court, who, in form and 
 in terms, impugned before the bailli the integrity of the orig- 
 inal judge, was thus enabled to obtain a rehearing and a new 
 decision of the cause. Thus the court of the seigneur at 
 length became, in effect, nothing more than a tribunal de 
 premiere instance ; a mere outer chamber, in which the pro- 
 cess was prepared for the final adjudication of the royal 
 judges. 
 
 Finally. As the imperial code had determined that Rome 
 was communis patria of all Roman citizens, so the royal baillis 
 drew from it the analogy and conclusion that all the subjects 
 of the King of France had their communis patria at Paris, 
 and were amenable' to the jurisdiction of the Parisian tri- 
 bunals. 
 
 To any one conversant with the history of the law of En- 
 gland, we might seem to be recounting some of the triumphs 
 of the courts at Westminster in elbowing out all the rival ju- 
 risdictions, in enlarging their own, and in confounding the 
 function of the interpreter of the law with that of the law- 
 giver ; for, amid all the specific distinctions between the legal 
 tribunals of different countries, they have a great sameness of 
 generic character. Their natural tendency every where is 
 toward uniformity of judicial procedure, toward concentration 
 of judicial power, and toward a well-defined subordination of 
 all the successive ranks of the judicial hierarchy to each other. 
 They are taught by a sure instinct that union is strength, and 
 
204 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 that such mutual dependence and submission are essential ta 
 union. 
 
 To complete the chain of subordination by which that hier- 
 archy was to be constituted and bound together, a new system 
 of tribunals arose at the commencement of the fourteenth cen- 
 tury, which were destined ultimately to control, and in a great 
 measure to supersede, all the other courts of justice in France. 
 I refer to the Parliaments, and especially to the Parliament of 
 Paris. In order to explain what at length became the judicial 
 character and functions of these tribunals, it is necessary to 
 return upon some of the steps which we have already taken, 
 and to endeavor, however briefly, to have their genealogy from 
 much more ancient institutions. 
 
 I attempted in a former lecture to justify the statement, 
 that, from the invasion of Clovis to the accession of Charle- 
 magne, France did not possess any national Legislature, nor 
 even any royal legislator. That part of the old Romano- Gal- 
 lic race which dwelt in cities, continued in those times to live 
 under their old municipal government, but had no share in 
 any national affairs. That part of the same race which lived 
 in the rural districts as slaves or serfs, or as coloni, took just 
 as little part in the conduct of the general interests of Graul as 
 the oxen which drew their plows. The Franks, on the other 
 hand, constituted one great army, the main body of which 
 was encamped round the abode of their Kyning or commander, 
 and the rest of which was broken up into various detachments, 
 stationed at great distances from each other, on the lands and 
 among the slaves appropriated for their maintenance. Every 
 such detachment became ere long a sedentary tribe, and the 
 chief of each was accustomed, as occasion required, to convene 
 the mallum (that is, an assembly of the free inhabitants) of 
 his district, to deliberate with him on all the affairs of his im- 
 mediate locality. The Kyning also occasionally convened an 
 assembly of the whole of the Frankish chiefs, to deliberate 
 with him at the Champs de Mars on the affairs of the whole 
 confederacy. But neither the mallum nor the Champs de 
 Mars was a legislative convention. Each of them was a coun- 
 cil of war or an assembly of warriors, who, brandishing their 
 swords and clattering their shields, shouted their acquiescence 
 or their dissent as their commander-in-chief laid before them 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 205 
 
 any military project; very much after the manner of the 
 Cherokees two centuries ago, or of the Foulahs of Central, or 
 the Zooloos of Southern Africa at the present time. 
 
 The assemblies even of Charlemagne, and of his sons and 
 grandsons, were little more than so many Frankish palavers, 
 brought together to discuss any military questions of unusual 
 difficulty or importance. The admission of the episcopal order 
 gave to them, indeed, an additional character strongly resem- 
 bling that of Synods ; and the large views of Charlemagne 
 himself, and of his wise and learned counselors, sometimes in- 
 duced him to borrow from such assemblages a higher sanction 
 for his capitularies than they would have had if avowedly rest- 
 ing on his own unaided authority. But whatever use he, or 
 his immediate descendants, may occasionally have made of 
 these armed or clerical conventions, it is a mere abuse of words 
 to designate them as national Legislatures. 
 
 "When the Carlovingian Monarchy had given place, first to 
 Anarchy and then to Feudalism, the mallums, and the Champs 
 de Mai, and (except in some southern cities) the municipal 
 curise also disappeared. But in their stead there came into 
 existence the feudal courts. Each tenant in capite of the 
 crown held within his fief a Parliament of his own free vas- 
 sals. To attend at such Parliaments was among the most im- 
 portant of the conditions on which the vassal held his lands or 
 his offices. He was as strictly bound to be present at his lord's 
 pleas in court, as to follow his lord's banner in the field. 
 
 For at such pleas or courts were done most of the acts by 
 which the lord asserted and perpetuated his seignorial rights. 
 There was administered the seigneur's justice, whether haute, 
 moyenne, or basse. There were discussed all questions im- 
 mediately affecting the seigneurie or the tenants of it. There 
 especially were adopted all general regulations which the ex- 
 igencies of the lordship were supposed to dictate, and especially 
 all such as related to the raising tailles or other imposts. 
 
 "What was thus done on a small scale in a minor fief, was 
 also done, though on a larger scale, in each of the feudal prov- 
 inces, and on a scale yet more extensive in the court or Par 
 liament holden by the king as a seigneur of the royal domain. 
 In that high assembly justice was administered by the king 
 to the feudatrries of the domain and to their vassals. There 
 
206 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL Ort 
 
 were discussed questions affecting the common weal of the 
 king, and of all his tenants in capite throughout the realm. 
 There also were proposed or promulgated such general regu- 
 lations as the exigencies of the king or of any parts of his 
 kingdom were supposed to require ; and there especially was 
 determined whatever related to the raising of tallies, or im- 
 posts, for the king's service, in any part of his dominions. 
 
 This royal court or Parliament was, however, not a Legisla- 
 ture in our modern sense of that word. It was rather a con- 
 vention, in which, by a voluntary compact between the king 
 as supreme suzerain and the greater seigneurs as his feudato- 
 ries, an ordonnance or an impost was established either through- 
 out the entire kingdom, or in some seigneuries apart from the 
 lost. From any such compact any seigneur might dissent on 
 behalf of himself and his immediate vassals, or, by simply ab- 
 senting himself, might render the extension of it to his own 
 fief impossible. 
 
 This system of holding royal courts or Parliaments was of 
 gradual and tardy growth. It can, indeed, scarcely be traced 
 at all in the four first Capetian reigns. But in the time of 
 Louis VII. it received a new impulse and importance from a 
 cause which never before or since exercised so striking an in- 
 fluence over human affairs. The British Arthur of the ballads 
 of that age had sat at his round table encircled by his twelve 
 knights, and the Troubadours and Minnesingers had therefore 
 assigned to Charlemagne (the hero of their romances) an equal 
 number of paladins. Bards have, in all times, had the high 
 office of predicting the future. In mediaeval France, as in an- 
 cient Greece, they attained to the additional prerogative of 
 divining, or rather of creating the past. Louis VII. believed, 
 or affected to believe, in Turpin, and in his traditions of Ro- 
 land, Oliver, and Tristan ; and, in real or pretended deference 
 to them, he actually summoned to his royal Parliament, with 
 the rank and title of Peers of France, six of the chief ecclesi- 
 astical, and as many of the principal lay seigneurs of his realm. 
 
 The romance thus became a reality. The fiction passed into 
 a truth. In the dramatic spirit which enters into the very life, 
 of the French people, Louis VII. and each in turn of his suc- 
 cessors delighted to enact the role of Charlemagne, while 
 each of these great princes, secular or ecclesiastical, gladly 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF PRANCE. 207 
 
 and ostentatiously assumed the character of a peer and pala- 
 din. Many generations had passed away before those peers had 
 entirely ceased to be regarded as a distinct order in the state, 
 and as the lieutenants and chief counselors of their sovereign. 
 As, however, they did not form a separate "body, "but sat and 
 deliberated with the other chief feudatories in the feudal Par- 
 liament of the king, they enhanced, instead of impairing, the 
 authority of his great council or royal Parliament. 
 
 Subject to the many corrections which would be requisite 
 to reduce to perfect accuracy this slight sketch of the origin 
 of the great council or Parliament of the kings of France, such 
 was, in substance, the constitution of it at the time of the ac- 
 cession of Louis IX. Before the close of his eventful reign, 
 that monarch had acquired the character, and was in full ex- 
 ercise of the powers, of a law-giver, and was habitually mak- 
 ing laws, not with the advice and consent of his council or 
 Parliament, but in the exercise of the inherent prerogative 
 which even they now began to ascribe to the French crown. 
 
 I have already observed, that under the Feudal System, 
 each tenant in capite of the crown held within his fief a Par- 
 liament of his own free vassals, at which were adopted such 
 general regulations as the exigencies of the seigneurie were 
 supposed to dictate, and especially all such as related to the 
 raising imposts ; and that, when it was judged necessary to 
 establish any such regulations or imposts throughout the whole 
 kingdom, the king arid his chief feudatories adopted them at 
 the royal court or Parliament, rather as international compacts 
 than as legislative enactments, in our sense of those words. 
 
 But in the reign of St. Louis new maxims began to prevail. 
 In the Roman code, -the royal judges found an inexhaustible 
 magazine of weapons with which to assail the feudal, and to 
 defend or enlarge the royal power. The wisdom of the pro- 
 prietary laws of Home, and the equity of much even of her 
 penal laws, afforded at once an apology and a disguise for the 
 silent introduction into France of much also of her political 
 law. Yet it was a law which had been molded into its later 
 forms in an Oriental seraglio, and which was fit only for the 
 government of a debased and servile population. The inherent 
 powers of the -French crown were assumed by the king, and 
 asserted by the judges, to be co-ordinate with those of the 
 
208 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 Byzantine Diadem. As the Emperor of the East had been ac- 
 customed to issue rescripts at his pleasure, so it was main* 
 tained, cautiously at first, but confidently at length, that the 
 King of France was also entitled, in the exercise of his royal 
 authority, to make such enactments as he might think neces- 
 sary. As the Crusaders had placed a French prince on the 
 throne of the East, so the East was now avenged by placing 
 an absolute power in the hands of the kings who afterward 
 sat upon the throne of France. 
 
 These encroachments, however, scarcely attracted th.3 atten- 
 tion, or, at least, they did not provoke the jealousy, of the no- 
 bles of that warlike and improvident age ; nor did any mon- 
 arch ever disarm suspicion by a nobler apology for the enlarge- 
 ment of his own powers, than that which St. Louis derived from 
 the wise and generous uses to which he devoted them. 
 
 Thus, for example, the feudal seigneurs and their clans, like 
 some of the barbarous tribes of Australia in our own times, re- 
 garded the responsibility for bloodshed as extending to the re- 
 motest kindred of the man-slayer, and as descending from gen- 
 eration to generation. They therefore, like those tribes, or 
 like our old Scottish clans, waged against each other wars of 
 alternate, and therefore of interminable vengeance. Louis IX., 
 in the exercise of his assumed character of a law-giver, pub- 
 lished an ordinance interdicting all such private wars. The 
 wisdom and the advantage of it were so evident, that the ille- 
 gality of it was unheeded or forgotten. ' 
 
 Thus, also, the court of Rome always claimed and often ex- 
 ercised three invidious and formidable secular powers. These 
 were, first, the power of nominating incumbents to benefices 
 in derogation of the rights of private patrons ; secondly, the 
 power of appointing the officers of cathedral churches without 
 the consent, or against the will, of the bishops, deans, and chap- 
 ters ; and, thirdly, the power of levying imposts on the eccle- 
 siastical revenues of France, without either the concurrence 
 of the clergy or the permission of the king. Louis IX., with 
 universal applause, interdicted all such papal encroachments 
 by that celebrated law which was ever afterward designated 
 as his Pragmatic Sanction. 
 
 In these, as, indeed, in most of his assumptions of legislative 
 power, St. Louis was, boyond all doubt, actuated by purposes 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 209 
 
 as pure as his enactments themselves were heneficial to his 
 people. Yet a conspicuous place is due to him in the roll of 
 princes, whose very virtues have been fatal to the states they 
 governed ; who, in genuine but mistaken patriotism, have cast 
 down ancient landmarks of inestimable, though unperceived 
 value, and who have bequeathed to future times examples to 
 be followed with equal readiness, though with most dissimilar 
 motives, by the worst as well as by the best of their successors. 
 
 The apology of having been guided only by public spirit and 
 love of country will, however, not apply to the most remarka- 
 ble of the assumptions which St. Louis made of the power of 
 legislation. I refer to that code or body of laws already men- 
 tioned, which bear the title of his Etablissements. It is a rude 
 imitation of the Justinian Code, and is evidently the work of 
 some practiced lawyer of that age, whose literary labors prob- 
 ably attracted but little of the attention of the king, in whose 
 name they were promulgated. This French Tribonian, who- 
 ever he may have been, seems to have been deeply imbued 
 with the spirit of the legistes of his times. His work, though 
 destitute of all methodical arrangement, is not without proofs 
 of a certain unity of design. That design was to elevate the 
 royal at the expense of the baronial power ; to repress, at what- 
 ever cost of human suffering, those crimes which Feudalism 
 most readily sheltered ; to extend the authority of the Roman 
 law by superseding in its favor the customary codes of the 
 greater fiefs ; and to enlarge the powers of the legal profession 
 by throwing over the a'dministration of justice a veil impervi- 
 ous to any eyes but theirs. 
 
 Inconsiderate as were the peers and barons of France in the 
 thirteenth century, they did not silently acquiesce in this last 
 and greatest usurpation by St. Louis of the legislative office. 
 But their opposition was vain ; for, first, the promulgation of 
 the Etablissements was very nearly coincident in point of time 
 with his departure for his last and fatal crusade to Tunis, when 
 the thoughts of all men were agitated by interests much near- 
 er and much dearer to them than those of constitutional priv- 
 ileges. And, in the next place, the objections of the seigneurs 
 appear to have been overruled by their legal colleagues in the 
 royal court or Parliament. There is to be found in Beauma- 
 noir. one of those jurists, an account of the distinction in vir- 
 
 
 
210 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 tue of which they vindicated the claims of their sovereign to 
 legislative power. " One may not say," he writes, " that the 
 king is of right the law-giver ; but it is admitted that he may 
 promulgate laws for the good of the realm ; and it is proper 
 to obey them, because we are bound to suppose them to result 
 from a wisdom superior to that of other men." It is difficult 
 to imagine any conclusion which might not be yoked to any 
 premises by the master of such a logic as this. 
 
 I have already stated that, at the commencement of the 
 fourteenth century, the Parliament of Paris began to complete 
 that chain of subordination by which the whole judicial hie- 
 rarchy was to be constituted and bound together as a single 
 and united body. But thus far I have been engaged in ex- 
 plaining how, in the presence of that Parliament that is, of 
 the royal council (for the terms were then convertible) Louis 
 IX. accomplished the greatest of all additions to the hereditary 
 prerogatives of his crown. With our English prepossessions, 
 it is impossible to repress the wonder, and even the incredu- 
 lity, with which we at first listen to the statement that the 
 supreme judicial tribunal of the kingdom could be otherwise 
 than the zealous and effectual antagonist of so momentous 
 an encroachment. To explain this, it now becomes necessary 
 to resume the broken thread of our discourse^ and to inquire 
 how the royal council or Parliament added a judicial authori- 
 ty to their earlier and more appropriate functions, and what 
 was the precise nature of that authority. 
 
 On the departure of Philippe Auguste for the Holy Land, he 
 had thought it necessary to provide for the decision, during his 
 absence, of such complaints as were in his days often preferred 
 to the crown respecting the conduct of the royal officers, polit- 
 ical or judicial. With that view, he directed the queen-moth- 
 er and the Archbishop of Rheims, as regents of the kingdom, to 
 hold once in each year an assembly of the greater barons. This 
 practice had become habitual by the time of Louis IX. For 
 the confirmation and improvement of it, that monarch ordered 
 that, before the day of any such assemblage, citations should 
 be issued, commanding the attendance, not, as before, of the 
 greater barons exclusively, but of twenty-four members of the 
 royal council or Parliament. Of those twenty-four, three only 
 were to be great barons, three were to be bishops, and the re- 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OP PRANCE. 2] 1 
 
 maining eighteen were to be knights. But as these members 
 of the royal council did not appear to St. Louis to possess all 
 the qualifications requisite for the right discharge of the judi- 
 cial office, he directed that thirty-seven other persons should be 
 associated to them. Of those associates, seventeen were to be 
 clerks in holy orders, and twenty legistes, that is, men bred to 
 the study of the law. The functions assigned to the legistes 
 was that of drawing up in proper form the decrees and other 
 written acts of the collective body. 
 
 To this body, when thus constituted, was given the distinct- 
 ive title of the Parliament of Paris. If we search our own in- 
 stitutions for an analogy to the Parliament of Paris as origin- 
 ally established, that analogy would be best discovered in the 
 Star Chamber of ancient times, or in the Judicial Committee 
 of the Privy Council as it has existed since the Restoration ; 
 for the members both of the English and of the French cham- 
 bers acted at once as judges and as privy counselors, and com- 
 posed at the same moment a council board and a court of jus- 
 tice. For the twenty legistes of the Parliament of Paris, coun- 
 terparts may be found in the Clerks of the Council in England. 
 
 But the legistes did not long content themselves with that 
 humble position. The barons, the bishops, and the knights of 
 the Parliament of Paris were beset with difficulties precisely 
 similar to those which (as we have seen) had perplexed the 
 judges of the seignorial courts. They were rescued from them 
 by the same hazardous remedy. The conseiller clerc, as he 
 was called, brought 'with him to the Parliament the same 
 humble aspect as that which the lettered clerk had brought to 
 the baronial tribunes, as a veil to the same aspiring ambition. 
 He was always a scholar, and usually a churchman. He had 
 been trained, probably at Bologna, in the study of the Roman 
 law. He was an adept in conducting legal controversies 
 through all their devious stages to their legitimate close, and 
 in deducing from those voluminous premises their just and 
 logical conclusions. At first the barons, knights, and prelates 
 listened, or seemed to listen, composedly to those sleep-com- 
 pelling oracles, and pronounced, or seemed to pronounce, the 
 sentences dictated to them. But ennui and ridicule (powers 
 ever regarded in France with the liveliest abhorrence) proved 
 in the Parliament of Paris a purge quite as effectual as that 
 
21.2 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 which Colonel Pride administered to the English House of 
 Commons. The conseiller clercs were soon left to themselves, 
 in due time to found, and to enjoy, what began to be called 
 La Noblesse de la Robe. 
 
 Having thus assumed the government of the court, the le- 
 gistes next proceeded to enlarge its jurisdiction. It had, as we 
 have noticed, been at first convened merely to take cognizance 
 of complaints preferred to the king against the misconduct of 
 his officers, political or judicial. But legal astuteness could 
 not long be confined within such narrow limits. 
 
 The earliest recorded invention of the conseiller clercs was 
 what, in the language of Westminster Hall, would be called 
 the writ of committimus. It was a royal license, which au- 
 thorized a person complaining of a grievance cognizable in any 
 of the royal courts, to overleap those ordinary jurisdictions, and 
 to prefer his complaint to the Parliament at once. "When this 
 innovation had been firmly established, the legistes proceeded 
 to promulgate the doctrine that, even without a special com- 
 mittimus, all prelates were entitled to this privilege ; a right 
 which, if I mistake not, was afterward admitted in favor of the 
 greater barons also. And, lastly, the lawyers maintained that, 
 the wrong decision of a judge being equally injurious to the 
 suitor whether the error was willful or unintentional, the griev- 
 ance must, in either case, be equally remediable by a Parlia- 
 ment expressly convened for the redress of all grievances in 
 flicted on the king's subjects by his judicial officers. In othei 
 words, they established the rule that the court in which they 
 served could entertain appeals, in the proper sense of that 
 word, from all the other courts within the royal domain. 
 
 By these astute constructions of the law, the Parliament 
 had, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, become the 
 supreme legal tribunal within the whole of that part of France 
 which was at that time attached to the crown. In all the 
 other parts of the kingdom, the seignorial courts retained the 
 whole of their ancient jurisdiction, excepting only, first , when 
 suits were evoked from them to the royal courts, as cas royaux ; 
 and, secondly, when any such suits were brought, in the first 
 instance, before the Parliament by the writ of committimus. 
 
 Having thus enlarged the range of its jurisdiction, the Par- 
 .iament of Paris next advanced to the increase and consolida- 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 213 
 
 tion of its powers. The measures taken with that view may 
 be arranged under the nine following heads : 
 
 First. With a view to that apportionment of duties which 
 is essential to the combined and energetic action of the mem- 
 bers of any corporate body, the Parliament was divided, in the 
 reign of Philippe le Bel, into three chambers ; that is, the 
 Chambre des Requetes, which took cognizance of all original 
 suits ; the Chambre des Enquetes, where all appeals were pre- 
 pared for adjudication ; and the Great Chamber, where such 
 appeals were actually adjudicated. From this third chamber 
 the legistes were, at this period, excluded. 
 
 Secondly. The royal council had always been a migratory 
 body, because it was always bound to attend the king in per- 
 son. But, though the Parliament was (as has been seen), to a 
 certain extent, identical with the royal council, it became se- 
 dentary in the year 1319. From that time it met at Paris, 
 and there only. 
 
 Thirdly. In the reign of Philippe the Long, this identity or 
 union of the royal council and of the Parliament was virtually, 
 though not formally dissolved, and each of them thencefor- 
 ward existed as a substantive and distinct body in the state. 
 Every member of Parliament was then bound to a constant 
 residence in Paris, except during the regular parliamentary 
 vacations. I am aware of no proof that this innovation origi- 
 nated with the legistes. But the case is probably so, because 
 the effect of the change was immediately to elevate their own 
 order to the supremacy which they ever afterward enjoyed in 
 that tribunal. No prelate, except the Archbishop of Paris, 
 could any longer retain his place there, for no other prelate 
 could fix his permanent abode in the capital. For the same 
 reason, the greater number of the most powerful of the baro- 
 nial members became disqualified, and the lawyers thus found 
 themselves in undisputed possession of the supreme court of 
 justice in the royal domain. 
 
 Fourthly. They sat there, originally, by the simple nomi- 
 nation of the king, and during his pleasure ; but, as early as 
 the year 1345, the practice was introduced of appointing the 
 parliamentary counselors, as they were now called, for life. 
 They received annual stipends, and their number was lim- 
 ited. 
 
214 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 Fifthly. Ere long the crown made a yet farther concession 
 in their favor. As vacancies on the bench occurred, candi- 
 dates for the succession were proposed to the king by the re- 
 maining counselors, and it became a settled practice to make 
 the choice out of that list of candidates. This statement ap- 
 plies only to the regular or stipendiary members. The num- 
 ber of honorary members- was unlimited, and usually included 
 many persons of high rank. But in those days such persons, 
 as a matter of course, absented themselves from the obscure 
 labors of a judicial tribunal. 
 
 Sixthly. Thus far the innovations in the character and 
 composition of the Parliament of Paris were not ill adapted 
 to secure the independence of the judges, and to invigorate 
 their activity. But in the disastrous reign of Charles VI. oc- 
 curred a change of a very different tendency. At that time a 
 seat in the Parliament was converted from a tenure for life 
 into an inheritance. The study of the law, with a view to 
 the judicial administration of it, thenceforward became the 
 exclusive patrimonial privilege of a certain number of families. 
 A new order of nobility thus made its appearance. The mag- 
 isterial noblesse asserted, if not an equality of rank, at least 
 an equality of rights, with the feudal and military nobles. 
 In the royal ordinances promulgated during two hundred years 
 next succeeding the middle of the fourteenth century, may be 
 traced the successive advances made by the parliamentary 
 counselors toward these aristocratic privileges. Without paus- 
 ing to enumerate the fiscal burdens from which they were thus 
 exempted, it may be generally stated that they were at length 
 delivered from all those which it was the peculiar fate and 
 hardship of the roturiers to sustain. 
 
 Seventhly. And as the counselors of the Parliament of 
 Paris thus fortified their position, so they continually enlarged 
 the range of their judicial authority. The writ of committi- 
 mus was brought within the reach of suitors of low degree, 
 instead of being denied, as at first, to all persons below episco- 
 pal or noble rank. The appellate jurisdiction was extended to 
 the decisions, not only of the university tribunals, but, in many 
 cases, to those of the ecclesiastical courts also. Even the 
 Chambre des Comptes was compelled to receive a certain num- 
 ber of parliamentary counselors as their assessors in hearing 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 215 
 
 complaints against their own judgments, from those public 
 accountants whose receipts and payments were audited there. 
 
 Eighthly. The Parliament, with more or less success, pro* 
 ceeded to usurp some of the functions of the executive govern- 
 ment. I do not, however, pause to recapitulate those attempts, 
 because they were finally repressed by the strong hand of 
 Charles VII. and his immediate successors. 
 
 Ninthly. The establishment of the grand jours made a great 
 accession to the more appropriate powers of the Parliament. 
 By grand jours were meant assizes held, or commissions of in- 
 quiry executed, by a certain number of the parliamentary 
 counselors, at the great cities, within the local limits of their 
 jurisdiction. The Ordonnance de Blois required that such as- 
 sizes should be holden annually. But, in fact, they took place 
 at uncertain and infrequent intervals. The parliamentary 
 commissioners holding them were charged with duties not 
 strictly judicial, but rather resembling those of the missi do- 
 minici of Charlemagne, or those of the baillis of a later age. 
 For example, they held inquests to ascertain whether the laws 
 were properly observed, whether the officers of the crown 
 were faithfully discharging their duties, and whether there 
 were any public abuses demanding correction. Even toward 
 the close of the eighteenth century such inquests were not 
 entirely obsolete. 
 
 While the Parliament was thus developing its powers and 
 enlarging its privileges, three other judicial revolutions were 
 in active though silent progress. The first was the gradual 
 elevation of the royal courts of the baillis and prevots ; the 
 second was the continual depression of the hereditary feudal 
 jurisdictions ; the third was the growth of the provincial Par- 
 liaments. 
 
 First, like satellites obeying the impulse and pursuing the 
 orbit of their central body, the royal courts followed the prog- 
 ress of the Parliament to which they were subordinate. Thus, 
 originally, the seneschals and baillis had been appointed by the 
 king at his own discretion. But, in the sixteenth century, 
 they were selected by the king from a list of candidates pre- 
 sented to him by the Parliament. Thus, also, the baillis, 
 though always seigneurs of high rank, and never professional 
 lawyers, had originally been accustomed to preside in person 
 
216 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 in their own courts. But now they were first permitted, and 
 then required, to execute their judicial functions by substitut- 
 ing for themselves deputies learned in the law. Early in the 
 sixteenth century, those learned deputies had entirely super- 
 seded their unlearned principals on the judgment-seat ; and, 
 when the courts of the baillis had received this new character, 
 a royal edict of the year 1536 for the first time distinctly de- 
 fined the range of their jurisdiction. "With some exceptions, 
 which I do not pause to enumerate, that jurisdiction was de- 
 clared to extend over almost all questions, civil or criminal, 
 of which the cognizance belongs to any secular tribunal, 
 though subject, of course, to the appellate authority of the 
 Parliament. 
 
 The baillis, or deputy baillis, had always been aided by as- 
 sessors or peers, or, as they might with little inaccuracy have 
 been called, jurors, taken from the body of the people. But, 
 in the sixteenth century, this popular element in the com- 
 position of these courts was superseded. The change was 
 brought about under the convenient shelter of new appella- 
 tions. Courts differing little, if at all, from those of the bail- 
 lis, except in name and in rank, were appointed by the king 
 with the title of sieges presidentiaux, or presidencies. The 
 substantial difference was, that the president was aided nei- 
 ther by assessors, nor peers, nor jurors, but by stipendiary and 
 permanent judges. The new institution, or rather the new 
 name, gradually took the place of the old. The presidencies, 
 like the Parliaments, administered justice scientifically, and 
 without any infusion of the public voice or sentiment. Ere 
 long the mention of baillis disappears from the judicial history 
 of France, although, under the name of presidencies, they 
 were, in fact, perpetuated until a comparatively recent period. 
 
 The courts of the prevots were, in the same manner, 
 brought into harmony with the supreme or parliamentary ju- 
 dicature. They had originally been established for the trial 
 of minor cases, and especially of cases affecting the roturiers. 
 But the sphere of the prevotal courts was now enlarged. Their 
 appointment proceeded no longer from the crown, but from 
 the seneschals and baillis ; and every prevot was required to 
 summon as his assessors, not peers or jurors taken from the 
 people at large, but persons who had graduated in the law. 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 
 
 Secondly. The next consequence of the growth of the pow- 
 ers and privileges of the Parliament was the depression of the 
 seignorial or hereditary jurisdictions. 
 
 Francis I. had purchased from some of the heritors of these 
 rights in the city of Paris a renunciation of them for money. 
 But the royal purse was a far less effective instrument of their 
 overthrow than the subtlety of the lawyers. They argued that 
 every such jurisdiction must at first have been acquired either 
 by usurpation or by a royal grant. If by usurpation, it was 
 void ab origine^ and no lapse of time could remedy that inhe- 
 rent vice in the title. If by royal grant, then the grantee had 
 been merely a royal officer J the delegate of the king's author- 
 ity. But the king's delegate was bound by the feudal law to 
 do homage in respect of any office holden by him under such a 
 delegation. Therefore all seigneurs must dp homage on ac- 
 count of their patrimonial jurisdictions ; that is, they must 
 acknowledge the subordination of their courts to the courts of 
 their suzerain. 
 
 The practical results of this doctrine justified the sagacity 
 which had discovered and promulgated it. For, first, the king 
 forbade the seigneur to preside in his court in his own person. 
 Secondly, he commanded him to appoint and to pay a deputy 
 to be approved by the king himself. Thirdly, the seigneur was 
 declared to be personally responsible for the damages which 
 any one might sustain by the judicial misconduct of his dep- 
 uty. Fourthly, he was also declared liable for the support of 
 the prisons and court-house within his seigneurie ; and, lastly, 
 it was provided that if a royal and seignorial court should both 
 have their seats within the same parish, they were not to sit 
 simultaneously, but by triennial alterations. All the inferior 
 seigneurs were thus (so to speak) legislated out of their he- 
 reditary judicatures. The right of justice was rendered not 
 only a worthless, but a burdensome privilege. Still, however, 
 not a few noble and princely houses yet retained, in the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries, those judicial rights which 
 acquired an imaginary value by their increasing rarity, and 
 which attested the patrimonial wealth and dignity of which 
 those houses were the actual occupiers and the legitimate in- 
 heritors. 
 
 The third judicial revolution which I have mentioned as 
 
218 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 coincident with the growth of the powers of the Parliament of 
 Paris, is the development of the provincial Parliaments. 
 
 Whatever I have hitherto offered respecting the jurisdiction 
 of the Parliament of Paris, must be understood as referring 
 only to that part of France which was included within the 
 royal domain. Though it constituted by far the largest fief in 
 the kingdom, yet many of the most important provinces of 
 France lay beyond its limits, and acknowledged the great 
 feudatories of the crown as their sovereign princes. But, in 
 the fourteenth century, the royal domain had, by successive 
 conquests, been enlarged to more than twice its original ex- 
 tent. The great provinces of Normandy and Languedoc were 
 at that period incorporated in it, and a new question arose, to 
 be debated, indeed, by lawyers, but to be decided only by 
 princes. That question was whether the supreme tribunals 
 of Normandy and Languedec had not, in consequence of the 
 annexation of those provinces to the crown, become royal 
 courts, and whether, therefore, their judgments, in common 
 with those of all other royal courts, might not be brought by 
 appeal before the Parliament of Paris for revision and amend- 
 ment. 
 
 It would be beside my present object to pursue the details 
 of that controversy. I will confine myself to the attempt to- 
 indicate, under the six following heads, what was at length 
 the position taken by these, and by the other provincial Parlia- 
 ments, in the judicial system of France. 
 
 First. The most celebrated of those bodies is the Parlia- 
 ment of Toulouse. It was created by Philippe le Bel, and in 
 his time it embraced Gruienne, Languedoc, and the whole of 
 the country to the south of the Dordogne. Charles VIII. , find- 
 ing that Parliament in decay, re-established it with privileges 
 and immunities corresponding with those of the Parliament of 
 Paris. After the lapse of eight years, the same monarch ef- 
 fected a judicial union beween the two Parliaments ; that is, 
 the counselors of each were declared to be counselors in both ; 
 and this theoretical unity of the sovereign courts of the South 
 and of the North became, in later times, the germ of the 
 broader and more practical doctrine, that while each of the 
 French Parliaments was sovereign and supreme within its own 
 precincts, they all collectively formed one great institution, the 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 219 
 
 dispersed members of which enjoyed a perfect equality and in- 
 tercommunity of rights. 
 
 Secondly. In 1472, G-uienne and several minor districts 
 adjacent to the city of Bordeaux were subjected to the juris- 
 diction of a Parliament then, for the first time, created in that 
 city, and were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the Parlia- 
 ment of Toulouse. The Parliaments of Dauphine, of Burgun- 
 dy, of Normandy, of Provence, of Brittany, and of Dombes, 
 were all successively established in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries by Louis XL, by Charles VIII., by Louis XIL, by 
 Francis L, and by Charles IX. In the following century, 
 Louis XIII. created Parliaments in Beam and in the Three 
 Bishoprics ; and Louis XIV. was the author of similar insti- 
 tutions in French Flanders, in Franche-Comte, in Alsace, in 
 Roussillon, and in Artois. But, though similar to the rest, the 
 institutions of Louis XIY. did not enjoy the rank, and did not 
 bear the name of Parliaments. They were called sovereign 
 councils or provincial councils. There was, however, no sub- 
 stantial difference between the various supreme provincial 
 judicatures of France, except such as resulted from the inflex- 
 ible varieties of their various local circumstances. 
 
 Thirdly. All the Parliaments of France were sovereign; 
 that is, each of them was supreme over all other royal courts 
 within its appropriate precincts, and was itself exempt from 
 the control of any appellate tribunal. The judgments in each 
 of them were executed in every part of the kingdom proprio 
 vigor e ; that is, without being affirmed by the local court of 
 any other province. Eventually it was decided by practice, 
 if not in theory, that no appeal would lie, even to the Parlia- 
 ment in Paris, from any judgment of any provincial Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 Fourthly. The institution of a sovereign court in any part 
 of France came to be considered as the proper and indispensa- 
 ble recognition of the fact that the territories over which it 
 administered justice had been finally annexed to the French 
 crown, in derogation of any other sovereignty, whether feudal 
 or foreign. 
 
 Fifthly. All these Parliaments, though instituted by the 
 king, were considered as the official protectors of the rights 
 and independence of their respective provinces. 
 
220 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 Sixthly, and finally. The system of administering justice 
 in the Parliament of Paris, and all the judicial rights, powers, 
 and privileges of that body, belonged, in all their force and in- 
 tegrity, to all the other sovereign Parliaments of the realm, 
 though subject to variations originating in local and peculiar 
 causes. 
 
 In the age of Louis XIV., therefore, France possessed a ju- 
 dicial system characterized by a remarkable uniformity in all 
 the provinces of the kingdom, and by a no less remarkable sub- 
 ordination within each province of the several ranks of the ju- 
 dicial hierarchy to each other. Every reader of French his- 
 tory is, however, aware of the very prominent place which it 
 assigns to the Parliaments, and especially to the Parliament 
 of Paris, in the political events, and especially in the political 
 controversies, of the reigns of the family of the house of Bour- 
 bon. It remains for us, therefore, to inquire, What were the 
 motives, and what the effects, of these habitual departures of 
 the magistracy from what we in England should consider as 
 their only appropriate duties ? 
 
 Before I attempt a more direct answer to that question, I 
 would direct your notice to a peculiarity in the French juris- 
 prudence for which our own habits of thought and action do 
 not prepare us. I refer to the Ministere Publique. No one 
 can rightly appreciate the conduct of the French Parliaments 
 who is not in some degree conversant with the nature of that 
 institution. 
 
 Originally, the enforcement of the penal law, and the pro- 
 tection of the rights of the crown or of society at large, be- 
 longed to the seigneur and his vassals in the fiefs, and to the 
 seneschal and the king's vassals in the royal domain. The 
 judges of those feudal courts were also the conservators of the 
 public peace, of the revenue, and of all the other public rights 
 within their respective precincts. But when those tribunals 
 were superseded by the royal courts, all such functions were 
 transferred to the advocates of the king, and, in subordination 
 to them, to the royal procureurs or solicitors. As early as the 
 year 1354, the principal of these advocates appears to have 
 borne the title of Procureur General. He was the chief of 
 what was called the Parquet ; that is, of a body of advocates 
 and procureurs specially engaged to represent his person, and 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 221 
 
 to execute his orders in any tribunals in which he could not 
 himself be principally present. The Procureur General and 
 his substitutes were collectively called the Ministere Pub- 
 lique. 
 
 The functions of this great officer were alike high and ardu- 
 ous. He was the universal public prosecutor. Before any 
 adjudication of the court to which he was attached, he deliv- 
 ered his conclusions ; that is, he demanded a judgment in such 
 terms as, in his opinion, the law sanctioned and the public in- 
 terest required. Therefore, if, in any private suit, the litigants 
 concurred either in asking a sentence which the law forbade, 
 or in deprecating a sentence which the law enjoined, the pro- 
 cureur general, by his conclusions, resisted them both, in the 
 interest, as it was expressed, of the law itself. To the min- 
 is tere publique also belonged many extra-judicial functions. 
 They were examiners of weights and measures. They had a 
 surveillance over certain parts of the police. They occasion- 
 ally ratified the by-laws of incorporated guilds. They were 
 orotectors of the royal revenue, and consequently exercised 
 some degree of influence in every branch of the administration 
 of public affairs. The procureur general, as the head of this 
 great ministry, was considered not only as a member of the 
 Parliament of Paris, but as its most powerful member ; and, 
 under the shelter of his great, though indefinite authority, the 
 Parliament were continually enabled to prefer, and were some- 
 times successful in establishing, their own political pretensions. 
 
 Those pretensions were not destitute of some plausible basis, 
 as, indeed, in the modern European world, Might has always 
 rendered to Right the homage of abstaining from a naked and 
 avowed usurpation. 
 
 "When the kings of France originally made laws for the gov- 
 ernment of the royal domain, it was, as I have already ob- 
 served, in an assembly of the great vassals of the crown, and 
 with their concurrence. If the king proposed to the assembly 
 a law which the vassals disapproved, the language in which 
 they expressed their dissent would, in the phraseology of those 
 days, have been called a remonstrance. But in the Middle 
 Ages the word remontrer did not mean to complain of an in- 
 jury, but rather to represent, or bring under consideration, 
 suggestions on any proposal. 
 
222 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 But at the period when the Parliament of Paris \vas acquir- 
 ing its peculiar character as a court of justice, the meetings 
 of the great vassals of the crown, to co-operate with the king 
 in legislation, were falling into disuse. The king, as I have 
 already explained, had begun to originate laws without their 
 sanction ; and the Parliament, not without some show of rea- 
 son, assumed that the right of remonstrance, formerly enjoyed 
 by the great vassals, had now passed to themselves. 
 
 For it was a principle admitted, I think, without exception, 
 by every French king and minister in his turn, that the Par- 
 liament were neither bound nor at liberty to execute any roy- 
 al ordinance unless it had first been communicated to them 
 and registered among their records. Before the art of print- 
 ing was in use, it was scarcely a fiction to say that a court of 
 justice was and must be ignorant of any ordinance which had 
 not been first read over to them, and then deposited in their 
 archives for facility of reference. 
 
 When any such ordinance was thus communicated to the 
 Parliament, they, if dissatisfied with it, answered the commu- 
 nication by a "remonstrance," in the sense which I have al- 
 ready given to that word. If their remonstrance was disre- 
 garded, their next step was to request that the projected law 
 might be withdrawn. If that request was unheeded, they at 
 length formally declined to register it among their records. 
 
 Such refusals were sometimes, but were not usually suc- 
 cessful. In most instances they provoked from the king a per- 
 emptory order for the immediate registration of his ordinance. 
 To such orders the Parliament generally submitted ; but, even 
 in that case, the arret for registering the law was usually pre- 
 faced by a preamble, explaining that it had been pronounced 
 in submission to the king's express commandment. The act 
 of obedience was thus accompanied by a protest against the 
 compulsion by which it had been enforced ; and thus, even 
 when the right of resistance did not actually prevail, it was 
 at least asserted ; and, by every new assertion of it, that right 
 (as it was supposed) acquired additional strength. 
 
 To fortify themselves in this contest, and to enlist public 
 opinion on their side, the Parliament maintained the doctrine 
 that, among the laws of the realm, some might be distin- 
 guished from the rest as being elementary and fundamental: 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OP PRANCE. 223 
 
 and they ascribed to themselves the character of guardians of 
 those fundamental rights during the long intervals which sep- 
 arated from each other the sessions of the States-General. 
 
 But an effective veto on all royal ordinances, though the 
 chief, was not the only political power with which law or cus- 
 tom had invested them. 
 
 For, first, they were, to a certain extent, legislators in their 
 own persons. The royal laws which they were "bound to exe- 
 cute were often defective, and it became an established maxim, 
 that, in order to give efficiency to any such law, the Parlia- 
 ment might promulgate arrets for supplying such omissions. 
 Those supplementary arrets were, indeed, provisional only, un r 
 til the defect of the existing law should be supplied by the 
 king himself ; and it was always in the power of the king to 
 abrogate or disallow them. But, notwithstanding these re- 
 strictions, the right of making such arrets was a political priv- 
 ilege of no light significance. 
 
 Secondly. As often as any Papal Bull was sanctioned by 
 the king, it became a part of the law of France to be enforced 
 by the ordinary tribunals. Every such bull was therefore sent 
 to the Parliament for registration ; and by resisting or remon- 
 strating against the registration of it, the Parliament not only 
 established the right of intervening in all ecclesiastical affairs, 
 but succeeded in investing themselves, in popular esteem, with 
 the high office of protectors of the liberties of the Grallican 
 Church. 
 
 Thirdly. They also established a right to interpose in dip- 
 lomatic questions ; for treaties with foreign powers, being in- 
 corporated into that part of the Jus Grentium to which the Par- 
 liaments were bound to give effect, were also supposed to re- 
 quire a parliamentary registration. They therefore not sel- 
 dom provoked remonstrances and refusals from that high tri- 
 bunal. It must, however, be added, that, in the exercise of 
 this power, the conflict between the Parliament and the crown 
 was sometimes nothing better than a comedy. For example, 
 when Francis I. had signed the humiliating treaty of Madrid, 
 he laid it before all the Parliaments of France, who all refused 
 to register it or to acknowledge its validity, because, as they 
 alleged, no king of France had a right to bind himself and his 
 people to such a dismemberment of the realm. Nothing onuld 
 
224 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 exceed the meekness with which the haughty monarch for 
 once bowed to a rebuke which narrowed his own prerogative. 
 To be absolved from an unwelcome engagement to which his 
 Christian faith and royal honor had been pledged, even the ac- 
 knowledgment of the controlling authority of a company of 
 long-robed lawyers did not seem an excessive price. He was 
 not always thus docile ; for, 
 
 Fourthly. The Parliament assumed the right to adjudicate 
 as mediators between all the other powers of the state, and 
 that mediation was usually accepted except when the king 
 himself was engaged in any such controversy. When, how- 
 ever, the Parliament attempted thus to define the limits of th( 
 prerogatives of Francis L, he indignantly told them that they 
 were attempting to debase him to the condition of a Doge of 
 Venice, and to raise themselves to the rank of Venetian sen- 
 ators. 
 
 From that age till the subversion of the monarchy there was 
 a constant succession of conflicts between the king and the 
 Parliament, with an invariable sameness in the result. Thus 
 Henry II. assailed them by dividing the grand chamber into 
 two bodies, which held alternate sessions of six months each. 
 Charles IX. had recourse to the practice of holding Lits de jus- 
 tice, where, by appearing in person in the Parliament, he si- 
 lenced all remonstrances to the registration of his edicts. 
 Richelieu dismissed some refractory members and imprisoned 
 others, and compelled the whole company, with bare heads and 
 on their bended knees, to supplicate the king's forgiveness. 
 The court, the princes, the populace, and the armies of Conde 
 and Turenne dissolved that union of all the Parliaments and 
 sovereign courts of France, which, during the troubles of the 
 Fronde, had menaced the kingdom with a new and strange 
 revolution -a revolution by which the absolute dominion of 
 the house of Bourbon would have been transferred to a com- 
 pany of hereditary magistrates. Louis XIV. never forgot or 
 forgave the attempt. Clothed in his hunting dress, and (as it 
 is usually added) with his whip in his hand, he presented him- 
 self to the Parliament of Paris, who, even more astonished by 
 his costume than by his imperious tone, listened submissively 
 to his commands to address to him no more remonstrances, but 
 to confine themselves exclusively to the discharge of their ju- 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OF FRANCE. 225 
 
 dicial office. By letters patent of the year 1673, he directed 
 that all the royal edicts and declarations should be registered 
 at Paris in eight days, and at the seats of the other Parlia- 
 ments in six weeks from their date ; and, until they had heen 
 so registered, all remonstrances against them were strictly pro- 
 hibited. During all the remaining part of his long reign, the 
 French Parliaments became simply courts of justice and noth- 
 ing more. 
 
 The. secret of their ill success in the attempt to elevate them- 
 selves to the highest rank among the members of the political 
 commonwealth is immediately detected. They were an aris- 
 tocracy elevated by learning, talents, and station above the 
 mass of the people, but an aristocracy which was at once ob- 
 noxious to the plebeian malignity of the many, and to the pa- 
 trician haughtiness of the few. In the eyes of the nation at 
 large, the parliamentary counselors were but a privileged caste, 
 and their contests with the crown were but so many selfish 
 struggles for their own personal aggrandizement; and even 
 in the judgment of many of the illustrious magistrates of 
 whom France is so justly proud, of L'Hopital, of Mole, of Har- 
 lay, and of D'Aguesseau, the attempt of their colleagues to at- 
 tract to the Parliament of Paris a large participation in the 
 powers of the crown, appeared at once hopeless of success, and 
 most disastrous if successful. To those great men it was evi- 
 dent that the inevitable effect of the accomplishment of such 
 a design must have been, not to rescue the nation from des- 
 potism, but to subject it to the most galling of all tyrannies, 
 by uniting the legislative, administrative, and judicial powers 
 in the hands of the same men, and of men totally disqualified, 
 by their education and their habits, either to legislate with 
 wisdom, or to reign with magnanimity. 
 
 The preceding statements will, I trust, enable me to render 
 intelligible in a few words the more precise answer which it 
 remains for me to return to the question with a view to which 
 they have been chiefly made the question, namely, Why did 
 not the administration of justice contribute in France, as it 
 contributed in England, to create and to maintain the national 
 liberties ? 
 
 First. Our land has ever lived under the dominion of law. 
 By that power the physical force of f h' many, the formidable 
 
 P 
 
226 THE INFLUENCE OF THE JUDICIAL ON 
 
 influence of the few, and the arbitrary will of the monarch, 
 have ever been controlled with more or less of energy and suc- 
 cess. This dominion of the law was exercised, in the time of 
 our Saxon progenitors, in the Folk-motes, the Shire-motes, and 
 the Wittenage-motes. In our own times it is exercised in 
 our courts of justice and in our high court of Parliament. 
 During more than a thousand years, our legal tribunals have 
 been interposed between the various organs of the state, to vin- 
 dicate the rights, and to arrest the encroachments of them all. 
 Throughout that long course of ages, those legal sanctuaries 
 have been at once the bulwarks of order and the strongholds 
 of liberty in England ; and to them it is to be ascribed that 
 the English Parliaments have never fallen as the Cortes of 
 Spain fell, and as the States-General of France silently disap- 
 peared. 
 
 If, as I believe, this is a correct summary of the judicial 
 history of England, it reverses with no less correctness the ju- 
 dicial history of France. For, first, the French judicatures 
 were all erected on a feudal substratum. The king's senes- 
 chal and vassals in the royal domain the seigneurs and their 
 vassals in their respective fiefs constituted the original tri- 
 bunals of the whole kingdom. But they constituted, also, the 
 deliberative and executive government, and the military staff 
 of each fief, royal or seignorial. They were bodies in which 
 the people had no share, over which public opinion exercised 
 no control, and the members of which were too numerous to 
 feel any lively sense of individual responsibility. The baron 
 who, at the head of his armed followers, was the terror of the 
 vicinage, was not less formidable to his neighbor when he sat 
 in his castle-hall to administer justice. The code of his tri- 
 bunal might be reduced to the old pithy compendium, " Si 
 veut le Roi, si veut la Loi." 
 
 Secondly. As if to multiply securities for wrong, and to 
 give full scope to prejudice, justice was regarded in those 
 times, not as a sacred duty, but as a patrimonial inheritance. 
 Like property of every other kind, it was considered by the 
 owner as a legitimate means of personal gratification. No 
 two ideas were ever more absurdly or more perniciously as- 
 sociated. 
 
 Thirdly. When the legistes employed their subtlety to 
 
THE MONARCHICAL SYSTEM OP FRANCE. 227 
 
 usurp the functions and to improve the system of the feudal 
 judges, they introduced into their courts all the arbitrary max- 
 ims which they had learned from, the imperial and canonical 
 codes. They rendered the administration of the law more 
 scientific indeed, but they also rendered the law itself more 
 subservient to the absolute powers of the crown. 
 
 Fourthly. When the king at length interposed to supply 
 the defects of the feudal judicatures, by the appointment of 
 prevots and baillis, he still united, in the persons of the higher 
 of those officers the baillis the judicial, military, and polit- 
 ical functions. In proportion as they were effective lieuten- 
 ants of their sovereign, they were partial and inefficient "dis- 
 pensers of justice to the people. But, 
 
 Fifthly. The substitution of stipendiary and permanent as- 
 sessors for the ancient peers or jurors, in the tribunals of the 
 prevots and baillis, still more effectually deprived those tri- 
 bunals of all sympathy with the people at large, and of every 
 tendency to nourish or vindicate popular or constitutional priv- 
 ileges. 
 
 Sixthly. The Parliament of Paris had, from its birth, an 
 indestructible bias toward arbitrary power, because, as I have 
 shown, it was originally identical with the council, which it- 
 self was the passive and helpless instrument of that power. 
 
 Seventhly. When the judicial authority of the Parliament 
 had passed from the grandees to the legistes, the.legistes held 
 it, not in virtue of any unequivocal right, which was openly 
 acknowledged, but in virtue of a silent usurpation, which was 
 studiously concealed. Like all other usurpers, the legal coun- 
 selors of the Parliament were timid innovators. They imi- 
 tated the spirit and habits of their predecessors, because they 
 desired to be confounded with them. They countenanced the 
 assumption of legislative power by St. Louis and his success- 
 ors, gladly rendering their aid to the monarchical authority, 
 on which the maintenance of their own was entirely depend- 
 ent. There was, at all times, this kind of tacit compact be- 
 tween the kings and the Parliaments of France, at the expense 
 of the rights and franchises of the French people. 
 
 Eighthly. The multiplication and dispersion of the Parlia- 
 ments enfeebled the magistracy by dividing it. They never 
 formed a single body, compact, unanimous, and Jnvincible, 
 
228 THE INFLUENCE OP THE JUDICIAL, ETC 
 
 like the twelve judges of England, when meeting on four 
 terms in each year beneath the same venerable roof of the hall 
 at Westminster. 
 
 Ninthly. The judicial office became, in the persons of the 
 parliamentary counselors, not only a property for life, but a 
 property acquired by purchase. They therefore considered 
 themselves on the bench as guardians of their own personal 
 rights, and not exclusively as trustees and protectors of the 
 rights of society at large. 
 
 Tenthly. The hereditary tenure of their office afterward 
 converted them into a company, which stood aloof from all 
 other Frenchmen. They formed, not a profession, but a caste 
 They became a distinct noblesse. They were exempted from 
 all the fiscal burdens of the great body of the people. Their 
 sympathies were, therefore, not with the people, but against 
 them ; not in favor of constitutional privileges, but of aristo- 
 cratic rights, and of the rights of the king, as the source and 
 shelter of their own aristocracy. 
 
 Eleventhly. The political character of the Parliament made 
 them continually oscillate between the sycophancy of royal 
 power and the flattery of plebeian turbulence. "Whoever has 
 read the Memoirs of De Retz is aware that, in that great cri- 
 sis of their history, the Parliament were nothing better than 
 the blind tools of the selfish nobles and mercenary dema- 
 gogues, at whose bidding they waged war with the court and 
 with Mazarin. 
 
 Finally. Among the judges of the Parliament of Paris were, 
 at all times, many of the best, the wisest, and the greatest men 
 who had ever acted on the theatre of public affairs in France. 
 They acted, however, on too wide a theatre. They appeared 
 there in characters so numerous, incompatible, and even dis- 
 cordant, that the weight of their judicial authority was over- 
 balanced by the weight of their other functions. They could 
 not have fought successfully the battles of the Constitution of 
 the realm and of the franchises of the people, even had such 
 been their wish, because they were at every moment compel- 
 led to defend their own very questionable pretensions. Nor, 
 if success in such a contest had been probable, would they have 
 really wished to engage in it. The aristocracy of the robe had 
 no alliance with any democracy of the jury-box, and had no 
 
INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS, ETC. 229 
 
 tendency either to promote or to defend democratic claims, in 
 the triumph of which their own overthrow was evidently and 
 unavoidably involved. 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS ON THE MONARCHY OF 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 THAT England is indebted for the growth and maintenance 
 of her constitutional liberties to none of her sons so much as 
 to her privileged classes, noble and sacerdotal, is an opinion 
 which, for the present, I must be satisfied to announce dog- 
 matically, hoping that I shall hereafter find a convenient oc- 
 casion for establishing it on solid and indisputable grounds. 
 In the mean time, I pass on to the inquiry which lies more 
 directly in my path the inquiry, How far the influence of the 
 corresponding bodies in France contributed to subvert the 
 Feudal Aristocracy, and why it was ineffectual to prevent the 
 usurpation by the French Monarchs of an absolute and unlim- 
 ited power ? 
 
 As early as the Feudal Age, society in France was divided 
 into the two classes of the Noblesse and the E-oturiers. To 
 the first of those classes belonged every tenant of a fief on 
 military service. To the second of them belonged every free 
 tenant of land on services exigible either in money or in kind. 
 
 Within his fief every noble enjoyed, to a greater or a less 
 extent, a sovereign authority; that is, he could make war, 
 levy troops, raise taxes, coin money, and dispense justice ; 
 although, in the exercise of those powers, he was more or less 
 amenable to the dominion, and subject to the control of the 
 king as suzerain of the whole realm. 
 
 This sovereign authority was, however, enjoyed in the high- 
 est degree by those nobles only who bore the title of peers of 
 France ; and that pre-eminent dignity, as we formerly saw, 
 was first created by Louis VII. As in our days history is con- 
 verted into romance, so in those days romance was converted 
 into history. As the legend of Turpin (of which the arch- 
 bishop of that name enjoys the unmerited credit) had sur- 
 
230 THE INFL,UEi\CE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 rounded the "board of King Arthur with twelve knights, ana 
 the throne of Charlemagne with twelve paladins, so Louis YIL, 
 oelieving, or affecting to believe those traditions, summoned 
 to his Parliament twelve counselors, each of whom was an im- 
 mediate vassal of the crown, and the holder of a fief lying 
 beyond the precincts of the royal domain. On these counsel- 
 ors he conferred the high designation of peers of France. Six 
 of them were ecclesiastics, the occupants for the time "being 
 of the archbishoprics of Rheims and of Sens, and of the bish- 
 oprics of Beauvais, of Meaux, of Noyon, and of Langres. The 
 six original lay peers were the Dukes of Normandy, of Bur- 
 gundy, and of Gruienne, and the Counts of Flanders, of Yer- 
 mandois, and of Toulouse. These great feudatories differed 
 little, if at all, from independent princes. They acknowledged 
 indeed, in theory, their obligation to render services to their 
 king as their liege lord. But they seldom, if ever, fulfilled it 
 in fact. Especially, they were unaccustomed to perform the 
 duty of attending at his feudal court or Parliament. A mem- 
 orable occasion, however, arose, on which Philippe Auguste 
 required, and obtained their assistance at that tribunal. It 
 .was on the trial of one of their own number, John, duke of 
 Normandy and king of England, for the murder of his nephew 
 Arthur. "When that precedent had been once established, it 
 was frequently followed. Sometimes the peers of France were 
 convened by the king to act judicially. Sometimes they met 
 at his summons, to concert with him, and with his other great 
 feudatories, such legislative or administrative measures as 
 were designed to take effect throughout the whole kingdom. 
 The laws made, or the resolves adopted at such meetings were, 
 in fact, conventions between the Peers, the Barons, and their 
 Suzerain, and were executed by them in their several fiefs, 
 not in obedience to the king's command, but in pursuance of 
 their own compacts with him. 
 
 There was, however, one fatal obstacle to the permanency 
 of this institution. It consisted in the continually increasing 
 probability of the annexation to the crown, either by conquest 
 or by cession, of the lay fiefs, to which the dignity of the peer- 
 age was attached. As often as such an event might happen, 
 the fief would lose its separate existence, and become absorbed 
 into the ever-widening limits of the royal domain ; while the 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 231 
 
 peerages themselves would either become extinct cr Would re- 
 vert to the sovereign as the author of them. 
 
 In the reign of Philippe Auguste and of his successors, these 
 events did actually occur. But, in their desire to perpetuate 
 the peerage of France, those kings, as often as any such 
 princely fief was added to their domain, annexed that dignity 
 to the possession of other fiefs. Thus, for example, the duch- 
 ies of Anjou and Bretagne and the county of Artois were ele- 
 vated to this rank by Philippe le Bel. But the substitution 
 was a nominal, not a real equivalent ; for, in the days of Phil- 
 ippe le Bel, Anjou, Bretagne, and Artois were no longer inde- 
 pendent feudal principalities. Each of them was, at that time, 
 holden as an apanage by a near relative of the reigning mon- 
 arch. The three new peers, therefore, owed to the king, as the 
 head of their family, a subjection which the Dukes of Nor- 
 mandy, of Burgundy, and of Guienne would never have avowed, 
 and an obedience which they would never have rendered. 
 This first encroachment on the real powers of the peerage was 
 quickly followed by others. Thus the number of the lay peers 
 was first augmented from six to seven. Then it became cus- 
 tomary to attach this honor to every new apanage which was 
 created in favor of any other prince of the blood royal. At a 
 later time it was bestowed, like an order of chivalry, on for- 
 eign sovereigns ; as, for example, on the King of Scotland and 
 the Duke of Cleves. Afterward, nobles of comparatively low 
 degree, holding fiefs within the royal domain, were admitted 
 to this high titular rank. At last it degenerated into a species 
 of honorary distinction, which the crown conferred sometimes 
 as appurtenant to certain lands, and sometimes as attaching 
 merely to the person of the grantee during his life. 
 
 By these methods the peerage of France descended from the 
 rank of a power in the state balancing the power of the crown, 
 until it had become little or nothing more than an embellish- 
 ment of some illustrious families, or a mere badge of royal fa- 
 vor and of courtly etiquette. 
 
 Next in the aristocratic hierarchy to the peers of France, 
 but next with a long interval, were the peers of the royal 
 domain. They also were the immediate vassals of the king 
 on military tenures, but they were his vassals, not as king of 
 the realm, but as duke of the duchy of France. Subordinate 
 
232 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 to these, and of much lower degree, were the throng of seign 
 eurs, distinguished from each other by countless gradations of 
 rank and inequalities of power, the result either of the com- 
 parative importance of their fiefs, or of the different conditions 
 on which those fiefs had originally been granted. As early as 
 the thirteenth century, the policy of assailing and crushing 
 this seignorial phalanx had passed into a traditional maxim 
 of the Capetian monarchs. How, under the guidance of that 
 maxim, those monarchs prohibited private wars and trial by 
 battle, and established communes or bourgeoisies, I attempted 
 to explain in two former lectures. Philippe Auguste pursued 
 the same design by abolishing the Droit de Parage ; that is, 
 by acknowledging none but the eldest of the sons of a deceased 
 seigneur as an immediate vassal of the crown, in respect of 
 any part of the paternal seigneurie. Philippe le Bel aimed a 
 still deadlier blow at their power, by depriving all future 
 grantees of heritable lands of the three chief feudal rights ; 
 that is, of the haute justice, of the power of sub-infeudation, 
 and of the right of ecclesiastical patronage. But the fatal 
 wound was inflicted by Louis XI. To him is chiefly due the 
 praise, or the reproach, of having made the noble separable 
 from the seignorial rank. Precedents were not, indeed, alto- 
 gether wanting to justify that innovation. But he first grant- 
 ed patents of nobility, not only to roturiers of low degree and 
 of base callings, but even to whole classes of men. Charles 
 IX. improved on this example. He sold such patents by the 
 score. Henry III. advanced farther still. He brought to 
 market not less than 1000 of them in the single year 1576. 
 In a nobler spirit, as became him, but with results not dis- 
 similar, Richelieu offered nobility as an inducement to men of 
 wealth to establish commercial companies, and to embark in 
 other expensive and hazardous public undertakings. 
 
 Thus the same fate befell both the peers of France and the 
 seigneurs of France. The honors of each of those bodies first 
 became the subject of royal patronage, and then were multi- 
 plied so profusely as to lose all their essential value. The 
 greater and the smaller feudatories had alike, in earlier times, 
 been the possessors of well-ascertained rights, and the deposit- 
 ories of formidable powers. From age to age they had ineffect- 
 ually resisted and deplored the decline and fall of those ancient 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 233 
 
 prerogatives, until at length the time arrived when the order 
 of nobility itself was debased into a subject of court favor 
 and of mercenary patronage. 
 
 Yet, even in the midst of that debasement, nobility was 
 something more than a mere titular distinction. Some sub- 
 stantial, or, at least, some highly-valued privileges, adhered to 
 it. Thus every noble was exempt from all ordinary taxes. 
 He had the rights of the chase, from which all ignoble persons 
 were excluded. Special laws were occasionally made to ena- 
 ble the nobles to redeem their forfeited mortgages, or to repur- 
 chase lands which had been sold for the payment of their debts. 
 The law of succession to tfre estate of a deceased ancestor was 
 more indulgent to the claims of a noble than of an ignoble heir. 
 In favor of the noblesse, many ecclesiastical benefices, many 
 military commissions, and some public offices, were closed 
 against all other candidates. And, finally, a certain part of 
 the royal revenue was appropriated to the payment of pensions, 
 in which the nobles alone participated. 
 
 It is, however, almost superfluous to say that such advan- 
 tages as these were the source, not of strength, but of weak- 
 ness. The possessors of them occupied the invidious position 
 of burdens to the rest of society ; nor did they relieve that 
 odium by any important contributions to the public service. 
 Under Richelieu, Mazarin, and the personal administration of 
 Louis XIV., the nobles were, indeed, almost entirely excluded 
 from any share in the conduct of public affairs ; and though 
 lavish of their blood in the field, they seldom won, even there, 
 any other praise than that of heroic gallantry. Neither had 
 they the power which every great body in the commonwealth 
 derives from the unity and consolidation of its various mem- 
 bers. The Noblesse, in the seventeenth century, was com- 
 posed of many different and discordant elements of nobles by 
 birth of nobles by patent of nobles by office and of nobles 
 by franc-fief, that is, by the possession of certain lands to 
 which that rank was inseparably annexed. These various 
 sections of the patrician order, though possessing the same 
 dignity and the same privileges, had nothing else in common, 
 but regarded each other with a jealousy as acrimonious a& 
 tha t with which they were all regarded by the plebeian classes 
 of society. I know not that a more curious and impressive. 
 
234 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 proof could be given of the diminished importance of the most 
 ancient hereditary seigneurs in the reign of Louis XIV., than 
 has been recently drawn by M. Dareste de la Chavanne from 
 the arguments by which, at that time, they vindicated their 
 ancestral claims to privilege and to honors. As that learned 
 author has pointed out, De la Hoque, their historian and apol- 
 ogist, resorted to various authorities to show that Adam was 
 the tenant of the world itself, as a fief holden by him as the 
 immediate vassal of the Creator ; and that the later feudatories 
 were but so many holders of arriere fiefs, derived by sub-in- 
 feudation from that primaeval title. St. Simon, and even Bos- 
 suet, appear to have lent their countenance to the kindred 
 opinion that the feudal rights were not a human, but a divine 
 institution. When, relying no longer on their swords and their 
 military retainers, the seigneurs rested their claims on such 
 doctrines as these, it was evident that their strength had de- 
 parted. When, virtually acknowledging themselves to owe to 
 the nation at large a defense of their privileges, they could 
 acquit themselves of that obligation by no better arguments 
 than were thus supplied by these zealous advocates, it was 
 clear that their days were numbered. 
 
 I have purposely compressed into the narrowest possible 
 compass the statements I have to make in explanation of the 
 impotence of the French Noblesse to prevent the usurpation by 
 the house of Bourbon of an absolute and unlimited power, 
 that I might leave myself the more space for explaining why 
 the sacerdotal order was equally powerless. 
 
 The G-allican Church, in the earlier feudal times, enjoyed a 
 large measure of independence, which may be considered, first, 
 as internal ; secondly, as judicial ; and, thirdly, as financial. 
 
 Her internal independence, or self-government, consisted, 
 first, in the free capitular elections of her bishops and other 
 great dignitaries ; secondly, in her national synods, which met, 
 deliberated, resolved, and promulgated their resolutions, with- 
 out receiving or soliciting any royal or papal sanction ; and, 
 thirdly, in the control which she more or less directly exer- 
 cised over all the secular powers of the kingdom. While every 
 other influence was tending to resolve France into an incohe- 
 rent assemblage of hostile states, the Church was the centre 
 and the cementing principle of the national unity While 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 235 
 
 violence, oppression, and wrong held an otherwise undisputed 
 dominion over the land, it was from that sacred shrine that 
 order and justice proceeded on their mission of mercy to man- 
 kind. 
 
 Secondly. The judicial independence of the ancient Gral- 
 lican Church was attested by the nature and the extent of 
 her jurisdiction. No clerk in holy orders was amenable to any 
 courts but hers, except when charged with capital offenses. 
 Those courts had also an extensive cognizance of all cases of 
 heresy and usury, and of all matrimonial and testamentary 
 suits 1 . To give effect to their sentences, the secular arm was 
 always at their bidding. * 
 
 Thirdly. The financial independence of the Church of 
 France in the Feudal Age rested on the ancient and then well- 
 established doctrine that spiritual persons were not liable to 
 pay tribute for the support of any of the civil governments or 
 potentates of the world. Whatever they gave toward the ex- 
 igencies of the king, was in form at all times, and in reality 
 at that time, a free and voluntary donation. 
 
 But, notwithstanding this internal, judicial, and financial 
 independence, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy were in many re- 
 spects dependent on the Feudal Hierarchy. Six of the French 
 prelates were (as we have already seen) peers of France, en- 
 joying within their respective fiefs the same powers as the lay 
 peers, and the same secular titles of dukes or counts. The 
 temporalities of fourteen other sees were also holden of the 
 crown, either as immediate or as arriere fiefs. Many bishops, 
 abbots, and other dignitaries held their endowments as vassals 
 of feudal lords, and most of them bore the relation of lords to 
 vassals of their own. 
 
 From this intimate connection of the churchmen with the 
 feudal tenures of that age, resulted many restraints upon her 
 freedom of action. First, as a relief was due to the seigneur 
 on the accession of a new tenant to every lay fief, so, on the 
 election of every bishop or other ecclesiastical feudatory, the 
 seigneur was entitled to a corresponding payment, which was 
 called a regale. Secondly, as often as an ecclesiastical corpo- 
 ration, sole or aggregate, acquired any lands in perpetuity, the 
 jord was prejudiced by the loss of those payments, which, if 
 the land had remained in the possession of lay men. would 
 
236 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 have accrued to him on the deaths or alienations of the ten- 
 ants. For this loss he was entitled to a compensation, which 
 was called the Droit d'Amortissement. Thirdly, the freedom 
 of canonical elections was not a little restrained by what were 
 called " recommendations ;" that is, suggestions addressed "by 
 the seigneur suzerain to his ecclesiastical vassals, of the names 
 of persons whom he wished to have preferred to vacant bene- 
 fices. Fourthly, in some cases this seignorial patronage was 
 openly asserted by the lord, and admitted by his clerical vas- 
 sals, as an absolute right ; as when an abbey, or prebend, or 
 chapelry had been founded, and endowed by the lord or by^his 
 ancestor. But, fifthly, it was chiefly in their character of pro- 
 tectors of the Church that the feudal seigneurs subjected it 
 to a vexatious and oppressive control ; for, as no churchman 
 might either make war, or administer justice in capital cases 
 in his own person, these indispensable offices were performed 
 on his behalf, either by the suzerain of his fief, who was then 
 called his Avoue, or by some powerful chief in the neighbor- 
 hood of his church or abbey, who was then called its Yidame. 
 For this service the Avoue or Vidame sometimes extorted a 
 recompense in the form of a territorial cession, and sometimes 
 he inflicted on his clients wrongs as grievous as those which 
 he had undertaken to avert. 
 
 But from these burdens the Church was at length emanci- 
 pated, if indeed that term can with any propriety be applied 
 to the forcible substitution of the royal for the feudal tyranny. 
 It was a gradual and a tardy change, of which the foundations 
 were first laid by Philippe Auguste. From all churchmen 
 holding fiefs, or (as I understand the case) arriere fiefs, on 
 military tenures, he exacted a pecuniary composition for those 
 services in the field which they were unable to render in per- 
 son. His successors gradually substituted the crown as the 
 universal protector of churches and monasteries, in lieu of the 
 avoues and vidames who had formerly sustained that office. 
 From that usurpation the elastic logic of arbitrary power drew 
 many momentous inferences. First, it was held that the price 
 of the protection received by these ecclesiastical bodies was 
 due to him who actually rendered it, and to him alone. Con- 
 sequently, the tribute which, under the name of mundium, had 
 been formerly paid to the seignorial avoues and vidames, was 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF PRANCE. 237 
 
 lost to the seigneurs and acquired by the king. Next, it waa 
 inferred that the regale, or relief exigible on the election of 
 every bishop or abbot, was payable, not to the immediate lord, 
 but to the royal protector of the episcopal or abbatial fief. 
 Then the droit d* amortissement followed the new destination 
 of the mundum and the regale. And, finally, this series of 
 encroachments was completed by Louis XL, who transferred 
 from the courts of his feudatories to his own royal courts the 
 cognizance of all questions relating to the patronage of eccle- 
 siastical benefices. Thus, step by step, the Gallican Church 
 had, at the end of the fifteenth century, been extricated from 
 her former dependence on the Feudal Hierarchy. 
 
 But the Popes had not been indifferent or inactive witnesses 
 of these innovations. The genius of Hildebrand, the persever- 
 ance of his early successors, and the energy of Innocent III., 
 were unintermittingly exerted to render Rome the seat and 
 centre of a dominion more extensive and formidable than the 
 empire which Julius had established, or than that which Tra- 
 jan had administered. It was the object of their meditations 
 by day, and of their visions by night, to destroy the freedom 
 of canonical elections, to transfer to the Holy See the patron- 
 age of all the benefices of Christendom, and to centralize at 
 the Vatican the judicial and financial administration of the 
 whole ecclesiastical commonwealth. In this great enterprise, 
 the Papal monarchy triumphed for a while over the French 
 monarchy, as the French monarchs had before triumphed over 
 the Feudal oligarchy. The Grallican Church became, though 
 for a short season, subject to the almost absolute sway of the 
 Church of Rome. And yet the fruits of the conquest were 
 not eventually to be gathered in by the conquerors. The 
 freedom (internal, judicial, and financial) of the Church of 
 France was the prey of the Popes and of the French kings in 
 turn ; but the spoil remained at last in the grasp, not of the 
 pontifical, but of the royal invader. The history of those rev- 
 olutions may be traced in the collection of the ordinances 
 promulgated under the Capetian dynasty. The time at my 
 disposal will not allow me to advert to them, except so far as 
 may be necessary to show how the kings of France encroached, 
 first, on the internal independence ; secondly, on the judicial 
 franchises ; and thirdly, on the financial liberties of the Gral- 
 lican Church. 
 
238 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 First, therefore, I will attempt (however briefly) to indicate 
 what were the encroachments of the French kings on . the in- 
 ternal independence of the Church of France. 
 
 "When Bossuet proposed, and the French clergy adopted the 
 declaration that the Pope had no authority, direct or indirect, 
 in temporal matters, they seemed to be laying down a rule ; 
 but they were, in fact, only raising the question, which is sug- 
 gested by every enactment of those ordinances on ecclesiastical 
 subjects, What is the distinction between things temporal and 
 things spiritual ? It is a distinction which can never be ac- 
 curately drawn in words, for the simple reason that it has no 
 such accurate existence in fact. No human interest is exclu- 
 sively temporal, and none is exclusively spiritual. The holy 
 and the profane states have many provinces in common, and 
 have no provinces which are not intermixed or conterminous. 
 What the Author of our existence has thus joined together, 
 man can not put asunder. In simple times and remote ages, 
 he did not even make the attempt. The priestly and the king- 
 ly office were then the same. The Imperator was also the 
 Pontifex Maximus. In teaching that the Church and the 
 State are properly convertible terms, Mr. Coleridge and Dr. 
 Arnold announced no new discovery, but merely recorded or 
 revived an ancient tradition. 
 
 In the Christian world, however, the administration of the 
 Ecclesiastical and the Civil governments ever has been, and 
 must ever remain, in different hands ; and each of those two 
 powers has ever exhibited, and will, perhaps, never cease to 
 exhibit, the propensity to enlarge, at the expense of the other, 
 the indefinite limits of its own appropriate dominion. And thus 
 the history of France is a record of the efforts made, not less 
 by the worthiest than by the least worthy of her kings, to sub- 
 stitute the royal will for the internal freedom which belonged 
 to the Church of their realms, as a part of her ancient and sa- 
 cred inheritance. 
 
 Of all those princes, St. Louis was the most upright and sin- 
 cere. But if he had been the most crafty, he would scarcely 
 have expunged a word from his Pragmatic Sanction. It de- 
 clared the right of every chapter, cathedral or abbatial, freely 
 to elect its own head and dignitaries, and the right of each 
 patron freely to collate to his own benefices. Nothing could 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 239 
 
 be more just and liberal ; nothing could more directly oppose 
 the pretensions of the court of Rome ; but nothing, it must 
 be added, could more effectually countenance the royal claims 
 of the pious legislator himself. Thenceforward, indeed, no 
 papal missives could direct how a vacant see or abbey should 
 be filled. But the seigneur's right or habit of addressing to a 
 chapter recommendations of some favored candidate survived 
 the Pragmatic Sanction of St. Louis. Now such was, at that 
 time, the number of the seigneuries absorbed in the royal do- 
 main, and such was the increase of the royal authority over 
 the seigneurs whose fiefs ]#y beyond it, that the edict which, 
 in appearance, restored the seignorial influence in elections and 
 collations, did in reality but enlarge the influence over them 
 of the royal legislator himself. 
 
 After the death of St. Louis arrived those periods in which 
 the judicial blindness of the successors of St. Peter prepared 
 the way for the great Reformation. That worldly wisdom, of 
 which they so justly boast, never failed them more than when 
 they transferred the apostolic chair from Rome to Avignon. 
 During their long exile from the banks of the Tiber to those 
 of the Rhone, the Popes yielded to the French kings a submis- 
 sion almost as absolute as that which is rendered to the Turk- 
 ish emperor by the Patriarch of Constantinople. In that pe- 
 riod the captive pontiffs were ^sometimes overawed and some- 
 times seduced into recognizing the royal right of presentation 
 to almost all the benefices of France not belonging to private 
 patrons. 
 
 The same papal infatuation next exhibited itself in the great 
 Schism. At that time, and by a skillful use of the authority 
 which that schism conferred on them, the French monarchs 
 made other conquests over the enfeebled Papacy. Then it was 
 that the Popes admitted the right of the secular courts to ad- 
 judicate on questions relating to benefices and capitular elec- 
 tions ; and then, also, was obtained by the kings of France 
 the yet more important advantage of being left in the exclu- 
 sive possession of the right, or, at least, of the power to convoke 
 synods of the national clergy. It is difficult or impossible to 
 say when that right was first asserted by them, but it is well 
 ascertained that, from the time of the great Schism, they in- 
 variably and successfully maintained it. 
 
240 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 The next great occurrences in the history of the Church oi 
 Rome are the Councils of Constance and of Basle. Under the 
 shelter of their C is- Alpine decrees, and under the guidance of 
 John Grerson, whom most of the fathers at Constance had re- 
 vered as their leader, Charles VII. promulgated the Pragmatic 
 Sanction of Bourges. It provided for the freedom of canonical 
 elections ; that is, for their freedom, not from royal, but from 
 papal interference. It forbade the acceptance of any bulls on 
 that subject, or on the subject of the collation to benefices. 
 It excluded all aliens from ecclesiastical preferments in France ; 
 and it authorized an appeal from any future decisions of the 
 court of Rome to the next oecumenical council. 
 
 To these provisions of the edict of Charles VII. was given 
 the much boasted, though very equivocal title of the liberties 
 of the Grallican Church. But to the son and successor of 
 Charles no liberties were welcome, nor any advantages of much 
 account, unless they were acquired by guile, and supported by 
 the mysterious policy in which he delighted and excelled. 
 
 Louis XL, therefore, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction of 
 Bourges, and seemed, at least, to abandon every position which 
 had been taken by his father against the encroachments of the 
 Roman pontiffs. And yet, in reality, he stipulated for, and 
 obtained the enjoyment of powers hardly less extensive than 
 those which he so renounced. No ingenuity will now, per- 
 haps, be sufficient to unravel the intricate web of his nego- 
 tiations on this subject. The most probable explanation of 
 them is, that Louis acted in this, as on most other affairs, un- 
 der the guidance of his two master passions his superstitious 
 dread of the powers of the world to come, and his insatiable 
 thirst for aggrandizement in this world of shadows. At once 
 to propitiate and to outwit the bearer of the keys of Paradise 
 was precisely the kind of success which would have been most 
 grateful to that astute and circuitous understanding. 
 
 Be this as it may, his two immediate successors seem to 
 have labored, long and fruitlessly, to discover what were the 
 rights and what were the powers which he had transmitted 
 to them for the internal government of the Church of France. 
 In the reign of Francis L, however, every such doubt was 
 effectually dispelled. His concordat with Leo X. was nothing 
 less than the immolation of the liberties of the Gallican 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 241 
 
 Church to the interests of her temporal and spiritual sover- 
 eigns. On the one hand, the kings of France, since the coun- 
 cils of Constance and of Basle, had maintained the superiority 
 of such councils to the Pope, and had asserted their own right 
 to demand periodical convocations of them. These claims 
 Francis abandoned to Leo. On the other hand, the Popes had 
 perseveringly asserted, at least in words, an indefeasible right 
 to nominate bishops to every vacant see, and to appoint to ev- 
 ery other ecclesiastical dignity. This right Leo abandoned ic 
 Francis, reserving to the court of Rome nothing more than a 
 formal and ineffectual veto on the royal nominations. From 
 that time forward the superior clergy of France, ceasing to be 
 either elective, or feudal, or pontifical, became exclusively 
 monarchical. To the present hour the concordat of Francis I. 
 continues to form the basis of the relations between the Pa- 
 pacy and the French government. The heads of that govern- 
 ment, whether royal, imperial, or republican, have ever since 
 bestowed on their friends those sacred offices which, under the 
 two first dynasties, and under the early Capetian princes, 
 were the rewards of a real or a supposed pre-eminence in piety 
 and learning. 
 
 "We may, I think, condemn without reserve the selfish poli- 
 cy which thus despoiled the Grallican Church of her freedom 
 of holding national synods, of electing ecclesiastical dignita- 
 ries, and of collating to vacant benefices. But the farther 
 encroachments on her liberties admit of much more apology, 
 if not, indeed, of a con-elusive defense. The most considerable 
 of them is that great innovation which interposed the crown 
 as the necessary channel of intercourse between the Pope and 
 the whole ecclesiastical body of France. When Boniface VIII. 
 promulgated a bull requiring the attendance of the French 
 prelates at Rome, Philippe le Bel answered by an edict for- 
 bidding them to go beyond the limits of his own dominions. 
 From that time it became, first, a favorite opinion, and after- 
 ward an absolute and fundamental maxim of the French ju- 
 rists, that no pontifical bull or brief, or other mandate, was 
 binding on any Frenchman unless it had been, nor until it had 
 been, expressly ratified by the King of France. Among the 
 many proofs which the collection of royal edicts might supply 
 of the general acceptance of this doctrine, I confine myself to 
 
 Q, 
 
242 THE INFLUENCE -F THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 those which were enacted by the evasive and superstitious 
 Louis XI. Subservient as he was to the Papal court, he yet 
 appointed a commissioner to ascertain, by the inspection of all 
 documents which might be received from Rome in the diocese 
 of Amiens, whether they were, in any respect, repugnant to 
 the laws of the realm. He forbade any papal legate to exer- 
 cise within the kingdom any powers to which his own sanc- 
 tion had not been first given. And he proclaimed the actual 
 nullity within France of every adjudication of the court of 
 Rome, even on subjects within their admitted competency, 
 unless such judgments had been inspected by himself, and con- 
 firmed by his own authority. At a later period, when Julius 
 II. made his extravagant declaration of war against Louis XII., 
 and enlisted the whole clergy of France in the cause and quar- 
 rel of their temporal sovereign, this principle of law grew into 
 a popular passion. Such, indeed, was the strength of that 
 passion, that Francis I., heedless as he was of the ecclesiastical 
 rights of his people, found it necessary to stipulate, in his con- 
 cordat with Leo, for the continuance of this royal veto on the 
 enforcement of any papal bull or brief within his dominions. 
 
 Most Protestants will applaud, and but few Roman Catho- 
 lics will strongly condemn, this interposition of the crown be- 
 tween the Papacy and the National Church of France. Yet it 
 was an infringement of her internal liberties which could be 
 justified only by the preceding unjustifiable invasions of them. 
 Had she been permitted to retain her ancient rights of episco- 
 pal elections, and of convoking independent synods, she would 
 have had the means, and would scarcely have wanted the will, 
 to oppose to every usurping rescript from Rome a resistance 
 quite as effectual as that of the royal veto, and far more con- 
 stitutional. The kings of France, having despoiled the Gral- 
 lican Church of her powers of self-defense, found in her de- 
 fenseless state the apology for intercepting her intercourse with 
 the pontiff whom they, as well as she, acknowledged to be her 
 spiritual head on earth. The one anomaly begat the other ; 
 but injustice does not cease to be injustice because a preceding 
 wrong has rendered it convenient or inevitable. When reduced 
 to the dilemma of an absolute servitude to her ecclesiastical 
 monarch, or of an increased servitude to her temporal monarch, 
 the G-allican Church wisely preferred or acquiesced in the lat- 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OP FRANCE. 243 
 
 ter as the lighter evil of the two. But to have reduced her to 
 that dilemma, or to have retained her in it, was not, on that 
 account, the less an unrighteous usurpation. 
 
 Such having been the encroachments made by the kings of 
 France on the internal independence of the Grallican Church, 
 I pass, secondly, to the consideration of the encroachments 
 which they made on her judicial franchises. 
 
 The jurisdiction of the French ecclesiastical courts was 
 originally of great extent. In addition to the powers which I 
 have already mentioned, they had cognizance of almost all 
 cases under the plea of what was called connexite ; that is, if 
 a suitor complained, not only that his rights were infringed, 
 but that, in the infringement of them, his adversary had been 
 guilty of sin, the spiritual tribunal became entitled, by reason 
 of that alleged connection of the violation of the divine and of 
 the human law, to entertain the suit ; for Innocent III. had 
 taught that, as the guardian of the law of God, the Church 
 might require every one who had offended against it to answer 
 at her bar for his transgression. 
 
 This subtlety would probably have availed little, or not at 
 all, if the ecclesiastical tribunals had not, in those times, ex- 
 celled all others in the simplicity of their procedure, in the 
 equity of their laws, and in the wisdom and impartiality of 
 their judges. In the twelfth century, and at the commence- 
 ment of the thirteenth, they therefore enjoyed the utmost pop- 
 ular favor, and continually enlarged the sphere of their juris- 
 diction. 
 
 But (as I have already observed) the judgments of the ec- 
 clesiastical courts, when affecting the persons or property of 
 the suitors, were referred to the secular arm for execution. 
 The Church had none but spiritual weapons in her own arse- 
 nal. She could excommunicate, or withhold the sacraments, 
 or refuse absolution, but she could neither fine, imprison, tor- 
 ture, or kill, proprio vigore. "When she denounced such pen- 
 alties, she was dependent on the temporal power for the en- 
 forcement of them. 
 
 But, in denouncing such penalties, the Church transgressed 
 the limits of her own high and holy office, and of that trans- 
 gression she received the appropriate recompense. When some 
 of the bishops of St. Louis applied to him to carry into effect 
 
244 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 punishments which they had denounced against certain wrong- 
 doers, his wise and equitable answer was, that he could not 
 confirm any sentence, and so make himself responsible for it, 
 until he had first satisfied himself of its justice. Thus, by in- 
 voking the aid of the arm of flesh, the spiritual courts afford- 
 ed to the royal judges not merely a pretext, but a justifica- 
 tion, for reviewing their decisions in spiritual matters. By 
 encroaching on the province of the secular tribunals, they en- 
 abled those tribunals to make an irresistible encroachment 
 upon their own appropriate sphere of action. 
 
 In the following century, the right of the prevots and baillis 
 of France to correct or reverse the sentences of the bishops or 
 their vicars was much agitated ; and, to resolve it, Philippe 
 de Yalois convened a mixed assembly of municipal lawyers 
 and of canonists. They decided that the king's judges had no 
 right to entertain an appeal from any sentence of an ecclesi- 
 astical court, but that, if any such court should abuse the 
 powers with which it was invested, or usurp powers not prop- 
 erly belonging to it, those judges might prevent or correct any 
 such abuse. In technical language, they declared that the 
 prevots and baillis were competent to receive les appels comme 
 cPabus. In fact, they laid down a rule exactly corresponding 
 with that which is at this day observed in Westminster Hall. 
 
 Thus the episcopal courts ceased to be sovereign, that is, to 
 be exempt from the supervision or control of any other tribu- 
 nal. But a more serious loss of power awaited them. "When 
 the royal judges introduced into their courts the reforms to 
 which I adverted in a former lecture, the ecclesiastical courts 
 fell into comparative disesteem. In France, as in England, 
 the conflict of jurisdictions between the two was active, and 
 even violent ; but there, as here, popularity and success at- 
 tended on the secular judges. In the fourteenth century, the 
 sages of the French law exhausted much of their time and 
 learning in the attempt to define the limits between the re- 
 spective provinces of the royal and episcopal tribunals. There 
 is said to be a book, called Le Songe du Verger, held in high 
 esteem by the curious in bibliography, in which a clergyman 
 and a knight are made to debate that arduous problem in the 
 presence of Charles Y. But the debate must have been either 
 imaginary or ineffectual, for it was not until the year 1539 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF PRANCE. 245 
 
 that any positive law was made for the determination of it. 
 An ordinance of that year confined the competence of the spir- 
 itual judges to questions exclusively spiritual, and to cases in 
 which personal actions might he "brought against clerks in 
 holy orders. 
 
 The result of a comparison of the judicial liberties of the 
 Church of France as they existed in the twelfth and in the 
 sixteenth centuries will, therefore, he to show that, during that 
 interval, they had declined to such an extent as very greatly 
 to impair the ancient influence and authority of the Church 
 in temporal matters. Even admitting the consequence to have 
 been unfortunate, the means by which it was accomplished 
 were, I think, evidently wise and justifiable. 
 
 It remains, thirdly, to inquire, in what manner the finan- 
 cial liberties of the Grallican Church were, during the same 
 period, invaded by the royal power ; and the result of that in- 
 quiry will be to show that, in this respect also, her losses, 
 though veiled under certain decorous forms and apologies, 
 were very considerable in substance. 
 
 Ecclesiastical persons and property in France were original- 
 ly exempt from all imposts, and therefore they promised to the 
 Popes, in the commencement of the thirteenth century, a rich 
 pecuniary harvest. For that purpose, the fiscal sickle was em- 
 ployed by the court of Rome with the most assiduous dili- 
 gence. Alarmed by the demands of their spiritual sovereign, 
 the French clergy invoked the protection of their temporal 
 monarch, Louis IX. ; and, in' compliance with their entreaties, 
 he forbade, by his Pragmatic Sanction of 1268, the transmis- 
 sion of any money to Rome without his own express authority. 
 The papal extortions were for the moment repelled, but the 
 Church was then summoned to the more arduous task of pro- 
 tecting herself against her royal protectors. Though she had 
 no longer to pay Peter's pence to the pontifical treasury, she 
 was required to furnish subsidies to the Capetian exchequer. 
 
 The Pope now, in his turn, assumed the office of guard- 
 ian of the ecclesiastical possessions, but with comparative ill 
 success. When, for example, Philippe le Bel balled on the 
 clergy for money, Boniface VIII. forbade their compliance. 
 But Boniface was not a Hildebrand. Philippe compelled him 
 to retract his prohibition, or, rather, to disavow the plain 
 
246 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 and unequivocal meaning of the words in which he had an- 
 nounced it. 
 
 Thus the temporalities, of which the clergy were the indis- 
 putable proprietors, became the prize for which their spiritual 
 and their secular monarchs contended with each other. But 
 in that contest the Church found her best security. So long 
 as the two potentates continued to regard each other as hostile 
 competitors for her wealth, the one or the other of them was 
 always on her side. Her real and most urgent danger was in 
 their reconcilement. She had nothing so much to dread as 
 their friendly compromise, at her expense, of their rival pre- 
 tensions. 
 
 Such a compromise was, in fact, accomplished when the 
 apostolic chair was transferred to Avignon. Then the de- 
 pendent Popes acquiesced in the usurpation by the crown of 
 the patronage of all the sees and sacerdotal dignities of France ; 
 and then the complaisant kings consented that the Pope should 
 raise what money he needed from the inferior clergy, and es- 
 pecially that he should receive the annates, or revenues of all 
 benefices during the first year after each vacancy of any of 
 them. 
 
 Tliese mutual concessions, prompted as they were by tran- 
 sient motives, were themselves of short and uncertain contin- 
 uance. They formed the subject of ardent controversy during 
 many generations, until they were at length, in substance, rat- 
 ified and rendered permanent by the concordat between Fran- 
 cis and Leo. 
 
 But, during that controversy, the royal demands on the rev- 
 enues of the Church were never intermitted. Emboldened 
 by the feebleness of the papacy during the great Schism, the 
 French kings endeavored to bring the clerical order under the 
 same laws of taxation as at that time applied exclusively to 
 the Tiers Etat, or Roturiers. The resistance of the clergy 
 was resolute and effectual, for they were zealously supported 
 in it by the Parliament of Paris. Charles VIII. withdrew 
 from the struggle with so formidable an alliance ; and from 
 his reign may be dated the final recognition, as a fundamental 
 law of the realm, of the doctrine that no imposts could be lev- 
 ied upon the Church without the free consent of the ecclesi- 
 astical order, lawfully given in a free assembly. 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OF FRANCE. 247 
 
 That consent was, however, but seldom refused ; nor, in- 
 deed, would such a refusal have been either just or prudent, 
 for the wealth of the clergy was enormous. Such estimates 
 of it as were commonly made and accepted before the acces- 
 sion of the house of Bourbon, were too vague, and too obvi- 
 ously partial, to merit, any serious notice. But in the year 
 1639, an ecclesiastical synod adopted and sanctioned a report 
 oh the subject, called "L'Etat abrege de 1'Eglise de France," 
 which represented the gross annual revenue of all the sees, 
 parish churches, abbeys, convents, monasteries, commanderies, 
 and chapels in France as t amounting to 103,500,000 crowns, 
 and the net annual revenue as amounting to 92,000,000. 
 Great as is the authority for these figures, I confess that it is 
 not without some incredulity that I have transcribed them ; 
 for, after making a fair allowance for the different effective 
 power of money now and then, it is as if the Church of France 
 in our own days possessed an independent annual income of 
 between ten and twelve millions of pounds sterling. 
 
 Doubtless, however, her endowments in the age of Louis 
 XIV. were exceedingly great, and would have been fatal to her 
 but for three principal reasons. First, though not an enlight- 
 ened, Louis was a very zealous son of the Church, and abhor- 
 red any sacrilegious confiscation of her property. Secondly, 
 against any such confiscations she was then defended by her 
 diocesan, provincial, and national synods. In each diocese the 
 clergy elected deputies, who met at the metropolis of each prov- 
 ince, and then nominated members of a general assembly. 
 These convocations, it is true, were all convened by the king, 
 and royal commissioners represented him at the national synod. 
 But it was a free and full representation of the sacerdotal or- 
 der, and enjoyed authority and influence enough to insure the 
 respect of the other orders in the state. And, thirdly, the dan- 
 gers of plethoric wealth were averted from the Church of 
 France by the wise liberality with which she was accustomed 
 to contribute to the exigencies of the commonwealth. The 
 crown had long attempted to participate in the ecclesiastical 
 treasure by the coarse and ready methods to which arbitrary 
 power in distress so habitually resorts. At one time the re- 
 gale had been extorted from all the churches of France indis- 
 criminately. At another, royal officers had been emplr yed to 
 
248 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PRIVILEGED ORDERS 
 
 administer the revenues of vacant benefices. Then the paro- 
 chial vestries were required to submit their accounts to audit- 
 ors appointed by the king. And when such means of exaction 
 proved ineffectual, recourse was had to the terror of those doc- 
 trines on the subject of church property which the Reformers 
 had so often advocated ; so that even L'Hopital himself lent 
 the sanction of his name to the opinion that the clergy were 
 the mere trustees, and the state itself the true proprietor of 
 such endowments. But to such demands and such menaces 
 the sacerdotal order opposed sometimes well-timed remonstran- 
 ces, and sometimes judicious concessions. They controlled the 
 despotic genius of Richelieu, and overawed the rapacity of 
 Fouquet, when each of these financiers, in his turn, meditated 
 a tax which would have deprived them of the whole of their 
 emoluments during one of every four successive years. But, 
 on the other hand, they repeatedly advanced large sums, either 
 on the security of the royal revenue, or for the exoneration of 
 particular branches of it from debt to other creditors. In the 
 reign of Louis XI Y. they consented to pay, for the support of 
 his government, the ordinary decimes, that is, a tenth of the 
 annual income of each benefice ; and, in great public exigen- 
 cies, they added to that heavy income tax what were called 
 the extraordinary decimes, that is, an occasional increase of 
 the rate of it. 
 
 The Church of France has seldom, if ever, received a due 
 acknowledgment of the wisdom and patriotism which thus dis- 
 tinguished her financial relations to the crown. In the midst 
 of the pecuniary distresses of Louis XIV., she had the sagacity 
 to teach, as he had the prudence to learn, that in her loyal at- 
 tachment he had a resource more abundant, as well as more 
 secure, than he could have found in the lawless spoliation of 
 her wealth. Between her and him there therefore grew up 
 a tacit compact, that, on the one hand, she should be free to 
 retain and manage her possessions, but that, on the other hand, 
 she should relieve, with no niggard hand, the ever-recurring 
 wants of his treasury. It was a compact indefinite, indeed, 
 and much liable on his side to abuse ; but it was not, in fact, 
 1 very grossly abused. The G-allican Church in his age was (it 
 is true) compelled to contribute to the support of many costly 
 wars, of much improvidence, and of not a little profligacy and 
 
ON THE MONARCHY OP FRANCE. 249 
 
 corruption, but, by wise firmness and wise forbearance, she 
 still found herself in possession of a financial freedom unknown 
 to any other body in the state, until the bursting of that great 
 tempest which, on the close of the eighteenth century, pros- 
 trated all the powers and all the institutions of France. 
 
 The preceding details, wearisome as they may have appeared, 
 have seemed to me essential to the intelligible statement of the 
 answer which it remains for me to return to the question" with 
 which I commenced the present lecture the question, namely, 
 "Why the influence of the Privileged Orders of France, Noble 
 and Sacerdotal, was ineffectual to prevent the usurpation by 
 the monarchs of that kingdom of an absolute and unlimited 
 power ? My answer to that question, then, is, 
 
 First. That the original peers of France were inadequate 
 to that great constitutional office, because they were not the 
 aristocratic subjects of the king, so much as independent and 
 rival princes. Their power excited his fears, and their domin- 
 ions excited his cupidity. They were successively his allies, 
 his enemies, and his victims. But they were too great to act 
 either as the subordinate partners and props of his lawful au- 
 thority, or as the legitimate checks on the unlawful abuse 
 of it. 
 
 Secondly. Neither the peers of France (after the conquests 
 of Philippe Auguste), nor the other seigneurs, ever enjoyed, in 
 the kingdom at large, an authority, legislative, executive, or ju- 
 dicial, co-ordinate with that of the king. As I had occasion to 
 show in a former lecture, the royal judges and the Parliament 
 of Paris assumed the whole judicial power which, before the 
 accession of St. Louis, had belonged to the noblesse. The king 
 became sole legislator, subject to an imperfect veto by the 
 Parliament ; and the administration of the executive govern- 
 ment was conducted by the crown through the agency of its 
 subordinate officers. Therefore the nobles had never in their 
 hands, at any later period, any one of those three weapons by 
 which alone the royal prerogatives can be peacefully and ef- 
 fectually controlled. 
 
 Thirdly. In the States-Greneral, the seigneurs appeared 
 only as the elected deputies of their order. They did not sit 
 there proprio jure ; and I shall hereafter have occasion to ex- 
 plain why the deputies, who from time to time were convened 
 
250 THE INFLUENCE OF THE PR I VI L E GE D ORDERS 
 
 to the states, failed to acquire the power which properly belongs 
 in all free governments to the national representatives. 
 
 Fourthly. The peerage and the nobility of France were 
 rendered impotent to all purposes of constitutional government, 
 by the mercenary and extravagant multiplication of their num- 
 ber, by the descent of the privileges of every noble to all his 
 sons, and more remote male descendants, and by the conse- 
 quent poverty and dependence of the great majority of their 
 order. Their force was thus diluted until it had almost ceased 
 to be felt at all. 
 
 Fifthly. The exclusive and most invidious privileges of the 
 nobles greatly impaired their political influence. They were 
 elevated too far above the level of the people at large to admit 
 of any fellowship or reciprocal attachment between them. The 
 aristocratic order never enjoyed the weight which results from 
 its intimate union with the plebeian. 
 
 Sixthly. There was a similar want of union between the 
 noble and the sacerdotal orders. They were not separate mem- 
 bers of the same . body, but separate and often antagonistic 
 bodies. Though not infrequently combining their forces in 
 the States- General, it was a combination which usually had in 
 view rather a triumph over the Tiers Etat than the accom- 
 plishment of any objects in which the Three Estates had a 
 common interest against the crown. 
 
 Seventhly. The transfer to the crown of the patronage of 
 all sees and other ecclesiastical dignities had a fatal tendency 
 to impair the independence of the clergy. It filled their ranks 
 with mercenary candidates and necessitous suitors for the 
 royal favor. 
 
 Eighthly. The use which the kings of France made of that 
 patronage might seem to have been dictated by the desire to 
 emancipate themselves from the salutary control under which 
 they would have been holden by a more independent clergy. 
 The bishoprics became little better than endowments for the 
 younger branches of noble families. The abbeys were made 
 so many apanages for lords and ladies of broken fortunes. The 
 great abbey of Fontevrauld, for example, was governed during 
 several centuries by an almost unbroken succession of abbesses 
 of the blood royal. 
 
 Ninthly The enormous inequality of rank and wealth be* 
 
THE MONARCHY OF FAA.NCE. 
 
 tween tLe superior and inferior clergy of France, was another 
 enervating effect of the possession and abuse by the crown of 
 the patronage of the higher dignities of the Church. It in- 
 duced a real, though unavowed, separation of the clerical or- 
 der into two sections ; the first partaking in all the interests 
 and prejudices of the Noblesse, the second attaching itself to 
 all the schemes and passions of the Roturiers, but each inca- 
 pable of a hearty co-operation with the other against monarch- 
 ical encroachments. 
 
 Tenthly. The so-called liberties of the Grallican Church 
 reduced her from the rank of a constitutional guardian of the 
 rights of the people to the rank of a submissive dependent 
 upon the pleasure of the crown ; for the real effect of those 
 boasted liberties was merely to interpose a secular power be- 
 tween the Church of France and her spiritual sovereign. La- 
 mentable as may have been, in other times and countries, the 
 abuse of the Papal supremacy, yet the Pope's free exercise of 
 that supremacy is essential to the political authority and to 
 the political influence of any Church in communion with 
 Rome, unless, indeed, she possesses and exercises an inde- 
 pendent right of self-government. 
 
 Eleventhly. When the Grallican Church lost that self-gov- 
 ernment that is, her right of freely convoking national syn- 
 ods, and of freely deliberating and voting in them she had no 
 longer the means of exerting the legitimate influence of the 
 ecclesiastical upon the political government. Her diocesan, 
 provincial, and general convocations, though a pretended, were 
 not an effectual substitution for the loss. If in those assem- 
 blies any voices had been raised in opposition to the royal 
 will, they would immediately have been silenced by the royal 
 commissioners. 
 
 Twelfthly. The loss of the invidious liberties, judicial and 
 financial, of the Grallican Church, might, perhaps, have been 
 a source, not of weakness, but of strength, if she had been per- 
 mitted to retain her internal liberties, that is, her right of self- 
 government in what related to synods, canonical elections, and 
 free intercourse with the papal court. But as the loss of those 
 liberties brought her in bondage to the king, so the simulta- 
 neous loss of her financial and judicial franchises, by bringing 
 her into subjection to the Parliament, eventually rendered 
 
252 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 more effective and irresistible her bondage to the arbitrary 
 powers of the sovereign. 
 
 Other explanations might be given of the incornpetency of 
 the privileged orders of France to arrest the growth of the royal 
 despotism. What I have already offered may be sufficient, if 
 not fully to explain, at least to suggest the explanation of the 
 causes why they were so long the passive spectators or the 
 active promoters of a usurpation of which they were destined 
 at length to be themselves the victims. 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 IN my last two lectures I endeavored to explain, first, how 
 the Judicial institutions of France contributed at once to sub- 
 vert the Feudal Confederation, and to promote the growth of 
 the absolute Monarchy in that country ; and, secondly, why 
 the Privileged Orders, Noble and Sacerdotal, failed to arrest 
 the advance of that Monarchy toward despotic power. I no\v 
 proceed (as far as the time at my disposal may admit) to re- 
 solve the corresponding questions with reference to the States- 
 G-eneral. 
 
 In entering upon that inquiry, it is necessary that I should 
 begin by stating (though the statement must be far more brief 
 and imperfect than the importance of the subject may seem to 
 demand) what was the legitimate composition of those bodies, 
 what their methods of procedure, and what the constitutional 
 limits of their authority. 
 
 It is an obscure and an intricate inquiry. "When it was 
 proposed by Louis XVI. to the Notables of 1787, they were 
 able to answer him only by a long antiquarian controversy ; 
 and such was the prevailing ignorance on the subject, that (as 
 we learn from Dumont) an English lawyer (the late Sir Sam- 
 uel Romilly) was detained on his journey through one of the 
 cities of France to extemporize for the perplexed citizens a 
 mode of procedure for conducting the election of their deputies 
 to the States-General of Versailles. Yet, in the midst of this 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 253 
 
 darkness, we may distinguish some few salient points on 
 which history has cast a clear and a steady light. 
 
 First, then, it is evident that the States- General could not 
 lawfully meet except in pursuance of citations issued by the 
 sovereign himself. Next, it is well established that each of 
 the three estates (the Clergy, -the Nobles, and the Commons) 
 were to be so cited. In the feudal age (as we formerly saw) 
 the king had been accustomed to summon to his Parliament 
 all his tenants in capite, lay and ecclesiastical, holding seign- 
 euries within the limits of the royal domain. He had also 
 occasionally added to them all the greater feudatories of the 
 crown, holding fiefs beyond those limits. Now, when the feu- 
 dal Parliaments gave place to the States- General, the same 
 practice was observed, but with the two following differences : 
 first, that the lay tenants in capite were commanded by the 
 king to bring with them to the States- General such other 
 seigneurs as might be chosen to represent the seignorial or 
 noble tenants of their respective bailliages ; and, secondly, 
 that the great episcopal or abbatial feudatories were command- 
 ed by the king to bring with them to the States- General such 
 other ecclesiastics as might be chosen to represent the clergy 
 of the principal churches or abbeys within their several juris- 
 dictions. 
 
 But, in order to complete the assembly, the king also sum- 
 moned a body of persons whose appearance is scarcely, if at 
 all, to be traced in the feudal Parliaments. These were the 
 representatives of the Commons. For this purpose royal writs 
 were addressed to the various baillis or seneschals of France, 
 commanding them to convoke the free male inhabitants of the 
 villages, towns, and cities comprised in their several bailliages, 
 or senechaussees, for the election of deputies to represent them 
 in the approaching States of the realm. The inhabitants of the 
 rural districts, called the plat pays, were not to be so sum- 
 moned, because they were supposed to be adequately repre- 
 sented by their respective seigneurs. 
 
 In obedience to these various royal mandates, the nobles 
 and the clergy met at the chief city of each bailliage, and 
 there elected deputies to represent their respective orders, 
 There, also, they drew up, or adopted, their mandates or in- 
 structions to their deputies, containing an enumeration of the 
 
254 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 public grievances, of which (as members of the States-Gren- 
 eral) they were to demand the redress. To such instructions 
 were given the name of Cahiers that is, Codices. 
 
 The election of the deputies for the Tiers Etat was a more 
 complicated procedure. At each village, the electors met on 
 some Sunday after mass, and chose deputies, to whom were 
 intrusted the Cahiers (or list of grievances) of the villagers. 
 In the towns and cities also, cahiers were prepared, and dep- 
 uties chosen ; not indeed publicly, but at separate meetings 
 of the incorporated trades or callings of which the commune 
 or civic corporation was composed. The deputies so appointed 
 in the various villages, towns, and cities then met together at 
 the chief city of the bailliage, there to constitute a central as- 
 sembly. The business of that assembly was, first, to elect 
 deputies to represent, in the States- Greneral, the Tiers Etat of 
 the whole of that bailliage ; and, secondly, to compile from 
 all the separate cahiers one general cahier, in which were meth- 
 odized and recapitulated all the grievances of all the Com- 
 mons living within its limits. 
 
 If it be inquired who were qualified to elect, and who to 
 be elected at those meetings, and by what number of deputies 
 the Clergy, the Noblesse, or the Tiers Etat respectively of the 
 several bailliages were to be represented, I can only answer 
 that those are questions on which the Notables, in the time 
 of Louis XYL, were unable to form any clear opinion, and 
 which have not, I think, been satisfactorily elucidated in later 
 times. 
 
 The States- Greneral were thus composed of the deputies of 
 the three estates of the realm, but not of them exclusively, 
 The princes of the blood royal, the peers of France, the cham- 
 berlain, and other high feudal officers of the crown, and the 
 knights of the different orders of chivalry, also sat there. But 
 they held those seats in virtue of their rank or offices, and act- 
 ed rather as spectators or as ornaments in that splendid pa- 
 geant than in any more important character. The chief minis- 
 ters of the crown also took their places in the States- Greneral, 
 where they were regarded as the legitimate channels of com- 
 munication with the king, and as the advocates and interpret- 
 ers of the royal proposals or demands. 
 
 In the States-Greneral of France, as in the Parliament of 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 255 
 
 England, the spiritual had precedence over the temporal lords ; 
 Tbut between the two first orders and the third the gulf was 
 immeasurable. Of this the established ceremonial was at 
 once the best proof and the clearest illustration. In their joint 
 assemblies, the Clergy and Nobles sat covered ; the Commons 
 bareheaded. When addressing the king, the orator of the two 
 first estates stood up, but the orator of the Tiers Etat knelt 
 down. The consciousness of a real, though unavowed superi- 
 ority of power may perhaps, however, in France in old iimes, 
 as in England in our own times, have given a kind of zest to 
 the endurance of these innoxious indignities ; for, from age to 
 age, the representation of the Commons became less and less 
 in fact what it was in theory, that is, an assemblage of mere 
 roturiers, possessing no definite rights or well-ascertained priv- 
 ileges. Officers of state, magistrates, lawyers, merchants, and 
 men of letters, eagerly sought the office of deputies in this 
 great national assembly ; and the boast now so common among 
 ourselves was anticipated by the Chancellor PHopital when he 
 reminded the Tiers Etat, in the States- Q-eneral of Francis II., 
 that none of the gates of honor was closed to their ambition. 
 
 The same sentiment, or rather the same fact, was an- 
 nounced, at nearly the same time, by a noble French author, 
 though in a very different spirit. " Gro," he exclaims, " into 
 the Parliament, and you will find there scarcely any one but 
 roturiers, who have purchased for themselves seats on the 
 fleurs de lys. Gro into the churches, and you will behold the 
 most brilliant mitres resting on heads which came into the 
 world to bear the yoke of slavery. Gro into the royal palace, 
 and you will see it filled by swollen pumpkins ; by men whose 
 fathers were tallow-chandlers, cooks, and tailors, but whose 
 audacity has raised them from the dust to the highest places, 
 at the very fountain of honor. Gro into society, and you will 
 mistake the gentlemen for roturiers, and the roturiers for gen- 
 tlemen ; for now, when every one is permitted to wear what- 
 ever dress his purse can afford or his vanity may prefer, lace, 
 silk, and scarlet have ceased to be any certain badge of noble 
 birth." 
 
 The deputies of the Tiers Etat seem to have been, not the 
 wealthiest only, but the most numerous also, of the three or- 
 ders in the States-Greneral, although they were usually out- 
 
256 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 numbered by the two first orders united. "When Louis X.YI 
 authorized the Tiers Etat to send to the States-General of 
 1789 twice as many deputies as the clergy and the nobility 
 together, he was, therefore, the author, not only of a fatal 
 measure, but of an entire innovation also. 
 
 When the deputies of the three estates had assembled at the 
 appointed place of meeting, each estate chose its own president, 
 registrar, and secretaries ; and, at the conclusion of this and 
 some other preliminary forms, a royal herald proclaimed the 
 approach of the king. He came, surrounded by the princes 
 and dignitaries of his court, himself unarmed, and unguarded 
 by any armed force ; and then took his seat on his throne ; be- 
 fore, but below which were drawn up, according to their rank, 
 the representatives of the three orders of his people. His ad- 
 dress to them was usually comprised in a few brief words of 
 princely greeting; after which the chancellor explained the 
 causes of their meeting in an oration in which (after the fash- 
 ion of those times) homily, eulogy, and pedantry contended 
 with each other for the mastery ; though, in the midst of his 
 dark speeches, the learned rhetorician never forgot to describe 
 the wants of the treasury, or to invoke the aid of the represent- 
 atives of France to replenish it. To this address the speaker 
 of each estate made answer in his turn ; and when eloquence 
 was exhausted, the chancellor directed the States to prepare, 
 for the consideration of the king, a statement of all the griev- 
 ances of which they sought the redress, bidding them not to 
 doubt that their demands would be very graciously accepted. 
 
 At the close of these inaugural ceremonies, the deputies of 
 each estate divided themselves into twelve sections or com- 
 mittees, that number corresponding with the number of the 
 twelve greater governments of France. The cahiers of all the 
 bailliages comprised within any one of those governments were 
 then referred to one of those committees, by whom they were 
 fused or digested into a single cahier for the whole of that gov- 
 ernment. Each of the twelve committees then presented its 
 cahier to the estate to which it belonged, and, by that estate, 
 those twelve cahiers were again consolidated into one ccusecu- 
 tive cahier. The final result of this complicated process was, 
 therefore, to extract from the multitude of cahiers of the whole 
 kingdom three general cahiers, each of which was to serve as 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 257 
 
 the exponent of the grievances and of the demands either of 
 the Clergy, or of the Nobles, or of the Tiers Etat respectively. 
 On all questions which arose in the preparation of these docu- 
 ments, the votes of the deputies of the States were taken both 
 by the poll and by governments ; that is, in each committee 
 the members gave their individual votes ; and by the majority 
 of such suffrages was determined the vote of the government 
 for which that committee acted. 
 
 Although, in thus representing the public grievances, each 
 of the three estates often occupied much of the same ground, 
 and were often substantially of the same mind, yet they did 
 not usually act in concert. The cahier of each of the three 
 estates was entirely distinct from those of the other two ; nor 
 were the three always presented to the king simultaneously. 
 
 "When they had all been completed, and had all been deliv- 
 ered to him, the States were, both of right and in fact, dis- 
 solved. It was, however, usual for the king to pronounce a 
 formal dissolution of them on such occasions, and they were 
 then dismissed with a gracious promise from the throne that 
 the sovereign would consider and give effect to their wishes. 
 
 Thus far all was preparatory. The States had projected, 
 advised, and solicited reforms, but they had accomplished noth- 
 ing. They retired to their homes, there to await, in impotent 
 anxiety, the fulfillment or the breach of the solemn pledge of 
 which alone their labors had been productive. That pledge, 
 however, was seldom redeemed, either honestly or completely. 
 Sometimes it was disregarded altogether ; sometimes it was 
 followed by the insertion of marginal notes on the cahiers, in- 
 timating, not the decisions, but the opinions or purposes, of the 
 king respecting the proposals contained in them ; and some- 
 times he promulgated ordinances, not referring to the proceed- 
 ings of the States, but as of his especial grace and mere mo- 
 tion to carry their proposals, or some of them, into execution. 
 Without such ordinances, the cahiers alone had no legal effi- 
 cacy whatever. They were petitions, not enactments ; and 
 even when they had at length ripened into positive edicts, it 
 was usually found that, by the use of defective, evasive, or 
 ambiguous terms, the royal legislator had defeated the very 
 concessions which he affected to make. Thus " as ineffectu- 
 al as a cahier" passed into a proverb : and each successive 
 
 R 
 
258 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 States- General placed on the front of their catalogue of com- 
 plaints the royal neglect of the complaints of their immediate 
 predecessors. 
 
 I have sought in vain for any authentic account of the ori- 
 gin and growth of the complex rules by which the election of 
 the deputies and the deliberation of the States- General were 
 thus regulated. But there is little risk of error in supposing 
 that the forms in use in the ancient Greek and Roman cities 
 of Narbonese Gaul for the election of civic officers were thence 
 transferred to the French municipalities, and were borrowed 
 . from them by the bailliages on the election of deputies of the 
 States- General ; for the love of subtle and refined schemes 
 of polity, and especially of municipal polity, was one of the 
 many analogies between the Greek and the French character. 
 As an example of the strength of that propensity in France, 
 take the scheme according to which the mayor, aldermen 
 (echevins), and auditors were chosen in the city of Peronne. 
 First ; each of the twelve guilds elected two delegates. Sec- 
 ondly; those twenty- four delegates nominated ten electors. 
 Thirdly ; those ten electors appointed other ten. Fourthly ; 
 the twenty, when so obtained, associated to themselves ten 
 electors more. Fifthly ; the thirty, when thus brought to- 
 gether, made choice of the mayor and aldermen. Sixthly ; 
 the mayor and aldermen then named six counselors, to whom 
 the masters of the guilds added six more counselors of their 
 own selection. And, seventhly, those twelve counselors united 
 together to form a board of audit. A people thus ingenious 
 in devising political mechanism may perhaps have regarded 
 as bald and uninventive the system of two degrees of election 
 for the deputies in the cities, towns, villages, and bailliages, 
 and may not improbably have despised, as an excess of sim- 
 plicity, the contrivances for compounding a single cahier of 
 grievances by the decomposition and new arrangement of all 
 the separate cahiers of all the various localities of the kingdom. 
 The common basis of all such refinements is suspicion. They 
 all assume that, in the discharge of any office in the common- 
 wealth, no man is to be trusted. They therefore mete out 
 such power in the smallest possible measures and with the 
 greatest possible jealousy. Thus, as we have seen, in old 
 France, the elector might not directly vote for his own repre- 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 259 
 
 sentative, and the representative might not decide for himself 
 on his own course of conduct. 
 
 Such elaborate devices are, however, rather cunning than 
 wise. They can not extinguish the dangers against which 
 they are aimed, though they may in some degree conceal, or 
 partially mitigate them; for in every possible or conceivable 
 adjustment of the political organization of a state, there will 
 still lurk somewhere a despotism which, if wakened into ac- 
 tivity, becomes absolute and uncontrollable, however much it 
 may in ordinary times be kept out of sight, or remain habitu- 
 ally dormant. To treat all the depositaries of that formidable 
 power as knaves or as fools is not the readiest way to avert 
 such a catastrophe. 
 
 The builder of E Utopian visions or of real Polities will of 
 course, if he be wise, take securities against man's abuse of 
 his authority over his fellow-men. But he will not guard 
 such abuses by exactly reversing the law of charity, and by 
 requiring the citizens of his visionary or of his actual republic 
 to be easily provoked, to think nothing but evil, to bear noth- 
 ing, to believe nothing, to hope nothing, and to endure noth- 
 ing. For men usually rise or fall to the level of their reputa- 
 tion ; and if soldiers are brave, judges upright, and merchants 
 honest, in proportion as such is the general expectation from 
 them, so, and in the same proportion, are statesmen patriotic. 
 Most men reach the point of honor in their several callings, 
 and a generous confidence will ever be the surest excitement 
 to the public spirit of those who are called to the most con- 
 spicuous public stations. 
 
 In the case of the States-General of France, suspicion fell 
 into her common error of spinning her web too fine. The 
 scheme combined, but could not neutralize or render inoccu- 
 ous the two opposite errors of universal suffrage and of secret 
 voting : the first depriving the primary elector of the sense of 
 privilege, and of most of the consequent restraints of duty ; 
 the second withdrawing the ultimate elector from the keen 
 but animating air and responsibilities of the Forum. 
 
 The division of the States- General into three different orders 
 and as many chambers was fatal to their legitimate influence. 
 When we met last, I attempted to investigate those causes 
 which subjugated the Noblesse to the authority of the crown, 
 
260 THE STATES -GENERAL OF 
 
 and those which preserved to the clergy a comparative inde- 
 pendence. The two bodies, if united together into one great 
 aristocratic chamber, might perhaps have interposed an effect- 
 ual barrier between the king and the people for the conserva- 
 tion of the rights and the powers of both. But, in their sep- 
 aration, the nobles degenerated into servile partisans of the 
 monarch, and the clergy exhibited the characteristic and in- 
 variable incapacity of men of that profession to act collect- 
 ively in the affairs of nations with common temper or with 
 common sense. 
 
 Neither was it reasonable to anticipate any effective national 
 progress from the deliberations of bodies chosen for the express 
 purpose of methodizing, and preferring, and seeking the redress 
 of long catalogues of grievances, swept together from every 
 city, town, and village of the kingdom. They who delegated 
 and they who accepted such a trust, must, almost of necessity, 
 have misunderstood both the disease with which they had to 
 do, and the means by which it might be remedied. In any 
 state where well-founded complaints of misrule are thus fer- 
 tile and habitual, the true disease consists in the moral and 
 intellectual debasement of the sufferers, and the true remedy 
 consists in whatever tends to elevate their character, and so 
 to render their good government practicable. No men, and 
 no society of men, ever bemoaned themselves into self-respect 
 or into the sympathy of others. The flatterers of Demos will 
 always encourage his complaints, and conceal from him the 
 unpalatable truth that, though his loud and persevering proc- 
 lamation of his wrongs may justly inculpate his rulers, it is 
 also an emphatic, though an unconscious proclamation of his 
 own unworthiness. 
 
 The States- G-eneral of France were also destitute of that 
 important element of success which consists in a firm alliance 
 between the representative and the judicial institutions. Be- 
 fore the States-General were first convened under Philip le 
 Bel, the courts of justice (as I showed in a former lecture) 
 had become the mere creatures and ministers of the crown; 
 and before these courts had attained to the independence which 
 at length rendered them formidable to the crown itself, the 
 States- General had ceased to meet. During their existence 
 they were never able to rely on an upright and impartial ad- 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 261 
 
 ministration by the judges of any law which might be enact- 
 ed at their own instance. 
 
 In the enactment of such laws they had, moreover, no act- 
 ual suffrage. I formerly attempted to show how St. Louis 
 assumed to himself the legislative power, and transmitted it 
 to his successors. In the interval which elapsed between his 
 death and the first meeting of the States- General, that en- 
 croachment had ripened into an undisputed prerogative, which 
 those assemblies never failed to recognize in the most express 
 and formal manner. That they should have yielded, without 
 controversy, to a pretension so momentous, and yet so recent 
 as this, may appear to us strange, if we read the history of 
 other times and countries only by the lights of our own. But 
 familiar as the disjunction of the legislative from the supreme 
 executive function is to our thoughts and language, the world, 
 in the time of Philip le Bel, had never seen a practical exam- 
 ple and illustration of such a severance. Has, indeed, such 
 an example been really ever seen even now ? The Lords and 
 Commons of England humbly petitioned the king (and often 
 petitioned unsuccessfully) for the enactment of what they 
 judged salutary laws, until at length their petitions having 
 ripened into commands, they, in reality and in truth, dictated 
 the administrative as well as the legislative acts of the crown, 
 though always retaining the style and the posture of petition- 
 ers. The States- General adopted the same humble language, 
 but (as we shall hereafter see) never attained the same com- 
 manding position. From the ninth Louis to the sixteenth 
 Louis, the king was the real as well as the nominal law-giver 
 of France. 
 
 Finally. The practice of resolving the Tiers Etat into com- 
 mittees for the separate discussion of all the cahiers of each of 
 the governments represented by any such committee, survives 
 in France, at the present day, in the corresponding practice of 
 resolving the National Assembly into bureaux, for the prelim- 
 inary discussion of all important questions. It is (as we may 
 daily observe there) a wise arrangement for mitigating the 
 violence of a republican democracy ; but in the monarchical 
 States-General, it impaired the healthful energy of the one 
 democratic element of that body. The swell of popular feel- 
 ing was broken alike by withdrawing the deputies, first from 
 
262 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 the invigorating influence of public elections, and then from 
 the sympathetic influence of public debate. 
 
 I do not pause to qualify the preceding statements by the 
 many exceptions which would be requisite to their complete 
 exactness. My time allows me only to exhibit the law, or con- 
 stitutional theory, of the States-G-eneral, as it may be deduced 
 from the general habits of the majority of the assemblies of 
 that nature of which the records have been hitherto discovered 
 and made public. I now propose to verify and illustrate what 
 I have hitherto said respecting that law or theory, by inquiring 
 into the proceedings of the most memorable of those conven- 
 tions which were holden in the fourteenth century. The share 
 taken by the States-General in the great constitutional strug- 
 gle of that age will, therefore, be the subject of our consider- 
 ation during the remainder of the present lecture. 
 
 I lately attempted to explain the manner in which the iden- 
 tity or union of the Royal Council and of the Parliament of 
 Paris was virtually, though not formally dissolved, so that each 
 of them thenceforward existed as a substantive and distinct 
 body in the state. This tacit revolution had been nearly com- 
 pleted when Philip le Bel for the first time convened the States- 
 General of France. 
 
 To resist the threatened invasion of the confederates of Cam- 
 bray, Philip, with the consent of the Royal Council, imposed 
 a tax on all his subjects, the ecclesiastics not excepted. To 
 repel this encroachment on the temporalities of the Church, 
 Boniface VIII. issued a bull forbidding the French clergy to 
 pay the required contribution. Philip retaliated by an order 
 forbidding them to pay the customary papal dues to Boniface 
 himself. The Pope then summoned a synod, to advise him 
 how he might most effectually resist this invasion of his pon- 
 tifical rights ; and Philip, in his turn, summoned the barons, 
 clergy, and commons of his realm to elect deputies who should 
 meet him at Paris, there to deliberate on the methods to be 
 pursued for the successful conduct of his controversy with 
 Rome. 
 
 To Philip himself, the importance of this great innovation 
 was probably not perceptible. He, as we may well believe, 
 regarded it only as a temporary device to meet a passing exi- 
 gency. It was, in fact, one of those occasions in which man 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 263 
 
 gives proof rather of the sluggishness than of the promptitude 
 of his insight into his own condition of his slowness to per- 
 ceive and to estimate correctly the resources within his reach, 
 much more than of his sagacity in discovering and in employ- 
 ing them aright. The King of France aimed at nothing more 
 than to baffle an imperious antagonist. Unconsciously to him- 
 self, he was laying the "basis of a power destined for a while 
 to balance, and at last to overthrow, the dominion of his suc- 
 cessors ; but a power which, if wisely used, might have proved 
 the shelter and the safeguard both of his people and of his race. 
 
 In obedience to the citation of Philip, the States-General 
 met at Paris on the 10th of April, 1301. When the deputies 
 presented themselves in his presence, he called upon them to 
 state of whom they held their seignorial fiefs and their eccle- 
 siastical benefices. Their answer was returned by a loud and 
 unanimous acclamation, the three orders with one voice de- 
 claring that they held them all of Philip himself and of his 
 predecessors. To his inference that they were, therefore, all 
 bound to support him against the pretensions of Boniface, they 
 listened with diminished enthusiasm, and retired to prepare a 
 more deliberate reply. It was at last returned by each of the 
 three estates apart from the rest. The nobles pledged them- 
 selves to support the king in his quarrel with their persons 
 and their property, and demanded that he should resist the in- 
 justice and the usurpations of Rome. The Commons implored 
 him to maintain inviolate his sovereign rights, and to announce 
 to the whole world that, in claiming a superiority over him in 
 spiritual matters, Pope Boniface had fallen into manifest error, 
 and had contracted the guilt of mortal sin. "With ill-disguised 
 reluctance, and not till after long delay, the clergy at length 
 assented to the conclusion of the nobles. The session was then 
 closed ; when, strong in the suffrages of the representatives of 
 his people, Philip promulgated a royal ordinance, forbidding 
 the exportation of any money or merchandise from France to 
 Home. 
 
 In reliance on such of the modern French historians as have 
 studied with the greatest diligence the ancient monuments of 
 their native land, I hazard the statement that there is not to 
 be found, in any writer of the age of Philip, any remark on the 
 great constitutional innovation which had thus distinguished 
 
264 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 the times in which they lived. If the fact he really so, this 
 is hut an example the more of the familiar truth, that politi- 
 cal changes are seldom the result of any profound policy, hut 
 generally spring from impulses unheeded and misunderstood 
 hy those who act in ohedience to them. If a Machiavelli or 
 a Montesquieu had heen living in France in those days, a sol- 
 itary student of the shifting scene, with what inquisitive in- 
 terest would he not have ohserved papal amhition contributing 
 to plant in that country the most promising shoot of national 
 liberty that had ever taken root there, and the people rising 
 into importance from the struggle between their spiritual and 
 temporal monarch as to the limits of their respective jurisdic- 
 tions. It would have been a craven philosophy which, from 
 such events, would not have exultingly inferred the progress- 
 ive and the secure development of the democratic in union 
 with the other elements of power in the commonwealth. We 
 know, indeed, such hopes, if indulged, would have proved fal- 
 lacious ; but from such a fallacy the most profound think- 
 ers of that period could hardly have been exempt. The next 
 meeting of the States-General would probably have confirmed 
 their error. 
 
 The gallant resistance of the Flemings to the treacheries 
 and usurpations of Philip had enabled them, in the year 1304, 
 to regain their national independence, and to effect the deliv- 
 erance of the Count of Flanders and his family. Ten years 
 later, the Parliament of Paris pronounced a sentence confis- 
 cating the dominions of the count for the benefit of the king, 
 and annexing them to his crown. To obtain the funds neces- 
 sary for carrying that sentence into effect, Philip, in August, 
 1314, again assembled the States-General at Paris, when En- 
 guerrand de Marigny, his principal minister, having repre- 
 sented to them the urgent need of money for this purpose, 
 Etienne Barbet, the mayor, as it would seem, or prevot des 
 marchands of Paris, pronounced a speech full of liberal prom- 
 ises ; after which, says the record, the other Bourgeois, repre- 
 senting the Commons, joined in a loud and tumultuous prom- 
 ise of the same general nature. Regarding, or affecting to re- 
 gard, these acclamations as a deliberate acquiescence in his 
 demands, Philip proceeded to promulgate an ordinance impos- 
 ing an ad valorem duty on the produce of the sales of all goods. 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 265 
 
 Bald and brief as this account of the States-Greneral of 1314 
 may be, it is yet of great value, because it is the earliest re- 
 corded instance of the acknowledgment of the right of that 
 body to authorize the imposition of taxes. The informality 
 with which that high function was, on that occasion, exer- 
 cised, is, perhaps, rather apparent than real ; for there is great 
 reason to doubt whether the States really intended to give, or 
 really supposed themselves to be giving, their sanction for that 
 imposition of the duties for which Philip found an apology in 
 the speech of Barbet and in the shouts of his associates. It 
 is at least certain that universal disquiet and insurrections, in 
 almost all the provinces of France, followed immediately upon 
 the promulgation of his ordinance, and that the year 1314 
 was still more remarkable for the revocation than for the im- 
 position of fiscal laws. Philip left to his son, Louis X., the 
 inheritance of these discontents. 
 
 The first year of the reign of Louis was signalized by the 
 charters or concessions which he was compelled to make suc- 
 cessively to the Normans, the Burgundians, the Picards, and 
 the people of Languedoc and Champagne. Of those grants, 
 the most celebrated and important is that of the 19th of May, 
 1315, called the Charte aux Normands. Although they dif- 
 fered materially from each other, these charters universally 
 bound the king not to change the coinage, not to levy extra- 
 ordinary tailles, and not to subject free men to torture, unless 
 the presumption of a capital crime were of the highest nature ; 
 to which the remarkable addition was made, in some provin- 
 ces, of a promise to restore the trial by battle, and the right 
 of private war, which had been abolished by St. Louis. . 
 
 If Boulainvilliers be accurately informed, Louis X. was the 
 author of a yet more general charter, or declaration, binding 
 himself and his heirs never to levy any imposts on the king- 
 dom at large, except with the consent of the three estates of 
 the realm. Of this important document, however, I believe 
 that neither the original, nor any authentic copy has hitherto 
 been discovered ; though, if any such charter or declaration 
 was really issued, we may safely adopt the opinion of Bou- 
 lainvilliers, that it became the basis of the authority afterward 
 exercised by the States- Greneral in the imposition of general 
 taxes. 
 
260 TUB gTATRS-ORNERAf, or 
 
 I;- tail as it may, it is highly worthy of notice 
 greater part of the provincial charter* of the reign of Loi 
 are exprcHnIy framed "sur la demande des Trois Etats" 
 word* referring, I presume, not to any demand made by tho 
 States-General of 1314, but to demands preferred by the dif. 
 ferent provincial states. Even when 00 understood, they wif- 
 
 I." '. :. how liow wide, \v;i:-: UK-, dillu ion, ;md l.ov/ finn UK-, 
 <5:-:1.aMi;-:Jiin-,nl,, at, Ijjal, period, of UK-, principle Ui:if, Uie eon ;:nt 
 
 of Ujr: repn enf.aliv .,1 U,e p,.,,,pk v/;, c r,|,|.i;,| |r, fl,,; V ;.I.<1- 
 
 ity of any extraordinary impost. 
 
 Tlinl, |iri/i:ijil: :',,,,., |,, },;,/.: L.-.-JJ . < : . ;in | ,| ;,,; , n .li J,IJ|,M hl<-, 
 
 and fundamental when the Htatew-General met at ?arw, in 
 November, 1355, in obedience to the summon* of King John, 
 
 ID HUcijDr him i/i MM: (Jj-:;i -:l,rou '. w;ir in v,ln-!) in: \v;i -: Un:n r.n- 
 
 gaged with Edward III. On this occasion, the three orders, 
 by the express permission of the king, deliberated, not sepa- 
 rately, but together; that request being advanced, on behalf 
 of the Tiers Etat, by the celebrated Etienne Marcel, who was 
 at that time the pr^vo" t des marchands at Paris. They offered 
 
 l.o insiinUin ;MJ Jinny of Unity UJDIJ -:;jnrj tm-.n lurin;' on--, y:;ir, 
 
 and to impose the duties necessary for the u ir <, ( i -,; u- ;, ;, 
 force. But they stipukted that a commission of nine persons, 
 of whom three were to be selected by each order from its own 
 
 nn-.iiiUiv, : Jjoul'J |j;i.vr, I Jjc, ^:n<:r;i I :-:n|>i:rinl..-.n]<-.n<:: oj fin; i;n :- 
 in- ol' llj)-: nioiiuy, ;ml l|j;jl. l|j: , '!;.!' :houl'l n-;i '-i/.LI'-, ;, t, 
 
 Parw, in March and in November of the following year, to re- 
 ceive the accounts of the receipt and expenditure of the funds 
 
 HD to l>e raised, and lx provide, if n--'-r- -. -:iry. lor UK-, ;iu;Mn<:ii1.- 
 ation of them. 
 
 A royal ordinance was made on the 28th of December, 1355, 
 not only to give effect to these stipulations, but also to enkrge 
 the public libertie by other provisions which the StatcM-dcn- 
 eral scern to have dictated. Thus it was declared that no reso- 
 lution of the States-General should be valid unless each of the 
 three orders should concur in it; that certain extraordinary 
 imposts should be payable by all persons without exception, 
 the king himself and the members of his family being expressly 
 declared liable to them ; that the value of the current coins 
 should no longer be mutable by the royal authority ; that the 
 Proit de Prise (or the right of pressing cattle, corn, and other 
 
Til 14 I' O I/ UT 14 14 NT If <!I4NTIJIIV. 207 
 
 iiiin^r/i for the kin^'n Hcrvice) rdiould bo abolinhcd ; and that 
 
 the i .iit.l.jon o| ix Ii eommoditie,! nii'dil. be M i I'd l,y 1 
 o| ;n//i'. by lie- person IIJ/JM leved, with the/ aid ol hit oe,ij/hborM, 
 III /e, Ih.-n, v/e have, m theory ill, lea I, Hie, une,(juivo(5al 
 ie.e.o;'iill;oi ,,\ lhi.-.-. j/rea I, e-0ll,i 1,1 1 i J I .ion;i I doe.l.i mc,;( : t)|f) fifNt, 
 I. hat lie M pie. i.nlal.JVHM of the, people, nhould meet, not Kl< l'e|y 
 when ii mi;dil. ml, the, royal convenience, but at i'.ueh pei iod 
 tin might be/ prescribed by a due/ regard to the, public/ wolfaro; 
 the Nocond, that all elaHHCM should equally contribute to the 
 pecuniary e IM M ,p ,,i i|,,, ; |.ai.e. ; and the/ third, that the crown 
 should ho deprived of the, arbitrary means of raining money by 
 a depreciated e/oina)/e,, or 1>y irriprcHNwentM of the, ^ood . ol (be 
 
 people, 
 
 On the, olhe.i lia,nd, tin-, Htate/M-^e,neral, on IJiin o(;e/aHiofi, 
 tablihe/d two prccjede/ntw, eaeh of the/m productive,, with but 
 little, delay, of union, . ,< ., ;md cnlnmilouK re/Hiiltn. liy uniting 
 
 all the, three/ oider ; m to ;i nede, de,libe,rati Ve body, the/y e/re 
 lon^S excluded the, l,wo fir;t orde,r.t altogether from any II.IM-. in 
 the- na.tional re,pre,:;eutal ion. Hy aXHUinin^ the, nedit to eollc.ftl, 
 and audit the, public, revenue, they made, the, In i i. j, toward 
 i.be.ij usurpation ol the, other appropriate, Junctin/iM of the ex- 
 e'-utive, ^/ove,rnme-nt. Tli- l.at< m- ii ol 17HiJ rnijHt have, ntud- 
 led to little purpom) the hint/fry of IU60. 
 
 In that year the/ Hta- '"U'i;J me I, n MIH at I'ari.t. All 
 
 their financial calculations bad be,e,n defeated by the, fatal bat- 
 tle, of i'oicticr;', and </harle< (the, haupbm and hulie, of Nor- 
 m:md;/;, a. youth ol irme.l.e.i-.n ye.aj t of aj'e,, appe,a,re,d amoii^ 
 l.be.m to re.pre, ;e,nl, tb'- j>e,r.ton ol hi i eaptive, fa,the,r, and to -tolic/it 
 aid lor the, pro,'.ee,ution of thr-, w/i.r. 
 
 The, Ic.ftHotiN of advernity, like. ,, >;,. , unwelcome ICHKOJIH, are 
 
 < / ' m . .J of l'-W> prove,d but unapt . -.hol.ii I )a.n;^ / "id alar/u, 
 
 ;j . u ual, e!<./;il,ed the, moil, H-. :oll| I e, and impaXHiofied H|liriU 
 
 amonj./ l/hem to the,ir natural I>M, < miie ne,e, in public, a, ! uie,m- 
 hlie..'.. le, f're,(|, Hi', hi .hop ol l/;ion, ;md Jitienni-, ,Mar- 
 
 <-,e,|, |,he, mayor 01 pr< /ol, d \ ma.rc-ha.nd : r -i I'an , ro e ,ii 
 l/i that position. L- ' n, to b * , n the leader with 
 
 in the, c,fiarnbc,rH f arid Mare,e,| the. mi nmon^ the citi/cnn, of 
 that ^rre-at party whr; Kaw with joy, e.ve.n m the, calamities of 
 ^tl^ir native land, UK; umiM of punwhing tlu?ir political appo- 
 
268 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 nents, and of changing the whole financial and military admin- 
 istration of France. To Charles, on the other hand, these 
 democratic designs were the objects of an ill-dissembled aver- 
 sion, for he saw in them the impending ruin of the monarchy 
 to which he was himself the heir. 
 
 The States- General opened their session by the appointment 
 of a Committee of Public Safety ; and, in deference to their 
 advice, unanimously agreed to maintain, during the ensuing 
 year, a standing army of 30,000 men. But severe, indeed, 
 were the stipulations by which this grant was qualified. They 
 demanded the immediate removal of a long list of public offi- 
 cers ; the trial of them on charges to be preferred by the 
 States-Greneral themselves, before commissioners of their own 
 choice ; the appointment of twenty-eight new counselors, to 
 be selected by each of the three orders from among their own 
 bodies ; the release from prison of the King of Navarre, a cele- . 
 brated demagogue of that age ; and, lastly, the substitution, 
 if possible, of Charles himself as a prisoner in England for his 
 father John. 
 
 Who will wonder that the heir of the crown of France 
 should have temporized and attempted to evade such proposals 
 as these ? "and who, if undisturbed by the sympathetic political 
 passions of his own times, will seriously join the modern French 
 democratic historians in their indignant censure of that at- 
 tempt ? For the moment it was unsuccessful. Charles first 
 urged that his answer could not reasonably be expected until 
 the time appropriated by custom to such purposes ; that is, 
 until the closing session of the States. "When that time ar- 
 rived, he adjourned it to a later day ; and when at last it was 
 necessary to make some answer, he alleged the impossibility 
 of pronouncing so momentous a decision before the arrival of 
 the expected orders of the absent king. 
 
 Thus the session reached its close amid ineffectual endeav- 
 ors to provide for the defense of the realm against the foreign 
 enemy. But, before the deputies finally separated, they met 
 together at the Convent of the Cordeliers, at the summons, as 
 it would seem, and under the presidency of Le Cocq. There 
 is still extant a brief notice of the discourse he delivered on 
 that occasion. He claimed, or was understood to claim for 
 his hearers, the right even to depose a king of France ; and 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 269 
 
 he recited to them the protests which their twenty-eight se- 
 lected members had proposed to address to Charles in person, 
 if they had actually been received by* him as his counselors. 
 
 The Dauphin was now relieved from the presence of the 
 States- Greneral ; but he was unprovided with the funds neces- 
 sary to encounter and repel the common danger. In his dis- 
 tress he resorted to the improvident and dishonest measure of 
 depreciating the currency. His new coinage was indignantly 
 rejected by the Parisians. Marcel, their mayor, being sum- 
 moned before the Dauphin, reiterated in peremptory terms the 
 decision of his fellow-citizens, and, immediately on quitting 
 the royal presence, called on them to arm in their own de- 
 fense. 
 
 The call was promptly obeyed ; and to such an intimation 
 of the will of the people of Paris, Charles could answer only by 
 the most immediate and humble concessions. "Within twenty- 
 four hours from the commencement of the insurrection, Mar- 
 cel and his followers were invited to the Louvre, and were 
 there assured by the lips of Charles himself of their own par- 
 don ; of the immediate meeting of the States-General ; of his 
 determination to displace his obnoxious counselors ; of the re- 
 call of the depreciated coins ; and of his intention to remit to 
 the States- Greneral the decision of the manner in which the 
 coinage might best be regulated for the advantage of the peo- 
 ple at large. 
 
 In fulfillment of these pledges, the States- Greneral were ac- 
 cordingly convened, and held their first session in the presence 
 of Charles himself. There is still extant an account of the 
 speech delivered by Le Cocq on this occasion. After recapit- 
 ulating all the wrongs inflicted by the government on the peo- 
 ple of France, and declaring their resolution to endure them 
 no longer, he demanded, first, the immediate removal from the 
 public service of the twenty-two obnoxious officers ; secondly, 
 the reformation of all other public offices by commissioners to 
 be appointed by the States- Greneral for that purpose ; and, 
 thirdly, the withdrawal from circulation of all coins to which 
 the States should not give their express sanction. 
 
 Prepared as it would seem for these demands, the Dauphin 
 immediately promulgated an ordinance giving effect to them 
 all, and adding to those concessions other and yet greater 
 
270 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 augmentations of the powers of the representative body. It 
 authorized them to hold three subsequent sessions without 
 awaiting any royal summons for the purpose ; to decide on the 
 nature and amount of the imposts to be levied by extraordinary 
 grants ; and to collect the proceeds of them by officers of their 
 own appointment. To all this Charles added a pledge, that, 
 without their advice, no change should be effected in the cur- 
 rent coin, and no truce made with the king's enemies ; and a 
 declaration that the twenty-two officers whom they had con- 
 demned were unworthy of any public trust or employment. 
 
 To complete the triumph of the States-General over the royal 
 authority, they were permitted to nominate a commission of 
 thirty-six of their own members, charged with a general super- 
 intendence of the administration of the executive government, 
 and especially during the intervals between the successive ses- 
 sions of the States themselves. It is not unworthy of a passing 
 remark, that the Commission de Permanence, which at this 
 day controls the conduct of the President of the French Re- 
 public during the vacations of the National Assembly, is but 
 a mere revival of the corresponding institution which kept in 
 check the regent of the French kingdom four centuries ago. 
 
 But the States- General of 1357 were not satisfied even with 
 this encroachment. Deputies were chosen by the three orders 
 to act as commissioners in every province, and to assume the 
 guidance of every department of the state. The government 
 by parliamentary committees during our own civil war was 
 but an imitation of the system established three hundred years 
 before at Paris. And as, with us, that system was substan- 
 tially, though not nominally, conducted by the House of Com- 
 mons alone, so, in the fourteenth century, it was in the hands 
 of the Tiers Etat only, to the virtual, though not to the nom- 
 inal, exclusion of the noblesse and the clergy. 
 
 The victory thus seemed to be complete. But with the pos- 
 session of power came also its responsibilities. The States- 
 Greneral, submitting to the same hard necessity which subju- 
 gates all other rulers of mankind, were compelled to vote new 
 subsidies, and to raise them by the imposition of new taxes. 
 A demand so distasteful from any quarter, and so unexpected 
 from an assembly of patriots and reformers, was followed by 
 general disgust without doors, and by numerous secessions from 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 271 
 
 within. The nobles and the clergy abandoned their invidious 
 position, leaving to the deputies of the Bourgeois the hazards 
 and the discredit of perseverance in the struggle. Even Le 
 Cocq himself abandoned the popular cause, and retired to his 
 diocese. 
 
 And now the tide which had hitherto been flowing in favor 
 of the States- General began, as it appeared, to ebb. Many 
 cities, not excepting Paris itself, addressed the Dauphin with 
 offers of pecuniary aid ; and again were to be seen at the Louvre 
 the ministers whom he had so lately denounced as unworthy 
 of any public trust. But a new and powerful ally appeared 
 for the defense of Marcel and his adhsrents. Liberated from 
 prison, the King of Navarre took up arms in their favor, and 
 restored their self-confidence. Once more, therefore, the States- 
 General resumed their authority, and regulated at their discre- 
 tion the financial affairs of the kingdom. Tried by that cru- 
 cial test of statesmanship, they were found deplorably wanting. 
 Their fiscal invention reached no farther than the renewal of 
 the very measure which, but a few months before, had brought 
 upon the Dauphin their own indignant and humiliating cen- 
 sures. To increase the revenue, they themselves depreciated 
 the currency. 
 
 But while the States- General were thus staggering beneath 
 the burden which they had rashly undertaken, their partisans 
 at the Hotel de Ville retained all their former audacity. The 
 reappearance at the Louvre of the condemned ministers kindled 
 the resentment of Marcel, who, accompanied by a body of his 
 followers, presented himself before the Dauphin, and inveighed, 
 with his accustomed energy, against this breach of the royal 
 promise. Two of the proscribed counselors, designated as the 
 Marshals of Normandy and Champagne, were at the moment 
 standing on either side of Charles, and, with their concurrence, 
 he answered Marcel in terms which still more excited his in- 
 dignation. The two marshals instantly expiated their error. 
 They fell dead at the feet of their master, of wounds inflicted 
 by the order of Marcel. To rescue his own life, Charles threw 
 himself on his knees before their murderer, implored his pro- 
 tection, and promised to defer in all things to his counsels. 
 The terrified prince then covered his head with the red and blue 
 cap, which the adherents of Marcel had assumed as a part) 
 
272 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 badge, and was permitted to retain his precarious regency. 
 The degradation of the Capetian race was to be signalized 
 more than once, in later times, by the same humiliating adop- 
 tion of the same fatal emblem. 
 
 The regent (for, on completing his twenty-first year, Charles 
 had assumed that title) was now regarded by the States-Gren- 
 eral, or rather by their Commission of Superintendence, as en- 
 tirely in their power ; and they permitted, or, as some main- 
 tain, they advised him to meet the Provincial States of Cham- 
 pagne in their assembly at Provins. If such was really the 
 advice of the States- General, they must have ill understood 
 their own actual position. At Provins Charles found himself 
 surrounded by the nobility of that great province, and received 
 their ardent assurances of their undiminished allegiance to the 
 crown, and of their increased scorn and hatred of the ignoble 
 Bourgeois, who had so long and so insolently usurped its he- 
 reditary powers, trampled upon the delegated authority of the 
 king in the person of his son, and assumed the guidance of the 
 royal government. The Champenois nobles found hi the re- 
 gent an eager listener and a ready convert. He returned from 
 Provins to command the attendance of the States- General, not 
 in the disaffected capital, but at the royal residence of Com- 
 piegne. 
 
 It is maintained by some that the States of Compiegne were 
 but a continuation or renewed session of the States of Paris, 
 and by others that they formed a distinct and rival assembly. 
 But it is admitted by all that they were the occasion and the 
 scene of a decisive royalist reaction. The States of Compiegne, 
 indeed, like their predecessors, reserved to themselves the col- 
 lection and expenditure of the proceeds of such taxes as they 
 imposed ; but they granted money freely, and brought Le Cocq 
 to trial on the double charge of seditious language and of 
 treasonable conduct. 
 
 Charles made no forbearing or merciful use of his returning 
 power. Gathering round him an army composed of the law- 
 less adventurers by whom France was then infested, he de- 
 stroyed the crops and burned the granaries in the neighbor- 
 hood of Paris, took possession of the towns and bridges on the 
 Seine and the Marne, and prepared to reduce the city by fam- 
 ine. On the night of the 31st July, 1358, Marcel, with a 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 273 
 
 arge body of his adherents, had posted themselves at the Pa- 
 risian gate of St. Denis, and there, with six other magistrates, 
 he fell by the swords of assassins hired by Charles for the pur- 
 pose. The city then received the regent in triumph, acknowl- 
 edged his supreme authority, and witnessed submissively a 
 large and sanguinary proscription of the citizens. 
 
 Yet, even in the hour of his success, Charles was compelled 
 to acknowledge the authority and to solicit the support of the 
 representatives of the French people. His father John had 
 signed, at London, a convention which ceded in full sovereignty 
 to the English crown the. larger and the fairer part of the 
 kingdom of France. Charles, to whom it was communicated, 
 regarded with just indignation so enormous a sacrifice, but 
 yet was compelled to acknowledge that he had no legal au- 
 thority to abrogate a treaty solemnly executed by the king 
 his father. His single prospect of escape consisted in obtain- 
 ing the repudiation of it from the representatives of the nation 
 at large. With that view he again convened the States- Gren- 
 eral. They met at Paris in May, 1359, and having declared 
 the treaty of London invalid, pledged themselves tg a vigorous 
 prosecution of the war with England. 
 
 Thus closes the history of the States-General of France 
 during the reign of John ; and thus, in the opinion of Mezerai, 
 closes the history of all the States-General really worthy of 
 that name. Charles, however, came to the throne at a mo- 
 ment when popular support was indispensable to the success- 
 ful conduct of those deplorable wars with which the English 
 monarchs were still to desolate France during eighty success- 
 ive, years wars of which we have been taught from our child- 
 hood to cherish an exulting remembrance, but which, as it 
 seems to me, every reasonable man must regard as among the 
 greatest of those calamities with which it has pleased Provi- 
 dence to permit our native country and the whole of Western 
 Europe to be visited. They sowed the seeds of international 
 animosities, the bitter fruits of which have been gathered in 
 by many past generations, and are still, too probably, to be 
 gathered by generations yet unborn. 
 
 During the frequent minorities of the kings of France, it- 
 happened, with a strange similarity of evil fortune, that many 
 jf them learned to conceive in their youth an irreconcilable 
 
 S 
 
271 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 prejudice against those free institutions in which the real 
 strength of their dominion consisted. It was so with Charles 
 VI., with Charles VIII., with Louis XIV., with his immediate 
 successor, but especially with Charles V. The inveterate re- 
 sentment with which the democracy of the States- General and 
 of the municipality of Paris inspired him can excite no sur- 
 prise in any one, and can scarcely justify the severe censure 
 which it has received from the more recent French historians. 
 Whether they justly accuse him of having mounted the throne 
 with a systematic design to bring the representation of the 
 French people into contempt, that so he might bring it into 
 disuse, I can not now pause to inquire. But it must be con- 
 fessed that the charge is not destitute of plausibility. 
 
 For, first, Charles V., from the commencement to the close 
 of his reign, appears to have studiously confounded together 
 the meetings and the functions of the States- General, of the 
 Royal Council, and of the Parliament of Paris. In the three 
 or four of his conventions which usually appear in the Cata- 
 logue of the States-General of France, the habits of preceding 
 times appear to have been intentionally disregarded. Neither 
 the mode of electing the deputies, nor the mode of proceeding 
 in the States, nor their composition, nor even the subjects 
 which engaged their attention, resembled those of the reigns 
 of earlier kings. 
 
 And, secondly, on his accession to the crown, Charles assailed 
 the democratic power with a weapon the most keen which can 
 ever be grasped by royal hands, but which had never been 
 wielded by any of his predecessors. It was borrowed from 
 the arsenal of his former antagonist. He became, in his own 
 person, a financial reformer. To him is due the praise of hav- 
 ing first introduced into France, or rather into Europe, the 
 practice of carefully estimating and balancing against each 
 other the ways and means, and the expenditure, of each suc- 
 cessive year, and of appropriating to each branch of the pub- 
 lic service the funds necessary for the support of each. 
 
 But while, by this wise economical foresight, Charles was 
 acquiring the confidence of his subjects, Edward, prince of 
 Wales, as administrator of the duchy of Aquitaine, by revers- 
 ing that enlightened policy, was provoking the just resentment 
 of that brave and irritable people. His unmeaning warfare 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 275 
 
 in Spain involved him in such financial difficulties as to ren- 
 der unavoidable the imposition on his subjects of an enormous 
 house tax, which bore the name of hearth-money. 
 
 It was with eager delight that Charles watched the contrast 
 between the conduct of his great rival and his own. Strong 
 in the popularity acquired by his thrift and by his stern resist- 
 ance to fiscal abuses, and stronger still in the unpopularity 
 which the Black Prince had acquired by his improvident waste 
 of the public money, Charles ventured to brave at once his 
 two formidable enemies, the English power and the French 
 democracy. The people of Aquitaine appealed to hinVas their 
 suzerain lord, against the misrule of the Prince of Wales, and 
 especially against his exaction of hearth-money. To enter- 
 tain such an appeal would be to declare war against the En- 
 glish prince, and therefore against his father. For the decis- 
 ion of that critical question, Charles convened an assembly at 
 Paris. 
 
 Whether that assembly was a convention of the States-Gen- 
 eral with elected deputies representing the Tiers Etat, r 
 whether it was a mere meeting of Notables nominated by 
 the king himself, is disputed by the French historians. The 
 words of the only original document illustrative of the subject, 
 which is still extant, are hardly to be reconciled with each 
 other, and afford some countenance to each of those opposite 
 opinions. On the one hand, it is clear that the forms and 
 semblance of the States- General were studiously maintained ; 
 on the other hand, it is not less clear that, at the same time 
 and in the same place, the forms and semblance of a Parlia- 
 ment, or judicial tribunal, were maintained with equal solici- 
 tude ; for, while the whole body was divided into three or- 
 ders, as in the States-General, Charles himself appeared and 
 sat among them, surrounded by his family, and by the chief 
 officers of his crown, as in a Parliament. It is hardly to be 
 doubted that the representative and the judicial institutions 
 were thus blended and confused with each other designedly. 
 It was no unmeaning ceremonial, or disregard of ceremony 
 The purpose of Charles was obviously to secure for the acts oi 
 the assembly both the deference with which the French peo- 
 ple were accustomed to regard the resolves of the Parliament, 
 and the authority which they ascribed to the decisions of 
 
276 THE STATES-GENERAL Oi^ 
 
 their representatives. He designed, by combining in one body 
 the attributes of both of those bodies, to bring both into sub- 
 mission to his own power. He did not so much intend to im- 
 part to the States -Greneral the character of a Parliament, as to 
 secure for the adjudication of a Parliament the reverence so 
 .generally accorded to the conclusions of the States- Greneral. 
 
 Transparent as such a device appears to us, it sufficiently 
 answered the immediate object of the king. He could not be 
 more solicitous to propagate the illusion that the assembly was 
 a lawfully-constituted court of justice, than the people were 
 willing'' to accept and to yield themselves to it. A generous 
 enthusiasm in favor of a monarch who excelled in the honest 
 arts of popularity ; a stern enthusiasm against the foreign 
 yoke ; a hearty dislike (as the French historians assure us) 
 for the cold and repulsive manners of their English conquer- 
 ors ; and a no less hearty disgust for the selfishness of the 
 demagogues who had governed the States-G eneral of the reign 
 of John, all concurred in impelling France to defy the En- 
 glish power, and to restore to Charles the prerogatives of which 
 he had so recently been deprived. The clerical order in the 
 assembly assured the king that he might entertain the ap- 
 peal from Aquitaine with a good conscience. The nobles of- 
 fered him the support of their property and their swords. The 
 Tiers Etat concurred in the propriety of the intended breach 
 with Edward, And when each of the three orders had thus 
 separately spoken, the whole assembly united in the declara- 
 tion that the appeal against the exactions of the Prince of 
 "Wales ought to be received, protesting that the King of En- 
 gland would be acting unjustly if he should make that meas- 
 ure the occasion of a war. 
 
 It was in May, 1369, that this resolution was adopted. In 
 the following December, Charles again convened the same as- 
 sembly, to perform the less grateful office of providing the 
 means of carrying on the war in which, at their instance, he 
 was now involved. They accordingly agreed to maintain in 
 force the tax on the sale of all goods, the salt tax, and the ad 
 valorem duties on wines and liquors. To these imposts they 
 added duties on the entry of wine into Paris and other great 
 cities, and a hearth tax on every house not within any mu- 
 nicipal limits. The almost unequaled amount and pressure 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 277 
 
 of these imposts sufficiently attests the strength with which 
 the refluent current of public opinion was now running in fa- 
 vor of the royal authority, and against the democratic influen- 
 ces by which it had been so lately encountered and restrained. 
 That such measures should have been adopted at all ; that 
 they should have been adopted by a body on which the pres- 
 ence of the king, his family, and his officers had impressed the 
 character of a Parliament ; and that this great innovation on 
 the constitutional forms of the States-Greneral should have been 
 silently tolerated by that body all this amounted, in effect, 
 to nothing less than a great counter-revolution. It was a sig- 
 nal triumph of the monarchical over the popular power. It 
 was the commencement of a long series of similar conflicts 
 and of similar successes conflicts and successes which term- 
 inated at length in the transfer of the power of the purse from 
 the representatives of the people to the ministers of the crown. 
 It will be the object of my two following lectures to trace out 
 (though, of course, very slightly and rapidly) the progress of 
 those struggles, and to show how they at length terminated in 
 a result so hostile to constitutional government in France. 
 
 The obvious, though very imperfect analogies between the 
 constitutional struggles of that kingdom in the fourteenth and 
 in the eighteenth centuries, have of late given a peculiar in- 
 terest and significance there to the passage of history on which 
 we have been dwelling. The characters and the policy of Le 
 Cocq and of Marcel, of the King of Navarre and of Charles V., 
 have recently been discussed by French writers, very much in 
 the same spirit, and under the influence of motives not a little 
 resembling those with which we ourselves still debate the mer- 
 its of Hampden and of Vane, of Cromwell and of Charles I. 
 M. G-uizot has shown how far an entire exemption from our 
 English preiudices may assist an author of our own times in 
 pronouncing an equitable judgment on that part of our En- 
 glish annals ; and if England could now boast an historical 
 philosopher worthy to be brought into competition with that 
 great man, his estimate of Charles V. and his contemporaries 
 might, in the same manner, supersede the advocacy or the 
 censures of their French eulogists or assailants. But, une- 
 qual as the most profound among us may be to emulate M 
 G-uizot's comprehensive survey x>f men and of their doings, it 
 
278 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 is within the power of the humblest to remember and to imi- 
 tate his judicial impartiality 
 
 I observe, then, that as neither Charles V. nor his opponents 
 rose above the level of their times, so the conflict between them 
 was conducted in a spirit which, on either side, was almost 
 equally narrow-minded. For, 
 
 First; Le Cocq and the States-General, Marcel and the 
 Bourgeois of Paris, seem to have acted throughout on the as- 
 sumption that the democracy must always increase then* own 
 strength and resources exactly in proportion to their success 
 in diminishing the powers of the crown. That each member 
 of the commonwealth is directly interested in the support of 
 the legitimate authority of the rest, was a truth as much hid- 
 den from them as to ourselves it has become trite and familiar 
 to satiety. 
 
 Secondly ; the agitators of that day, as of some later days, 
 contemplated the venerable edifice of society, not as a sacred 
 institution, to be approached with reverence and touched with 
 awe, but as a mechanism on which the rude hands of igno- 
 rance or of passion might be laid without contracting guilt or 
 deserving punishment. No man's conscience seems at that 
 time to have been possessed with that sense of duty, or to have 
 been alarmed with that dread of sin, which should either ani- 
 mate or deter him who undertakes to reform the government 
 of a mighty nation. 
 
 Thirdly ; in their eagerness to subvert, the States-General 
 of the reign of John forgot, or perhaps they did not know, how 
 extreme is the difficulty of reconstruction. They regarded rev- 
 olution as an exciting game, to be played out in the spirit of 
 audacious adventure, not as the most extreme of all remedies, 
 and the most arduous of all duties ; to be undertaken, indeed, 
 resolutely, when the sad necessity arrives, but to be discharged 
 even then with moderation and with self-control. 
 
 Fourthly; the usurpers of the French government in the 
 fourteenth century seem not to have remembered that, in such 
 revolutions, the hour of triumph is also the hour of trial. They 
 learned, when too late, that there may be, and often is, no con- 
 nection at all between the vulgar talent which detects and cen- 
 sures the errors of the rulers of mankind, and the nobler talent 
 which discerns and knows how to pursue the path of safety 
 
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 279 
 
 and ot true wisdom. The States-General were as unskillful 
 financiers and as unsuccessful administrators as Charles him- 
 self ; and in both those functions far weaker, because far more 
 unpopular, than he. In him the people at large forgave the 
 excesses of youth, and pitied the misfortunes of the most ex- 
 alted birth, and revered the descendant and representative 
 of a long line of kings. In the blunders of the States-Gen- 
 eral and their commissioners, they despised the incapacity and 
 hated the insolence of a body of reckless and arrogant innova- 
 tors. Reviving despotism could have desired no firmer sup- 
 port in all its subsequent aggressions than the memory of such 
 a revolution, conducted by such persons to such an issue. 
 
 Fifthly ; in the excitement of that desperate game, the 
 States-General were, in appearance at least, indifferent to the 
 disasters of their common country, and to the high claims 
 which the young heir to the crown of France had to their for- 
 bearance and their zealous support. They rashly hazarded 
 the independence of France rather than forego the opportunity 
 of seizing upon the government. In the very dawn of his 
 manhood, they studiously trained up their future king with 
 such prepossessions and with such just resentments as could 
 not but render him, in his more mature days, the irreconcila- 
 ble enemy of the popular cause. Nor, 
 
 Sixthly; is it 'their least reproach that they squandered an 
 inestimable opportunity of obtaining solid and permanent guar- 
 antees for the very reforms which they most desired to accom- 
 plish. The memory of the Provincial Charters of Louis X. was 
 still recent and distinct. They were not ignorant of the pow- 
 ers which their Anglo-Norman enemies were deriving from the 
 observance of not dissimilar charters. It was in their power 
 to secure for their constituents periodical meetings of the States- 
 General the power of the purse and a large share in the 
 legislative power. On that basis they might have cemented a 
 firm alliance of all the three orders, with a due regard to the 
 powers and dignity of the crown. But all these advantages 
 were, in their eyes, as nothing, if only Le Cocq might govern 
 France from the tribune, and Marcel be supreme over Paris at 
 the halles. 
 
 Seventhly ; fatal also, and of ill omen, was that union of the 
 representatives of the people and the demagogues. Between 
 
280 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 the guardians of law, of order, and of constitutional franchises 
 on the one hand, and the agitators of the multitude on the 
 other, there can never be any permanent reconcilement, nor 
 any other than a dangerous truce. The States-General could 
 not reasonably anticipate any thing but a ruthless and de- 
 grading servitude from the elevation of him who had slaugh- 
 tered the counselors of the Dauphin at their master's feet, and 
 who had induced, if he did not enjoy, the personal humiliation 
 }f the heir of their captive monarch. 
 
 Eighthly ; it is, on the other hand, impossible to vindicate 
 the Dauphin himself. His conduct in these controversies was 
 improvident, faithless, cruel, and capricious. Yet in his youth, 
 and in the resentment but too justly provoked by his opponents, 
 we may at least discover some apology for his errors, and some 
 extenuation even of his crimes. But, 
 
 Lastly ; be the judgment of history on the personal charac- 
 ter of Charles what it may, his struggle with the States-Gen- 
 eral is important to us chiefly as illustrating some great and 
 permanent truths. It shows that in political contests success 
 awaits the power which opposes a single and unfaltering pur- 
 pose to the shifting and uncertain impulses of its antagonists ; 
 that though distrust of our brethren may too often be neces- 
 sary for the defense of society, faith in them is the essential 
 condition of all true social progress ; that the privileged orders 
 of any state, if not themselves strictly united, must fall at the 
 first direct encounter with the democracy, at all times their 
 most irreconcilable and their most dangerous enemy ; that the 
 habitual and intense contemplation of the wrongs we endure 
 is not the best method of attaining the 'rights to which we 
 aspire ; that, while ages pass away, man remains unaltered, 
 the revolutions of one century differing in circumstances only, 
 not in spirit, from those of another ; that it is for this reason 
 that history is a science, and not a series of aimless though 
 amusing narratives ; and that (as the wise man teaches) " The 
 thing that hath been is that which shall be ; and that which 
 is done is that which shall be done ; and there is not any thing 
 whereof it may be said, See, this is new. It hath been already, 
 of old time which was before us." 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 281 
 
 LECTURE XL 
 
 ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 HAVING in my last lecture attempted to review the proceed- 
 ings of the principal conventions of the States-G-eneral of 
 France in the fourteenth century, I proceed, as far as the time 
 at my disposal will allow, to explain the various attempts and 
 the ultimate failure of the States assembled on the fifteenth 
 or following age, to maintain the authority of the representa- 
 tives of the people, and to restrain the usurpations of the royal 
 power. This chronological distinction is not, indeed, very ac- 
 curately drawn, as I have yet to notice the measures of the 
 States-G-eneral of 1380 and 1382, hut these may be most con- 
 veniently considered and reviewed as introductory to those of 
 the reign of Charles VII. and of his two immediate successors. 
 
 "When Charles VI. ascended the throne of his ancestors, he 
 had not completed his twelfth year. He had, therefore, to 
 anticipate the dangers of a long minority ; but, otherwise, no 
 prince had ever entered on that high office with what might 
 have seemed brighter auguries of a prosperous reign. His 
 three uncles, the Dukes of Anjou, of Berri, and of Burgundy, 
 disputed the honor of defending the realm and the person of 
 their young sovereign. Duguesclin and the other great com- 
 manders of the armies of Charles V. had wrested from the 
 English nearly the whole of their conquests in France. By 
 the thrift and foresight of that wise monarch, a treasure had 
 been accumulated, which the estimates (perhaps the exagger- 
 ated estimates) of that age represent as having amounted to 
 between two hundred and fifty and three hundred millions of 
 francs ; and the Assembly, or States- General of 1369, had 
 placed at the disposal of the crown such permanent financial 
 resources as might seem to have banished all reasonable fear 
 that France would ever again have to mourn over such a defeat 
 as that of Poictiers, or to sign such a treaty as that of Bretig- 
 ny. Justly confident, therefore, as it then appeared, in tho 
 
82 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 prospects of his suceessor, Charles V. had signalized the last 
 day of his life by the promulgation of letters patent abolishing 
 the hearth tax, and prohibiting the revival of it. 
 
 But these brilliant hopes were almost immediately overcast. 
 Louis, duke of Anjou, the eldest of the uncles of Charles VI., 
 and regent of France during his minority, had been appointed, 
 by the will of Jane, the deceased Queen of Naples, to succeed 
 to her on the Neapolitan throne. To prosecute his claim to so 
 brilliant an inheritance, Louis stood in urgent need of large 
 sums of money. The treasure accumulated by Charles V. had 
 been deposited for safety in the Castle of Melun, and Louis had 
 solemnly sworn to guard it for his royal nephew. He, how- 
 ever, broke open the chest and purloined the money. 
 
 At this time the patience of the people of Paris had already 
 been severely exercised. They had resented the delay in car- 
 rying into effect the abolition of the hearth tax, to which the 
 letters patent of their dying sovereign had entitled them. 
 They had been irritated by an attempt to extend the tax on 
 the sales of merchandise to all those petty articles with which 
 the public markets were supplied for the daily consumption of 
 the citizens. When, therefore, the intelligence of the robbery 
 of Melun reached them, their discontent broke out into actual 
 insurrection. A Parliament, as it was called, of the townsmen 
 was convened, and marched, at the head of the insurgents, to 
 the royal palace. A cobbler distinguished himself by a vehe- 
 ment harangue against the farther payment of any taxes what- 
 ever. The popular fury rose, and was irresistible. Even the 
 chancellor was compelled to provide for his safety by an arti- 
 fice with which, during the last sixty years, almost every 
 statesman in France has been more or less frequently familiar. 
 He assumed the character of a demagogue, and won the mo- 
 mentary confidence of the mob by exclaiming, " Kings reign 
 only by the suffrages of their subjects, though they may deny 
 it a hundred times." In the name of their youthful monarch, 
 the terrified courtiers issued an ordinance, complying with 
 every demand of the agitators. It repealed all aids and sub- 
 sidies imposed since the time of Philip le Bel ; and it declared 
 that the payment of such imposts in time past by the people 
 should never be drawn into a precedent for the renewed exac- 
 tion of them. The triumph of democratic violence was then 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 283 
 
 celebrated with the usual demonstrations of popular joy. The 
 Jews were plundered of all their property, and the hous;e of 
 every tax-gatherer was given up to pillage. 
 
 But France was now again involved in war with England, 
 and to supply the funds required to provide for the public de- 
 fense, an assembly was convened at Paris in the year 1380. 
 It is much debated by the French historians whether this as- 
 sembly was, in the proper sense of the words, a meeting of the 
 States- G-eneral. But it is perfectly clear that the members 
 of it assumed the right of granting large duties on the sale of 
 merchandise. They assumed it, however, in vain. The ful- 
 fillment of the king's recent pledges was sternly demanded by 
 Paris, and by many other great cities. The demand could not 
 be silenced, and yet it could not be conceded. To collect the 
 existing taxes was scarcely possible. To levy any new im- 
 posts seemed altogether hopeless. The war, however, would 
 not remit its demands for money ; and so urgent were the ex- 
 igencies of the public service, that, at length, in January, 
 1381, an ordinance was made in the royal name for the impo- 
 sition of new duties, and for the sale of them as a farm to the 
 highest bidder. The strength and the violence of the popular 
 party had now become so formidable that no one ventured to 
 undertake the office of proclaiming this unwelcome enactment. 
 At length a man of more than usual address and courage was 
 hired to run the hazard. Mounted on a swift horse, he rode 
 into the srowd, and amused them by a story of a supposed 
 robbery, and by the offer of a reward to any one who might 
 detect the criminals ; and then, availing himself of the wonder 
 and of the talk which his tale had excited, he abruptly an- 
 nounced that the new taxes would be levied on the morrow, 
 and, setting spurs to his horse, hardly escaped with his life 
 from the rage of the indignant multitude. 
 
 This strange device was the signal for a new insurrection. 
 It was called the revolt of the Maillotins. Barricades were 
 erected, a civic guard was organized, the prisons were thrown 
 open, and, during several successive days, Paris was aban- 
 doned to massacre and pillage. 
 
 In the midst of these excesses, an assembly of the States- 
 General was convened, in April, 1382, at Compiegne, when 
 the. first president of the Parliament of Paris demanded, in the 
 
284 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 king's name, the indispensable supplies for the conduct of the 
 war. The deputies of the Tiers Etat answered by promising 
 to consult their constituents. They did so, and, in due time, 
 reported their decision in the following pithy words : " Potius 
 mori quam leventur." Again, therefore, Charles VI. was com- 
 pelled to publish a retraction of his recent ordinance, in very 
 nearly the same language as that which had been extorted 
 from him by the first of these Parisian insurrections. Thus 
 it seemed to be firmly established, at least in the North of 
 France, that, without the consent of the States-General, no 
 taxes could be lawfully raised, and that, for the present, their 
 consent to any new taxation was not to be obtained. 
 
 The unwonted energy and success of the popular cause in 
 France at this time is to be explained by the fact that it was 
 an era when, under the influence of some strange sympathy, 
 the whole of Europe was agitated by the simultaneous discon- 
 tents of all her great civic populations. The insurgent spirit, 
 commencing in the Italian Republics, had spread from the 
 south to the north of the Alps, every where marking its ad- 
 vance by tumult, spoil, and bloodshed. "Wat Tyler and his 
 bands had menaced London ; and the communes of Flanders, 
 under the command of Philip van Arteveld, had broken out 
 into open war with the counts, their seigneurs, and with their 
 suzerain lord, the Duke of Burgundy, The Flemings had 
 established intimate relations with the insurgents of Paris, 
 and every eye in that city was turned toward the Burgundian 
 army, which, under the nominal conduct of the young king, 
 was advancing to chastise the Grantois. On the issue of that 
 attempt, the fate of the royal and baronial power seemed to 
 hang in France, not less than in Flanders. The battle of Ros- 
 becque decided that controversy in favor of the king and the 
 Duke of Burgundy. It crushed the Flemish revolt, and drove 
 the Maillotins of the French capital first to panic, and then to 
 despair. The victorious army returned to Paris. The citi- 
 zens were disarmed. Three hundred of the richest of them 
 were drowned or hanged without any form of law. The mu- 
 nicipal rights and property of the city were declared to be for- 
 feited. A fine of 400,000 francs was imposed on the Parisians 
 alone. Penalties scarcely less enormous were levied at Rouen, 
 Rheiras, Chalons, Orleans, Sens, and many of the cities of 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 285 
 
 Languedoc. The Burgundian soldiers were sent to live at 
 free quarters among them. All the imposts so recently abol- 
 ished were reimposed by the mere authority of the king. All 
 the pledges given by him, or in his name, were set aside as so 
 many unmeaning words. The reaction was complete ; and no 
 less than thirty years elapsed before France ever again wit- 
 nessed the convention of the States-Greneral of the realm. 
 
 In that long interval money was sometimes raised for the 
 public service by simple edicts of the crown, but, more fre- 
 quently, the concurrence of some of the constituted bodies of 
 the state was solicited to sanction or countenance this usurped 
 authority. On one occasion the clergy and the University of 
 Paris were thus convened to give their assent to the imposition 
 of a tax. At another, the deputies of particular cities were 
 brought together for the same purpose. But neither the bat- 
 tle of Rosbecque, nor the executions and terrors which had fol- 
 lowed it, nor the isolated position of the clergy, nor the defense- 
 less state of the Bourgeoise, could repress that daring spirit 
 which, in the close of the fourteenth and in the beginning of 
 the fifteenth century, had so deeply possessed the national 
 mind of France. 
 
 Thus in the year 1411, the king proposed to the clergy and 
 University of Paris the imposition of a new tax which should 
 affect all orders of men indifferently ; when, in the answer 
 which they returned through the Chancellor of Notre Dame, 
 those learned bodies had the courage or the temerity to de- 
 clare that a king who should so abuse his power ought to be 
 deposed. The chancellor was prosecuted for his audacious 
 words, but the universal enthusiasm in his favor compelled 
 the government to abandon the prosecution. 
 
 The reins of royal authority had been strained too far. 
 Public dangers and private intrigues at length compelled the 
 king and his ministers to relax their grasp of them. Alarmed 
 by the perils with which the renewal of the war with England 
 was menacing the kingdom, the Dukes of Berri, of Burgundy, 
 and of Orleans brought their selfish hostilities with each other 
 and with their sovereign to a close by the treaty of Auxerre. 
 To ratify the compact by the highest possible sanction, it was 
 resolved to convene once more the States-Greneral of France, 
 and thus to obtain such supplies as might be requisite to repel 
 
286 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 the invader. The States accordingly assembled at Paris in 
 the year 1412, when the Chancellor of Gruienne delivered, in 
 the name of his sovereign, an address which might well have 
 been stereotyped for the use of all ministers who in all future 
 times should have occasion to appeal to the liberality of repre- 
 sentative bodies. It eulogized the executive powers who stood 
 in need of money ; it magnified the benefits which the posses- 
 sion of money would enable them to confer ; and it ended by 
 an earnest entreaty for assistance from those who had money 
 to bestow. " The king," exclaimed the chancellor, in his pe- 
 roration, "requires of you three things, that is, comfort, aides, 
 et secours ;" or, as we should say in English, money more 
 money and yet more money still. 
 
 The three orders, embarrassed, though certainly not sur- 
 prised by the demand, deputed the clergy and the University 
 of Paris to prepare and deliver their common answer. The 
 choice of men of the gown for what might well appear a haz- 
 ardous service was well justified by the result ; for never did 
 coat of mail or cuirass cover hearts more dauntless than 
 throbbed beneath the hoods and surplices of those reverend 
 churchmen. Listen, for example, to the following passages 
 from the speech which, in their name, the Abbe du Moutier 
 addressed to the kings and princes before whom the knights 
 and burgesses of France had been quailing for the last thirty 
 years. " Most of your revenue officers," he said, " are mere 
 nobodies, who were poor enough when they entered your serv- 
 ice, but have grown rich in the course of it. Only let a va- 
 grant become the clerk to a receiver, to a secretary, to a treas- 
 urer, or to a general, and forthwith you shall see him ruffed 
 and furred with marten skins and other rich dresses, so that 
 nobody can know him for the same man. He must needs 
 have a rich sash round his loins, and won't dine with any man 
 who does not treat his guests to hippocras. And all this waste 
 is at the king's cost. It won't do, however, to reform the pet- 
 ty offenders only. You must begin with the grandees, and 
 give a shake to the Court of Parliament, where sits many a 
 worthless member. The aides were increased on account of 
 the king's wars ; but now, when the wars have begun to re- 
 lax, some of those aides are bestowed by the king on their 
 lordships. As he has given them money, so let them give 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 287 
 
 money to him. Let not the king exempt them from contrib- 
 uting to his service. They are of his own blood. They are 
 his subjects. They hold of him so many noble estates that 
 doubtless they will be among the foremost to assist him." So 
 spake the University of Paris by the lips of their delegate ; 
 and not unlike this was the dauntless tone in which, in the 
 following century, our own University spoke by the lips of 
 brave old Greorge Latimer, who, fearing the face of no man, 
 compelled all bad men to fear him. 
 
 But, at that time, Paris boasted a far more eminent son 
 than Du Moutier in the devout and learned John Grerson, af- 
 terward the ornament and leader of the Council of Constance. 
 Not even at that celebrated synod did Grerson ever raise his 
 voice with greater energy than when, at the States- Greneral of 
 1412, he asserted the right and the determination of his Uni- 
 versity to rebuke the king and the princes for the wrongs 
 which they had inflicted on the people of France. " Univer- 
 sitas," he demanded, " representat ne universum regnum? 
 Immo vere totum mundum. Q,uare ergo non potest et debet, 
 similia verba (veritatis magistra), regi suo et domino liberius 
 intonare ? Quid totus diceret Franciae populus, quern quotidie 
 Universitas, per suos subditos, ad patientiam et bonam obedi- 
 entiam regis et dominorum adhortatur, si non aeque bene regi 
 loqueretur, ut sese benigne, juste, et rationabiliter, erga popu- 
 lum suum haberet ? Yideretur adulationis et dissimulationis 
 factum, nee unquam populus nos audire vellet." 
 
 But of all the learned doctors who signalized their public 
 spirit on this occasion, the most remarkable was Eustache de 
 Pavily (the public orator, as we should say, of the University), 
 whose expostulations were drawn up in the form of a memo- 
 rial or written speech, which is still extant. In the name of 
 his constituents, De Pavily impeached Jean de Nesle, the chan- 
 cellor of the Dauphin, and demanded the seizure of his goods 
 and person ; and then addressing himself to Charles, upbraid- 
 ed him with his personal extravagance with the non-payment 
 either of the ordinary expenses of his household or of the sal- 
 aries of his officers with the decay of his castles with the 
 neglect of his royal domain and with the example of his fa- 
 ther, who, after nobly employing his revenue in the expulsion 
 of the English, had accumulated a vast treasure for the serv- 
 
288 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 ice of the crown. Louis XYI. scarcely received from the Na- 
 tional Convention reproaches more bitter, contemptuous, or dis- 
 loyal than Charles VI. was compelled to hear from the lips of 
 Eustache de Pavily, as the organ of that great and learned so- 
 ciety, which, strong in the reverence of Europe and of the 
 Church at large, maintained its independence and its free spirit 
 amid the wreck of every other popular institution. The cour- 
 age of the reverend orator may merit admiration ; but his in- 
 vectives were as unjust as they were indecorous, for the sov- 
 ereign to whom they were addressed was exempted from all 
 personal responsibility, and ought to have been rescued from 
 all such indignities, by the madness under which he labored, 
 and which seldom knew a partial, and perhaps never a com- 
 plete suspension. 
 
 The grievances against which Du Moutier, Grerson, and De 
 Pavily raised these indignant expostulations were, however, 
 intolerable ; as we may sufficiently learn from the Ordinance 
 of the 25th of May, 1413, which, at the instance of the States- 
 Greneral, was enacted for the redress of them. It was the 
 work of a committee appointed by the States for that especial 
 purpose, and is the earliest of that long series of written con- 
 stitutions which attest the subtle, the philosophical, and the 
 sanguine spirit of the statesmen of France, but which also at- 
 test their habitual unconsciousness or disregard of many sim- 
 ple and elementary truths, moral and political. Such, for ex- 
 ample, is the truth that there has been constituted among men 
 a polity not human, but divine a polity to which all secular 
 institutions are so far subordinate that there never can be a 
 perennial spring of life in any civil state, the laws and Con- 
 stitution of which forbid the free action and the progressive 
 development of the state ecclesiastical. Such, also, is the 
 truth, that communities, like individual men, are subject to 
 duties which they may not abandon, and to laws which they 
 may not violate with impunity. And such, again, is the truth, 
 that "in political society no real or enduring blessing can be of 
 an ephemeral growth, but must be gained by sacrifices, and 
 perpetuated by tradition, and nourished by reverence, and ma- 
 tured by habit, and maintained, among the ruder multitude, 
 by much submissive faith and by many honest prejudices. 
 Maxims such as these, familiar as they are to ourselves, were 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 289 
 
 as completely hidden from the French people in the fifteenth 
 as in the nineteenth century. In May, 1413, therefore, the 
 States-Greneral procured the enactment of a royal ordinance 
 establishing a new and a complete system of government. It 
 regulated the royal domain, the coinage, the taxation, the mil- 
 itary expenditure, the audit of the public accounts, the man- 
 agement of the royal forests and navigable rivers, the admin- 
 istration of justice, the office of chancellor, and the constitu- 
 tion of the Parliament. Just eleven months afterward, the 
 whole of this splendid edifice was swept away, leaving behind 
 no trace of its existence, except on the parchments on which 
 it had been delineated. The sacred right of insurrection was 
 once more called into exercise. Vast mobs, who bore the 
 name of Cabochiens, usurped for a moment all the powers of 
 the state ; and by a strange imitation of the extravagances 
 of their predecessors in the reign of John, and a still stranger 
 anticipation of the feats of their remote posterity, subjected 
 the Dauphin to the very same insult and humiliation which 
 Louis XVI. was afterward destined to endure, except, indeed, 
 that the cap of liberty worn by the unhappy Louis was red, 
 while that which was forced on the head of Charles was white. 
 
 In this reign of terror of the fifteenth century, the Duke of 
 Burgundy assumed the character which Philippe Egalite was 
 to enact nearly 400 years afterward in the same city. He or- 
 ganized the butchers of the capital into a force at once mili- 
 tary and fiscal ; and having collected the public taxes by their 
 agency, employed those funds in supporting the rabble who 
 gathered round his hotel as at once his partisans and his de- 
 fenders. 
 
 The battle of Agincourt was fought in the midst of these 
 tumults. It is impossible, and perhaps, if possible, it might 
 not be desirable, to repress the exultation with which we dwell 
 on that marvelous victory ; yet neither is it desirable to con- 
 ceal from ourselves the fact that our heroic ancestors triumph- 
 ed over a disunited people over an undisciplined army over 
 generals at once unable to command and unwilling to obey 
 over princes of the blood who had debased themselves into 
 mere demagogues and over a king whom Providence had 
 smitten with an incurable madness. To these causes, more 
 than to his own capacity or valor, Henry was indebted both 
 
290 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 for that triumph and for his subsequent successes. The Bour- 
 geois of Paris "became his avowed partisans. The Dukes of 
 Burgundy and of Bretagne basely acknowledged his authority ; 
 and, on the 31st of May, 1420, he was solemnly acknowledged 
 as the legitimate heir to the crown of France. 
 
 Yet, even in that hour of humiliation, the French people did 
 not abandon the hope of vindicating the constitutional rights 
 for which they had so long contended. They obtained from 
 Henry a pledge that he would neither impose nor levy any 
 imposts upon them except for reasonable and necessary causes, 
 nor even then except in accordance with the laws and ap- 
 proved customs of the realm. To secure the fulfillment of 
 this promise, they farther stipulated that the States-General 
 should immediately be convened to give their advice and con- 
 sent respecting the terms on which the crowns of France and 
 of England should be combined in the person of Henry, with- 
 out any such union of the two kingdoms as might impair the 
 independence of either. 
 
 Henry observed this engagement so promptly that the States- 
 General of France met at Paris, in obedience to his summons, 
 in the course of the same year. It is, however, a passage of 
 history not to be read without shame and indignation, whether 
 the reader belongs to England or to France. The States- 
 General, depressed by the public calamities and stimulated by 
 the Burgundian party, not only submitted to Henry, but openly 
 announced their hostility to the Dauphin. To aid the English 
 king in his war against the legitimate heir to the French crown, 
 they authorized levies of money in the most oppressive and in- 
 iquitous forms. The coinage was to be debased for the profit 
 of the treasury ; and all persons possessing property were to 
 be compelled to make loans to Henry on such terms as he 
 might dictate, and on such security as he had to offer. Not 
 satisfied with thus humbling the subjects of Charles of Valcis, 
 Henry compelled that unhappy prince, though actually labor- 
 ing at the time under his constitutional insanity, to appear in 
 person before the States- General of France, and there to ac- 
 knowledge that the treaty of Troyes, which had transferred 
 the royal inheritance of his posterity to the English king, was 
 his own free and spontaneous act, and to declare that it would 
 redound to the praise and honor of God, to his own advantage, 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 291 
 
 to tho weal of the kingdom of France, and to the benefit of all 
 his subjects. These lamentable declarations of the insane old 
 man were received by the Three Estates with loud applause, 
 and (as may be read in Rymer), " eandem paoem laudarunt, 
 acceptarunt, et auctorisarunt, referentes humillime gratias 
 utrisque regibus." That the Assembly might drain the bitter 
 cup to the very dregs, they were then compelled to swear to 
 the observance of the treaty of Troyes, and to sanction an 
 edict promulgated in the name of Charles, which denounced 
 as traitors and as rebels all who should presume to contravene 
 that treaty. ^ . 
 
 In opposition to these intolerable indignities, a solitary voice 
 was raised. It is impossible, in this place, to record, without 
 some sympathetic exultation, that it again proceeded from the 
 University of Paris. The rude and contemptuous menaces of 
 Henry, however, silenced their orator, and the last faint em- 
 bers of the ancient spirit of the States-Greneral seemed to be 
 finally extinct. Confident in his success, and despising those 
 on whom he had thus been permitted to trample, Henry, in 
 April, 1421, published in the name of Charles, the titular 
 king, an ordinance which imposed on the French people all the 
 ancient duties on wines and liquors, the salt tax, and the ad 
 valorem duties on the sales of merchandise. 
 
 These memorials of the degradation of their forefathers are 
 suppressed by most of the French historians, or are explained 
 by the hypothesis that the States-Greneral of 1420 were com- 
 posed only of the hired creatures of the Duke of Burgundy and 
 of the English king. If in that or in any other supposition 
 the wounded national self-esteem of that great people can find 
 any solace, it is a consolation of which no Englishman should 
 wish to deprive them ; for our own ancestors partook largely 
 of the degradation which they inflicted, and grievously abused 
 the advantages which they had won. They constrained, or en- 
 couraged the States- General of France to concur with their he- 
 reditary but insane sovereign in proclaiming his own and their 
 disgrace ; in denouncing his son as a traitor for resisting the 
 cruel enemy of his house ; and in extorting money from his sub- 
 jects to crush the last efforts of that young and gallant prince. 
 
 That Shakspeare is not only the best, but the only tolerable 
 historian of the wars waged by the Roses against France and 
 
292 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 against each, other, has passed from a sportive jest into almost 
 a serious article of our received' literary creed. At the risk of 
 a seeming treason to the majesty of our great dramatist, and 
 of a seeming insensibility to our national glories, I must avow 
 my regret that he ever wrote those parts of his historical dra- 
 mas (if his they really be) which celebrate the reigns of Henry 
 V. and of his less famous, though far worthier son. The most 
 exalted genius has really no privilege to propagate miscon- 
 ceptions and prejudices hostile to " peace on earth and good- 
 will among men." That " myriad-minded man" was not, 
 after all, exalted so far above the common level of the human 
 intellect, that, from those heights, he might teach his worship- 
 ers to call evil good, and to put darkness for light. The wars 
 of Henry Y. were among the greatest crimes which disgrace 
 the annals of Christendom, as they drew down upon England, 
 in her own civil wars, one of the most swift and fearful ex- 
 amples of providential retribution. Henry himself, though a 
 lion-hearted captain, has no place among the great masters of 
 the art of war. His comrades, who, under the names of Flu- 
 ellen and the rest, have so long provoked our merriment, might 
 have been exhibited with greater real, though with less dra- 
 matic truth, as barbarians who employed the arts of civiliza- 
 tion to convert the fair realm of France into an Aceldama, and 
 who bequeathed to the most distant generations of Frenchmen 
 a hatred of the English name which it is difficult to condemn, 
 even when we most regret or censure the excesses to which it 
 has occasionally given birth. 
 
 For all these enormous wrongs, however, the Dauphin lived 
 to take such vengeance as might have satisfied the most vin- 
 dictive hostility. After the lapse of some years from his ele- 
 vation to the throne of France, under the title of Charles VII., 
 he was able to boast that he had brought to a triumphant 
 close the protracted war between the houses of Valois and 
 Plantagenet ; that he had established in France a standing 
 army ; that he had provided adequate and permanent funds 
 for the support of it ; and that, at the expense of the aristoc- 
 racy, by whom his father was betrayed, he had enlarged the 
 monarchical power to a greater extent than all or any of his 
 predecessors. Yet it is difficult to assign to Charles VII. a 
 place among truly great princes. 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 293 
 
 The first and most indispensable element of greatness in 
 active life is a social spirit that sympathetic temper "by which 
 a man can render others the willing agents of his own ener- 
 getic will, or by which he can render himself the willing agent 
 of minds more powerful than his own. It is in this last sense 
 only that Charles VII. can with any plausibility be ranked 
 among the magnanimous rulers of the world. He had not the 
 gift of subjugating to himself the dominant souls or intellects 
 of his age, but he had the gift of discerning, of appreciating, 
 and of obeying them. 
 
 Thus, in the midst of his constitutional languor aud volup- 
 tuousness, he was roused to heroism by two women, who had 
 indeed nothing in common but this power of infusing energy 
 into the torpid genius of their king by Joan of Arc, the no- 
 blest of heroines, and by Agnes Sorel, to whom the present 
 generation of Frenchmen, not satisfied merely to forgive her 
 guilt, are enthusiastically erecting statues. Thus, also, the 
 military ardor which indolence and the love of pleasure might 
 seem to have extinguished in him, was kindled by the influ- 
 ence and the example of Bichemont and of Dunois. And thus, 
 again, in those great administrative duties to which the habits 
 of his early life had most indisposed him, he promptly followed, 
 though he so lamentably requited, the guidance of Jacques 
 Coeur and of Xaincoing. "With a character to which, if he 
 had lived apart from minds superior to his own, it would 
 scarcely have been possible to yield any respect, Charles, sub- 
 mitting himself in turn- to each of these influences, became the 
 author of unrivaled benefits to his people ; the emancipator 
 of his native land from a foreign yoke ; the triumphant con- 
 queror of her enemies ; and the founder of some of the most 
 important of her civil and military institutions. 
 
 The first convention of the States-General, in the reign of 
 Charles VII., of which we have any distinct account (for these 
 assemblies were now accustomed to meet and to separate an- 
 nually, without attracting any notice from the chroniclers of 
 the times), was holden at Meun-sur-Yevre. They represented 
 only those parts of Southern France which, in the year 1426, 
 were still adhering to his cause. Eighty years had now elapsed 
 since France had become the seat of war. Even when peace 
 had been nominally established, it had been attended neither 
 
294 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 by security nor by repose. It had merely thrown the dis- 
 banded soldiery on the people for support, in a terhper as 
 rapacious and as formidable as when they were in open war, 
 but not as then governed by any wholesome restraints of mil- 
 itary discipline. Relief from this intolerable oppression was, 
 therefore, the one desire and demand of the States of Meun ; 
 and when Charles gave them a solemn assurance of redress, 
 they answered by pledging themselves to repay the boon at the 
 sacrifice of all the property, and even of all the rights which 
 they possessed. They engaged to serve him even to the death 
 with their persons and their substance, and with whatever 
 else was dear to them. 
 
 Such pledges are usually nothing more than the conven- 
 tional rhetoric of representative assemblies when expressing 
 their gratitude to the sovereign power. But, in this case, a 
 more specific engagement imparted to their language a far 
 deeper significance. The States consented that, inasmuch as 
 they could not easily be brought together, the king might 
 from thenceforward, as often as war should be made upon 
 him, do whatever justice and right should require, without 
 awaiting another assembly of the three orders ; and they prom- 
 ised to obey him with all their power ; to live and to die with 
 him in any such quarrel ; and (in then- own names and in the 
 names of all the absent people of the realm) to place the lives, 
 the persons, and the goods of them all, at the service of the 
 king against any persons whomsoever. 
 
 At the same meeting, the clergy proposed that a separate 
 fund should be formed for the regular maintenance' of the 
 army a security against the rapine of the disbanded troops, 
 which they very reasonably regarded as of much higher value 
 than the most lavish promises which could be addressed to 
 Charles, or than the most solemn pledges into which he could 
 enter. 
 
 We may, however, safely understand the language thus em- 
 ployed, both by the clerical order and by the States-General 
 of Meun, not as the expression of any deliberate purposes, but 
 as extorted from them by the distress and excitement of those 
 disastrous times. They were willing, at the moment, to ab- 
 dicate their own privileges, and even to create a permanent 
 dictatorship in the person of the king, that, under the shelter 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 295 
 
 of his absolute authority they might be secure from wrongs, 
 which rendered all franchises worthless, and life itself a bur- 
 den. Their offers and suggestions did not fall unheeded on 
 the ear of Charles. They were never really forgotten, nor were 
 they eventually barren of the results to which they so obvi- 
 ously tended. But he did not at once assume the powers thus 
 proffered to him. The time had not yet come for such a de- 
 parture from what the great majority of Frenchmen then re- 
 vered and cherished as their national constitution. 
 
 Two years after the States of Meun, the one subject of the 
 thoughts of all men in France was the siege of Orleans. To 
 advance his cause, Charles assembled at Chinon the deputies 
 of such parts of his kingdom as at that time acknowledged 
 his sovereignty. The Maid of Orleans herself was present 
 there, and popular enthusiasm rose to its highest pitch. By 
 the unanimous acclamations of the Assembly, an aid was voted 
 of four hundred thousand francs. No layman in the realm 
 was to be exempt from it. The nobles, nay, even the common 
 beggars, were expressly required to contribute to this sacred 
 fund. Ere long the siege of Orleans was raised. Accomplish- 
 ing the strange presages of her early life, Joan of Arc conducted 
 her sovereign to Rheims. The Duke of Burgundy renounced 
 the English alliance ; and Charles, exulting in his almost mi- 
 raculous success, caught, for the first time, a distinct foresight 
 of his approaching triumph over the inveterate foreign enemies 
 of his people and of his crown. 
 
 With that prospect seems also to have come the first clear 
 intimation of the other approaching triumph which he was to 
 win over the domestic antagonists who had so long circum- 
 scribed the power of his ancestors, and who, during the two 
 preceding reigns, had s.o often agitated France with tumult 
 and insurrection. The first, though incomplete accomplish- 
 ment of these hopes occurred at the States- General hold en at 
 Tours, in the year 1435-6, for confirming the peace which had 
 been made at Arras with the Duke of Burgundy. The States, 
 on that occasion, submissively concurred in re-establishing 
 those imposts against which the Parisians had so often and 
 so successfully revolted. 
 
 After three years of tranquillity, during which the contrib- 
 utors made no attempt to resist the exaction of those impcsts, 
 
296 THE STATES-GENKRAL OT 
 
 Charles, emboldened by their general acquiescence, convened 
 the States- General of Orleans in the month of October, 1439. 
 Of all the assemblies of that nature holden in his reign, it was 
 at once the most important and the most brilliant. Victorious 
 over the arms of England the undisputed master of his once 
 rebellious capital and revered by his subjects as their pro- 
 tector against wrongs still more intolerable than those of war, 
 Charles, shaking off the levity and the indolence of his ear- 
 lier days, exhibited himself at the States- General of Orleans 
 arrayed in all the outward dignity, and animated by all the 
 royal instincts of a mighty sovereign. The chroniclers of the 
 age, captivated with the splendor of the ceremonial, labor to 
 describe him as surrounded by the lords, the prelates, and the 
 commons of his realm ; as attended by the princes of his house 
 and by the great officers of his crown ; and as supported by 
 Eichemont and Dunois, and the other commanders who had 
 led his troops to victory. They commemorate the orations 
 spoken by the chancellor, and they tell of the sanction given 
 by the States to the projected peace with England, to the 
 ransom of the Duke of Orleans, and to the resumption by the 
 crown of all grants by which the royal domain had been di- 
 minished. But they pass over in silence, as they had proba- 
 bly witnessed with inattention, the momentous proceedings 
 which led to the enactment, on the 2d of November, 1439, of 
 the celebrated law entitled an " Ordonnance sur la Gendarme- 
 rie." Yet a law more important in its principles and in its 
 results had never before been advised by the representatives 
 of the French people, nor enacted by any king of France. 
 
 We have seen that the clergy in the States of Meun had 
 recommended that a fund should be created for the regular 
 payment of the troops, and for the prevention of their rapine 
 and misconduct. One of the counselors of Charles, and, as it 
 is generally supposed, Jacques Cosur, revived this proposal at 
 the States of Orleans. He pointed out to the deputies the 
 necessity of appropriating in the various provinces funds ade- 
 quate to this purpose, that so the troops, wherever stationed, 
 might receive their pay with strict punctuality once in each 
 month. And he farther suggested that the whole force to be 
 so maintained should consist of nine thousand men, each of 
 whom should receive ten livres monthly. There is no com* 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 297 
 
 plete contemporary evidence in support of the common opinion 
 that the States of Orleans made a permanent appropriation 
 for the support of this force, of one million two hundred thou 
 sand livres per annum, payable from the tallies due to the va- 
 rious seigneurs in the kingdom within tneii respective fiefs. 
 That the case was really so is, however, reasonably inferred, 
 partly from the language of the Ordonnance sur la Grendarme- 
 rie, and partly from the proceedings of the States held, fifty 
 years later, at Tours. 
 
 The Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie, by which this resolu- 
 tion of the States was carried into effect, reserved to the king 
 the exclusive right of appointing all officers having the rank 
 of captains, and of fixing the number of their troops. No offi- 
 cer was to assume that title, or to command any soldiers in 
 war, without the king's express sanction. Every captain was 
 to be responsible for the conduct of those serving under him, 
 and was to prevent their pillage and ill treatment of the peo- 
 ple. The whole force was to be subject to the jurisdiction of 
 the king's ordinary judges ; and, if any wrong should be com- 
 mitted by any soldiers for which redress could not otherwise 
 be obtained, the sufferers were authorized to invoke the aid of 
 their fellow-citizens, and, in concert with them, to attack the 
 wrong-doers, and deliver them up to justice. Barons com- 
 manding garrisons in their own castles were required to main- 
 tain them at their own cost, and were made responsible for 
 their misconduct. All such barons were forbidden to levy tail- 
 les for victualing their -fortresses, excepting such as had been 
 immemorially payable to them ; or themselves to retain the 
 whole or any part of the tailles or aides granted by the three 
 estates and levied in their seigneuries a provision from which 
 is drawn the only contemporary proof that such an appropria- 
 tion of the seignorial tailles was actually made. The ordon- 
 nance closes with another provision hardly less memorable. 
 It declares that the king will never pardon any ore who shall 
 violate this fundamental law ; and adds that, if by importunate 
 solicitation he should ever be induced to grant such an indulg- 
 ence to such an offender, the judges are to pay no regard to it. 
 
 You will readily perceive the great magnitude of these in- 
 novations. The States-Greneral had at once encouraged and 
 empowered the King of France to introduce, in favor of the 
 
298 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 people at large, and to the prejudice of the seignoriai author 
 ity, a reform which the boldest of his predecessors would not 
 have hazarded. The soldiery were now, for the first time, sub- 
 ordinated to the magistracy and to the law. The barons, and 
 the men-at-arms serving under them, were reduced from the 
 rank of uncontrolled masters of the people to that of obedient 
 subjects of the king. The seignoriai tailles became, not an oc- 
 casional, but a permanent tax. They were transferred to the 
 royal from the baronial treasuries. The king was placed at 
 the head of a standing army, the gathering of which could no 
 longer be prevented by the active or passive resistance of the 
 seigneurs, and the government of which could neither be dis- 
 organized nor usurped by the officers in the immediate com- 
 mand either of battalions or of companies. 
 
 The satisfaction with which this great change was regarded 
 by Charles himself, seems not to have been unmixed with 
 anxiety. He saw in it a conclusive proof of the vast influence 
 of the States-General over the people of France ; and he never 
 again convened them. In enabling him to promulgate the 
 Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie, they had given proofs of a 
 power, and of a consciousness of power, which, if permitted to 
 increase by farther exercise, might as readily abase, as it had 
 elevated, the authority of his crown. By rendering themselves 
 too useful, they had, in his eyes, destroyed their own utility. 
 After the dissolution of the States of Orleans, Charles there- 
 fore provided for such exigencies as he occasionally encoun- 
 tered by convoking either the Provincial States or Assemblies 
 of Notables. One such assembly met at Nevers, in the year 
 1441. It presented to him a demand for the redress of griev- 
 ances, and advised him to summon the States-General of the 
 kingdom. His answer reminded them that such a convention 
 was no longer necessary to legalize his levying of tailles a 
 lesson, or perhaps a sarcasm, by which it was now too late for 
 them to profit. 
 
 The Notables, that is, the barons and seigneurs, were indeed 
 ere long dissatisfied with the concessions which they had made 
 to the king at Orleans. If Philip de Comines be well informed, 
 their concurrence had been purchased by money secretly ad- 
 vanced by the king for that purpose. But, after some experi- 
 ence of the effects of the Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie, they 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 29!) 
 
 presented to him earnest remonstrances against the farther 
 execution of it. M. Michelet has given an account (and, as is 
 usual with him, an amusing and picturesque account) of their 
 ineffectual struggles to shake off the fetters which they had 
 inadvertently assumed at Orleans. To all their expostulations 
 Charles opposed a peremptory and decisive refusal. He was 
 now at the head of a force which rendered his decisions, and 
 especially his popular decisions, irresistible. 
 
 For the Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie appears to have 
 been eminently popular, even though it was carried into exe- 
 cution by means the least calculated, as it would seem, to 
 conciliate the people at large. Since the time of St. Louis, 
 the tallies had always been apportioned among the contribu- 
 tors by officers of their own election, and who, for that reason, 
 were called Elus. But, on acquiring a permanent charge on 
 the seignorial tallies, Charles assumed the power of nominat- 
 ing those officers, and changed their title into that of Elus 
 Royaux. It was the ill-omened intimation of an unwelcome 
 novelty. The irresponsible power of apportioning the tailles 
 among the various fiefs and contributors became thenceforward 
 the fertile source of many abuses. ' The grievance was aug- 
 mented by the delegation to the Elus Royaux of a judicial au- 
 thority in all fiscal cases between the king and the tax-payers. 
 The executive and the judicial functions, in these cases, were 
 thus united in the same hands ; and the ordinary judges were 
 superseded precisely on those occasions on which their arbitra- 
 ment was most requisite for the protection of the people. 
 
 The people were, nevertheless, well content. "With the nat- 
 ural and simple instinct which rejoices in immediate relief, and 
 is not embarrassed with the foresight of future and doubtful 
 contingencies, they regarded as a most beneficial measure the 
 law which delivered th<3m from the insupportable tyranny of 
 the disbanded soldiers, who had so long roamed like so many 
 hungry wolves over the land, but who, as members of a regu- 
 lar and well-paid army, were thereafter to become subject to 
 law and to military discipline. The songs of those times 
 then, as at all times, the best criterion of the state of public 
 feeling in France celebrate the deliverance of Jacques Bon- 
 homme, by this royal ordinance, from the tyranny of the Bra- 
 and from the injustice of the seigneurs. 
 
300 THE STATES-GENERAL 0* 
 
 Even at tnat time there were probably in France some per- 
 sons thoughtful and enlightened enough to perceive that the 
 permanent intervention of the Tiers Etat in the government 
 of the kingdom was essential to the public good. But it was 
 an opinion which as yet had struck no deep roots in the minds 
 of the people at large. The cruel and desolating invasions of 
 the Plantagenets during open war, and the outrages of their 
 disbanded troops during each successive truce, had plunged 
 the greater part of France into miseries which, by limiting the 
 hopes of the people to an immediate deliverance from those 
 sufferings, rendered them indifferent to the sacrifices by which 
 that relief was to be obtained. 
 
 The administration of the government of Charles VII. was, 
 as I have said, the combined result of many concurrent influ- 
 ences upon the mind of a prince peculiarly susceptible of the 
 control of spirits more audacious, and of understandings of 
 greater capacity than his own. Louis XL, his son and suc- 
 cessor, on the contrary, gave an eminent, and perhaps a re- 
 pulsive example of a mind so relying on its own inherent vig- 
 or as neither to receive nor to desire the support of any exter- 
 nal sympathies. Historical portraits, whether drawn by the 
 writers of historical romance or of romantic history, are rarely 
 entitled to the praise of being faithful likenesses ; yet no one 
 can doubt the general fidelity of the pictures of Louis XL, 
 which have been bequeathed to us by the two great masters 
 of those arts by Sir Walter Scott and by Philip de Comines. 
 The reason of their success probably is, 'that the outline or 
 mere surface of the character of Louis was so singular and so 
 strongly marked that its features could not be mistaken by the 
 humblest limner ; while, in discovering the harmony and the 
 reconcilement of them all, genius such as theirs found an ap- 
 propriate and a worthy exercise. 
 
 It was the pleasure and the habit of Louis to be even osten- 
 tatiously exempt from those dependencies on other men, or on 
 any outward things, by which ordinary sovereigns are sus- 
 tained. He delighted to show that, in his person, royalty could 
 not only exist, but flourish, without the aid of the external 
 majesty of the crown. Except St. Louis, he was the first, as, 
 indeed (with the solitary exception of Louis Philippe), he is 
 still the only king of France whose mind was ever prepared 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 301 
 
 for the duties of that high station by any course of severe and 
 systematic study. Before he ascended the throne of his an- 
 cestors, he had profoundly meditated the great Italian authors, 
 and the institutions and maxims of the Italian republics. 
 From those lessons he had derived a low esteem of his fellow- 
 men, and especially of those among them upon whom wealth, 
 and rank, and power had descended as an hereditary birthright. 
 That sentiment had been cherished by his early and intimate 
 intercourse with such of the French nobility as were his asso- 
 ciates in his revolt against his father. It was his pleasure to 
 assume the manners and appearance of a roturier, and to court 
 the society of persons of that class in preference to any other. 
 Nor was this a mere affectation a mock humility, designed 
 to enhance his real greatness by a pretended repudiation of 
 it. He not only assumed the dress and manners of an ob- 
 scure merchant, but was seriously, and even eagerly inquisi- 
 tive about all mercantile affairs, habitually consulting and con- 
 versing with traders and mechanics, and busying himself about 
 shipping, and manufactures, and mines, and high-roads, and 
 markets, without feeling, or afTecting to feel, any military ar- 
 dor, or any desire for the glory which is to be conquered only 
 in the field. His favorites, and even his chief counselors, 
 were men of vulgar address and of menial occupations. 
 
 And yet there was nothing base or unkingly in the spirit 
 of Louis. He clearly understood, and pursued with inflexible 
 steadfastness of purpose, the elevation of his country and the 
 grandeur of his own royal house and lineage ; but he pursued 
 them with a torpid imagination, a cold heart, and a ruthless 
 will. He regarded mankind as a physiologist contemplates 
 the living subjects of his science, or as a chess-player surveys 
 the pieces on his board. They were, in his eyes, but the ma- 
 terials on which his skill was to be employed ; not brethren, 
 of whose good or evil fortunes he must himself be the partaker. 
 "With no apparent delight in human suffering, he appears to 
 have been altogether unmoved by the miseries he inflicted. 
 With no distinct preference for tortuous over direct courses, 
 he unscrupulously practiced deceit whenever it seemed best 
 to answer his immediate purpose, and apparently enjoyed the 
 occupation of weaving for his enemies toils at once too fine to 
 be detected and too strong to be escaped. 
 
302 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 It has been said of Louis XL, that the appearance of the 
 men of the Revolution of 1789 first made him intelligible. 
 Before that era, the world had been sufficiently familiar with 
 selfish tyrants, but had seldom seen, and had never understood, 
 a pitiless innovator. Louis was the first of the terrible Ideolo- 
 gists of France of that class of men who, to enthrone an idol- 
 ized idea, will offer whole hecatombs of human sacrifices at the 
 shrine of their idol. The Idea of Louis was that of leveling 
 all powers in the state, in order that the administration of the 
 affairs, the possession of the wealth, and the enjoyment of the 
 honors of his kingdom might be grasped by himself and his 
 successors as their solitary and unrivaled dominion. 
 
 The feeble superstition which was united to this relentless 
 inflexibility of ambition was not incongruous with it, but the 
 reverse. When a will so resolute, and an intellect so perspi- 
 cacious as his have surrendered the whole man, with all his 
 powers, to the pursuits of this transitory world, the mysterious 
 powers of the world of spirits and of the world to come will 
 haunt the fevered fancy and oppress the burdened conscience 
 with terrors which the mind has not either the leisure to an- 
 alyze or the composure to interrogate. The leaden images or 
 amulets borne by Louis on his person were but so many vari- 
 eties of those mystic spells which Julius recognized in the flight 
 of birds, and Napoleon in the Sun of Austerlitz. 
 
 Louis may be considered as having been the living solution 
 of the problem What is the greatest amount of mental sa- 
 gacity which can be combined with the smallest amount of 
 human sympathy ? or of the problem What is that point at 
 which selfishness darkens the clearest vision, and defeats the 
 most subtle scrutiny into the secrets of other minds ? Lack- 
 ing the wisdom of love, he was, at length, but seeming wise. 
 His understanding, though almost preternaturally acute, was 
 continually baffled from his want of that magnetic chord which 
 in guileless bosoms vibrates to every genuine feeling, and inter- 
 prets every honest motive of those with whom they have to do. 
 
 Once, and only once, during his reign of twenty-two years, 
 did Louis XI. convene the States-General of his kingdom ; nor 
 does any incident of his life afford a more curious illustration 
 of the peculiarities of his character than is afforded by his 
 management of that assembly. 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. ' 303 
 
 Before his accession to the throne, all the great fiefs into 
 which France had been divided under the earlier Capetian 
 kings had, with the exception of Bretagne, been either annex- 
 ed to the royal domain, or reduced to a state of dependence on 
 the crown. But, under the name of Apanages, these ancient 
 divisions of the kingdom into separate principalities had reap- 
 peared. The territorial feudalism of the Middle Ages seemed 
 to be reviving in the persons of the younger branches of the 
 royal house. The Dukes of Burgundy had thus become the 
 rulers of a state which, under the government of more politic 
 princes, might readily, in fulfillment of their desires, have at- 
 tained the rank of an independent kingdom. The Duke of 
 Bretagne, still asserting the peculiar privileges of his duchy, 
 was rather an ally than a subject of the King of France. 
 Charles, duke of Berri, the brother of Louis, aspired to the 
 possession of the same advantages. And these three great 
 territorial potentates, in alliance with the Due de Bourbon 
 and the Comte de St. Pol, the brothers-in-law of Louis and of 
 his queen, united together to form that confederacy against 
 him to which they gave the very inappropriate title of La 
 Ligue du Bien Public. It was, however, a title which recog- 
 nized the growing strength of the Tiers Etat, and of that 
 public opinion to which the Tiers Etat at once gave utterance 
 and imparted authority. Selfish ambition was thus compelled 
 to assume the mask of patriotism. The princes veiled their 
 insatiable appetite for their own personal advantages under 
 'the popular and plausible demands of administrative reforms 
 of the reduction of imposts of the government of the peo- 
 ple by their representatives and, consequently, of the con- 
 vocation of the States-Greneral. 
 
 To these pretensions Louis was unable to make any effect- 
 ual resistance. At the commencement of his reign he had 
 imposed on his subjects a series of exactions as illegal as they 
 were burdensome, and the Leaguers had therefore, in the 
 commonalty of France, allies who, for the moment, rendered 
 them irresistible. The king consequently yielded, or appeared 
 to yield, to the necessity of his condition. He assented, in 
 terms at least, to all the demands of his antagonists. He 
 granted to the Duke of Berri the duchy of Normandy as an 
 apanage transmissible in perpetuity to his male heirs. He 
 
304 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 promised to revoke all the fiscal laws against which the 
 Leaguers and the people had protested. He bound himself 
 to form a council of government, to be composed of members 
 of the University, of the Parliament, and of the Bourgeoisie 
 of Paris. He admitted the claims of his opponents for gov- 
 ernments, privileges, and dignities almost as promptly as they 
 advanced them ; and, that nothing might be wanting, he sign- 
 ed at Conflans a treaty; by which he solemnly pledged him- 
 self to the observance of these engagements. The confeder- 
 ates then laid down their arms. The wily monarch bided his 
 time. He had bestowed on them advantages which he well 
 knew would destroy their popularity and so subvert the basis 
 of their power, and which he also knew the state of public 
 opinion would not allow them to retain. To wrest those ad- 
 vantages from their hands, it was only necessary to comply 
 with their last stipulation, and to convene the States-G-eneral. 
 
 They met accordingly, at Tours, on the 6th of April, 1468 
 The leaders of the Ligue du Bien Public absented themselves, 
 distrusting probably, when too late, the policy which had in- 
 duced them to invoke the appearance of such formidable aux- 
 iliaries. In the whole design, and ceremonial, and procedure 
 of the assembly, they might indeed trace, with just suspicion 
 and anxiety, the working of the subtle spirit of their crafty 
 king. The elections, as some maintain, had been so conduct- 
 ed, that the same persons were every where chosen to repre- 
 sent at once the Noblesse, the Clergy, and the Bourgeois, The 
 king (says Comines) had taken great care that such deputies 
 only should be elected as were satisfactory to himself, that so 
 he might be assisted and not embarrassed by them. Many of 
 them were persons of low degree, and some were apparently 
 mechanics. The hall of meeting was so arranged that the dep- 
 uties of each of the three orders sat promiscuously together, 
 and deliberated and voted in common. The utmost freedom 
 of speech was conceded to them, and every democratic preten- 
 sion was received by Louis with marked and studied defer- 
 ence. He judged it impossible to give too great a weight or 
 too keen an edge to the weapon which he was about to turn 
 against his adversaries. 
 
 The deliberations were then opened. The chancellor deliv- 
 ered a homily on the decline of passive obedience, founded on 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 305 
 
 the book and the example of Joshua. " The king," says the 
 chronicler, "in his own person and in his own words, made a 
 clear and notable summary of the questions then depending, 
 with respect to the duchy of Normandy, which his brother, 
 my Lord Charles, proposed to take for his apanage ; and the 
 king said that he was unwilling to decide in his own favor in 
 a cause and quarrel in which he was himself engaged, and did 
 not think it right to assume that, in such a controversy, he 
 could of himself distinguish what was right and equitable, and 
 therefore he protested that he was altogether insufficient for 
 the decision of such a cause, but referred it to them as a cause 
 touching the welfare of the whole kingdom." 
 
 After listening to this extraordinary manifestation of the 
 royal diffidence and humility, an orator arose who, one might 
 conjecture from his style and his similes, belonged to that 
 worshipful society of barber-surgeons for whom Louis had so 
 strange a predilection. " States and men," he said, " were in 
 common liable to three mortal maladies the loss of a limb, a 
 burning fever, and a hemorrhage. A state labored under the 
 first of these diseases when any of her provinces were taken 
 away ; under the second, when she was harassed by disband- 
 ed soldiers and tax-gatherers ; under the third, when drained 
 of her money by remittances to Rome, or by the purchase of 
 foreign luxuries." To this diagnosis of the maladies of France 
 he added the following therapeutic advice : " Let the grant of 
 Normandy to the Duke of Berri be canceled. Let the soldiery 
 be compelled to obey the Ordonnance sur la Gendarmerie. Let 
 the taxes be made uniform, and the salt tax reduced. Let the 
 Pragmatic Sanction be re-established. Let sumptuary laws be 
 enacted ; and let all parts of exorbitant pensions be revoked." 
 
 One is compelled to regret the now irreparable loss of the 
 name of a speaker who could express himself so pithily and so 
 much to the purpose ; but the reporters of those days, more 
 parsimonious than in our own, have suppressed it, and with 
 it all the other speeches delivered at the States- General of 
 Tours of 1468, although eight successive days appear to have 
 been passed in pronouncing and in listening to them. Bou- 
 lainvilliers indeed declares, with the aristocratic indignation 
 with which all the sayings and doings of this plebeian assem- 
 blage affected him, that the usual decorum of such meetings 
 
 U 
 
306 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 gave place to tumultuary acclamations, in which no heed was 
 given to the voices of the nobles, nor to those of any individual 
 members. But, however little we can ascertain what they 
 said, there is no doubt at all as to what they did. 
 
 First ; they resolved that " for no earthly consideration, 
 whether favor or brotherly kindness, or the obligations of a 
 promise, or the convenience of making such a settlement, or 
 fear, or the threat of war, or regard to any temporal evil, could 
 the king acquiesce in the separation from his crown of the 
 duchy of Normandy, or in the transfer of it into the hands of 
 any man living from- his own." Secondly ; they declared that 
 my Lord Charles ought to be satisfied with an apanage of 
 12,000 livres of annual rent, and with a titular dukedom or 
 earldom ; but that, as the king was pleased to augment it to 
 60,000 livres, he ought to be very grateful. Thirdly ; they 
 decided that the Duke of Brittany, who was exciting disturb- 
 ances in the kingdom and contracting alliances with the En- 
 glish, ought to be summoned to surrender the cities of which he 
 had possessed himself, or driven from them by force if neces- 
 sary the clergy promising to promote the success of any such 
 measures by their prayers the two- other orders pledging their 
 persons and their property for the advancement of them. And, 
 finally, the States resolved that an embassy should be sent to 
 the Duke of Burgundy, to invite him to concur with the king 
 in the establishment of justice and order throughout the realm. 
 Thus far the deputies had labored for the support of the 
 royal authority against the confederates of the Ligue du Bien 
 Public. It remained that they should attempt something for 
 the benefit of their own constituents. They therefore represent- 
 ed to Louis that his troops were ill disciplined ; that justice 
 was ill administered ; and that the public finances were ill reg- 
 ulated. The admonition was received not only with courtesy, 
 but with the most edifying meekness. The seditions pro- 
 voked by his enemies had, as he acknowledged and deplored, 
 given birth to the abuses of which they complained ; and, that 
 they might be effectually remedied, he invited the States- Gen- 
 eral themselves to nominate commissioners to be employed in 
 the great work of reformation. Shouts of grateful applause 
 welcomed the proposal. "Who could doubt that the task of 
 correcting misgovernment was already in effect accomplished, 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 307 
 
 when delegates of the representatives of the people were called, 
 by the king himself, to the discharge of it ? The States-Gen- 
 eral of 1468 were therefore dissolved, but not till they had first 
 selected the commissioners of public reformation. It is almost 
 superfluous to add, that the commission attempted little, and 
 effected nothing, 
 
 Louis himself, however, had accomplished all the objects 
 for which he had hazarded the convention of the three orders 
 of his people. The Duke of Berri resigned his apanage. The 
 Duke of Brittany abandoned his English alliance. Louis re- 
 sumed all the grants which distress had extorted from him. 
 For those advantages he was indebted to the formidable aux- 
 iliaries with whom he had just parted. Subservient as they 
 had been, they had given proofs of a moral power, with which, 
 if their temper should change, it might be perilous to contend. 
 The wily monarch descended to the grave without affording 
 them another opportunity of engaging in such a contest. 
 
 Few of the sovereigns of France have contributed so much 
 to her permanent greatness as Louis XL, and none ever died 
 amid a more universal unpopularity or more bitter resent- 
 ments. His offenses were of that class for which Frenchmen 
 have the least toleration. Cruel, crafty, and cold-hearted, he 
 wounded the moral sense of his people, without being able to 
 kindle their imagination, even when he promoted their ag- 
 grandizement. His death brought to an end a protracted and 
 merciless reign of terror. The princes of his house quitted 
 the dungeons in which they had been taught to acknowledge 
 and to lament the extinction of the boundless privileges which 
 had been so long attached to the blood royal of France. The 
 noblesse once more breathed freely, and indulged the hope 
 that they should not again see their order subordinated to base- 
 born usurpers of the high offices of the state, nor have to 
 mourn the ignominious destruction, on the scaffold, of families 
 which traced their lineage through the most ancient of the 
 peers and the greatest of the feudatories of the kingdom. The 
 army anticipated a time when French soldiers should no longer 
 be superseded in the highest and most honorable services by 
 Scotch or Swiss mercenaries, nor condemned to waste their 
 martial energies in an inglorious repose. The peasantry, still 
 groaning beneath the unmitigated oppressions to which they 
 
308 THE STATES-GENERAL Or 
 
 had so long beon subject, had at least nothing to regret from the 
 loss of their king, as indeed they had nothing to hope from his 
 successor. Yet, by two classes of his subjects, though by 
 them alone, Louis was probably lamented. The Bourgeois 
 lost in him the most zealous promoter of their commercial in- 
 terests who had ever filled the throne of France ; while, by 
 his death, the men of letters and of enlightened intellects were 
 deprived of an associate whom they regarded, if with fear and 
 mistrust, yet with genuine and unbounded admiration. From 
 the memoirs of Philippe de Comines we may learn how pro- 
 found was the impression made by Louis on the few who 
 were capable of appreciating the wealth and the variety of his 
 mental resources, and of following the eagle glance with which 
 he penetrated the folds of the human heart and the labyrinths 
 of human policy. 
 
 Louis was gathered to his fathers on the 30th of August, 
 1483, and Charles, his only son, a boy of little more than thir- 
 teen years of age, reigned in his stead. His mother died four 
 months later ; and the administration of the government, in 
 the name of the young king, was a prize disputed between 
 three principal competitors. They were, first, his eldest sister 
 Anne, the Lady of Beaujeu, so named as being the wife of the 
 Sire de Beaujeu, a younger son of the house of Bourbon, and 
 therefore, though very remotely, a prince of the blood royal. 
 The second aspirant to the virtual regency was the Duke 
 of Bourbon, the elder brother of Beaujeu, and therefore, of 
 course, bearing the same relation to the reigning family. 
 The Duke of Orleans, who was at once the presumptive heir 
 to the crown and the husband of Jane, the younger sister of 
 Charles, was the third of the candidates for that dignity. His 
 cousin, the Due d'Angouleme, the next in the line of succes- 
 sion, was content to wave his own less considerable pretensions. 
 
 This controversy was at first settled by the kinsmen and 
 courtiers of Charles between themselves, in favor of the Duke 
 of Bourbon, who accordingly received from the young king the 
 offices of Constable and Lieutenant General of France. But 
 Bourbon was grievously afflicted with the gout, and proved a 
 feeble and incapable administrator of affairs of so much weight 
 and difficulty. Alarms of war from Austria and England, 
 combining with internal distress and popular discontent 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 309 
 
 those chronic maladies of France enhanced at once the per- 
 plexities of Bourbon and the ambitious hopes of his competi- 
 tors for power. When, therefore, the voice of the nation at 
 large demanded that the States- General should be convened, 
 to place the government of France on a surer basis, the kin- 
 dred and the ministers of Charles had neither the power nor 
 the wish to oppose any obstacle to a measure by which alone, 
 as it was universally believed, the nation could be rescued 
 from the embarrassments in which it was involved, and from 
 the yet greater evils with which it was threatened. 
 
 The States-General of France were, for these reasons, again 
 convened at Tours, where they met in January of the year 
 1484, if the year be considered as commencing in that month, 
 or of the year 1483, if, according to the habits of those times, 
 Easter be considered as the commencement of the year. Their 
 proceedings, whether we have regard to their tone and charac- 
 ter or to their immediate results, constitute the most import- 
 ant passage in the history of such assemblies. 
 
 Hitherto the States-General had met in times of compara- 
 tive intellectual darkness ; but now might be distinctly per- 
 ceived the dawn of that day which, in the following century, 
 was to burst in its full radiance on the nations of Western 
 Europe, In Italy, indeed, it had already risen, and had illu- 
 minated that hereditary land of genius, not only with poet- 
 ry, and art, and literature, but with philosophy also. Even 
 the papal chair had been filled by some of the most accom- 
 plished scholars and most profound thinkers of that age. os- 
 mo de Medici had combined in his own person all the munifi- 
 cence of a princely merchant, and all the magnanimity and 
 wisdom of a patriot prince. If in France itself neither poetry 
 nor history ha~ given birth to any immortal works, they had 
 at least, undei the humbler forms of fable and romance, called 
 the national mind into active exercise. Froissart and Mon- 
 strelet had recorded the feats of arms of their own days, as 
 they would have told of the achievements of Amadis of Gaul 
 or of Amadis of Spain ; while another race of authors, taking 
 Livy for their model, had invested the warriors of Charles V. 
 and of Charles VII. with the demeanor of Roman consuls and 
 with the rhetoric of the Roman Forum. Commerce also had 
 begun to teach her lessons of comprehensive philanthropy. 
 
310 THE STATE?) -GENERAL OF 
 
 And Wickliffe, and Huss, and Jerome of Prague, had so wide- 
 ly diffused their opinions, that, even in France, the Church 
 of Rome, awakening from her fancied security, was attempt- 
 ing to arrest the progress of knowledge and of truth by her 
 habitual and her sharpest weapons of persecution. 
 
 How powerful was the combined influence of all these 
 causes on the States-Greneral of 1484 may be learned from the 
 Proces Verbal of their proceedings, for which we are indebted 
 to Masselin, who was at once a canon of the cathedral church 
 of Rouen and among the most zealous of the deputies attached 
 to the popular cause at that assembly. From him we gather 
 that so brilliant a convention of the representatives of the peo- 
 ple of France had never before been brought together. On an 
 elevated stage or platform, erected in the great hall of the 
 episcopal palace of Tours, sat the young king, surrounded to 
 the right and left by the constable, the chancellor, and the 
 other great officers of state ; behind whom sat two cardinals, 
 with the six ecclesiastical peers, and the princes of the blood 
 royal as representatives of the six lay peers ; behind whom, 
 again, stood twenty nobles of the highest rank. In front of 
 this royal and princely assemblage rose two semicircular 
 benches, on the foremost of which were ranged such of the 
 deputies as belonged to the two privileged orders, the hinder- 
 most being occupied by such of the deputies as were them- 
 selves bourgeois. A picture of the hall thus apportioned 
 among the various sections of the assembly has been repeat- 
 edly published, to illustrate and support the theory of some 
 recent historians, that it formed a visible adumbration of the 
 Legislature convened under the charter of 1814, of which the 
 king, the Chamber of Peers, and the Chamber of Deputies 
 were all component and indispensable elements. If so, the 
 type and the antitype were at least so far alike, that they 
 were almost equally transitory. 
 
 A less doubtful analogy between the two assemblies may 
 be found in the presence in each of men of literary renown. 
 Measureless, indeed, is the interval between the illustrious 
 authors who imparted dignity to the national representation 
 under Louis XVIII. and their predecessors who sat among the 
 deputies convened at the episcopal palace of Tours by Charles 
 VIII, Yet Theology was represented there by Cirey and by 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 311 
 
 John de Yilliers the Humanities by De la Souze Astrono- 
 my by Denys de Bar Poetry by John Meschineau and His- 
 tory by Masselin himself: worthy representatives of those va- 
 rious faculties, as, on the report of others, I willingly believe ; 
 but, whether worthy or unworthy, memorable as illustrations 
 of the fact that nearly 400 years ago France assigned to her 
 intellectual aristocracy the same share as at the present day 
 in the conduct of her most arduous political affairs. 
 
 Another resemblance between Frenchmen of that remote 
 age and their descendants in comparatively modern times 
 may be discovered in the speech with which the Chancellor of 
 France opened the sessions of the States-General of 1484. He 
 paid to their native land that tribute of admiration by which 
 that patriotic race have ever fed their national self-esteem, 
 and he contrasted French loyalty with English sedition in 
 terms like those in which Frenchmen have ever since nourish- 
 ed their vindictive hatred and contempt for their neighbors. 
 The speaker then passed on to the praises of their young king, 
 whom, with curious infelicity of phrase, he described as " Sol- 
 omon the Pacific," whose wisdom was, he said, exhibited by 
 his e<trly wish to meet his subjects, to make known to them 
 the state of his kingdom, and to associate them to himself in 
 the management of its affairs. " He entertained not so much 
 as a thought of putting his royal hands into their pockets. 
 He would maintain his government by means of his royal do- 
 main, and would ask no pecuniary aid from them, unless, in- 
 deed (as it might happen), such a request should be dictated 
 by necessity, and by his zeal for the public good." 
 
 It appears that two hundred and forty-six deputies listened, 
 or that, at least, so many were entitled to listen, to these hon- 
 eyed words ; and from Masselin we learn that no one of those 
 deputies had been elected by the members of any single order 
 alone, but that, in their respective counties, bailliages, or sene- 
 chaussees, the clergy, the nobles, and the bourgeois had all 
 joined together to elect members to represent them in com- 
 mon. If the fact be so, it is the more easy to understand 
 the motives of another remarkable innovation. The deputies 
 agreed to deliberate, not in separate orders, but collectively ; 
 that is, they resolved themselves into six bureaux, correspond- 
 ing with the six nations into which France was then consid- 
 
312 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 ered as divisible ; the " nations," namely, of Paris, or the 
 duchy of France, of Normandy, of Burgundy, of Aquitaine, of 
 Languedoc, and of Languedoi'l. By each of those bureaux 
 was to be prepared a cahier of grievances ; and the six cahiers 
 were then to be decomposed, and remolded into one general 
 cahier, by a committee of thirty-six deputies, whose report was 
 afterward to be adopted or amended by the collective States- 
 General. 
 
 "Within the narrow limits of time to which I am unavoida- 
 bly confined, I can not exhibit even an epitome of the subse- 
 quent proceedings, which Masselin has recorded at great length, 
 except by attempting to abbreviate the various demands com- 
 prised in the ultimate or general cahier, and the various an- 
 swers which, in the name of the young king, were returned 
 to them. 
 
 First, then, by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bruges, Charles 
 VII. had reserved to the kings of France what have been so in- 
 appropriately called the liberties of the Grallican Church ; that 
 is, the right of the crown to nominate both the bishops and 
 other great benefices, and to prevent the remittance of money 
 to Rome. Louis XI. had abandoned and revoked this royal 
 ordinance. The States- Greneral now demanded the re-estab- 
 lishment of it. The royal answer, in substance, was, that any 
 farther legislation on the subject would be superfluous, because 
 the Gallican liberties were sufficiently secured by the general 
 and permanent laws of the realm, from which no particular 
 enactment could derogate, and to which no such enactment 
 could add any new strength. 
 
 Secondly. The Noblesse demanded that the Ban and Ar- 
 riere Ban should be less frequently called out ; that time should 
 be allowed them for redeeming the debts with which the exi- 
 gencies of the war had compelled them to burden their estates ; 
 that they should be restored to their ancient rights of the chase ; 
 and that all foreigners should be excluded, in their favor, from 
 military commands, and from the government of any of the 
 cities or fortresses of France. To these claims the king's un- 
 qualified assent was given. 
 
 Thirdly. The complaints of the Commons were preferred 
 in terms so simple and pathetic that I regret the necessity for 
 confining myself to a brief quotation from them. They said 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 313 
 
 tliat "during the last thirty-four years the king's troops have 
 been continually passing and repassing through every part of 
 France now the gendarmerie, then the noblesse of the Ban 
 at one time the French archers, at another the hallebardiers 
 sometimes the Swiss, and sometimes the pikemen but all in 
 turns living on the poor people. Though hired to prevent op- 
 pression, they are themselves the most grievous of all oppress- 
 ors. The poor laborer must pay for the hire of the man who 
 beats him, who turns him out of his house, who carries off his 
 substance, and who compels him to lie on the bare earth. 
 "When the poor man has with extreme difficulty, and by the 
 sale of the coat on his back, managed to pay his taille, and is 
 comforting himself with the hope that he may live out the year 
 on the little he has left, then comes a new troop of soldiers, 
 eating and destroying that little ; and, not satisfied with what 
 they find in the poor man's cottage, compelling him with heavy 
 blows to seek in the town for wine, for white bread, for fish, 
 for groceries, and for other extravagances ; so that, if God did 
 not comfort the poor man, and give him patience, he would fall 
 into utter despair. In Normandy a great and countless mul- 
 titude have died of hunger ; others, in despair, have killed their 
 wives, their children, and themselves. From the want of 
 beasts of labor, men, women, and children there are compelled 
 to yoke themselves to the carts ; and others, fearing that if seen 
 in the daytime they will be seized for non-payment of their 
 taille, are compelled to labor through the night : all which 
 things being considered, it seemeth to the States-General that 
 the king ought to have pity on his poor people, and ought to 
 relieve them from the said tallies and charges." 
 
 "With this pathetic preface the States-General demanded of 
 the king that all the alienated parts of the royal domain might 
 be resumed ; that all useless offices might be suppressed ; that 
 the pension list might be retrenched, and the army diminished. 
 The cry of misery was, however, but little heeded by those 
 who then dictated the answers from the throne. They prom- 
 ised nothing except that due care should be taken to resume 
 the alienated parts of the royal domain. 
 
 Fourthly came the demands for judicial reformations. The 
 States-General proposed that the judges should hold their offi- 
 ces for life ; that on each vacancy in their number the remain- 
 
JJJ4 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 ing judges should nominate three candidates, from whom one 
 should be chosen by the king ; that the number of judicial 
 offices should be diminished ; that they should be no longer 
 venal ; that the king should no longer evoke causes from their 
 natural judges, and transfer them to special commissioners ; 
 that the customs of the realm should be ascertained and re- 
 duced to writing ; that all suitors might be allowed to appear 
 by their procureurs ; and that no implement (animate or in- 
 animate) of agricultural labor should be liable to seizure on 
 any process from the courts of justice. To all these demands, 
 except those which related to the number and the sale of judi- 
 cial offices, the king promised to accede. 
 
 Fifthly. With regard to commerce, the States-General de- 
 manded, with no very apparent consistency, first, that there 
 should be a perfect freedom of trade within the realm ; and, 
 secondly, that those frontier fairs and markets should be sup- 
 pressed, by means of which the foreigner introduced his wares 
 into France. To either branch of this commercial policy, the 
 restrictive as well as the liberal, the States were assured of the 
 royal adhesion. 
 
 Such were the grievances of which they sought the redress, 
 and such the assurances which they received of their removal. 
 It remained to determine what were the pecuniary aids by 
 which they were willing to purchase these advantages. I pass 
 over reluctantly, but unavoidably, the long debates which pre- 
 ceded their ultimate decision. But the terms of that decision 
 are too important to be omitted. The States declared that, 
 for the assistance of the king in his great affairs, and for the 
 payment of his troops, they would give him, as a free and gra- 
 tuitous grant, but not on any other ground, the same sum as 
 was annually raised for the support of the government of 
 Charles VII. (that is, as we have already seen, 1,200,000 livres 
 per annum) ; but that this grant was to be in force during two 
 years only. Farther, as a special gratification, they voted an 
 additional 300,000 livres, payable during one year only. But 
 they at the same time requested that he would be pleased to 
 convene and hold the States- General of France within the next 
 two years, at whatever time and place he might see fit, and 
 that he would immediately declare what that time and place 
 should be, '^inasmuch as tho said States- General expected that 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 thenceforward no taxes would be imposed on the people until 
 they should have been convened and consulted on the subject, 
 nor unless the imposition of such taxes should be made with 
 their free will and consent, as the guardians and keepers of the 
 liberties and privileges of the realm." 
 
 These grants were of course accepted. It is almost as much 
 of course to add , that the conditions on which they were thus 
 made were not observed by the royal grantee. It seems, in- 
 deed, that they were not even noticed in his answer. 
 
 Charles was a boy in his fourteenth year, of feeble health, 
 and so little qualified to sustain either the mental or the bodily 
 labor of governing a great nation, that he was compelled, by 
 sheer fatigue, to break up prematurely the royal session for 
 receiving the cahier of the States- General. After little more 
 than two hours had been passed in reading it to him, it be- 
 came evident that his strength was exhausted, and that the 
 chair on which he reposed was as capable as himself of under- 
 standing the language of the representatives of his people. 
 
 To those representatives, as to the princes of his house, the 
 fiction that such a youth was of full age, and competent to 
 reign in his own person, had from the first appeared in its true 
 absurdity, nor did they even affect to yield any deference to 
 it. They openly and avowedly debated to whom the real re- 
 gency of the kingdom should be intrusted. 
 
 It was at that time actually in the hands of the Lady of 
 Beaujeu. It was apparently vested in a council of fifteen> 
 composed of the princes of the blood, and of several of the for- 
 mer ministers of Louis XI. But that council was itself divided 
 into two parties ; the one in the interest of the Bourbons, the 
 other attached to the Duke of Orleans. To throw the whole 
 preponderance of authority into the hands of the duke, the 
 president of the States-General (one of his partisans) proposed 
 that the administration of the government should be commit- 
 ted to a council of twenty-four ; that is, of nine persons to be 
 selected by the States-General themselves, in addition to the 
 fifteen who were actually seated there ; that the choice of the 
 nine should be made by each of the six " nations," but that 
 the Parisians (who were Orleanists) should be allowed to 
 choose a greater number than any other " nation," in propor- 
 tion to their superiority in wealth and population to any othor. 
 
316 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 To avoid this disparity, the other five " nations" concurred 
 in a resolution to establish a council of twenty-six, and, for 
 that purpose, to reduce the fifteen actual counselors to eight, 
 and to add to the eight eighteen more, of whom each of the 
 six "nations" was to elect three. Orleans, or his adherents 
 in the States-General, and especially the Parisian party, op- 
 posed this project by an unqualified denial of the right of that 
 assembly to interfere at all in the nomination of a regent. 
 They maintained that, in the case of the incapacity of the 
 king, the princes of the blood, and especially the heir pre- 
 sumptive to the crown, had an inherent right to assume the 
 provisional exercise of the kingly office. 
 
 There is, indeed, no new thing under the sun. When, in 
 the year 1788, the Prince of Wales, by his friends in the 
 House of Commons, claimed, as of right, the regency of Great 
 Britain, the indignant and democratic protest of William Pitt 
 might have passed for an imitation of that which, in the year 
 1484, had been made, in the States-General of France, by 
 Philip Pot, against the corresponding pretensions of the Duke 
 of Orleans. 
 
 After denying the existence of any law which devolved the 
 government of France on the princes of the blood during the 
 minority or incapacity of the king, and after observing that 
 the very expression, " princes of the blood," was susceptible 
 of many different meanings, Pot exclaimed, "Above every 
 thing else be assured, that to the people, and to them alone, it 
 belongs to determine any question affecting the welfare of the 
 commonwealth at large ; that the government of it has been 
 confided to our kings by the people ; and that they who have 
 possessed themselves of that power by any other means than 
 the consent of the people, are nothing else than tyrants and 
 usurpers. It being evident that our king is unable to govern 
 the state in his own person, the government of it reverts to 
 the people from whom he received it, that so they may resume 
 that which is their own. By the people I do not mean the 
 populace, or merely the commons of the realm, but all French- 
 men of every condition. Even so, under the name of the 
 States- General, I mean to comprise the princes themselves ; 
 nor do I regard any inhabitant of France as excluded from the 
 meaning of that comprehensive term." 
 
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 317 
 
 The regency debates in France, as in England, were both 
 long and tedious. In the progress of them the States-General 
 were about to resolve on a joint regency, to be divided between 
 the Duke of Orleans and the Lady of Beaujeu ; a measure 
 which, combined with that of a council of twenty-six, would 
 have placed the real administration in the hands of the eight- 
 een selected deputies, to the exclusion both of the princely and 
 of the Parisian aspirants. In an evil moment for his own am- 
 bition, Orleans attempted to parry this attempt by a message 
 to the States, in which he advised them to interfere no farther 
 than by merely adopting a resolution that the Sire and the 
 Lady of Beaujeu should retain the position which they had 
 occupied near the person of the king. To this advice the 
 Beaujeu or Bourbon party gladly, though with affected reluct- 
 ance, gave in their adhesion. The deputies, finding that the 
 princes were thus at length unanimous, adopted the advice of 
 the Duke of Orleans, though not without the ardent resistance 
 of the " nations" of Normandy and Burgundy. 
 
 The cahier, so far as respected the regency, was therefore 
 drawn up as follows : It acknowledged the competency of the 
 king to dispatch all the public business, so long as he should 
 act in conformity with the advice of his council. It request- 
 ed him to preside as often as possible at their deliberations, 
 that he might be trained betimes to the conduct of affairs. In 
 his absence the Duke of Orleans was to preside. In the ab- 
 sence of Orleans, the presidency was to belong to the Duke of 
 Bourbon. In the absence of both dukes, it was to pass to the 
 Sire de Beaujeu. The other princes of the blood were to sit 
 and vote in the council according to their rank. Twelve ad- 
 ditional counselors were to be selected from the six " nations," 
 but the selection was to be made by the king and the princes. 
 M. de Sismondi shall explain the real character and effect of 
 this policy. 
 
 "The deputies," he says, "had risen to the height of the 
 loftiest and the noblest constitutional principles. But, after 
 having announced that the whole sovereign power was their 
 own, they abandoned themselves to the guidance of chance, 
 by remitting that power into the hands of a child, without ap- 
 pointing for him a regent, a council, or a tutcr. After having 
 resolved that the nations should be represented in the Royal 
 
318 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 Council by at least twelve members of the States, they aban- 
 doned the choice of those members to the king himself ; a de- 
 cision dictated by the narrow and selfish calculations of the 
 section of Paris, which doubted not that the royal choice would 
 fall on some of the inhabitants of their own city." 
 
 The States- General of Tours were then dissolved. Anne of 
 Beaujeu became the undisputed, though not the nominal re- 
 gent of France. To the demands of the deputies, that no du- 
 ties should be raised without their consent, and that they should 
 be again convened within two years, no answer whatever had 
 been returned. Before one of those years was over, the chron- 
 ic disease of the royal government of France reappeared. The 
 revenue was again insufficient to meet the exigencies of the 
 public service. In the name of the young king, the Lady of 
 Beaujeu therefore promulgated an ordinance rendering perma- 
 nent the additional revenue of 300,000 livres, which the States 
 had expressly limited to a single year. After the lapse of the 
 two years, during which alone the States had authorized the 
 levying the tailles, she promulgated another ordinance, author- 
 izing the continued exaction of them. She required the Par- 
 liament of Paris to register these ordinances, and they imme- 
 diately obeyed. Thus, by the mere registration by a court of 
 justice of a royal ordinance, and without any other formality, 
 the property of the people at large was brought within the 
 grasp of their sovereign. This great revolution was effected 
 silently, without resistance, and, as it might seem, without 
 notice, at the very moment when the most powerful assembly 
 of the States- General which France had ever seen had assert 
 ed, as an incontrovertible principle, that no taxes could be lev- 
 ied on the people of France except with the consent of theii 
 representatives. The king had thus become the single and the 
 absolute legislator in all fiscal matters ; for, at this period, the 
 Parliament of Paris had not asserted their pretension to rep- 
 resent the States-G-eneral of the nation during the intervals of 
 their successive assemblies. They did not then even claim 
 the right of remonstrance. The University of Paris, indeed, 
 requested them to assert that right ; but their answer, as quot- 
 ed by Parquier, was, that it was their office not to solicit jus- 
 tice, but to do justice ; and that, in a case where they were 
 judges, they could not degrade themselves by becoming suitors. 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 319 
 
 We have already had occasion to see how much, in later 
 times, the Parliament of Paris elevated their tone, and en- 
 larged their sphere of action with regard to royal ordinances. 
 But their subserviency to Anne of Beaujeu frustrated all the 
 labors of the States- General of Tours. Eighty years rolled 
 away before France ever witnessed another, free assembly of 
 the representatives of the people. In that period the monarchy 
 had, in the fullest sense of the word, become absolute. After 
 the lapse of other centuries, the Parliament of Paris, reversing 
 the decision of their predecessors, discovered and declared their 
 own incompetency to register any of the fiscal edicts of Louis 
 XYI. There are, even yet, some surviving among us who re- 
 member the commencement of the convulsions which imme- 
 diately followed. It is doubtful whether there is among us 
 any one who will live long enough to witness their effectual 
 termination. 
 
 LECTURE XII. 
 
 ON THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 SUPPOSE a man, thoroughly conversant with the histories of 
 Greece and of Rome, and not unacquainted with that of En- 
 gland, but profoundly ignorant of the history of France (the 
 supposition is not really so extravagant as it may sound) 
 suppose such a man to be told that, from the year 1302 till 
 the year 1789, the acknowledged law and constitution of that 
 kingdom had confided the right of imposing taxes, for the sup- 
 port of the government, to an elective assembly fairly represent- 
 ing the clergy, the nobility, and the commons of the realm, and 
 to that assembly alone that, in point of fact, such an assembly 
 had been convened at every great crisis of the national fortunes 
 throughout the three first centuries of its existence, and not 
 seldom, during that period, from year to year that, at differ- 
 ent epochs, such assemblies had made or sanctioned innova- 
 tions of the utmost importance both in the polity and in the 
 policy of the state that this part of the national constitution, 
 though frequently allowed to fall into disuse, had never become 
 
320 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 obsolete, but had always lived in the memories and in the hearts 
 of the people ; and yet, that, in the immediate vicinity, and 
 under the shelter of it, had grown up a despotism, bearing to 
 that of Turkey a resemblance as close as can subsist between 
 the governments of the most and of the least civilized of the 
 members of the great community of nations. Who can doubt 
 that such an auditor would consider such a statement merely 
 as a fiction, alike incredible and dull ? Yet, if our supposed 
 skeptic, being provoked to search for himself, should find that 
 the narrative was strictly true, and should be compelled to ad- 
 mit the real coexistence of social phenomena, in appearance so 
 contradictory, he might still be reasonably curious and per- 
 plexed to discover the reconcilement of them. To a certain 
 extent, I have already attempted to suggest it, and I am now 
 about to offer such farther explanations as the proceedings of 
 the States-General in the sixteenth century seem to require. 
 But, before we advance to that subject, it may be convenient 
 to take a brief retrospect of the progress which we have al- 
 ready made. 
 
 Under the guidance of Le Cocq and the patronage of Mar- 
 cel, the States of the reign of John had anticipated the ideas 
 of the great revolution. The Convention itself did not pro- 
 claim more distinctly the dogmas of political equality, unity, 
 and uniformity. The people were hailed as " sovereign," with 
 equal enthusiasm, by their representatives at either epoch. 
 To convert the States- General into a permanent national as- 
 sembly, and to centralize all the powers of the government at 
 Paris, were maxims inculcated and acted upon with the same 
 zeal in the fourteenth and in the eighteenth centuries. In the 
 earlier as well as in the later of those ages, they had their 
 cap of liberty and their new national flag, the only difference 
 being that those emblems of popular dominion were distin- 
 guished at first, not by three colors, but by two. And, as if to 
 complete the resemblance between the Parisians of the time 
 of John and those of the time of Louis XI V., the first had their 
 Philippe Egalite in the person of the King of Navarre, as they 
 would have had their Robespierre also in the person of Marcel, 
 if the Dauphin Chailes had been of the temper of his successor. 
 
 From .this singular parallelism some modern French writers, 
 of no vulgar authority, have drawn the conclusion that Le 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 321 
 
 Gocq and Marcel, and their associates, \vere what is called in 
 France " grands organisateurs" constitution makers, that is, 
 not unworthy to be ranked with those ephemeral French re- 
 publics and monarchies which have so often appeared and dis- 
 appeared during the last sixty years. I have no disposition to 
 dissent from this eulogium ; but the inference which I should 
 deduce from it is, not that the innovators of the fourteenth 
 century were men eminent for their understanding or for their 
 public spirit, but that " organization" is a science or an art in 
 which eminence may be easily attained by men of ready wits, 
 of shallow minds, and of audacious spirits. It is not, after all 
 a very difficult problem how to decompose -human society into 
 its elements. Nor is it a very arduous task to rearrange those 
 elements on the naked principle of subordinating every mem- 
 ber and every movement of the state to the physical force and 
 the arbitrary will of the multitude. A great deal of hardi- 
 hood united to but a slender reach and combination of thought, 
 may accomplish such ends as these. The real test of political 
 wisdom is found in precisely reversing this process. It aims 
 to produce the greatest attainable amount of good by means 
 of those organs of government which habit has made familiar. 
 &nd which antiquity has rendered venerable. Tried by this 
 test, Le Cocq was as arrant a sciolist as Sieyes, and Marcel 
 as great a blunderer as Danton. 
 
 The revolutionary usurpations of the States- G-eneral of John 
 were fatal to the constitutional liberties of France. They 
 drove the friends of order and of peace to seek the -fatal shelter 
 of absolute power. "When the clergy and the nobles abandon- 
 ed the States of Paris in July, 1357, their' secession secured 
 not merely the ultimate, but the early preponderance of the 
 crown. Within four months from that time many of the 
 chief cities of France had proffered to Charles the aid which 
 the States had refused ; and Paris herself at last asserted her 
 wonted pre-eminence over the rest of France by a more abun- 
 dant zeal in coming with similar offers to the rescue of the 
 regent. Six months later, Le Cocq was impeached for his 
 abuse of his freedom of speech as a deputy; and, within anoth- 
 er year, all the royal counselors, whom he had himself im- 
 peached, and compelled the Dauphin to dismiss, were publicly 
 reinstated in their offices. 
 
 X 
 
322 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 "When the Dauphin, under the title of Charles V., ascended 
 the throne, we need not doubt that he brought with him to 
 the administration of affairs an indelible remembrance of the 
 dangers and humiliations of his youth. Nor could that great 
 popular organ of the French government have provoked a more 
 subtle or a more dangerous enemy ; for Charles had learned 
 in adversity some lessons, not perhaps of wisdom, but at least 
 of foresight and prudence. He had been taught to dread a 
 direct conflict with the national representatives, and had dis- 
 covered that it was easier to undermine their constitution than 
 to resist their power. His hostility to them was, therefore, 
 conducted and veiled under the form of an innovation, which 
 studiously confounded the States-General either with, the 
 Royal Council or with the Parliament of Paris, and which oc- 
 casionally combined all those three bodies together. During 
 the whole of the reign of Charles Y. the deputies were thus 
 yoked with associates more docile than themselves, and more 
 subservient to the royal will, and therefore, at that period, 
 made no attempt to revive the pretensions by which his re- 
 gency had been agitated. 
 
 But when that sagacious and resolute prince made way for 
 his son and successor Charles VI., the claims and the authori- 
 ty of the States- General (assisted by the revolt of the " Maillo- 
 tins") having revived, they extorted from the new king a form- 
 al renunciation of all the novelties introduced since the reign 
 of Philippe le Bel, and an equally formal restitution to the na- 
 tion at large of all their " franchises, liberties, privileges, and 
 immunities." The battle of Rosbecque, however, enabled 
 Charles, though the feeblest of all the princes of the house of 
 Valois, to gratify the hereditary dread and resentment with 
 which he regarded the States-General, and, during thirty suc- 
 cessive years, to suppress their assemblies altogether. 
 
 Humbled by these successive defeats, and perhaps render- 
 ed forgetful and unconscious of the magnitude of their own 
 powers by this protracted disuse of them, the States-General 
 of December, 1420, enabled the foreign usurper, Henry V., to 
 debase still farther the representation of the French people by 
 lending themselves as his willing instruments in the indigni- 
 ties to which he subjected their unhappy sovereign, and in the 
 oruel wrongs which he inflicted on their constituents. 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 323 
 
 With the crown of his ancestors Charles VII. inherited the 
 tradition of distrust and antipathy which these proceedings of 
 the States- General during the three preceding reigns had pro- 
 voked, and might almost seem to have justified. Charles, or 
 rather his minister Le Coeur, was indeed a great and success- 
 ful " organisateur." But they undertook to organize that pre- 
 cise form of human society which at once the most urgently 
 requires and the most readily admits the exercise of such plas- 
 tic skill ; for he who would mold a national army to the pur- 
 poses of its existence, has to be guided in that work by the 
 simplest of all laws and by the most obvious of all principles. 
 Implicit obedience is the one rule of conduct, and honor the 
 single spring of action to be taken into his account. Conse- 
 quently, in the composition and structure of military society, 
 a law-giver may safely, and even wisely adhere, with inflexible 
 rigor, to the rules of what may be called the science of social 
 dynamics. Such was apparently the judgment and the habit 
 of Le Coeur. 
 
 The States of Orleans of 1439 seem to have been captivated 
 with the symmetry and the systematic completeness of his 
 military projects. They were delighted with the prospect of 
 the exact discipline to which the lawless men-at-arms were to 
 be subjected by the provisions, at once so peremptory and so 
 comprehensive, of the proposed Ordonnance sur la Gendarme- 
 rie. They were either heedless or ignorant of the deep polit- 
 ical significance of that great measure. The very instinct of 
 parsimony failed them. They forgot that their proper function 
 was only to supply the deficiency of the king's hereditary rev- 
 enue or royal domain by " subsidies, aids, subventions, suc- 
 cors," or by whatever other equivalent terms their temporary 
 grants might be called. They overlooked the warning con- 
 veyed by the very style and structure of this constitutional 
 phraseology against the error of assigning to the crown any 
 new, permanent, and irrevocable resources. They recklessly 
 placed the purse and the sword, at the same moment, in the 
 hands of the king ; not, as it might seem, observing that they 
 were thus emancipating him from their own control, and sub- 
 jecting themselves and their constituents to the absolute power 
 of their present and of their future sovereigns. 
 
 But to Charles himself, and to Louis, his keen-sighted son 
 
324 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 no consequence could be more clearly perceptible. Charles 
 never again summoned the States-General to his assistance ; 
 nor did Louis ever convene them except when he needed their 
 support against the princes of his house. 
 
 To obtain that support, the subtle monarch assailed them at 
 once on each of the two vulnerable sides of all popular assem- 
 blies. He gratified both their plebeian jealousy of the power 
 of the great, and their plebeian thirst for the adulation of the 
 great. He called on them to decide whether France should be 
 dismembered in favor of one great prince ; whether traitorous 
 alliances should be contracted with England by a second ; and 
 whether the royal treasury should be exhausted by a ruinous 
 dotation for a third. Not merely assuming the appearance and 
 manners of a roturier, but contriving to impress a correspond- 
 ing aspect on all the proceedings of the deputies, Louis, with 
 irresistible lowliness, avowed his own incapacity to determine 
 these great and arduous questions. What wonder that Adam 
 Fumee and Mathurin Baudet, with the rest of then* worship- 
 ful brotherhood, immediately resolved to support their unas- 
 suming king against the dukes and barons of the Ligue dn 
 Bien Public ! Or what wonder that, when humbly and- cour- 
 teously requested by him to appoint their own deputies for 
 promoting any reforms which they might think desirable, the 
 Bourgeois, in the exultation of the moment, forgot that, as the 
 misconduct of Louis himself had rendered reformation 'neces- 
 sary, so his power, when rescued from any counterpoise of 
 theirs, would as certainly render it impossible ! Charles VII. 
 overreached the representatives of the people by splendid 
 schemes, Louis XL by adroit flatteries. The one conciliated 
 their- imagination, the other their vanity. In either case the 
 concentrated powers of a single mind triumphed, as usual, over 
 the discordant passions and purposes of a multitude of minds. 
 They had yet to learn that no such multitude can conduct it- 
 self steadfastly or successfully except under the guidance of a 
 single leader and of a recognized head. 
 
 The States-General of Charles VIIL came together with 
 ideas far more mature, and with a much more correct appre- 
 ciation of their duties and of their powers. They were the first 
 assembly of that kind in which all the orders appear to have 
 acted with perfect mutual good understanding. They were 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 325 
 
 the first which knew how to reconcile a due regard for the 
 liberties of their constituents with a due respect for the au- 
 thority of the crown. They were the first to whom really 
 great orators addressed eloquent and enlightened expositions 
 of the interest and duties of the various members of the state, 
 and of the relations in which they severally stood to each 
 other. They firmly established both the precedent that it be- 
 longed to them to dispose of the royal authority in case of the 
 incapacity of the reigning monarch, and the principle that they 
 possessed that right as representing the people at large, who 
 were the authors, and the ultimate depositaries of all political 
 power. And, finally, they limited their grants to the royal 
 treasury to a very short period ; and they did so, not so much 
 from parsimony, as on the constitutional ground and demand 
 that, before the lapse of that period, they should be reassem- 
 bled, and resume the consideration of the exigencies of the 
 public service. 
 
 Such is their just praise. It is their no less just dispraise 
 that their proceedings were fluctuating, irresolute, and unskill- 
 ful. It would seem as though the long intermission of the 
 meetings of the States-General had prevented the deputies 
 from learning or remembering the art of parliamentary tactics. 
 They possessed no party combinations, no expert or acknowl- 
 edged leaders, and no well-defined objects or line of policy. 
 But, above all, they did not proceed in combination or in con- 
 cert with any other of the great powers of the state, adminis- 
 trative or judicial ; or, rather, they were in actual, though in 
 unavowed hostility to each of those powers. No sooner had 
 they ceased to deliberate and to act in their collective capaci- 
 ty, than the king and his ministers set at naught their most 
 important decisions ; and the judges, or Parliament of Paris, 
 distinctly recognized the lawfulness of royal ordinances, pro- 
 mulgated in direct opposition to their most solemn decrees. 
 
 Yet the States-Greneral of Charles VIII. had given proof of 
 such powers, and had proclaimed such principles, as effectu- 
 ally induced him to dread and deprecate their reappearance. 
 He never again convened them. Heavy as were the expenses 
 of his Italian wars, he defrayed them partly by his hereditary 
 revenue, and partly by taxes imposed by his own authority , 
 and., when it would have been unsafe to strain that usurped 
 
326 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 power any farther, then by loans raised in anticipation of his 
 revenue. The national passion for military triumphs which 
 then first, in modern times, developed its disastrous tendencies 
 in France, then also first gave birth to that apparently insolu- 
 ble problem, How the glories of the arms of France can ever 
 be reconciled with the liberties of the French people. 
 
 Louis XII., like his predecessor, conducted his wars in Italy 
 by means of loans, and of alienations of the royal domain ; for 
 not only did his wise and generous frugality render him inde- 
 pendent of the aid of the States- G-eneral, but, strange as it 
 may sound, it enabled him to enhance his popularity by dis- 
 pensing altogether with their presence. To hold such assem- 
 blies, and to demand pecuniary supplies from the people, were, 
 in that age (indeed in all ages), acts so indissolubly connected 
 with each other, that not to hold them had come to be regarded 
 as a kind of patriotic forbearance. The assembly of Notables 
 which hailed Louis as " the Father of his people" did not for- 
 get his merit in never having been compelled to meet the rep- 
 resentatives of his people. 
 
 When, in his turn, Francis I. sought for glory to the south 
 of the Alps, he did not entitle himself to the same grateful 
 eulogy ; for though, like Louis XII., he never brought together 
 the Three Estates of his kingdom, yet both at Cognac and at 
 Paris he invoked the aid of the Notables to extricate him out 
 of the calamities which followed on the defeat of Pavia. The 
 first of those assemblies supported him in breaking his faith 
 to Charles ; the second of them enabled him to raise the ran- 
 som required to rescue his son from the hands of that mon- 
 arch. The States were, however, so far indebted to Francis, 
 that, by never allowing them to meet, he made others, and 
 not them, the instruments of the public loss, and of the na- 
 tional repudiation of his own sworn promise. 
 
 Henry II., in his fiscal distress, imitated and improved on 
 this example of his father. Instead of issuing a summons for 
 the election of deputies, as in former times, he himself nomi- 
 nated them ; and his mock States-Greneral were farther distin- 
 guished from all genuine assemblages of that kind by the ap- 
 pearance there of a fourth estate ; that is, of the various Par- 
 liaments of France as represented by nominees of the crown. 
 The great object of this assemblage was to obtain a contribu- 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 327 
 
 tion from those privileged classes who were exempt from the 
 tailles and from most other extraordinary imposts. Nor was 
 the attempt unsuccessful. The enthusiasm excited by the 
 recent capture of Calais, and the zeal of the Parliaments to 
 requite the king for having elevated them to the rank of a new 
 estate of the realm, opened the hearts and the purses of the 
 members of this anomalous body. 
 
 But when Henry had fallen by the lance of Montgomery, 
 and Francis, his son, reigned in his stead, such evasions of the 
 ancient laws and constitution of the kingdom ceased to be any 
 longer practicable ; for the time was not yet come when the 
 kings of France were to assume the plenitude of the power of 
 raising taxes without the consent of their people. By Charles 
 VIIL, by Francis L, and by Henry II., the power had indeed 
 been exercised, but it was with the timidity and hesitation of 
 usurpers, and with the too plausible apology that they were at 
 the same time promoters of the glory of France. But the scene 
 and the actors in it were now to undergo a total change. 
 
 The seventy-eight years which had elapsed since the dis 
 solution of the States-General of Tours by Charles VIIL had 
 been a period of internal progress, though of external disaster. 
 The blood and treasure of France had been profusely squan- 
 dered in the Italian wars, in the rivalry with the house of 
 Austria, and on the fatal fields of Pavia and St. Q,uentin. 
 These calamities had at length passed away, and unequivocal 
 indications of increasing prosperity were every where visible. 
 But the blast of a new trumpet of woe was about to be heard 
 throughout that devoted land. The wars of religion drew near, 
 and already the hostile bands of the Huguenots and the Cath- 
 olics were arrayed against each other for that deadly conflict. 
 The civil and military conduct of the cause of the Reformers 
 had been committed to the princes of the house of Bourbon. 
 The Catholics acknowledged the chiefs of the house of Lorraine 
 as their guides and champions. At the head of the Mediating, 
 or, as they were called, the Political party, were the Constable 
 Montmorency and the Chancellor PHopital. The king himself 
 was a cipher a mere boy in his sixteenth year, in tutelage 
 to his mother, Catharine of Medici, whose Italian guile found 
 ceaseless exercise in maintaining her own dominion by the ad- 
 justment of the balance between the contending factions. Noi 
 
328 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 wore the other great sovereigns of Europe passive spectators 
 of the brooding tempest. Philip II. had pledged himself to 
 the defense of the Catholic, Elizabeth and the Reformed states 
 of Germany to the support of the Calvinistic arms. But, ere 
 those pledges could be redeemed, the Duke of Cruise and his 
 brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine, by the defeat of the Protest- 
 ant conspiracy of Amboise, had risen to an absolute supremacy 
 in the administration of the government of France, and had 
 constrained the wily Catharine, at least for the moment, to 
 grace and to partake their triumph. 
 
 But with the powers came the responsibilities of that high 
 position. The public revenue was inadequate, by two and a 
 half millions, to meet the annual expenditure for which the 
 Cruises had now to provide. They had to choose between the 
 unpopularity (so hazardous at such a crisis) of raising the 
 necessary supplies by edicts, to be issued in the name of the 
 king alone, and the hazard (so formidable to the French court 
 at all times) of convening the now almost obsolete assembly 
 of the States-General of France. Yet, from such a convention, 
 the house of Lorraine not unreasonably hoped to derive at once 
 pecuniary resources and popular support ; and, in that expect- 
 ation, they became the avowed advocates of what then seem- 
 ed so bold a policy. On the other hand, Antoine, king of Na- 
 varre, and his brother, the Prince of Conde (the two chiefs of 
 the house of Bourbon), anticipated, from the, same source, the 
 triumph of their Protestant adherents, and their own elevation 
 to the political authority which Catharine was exercising in 
 passive subservience to the Princes of Lorraine. Catharine 
 herself hailed the prospect of their meeting as the most prob- 
 able means of depressing each of the rival houses, and of con- 
 firming her own questionable powers, while the Political party 
 believed that the authority of the constable and the eloquence 
 of the chancellor would enable them to subjugate the deputies 
 to their pacific and constitutional policy. Under the influence 
 of those opposite, though concurrent motives, the leaders of all 
 the great rival parties in France unanimously- advised the king 
 to convene the States- G-eneral of the realm. But the people, 
 to whom the royal citations were addressed, were as much in- 
 fected as their rulers by the epidemic fever of political excite- 
 ment, From De Thou and Regnier de la Planche each of 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 329 
 
 them a contemporary historian we learn that, from one end 
 of the kingdom to the other, the electoral meetings rang with 
 the characteristic eloquence of France, and that the vices of 
 the clergy and the crimes of the privileged orders were the 
 invariable themes of this popular oratory. 
 
 For example, John Bazin, an advocate of Blois, in the course 
 of his invectives on such an occasion, having exclaimed that 
 what he had spoken was felt, and would he avowed by his 
 constituents the people was interrupted by the presiding 
 bailli with the question, And what mean you by the people ? 
 " I mean," replied Bazin, " that bestia multorum capitum of 
 whom you, M. le President, are yourself one." The speech 
 delivered by another advocate, Grrimaudet by name, at Angers, 
 might pass for a communist oration at Paris of the year 1848. 
 It denounces the courts of justice as shops for the sale of ju- 
 dicial sentences ; the priests as hireling absolution mongers ; 
 the patrons of benefices as simoniacal debauchees ; and the 
 nobles as so many robbers and cowards, sheltering then* in- 
 famy beneath their great hereditary titles ; while the Tiers 
 Etat, exempt from all blame, but laboring under every form 
 of oppression, bore all the brunt of war, and endured all the 
 burdens of peace, producing, by their toils, wealth in which 
 they were allowed no share, and maintaining, by intolerable 
 imposts, luxuries and employments in which they might not 
 participate. 
 
 The deputies, who were elected in the midst of these tu- 
 mults, had scarcely met before Francis died, and they gener- 
 ally adopted the opinion that their legal existence had ended 
 with his natural life. The sages of the law decided otherwise. 
 They maintained that, numerous as were the instances of the 
 mortality of the king's of France, the King of France was 
 immortal ; and that, therefore, the assembly which Francis 
 had summoned might, without any new elections, be holden 
 by his successor, Charles IX. ; and thus it happened that the 
 ceremonial of opening the session was performed by the new 
 king, then a boy in his eleventh year. The more arduous 
 duty of explaining why this venerable institution of their an- 
 cestors was once more called into activity, devolved on the 
 Chancellor PHopital. 
 
 He reviewed the origin, the labors, and the privileges of the 
 
330 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 States-General from the earliest times. He disclosed and la- 
 mented the oppressive wants of the treasury. He depicted 
 the calamities which either menaced or were actually afflict- 
 ing the kingdom. He ascribed them to differences of religious 
 opinions, for which (as he maintained) a General Council was 
 the only remedy ; and he earnestly recommended a reciprocal 
 toleration until such a synod should have met and spoken. 
 " Gentleness," he said, " will make many more converts than 
 violence. Pray for the heretics. Do your utmost to reclaim 
 them, and you will render to the Church a far better service 
 than by hating and reviling her antagonists." 
 
 To these wise and Christian counsels the Clergy answered 
 by quoting against the Huguenots the divine commands to 
 exterminate the guilty Canaanites. The Nobles and the Tiers 
 Etat, on the contrary, joined with the chancellor in his appeal 
 to the next General Council, and echoed his advice that, until 
 the religious controversies should have been set at rest by that 
 ultimate authority, no weapon but that of kind persuasion 
 should be employed against the innovators. Respecting the 
 secular interests of the nation, the three orders were, to a great 
 extent, unanimous. 
 
 Here, then, was a concurrence of whatever could promise a 
 successful result to the deliberations of the States-General. 
 Holding the balance between the royal and the aristocratic 
 powers, and regarded both by the Catholics and by the Hu- 
 guenots as at least the immediate umpires in their disputes, 
 what was the obstacle to the assertion, by the representatives 
 of France, of all the powers necessary the vindicating the lib- 
 erties and redressing the grievances of the French people? 
 The obstacle was found in their want, not of strength, but 
 of wisdom. They squandered the invaluable opportunity of 
 which they were masters by two capital errors. The first was, 
 that they demanded every thing; the second, that they con- 
 ceded nothing. 
 
 After passing laborious weeks in the preparation of their 
 cahiers, the States presented them, at last, in a form the best 
 calculated to alarm each of the three great powers, whom it 
 most behooved them to conciliate- the queen-mother, the 
 house of Lorraine, and the Middle, or Constitutional party in 
 the government. In those cahiers were recapitulated all the 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 331 
 
 evils under which society was laboring, and all the remedies 
 by which they might be either removed or mitigated. Every 
 existing form of misgovernment was thus, at once, brought 
 into view, and depicted on the same dark canvas ; and reforms 
 so numerous and important were simultaneously suggested, 
 as to give to the project the menacing appearance of a total 
 revolution. Such a scheme at once excited the jealousy of 
 the royal and aristocratic powers, and depressed the hopes of 
 L'Hopital and the other enlightened advisers of the crown. In 
 the presence of such a pyramid of alleged abuses, and of such 
 a mass of proposed measures of relief, the zeal of the most 
 ardent reformers was paralyzed, while to the opponents of all 
 change it afforded at least a plausible apology for inaction. 
 
 At once to pursue and to postpone theoretical perfection 
 to reconcile the loftiest hopes for the future with the humblest 
 labors for the present, and so to work out the practicable while 
 meditating the ideal is a wisdom of which ancient France 
 has left no traditions, and of which (perhaps for that reason) 
 modern France has had no experience. % & 
 
 But the States- Greneral of Orleans erred as much in refusing 
 all reasonable concessions as in keeping out of sight no imag- 
 inable demand. The wants of the treasury were urgent and 
 extreme, and a necessitous court and nobility would not have 
 been unwilling to repay a liberal supply of money by enlarg- 
 ing the franchises of the French people, and by redressing some 
 of the complaints of their representatives. But that price the 
 authors of the cahiers were unwilling either frankly to offer or 
 distinctly to refuse. They evaded it by an excuse alike un- 
 founded and imprudent. They affected to regard themselves 
 as invested by their constituents, not with a general authority 
 to judge and act for them, but only with a limited power to 
 judge and act in the particular affairs expressly mentioned in 
 their instructions ; and finding in those instructions no direct 
 authority to impose any new tax, they declared themselves 
 incompetent to make the grants which the crown had required. 
 
 In this suicidal repudiation of one of their own highest priv- 
 ileges, the court acquiesced promptly and with apparent pleas- 
 ure. To Catharine and her counselors it was no unwelcome 
 tidings that the States-G-eneral of France, so long disused and 
 so much dreaded, had disavowed any higher character than 
 
332 THE ST A TE-S- GENERAL OF 
 
 that of delegates or mandatories, invested only with the right 
 of carrying into effect the express orders of their constituents. 
 But this abandonment of their higher and more independent 
 functions was unrewarded by the anticipated escape from the 
 pecuniary demands of the Queen Regent. The deputies were 
 sent back to their constituents to obtain from them the requi- 
 site authority for raising new imposts, with no one grievance 
 redressed, but with gracious promises of the benefits which 
 the king would confer if the necessary supplies should be first 
 granted to him. 
 
 New writs were accordingly issued for the election of depu 
 ties, to meet in another assembly of the States-Greneral. But 
 much of the terror once inspired by such bodies had now pass- 
 ed away ; and the court was encouraged, by the experience 
 gained at Orleans, to depart widely, on this occasion, from the 
 ancient laws and usages of the realm. For, first, the whole 
 number of the deputies of the three orders was reduced from 
 393 to 39 ; and, secondly, they were declared to be eligible, 
 not by the various bailliages, but by the twelve greater gov- 
 ernments of the kingdom; and, thirdly, the electoral bodies 
 were expressly forbidden to instruct their deputies, or even 
 themselves to deliberate on any subject, excepting only that 
 of the aids and subventions to be given to the king. In ear- 
 lier times such an infringement of the constitution of the 
 States would have been indignantly resisted. But the court 
 had rightly inferred from their recent proceedings that such as- 
 semblies were no longer really formidable. There remains no 
 record of so much as a single remonstrance or murmur against 
 these enormous innovations. 
 
 Resolved, as it would seem, to ascertain whether there was 
 any limit to their submissive spirit, the court separated the 
 three orders from each other almost immediately after their 
 meeting at St. Germain's, in August, 1561. The clergy were 
 removed to Poissy, to join the conference at that place between 
 the Catholic and Protestant divines ; the Nobles and the Tiers 
 Etat being sent to conduct the business of the session at Pon- 
 toise. When thus divided, the three orders were easily sub- 
 dued. The Clergy were terrified by threats into what was 
 called a voluntary gift of fifteen millions of livres. The No 
 ble* and the Tiers Etat were allured, by vague promises of re 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 333 
 
 'form, to impose heavy duties on liquors imported into any for- 
 tified cities. 
 
 The triumph of the queen-mother and of the house of Lor- 
 raine over the representative "body was thus complete. But in 
 the Chancellor 1'Hopital France at that time possessed a states- 
 man in whose wisdom, equity, and moderation some counter- 
 poise was found against the cruel and selfish ambition of Cath- 
 arine, and of the Duke and Cardinal of Cruise. By L'Hopital's 
 advice, the States of Pontoise were not used merely as instru- 
 ments for extracting money from the people, but, in return for 
 their grants, they were permitted to reap some important ad- 
 vantages. They were admitted to a direct participation in 
 three great measures of state policy : the ratification of the 
 treaty by which the queen-mother and the King of Navarre 
 had divided between them the powers of the regency ; the de- 
 vising measures for the reconcilement of the Catholics and 
 Calvinists ; and the preparation of a scheme for the discharge 
 of the debts of the crown. To L'Hopital, also, the States- 
 General were indebted for the promulgation, in the name of 
 Charles IX., of what was called the Edict of Orleans a law 
 designed to give effect to some of the reforms demanded by 
 them during their session in that city. That edict fell, indeed, 
 very far short of their interminable project, and was, therefore, 
 vehemently opposed by most of the members of their body. 
 It also greatly abridged the privileges of the Parliament of 
 Paris, and was, therefore, opposed by that company with equal 
 vehemence. But it was precisely in this conflict between the 
 two that the chancellor found the means of accomplishing his 
 own purposes. The States sought his support against the Par- 
 liament, and the Parliament against the States ; and his pro- 
 jected law was at length accepted as a compromise by both. 
 It long continued in force, bearing his name, and destined, as 
 it seemed, to remain an imperishable monument to his honor. 
 But it fell at last in the universal wreck of all the ancient in- 
 stitutions of France. It is, however, still a monument to be 
 studied, in all its details, by any one who would rightly ap- 
 preciate the true spirit of that once venerated monarchy. For 
 the present it may be enough to say that it established the 
 Pragmatic Sanction so far as it related to the right a of the king 
 to appoint the bishops of France ; that it forbade the abuse of 
 
334 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 Papal monitories ; that it regulated the law of the licensed 
 publication of books ; that it confined judicial offices to men of 
 the gown, to the exclusion of men of the sword ; that it abol- 
 ished the seignorial courts of justice ; and that it abridged the 
 power of an ancestor to disinherit his heir. If, to us, these 
 enactments, and such as these, should appear to be but scanty 
 fruits of the labors and the sacrifices of two successive national 
 assemblies, we should bear in mind that the innovations thus 
 established were in themselves of no light importance, and that 
 the mode of effecting them was in the highest degree moment- 
 ous. It was the first law which had been enacted by any king 
 of France since the reign of John, with the express and avow- 
 ed purpose of giving effect to the desires of the States-Greneral. 
 The Ordinance of Orleans, imperfectly as it may have accom- 
 plished that object, was, therefore, not unjustly hailed as the 
 recognition of a great principle, and as the prolific germ of 
 other concessions to be made, in future times, to the represent- 
 atives of the French people. 
 
 That hope was not, however, to be accomplished. In the 
 dark annals of France, few periods are involved in a deeper 
 gloom than the fifteen years which intervened between the 
 dissolution of the States of Pontoise and the first of the two 
 meetings of the States at Blois. They had been years of civil 
 war embittered by religious animosities. The Protestants had 
 won battles, had suffered defeats, had endured persecutions, 
 had crowded the scaffold as martyrs, and had undergone the 
 butcheries of St. Bartholomew. Five successive edicts of pa- 
 cification had, each in turn, introduced a short, hollow, and un- 
 quiet truce. But between the hostile parties there was no 
 longer any place for confidence or for pardon. By each of them 
 had been organized a confederation full of menace to the other ; 
 and of danger, both to the authority of the crown and to the 
 peace of the kingdom. Between the Huguenots and the Po- 
 litical Catholics had been concluded a treaty for establishing 
 within the state, but apart from it, a species of republic, gov- 
 erned by laws peculiar to itself in whatever related to public 
 worship, to justice, to war, to commerce, and to finance. Th 
 more zealous Catholics, under the guidance of the house of 
 Guise, had^ laid the foundation of the great Catholic league, 
 with the scarcely disguised purpose of subverting the liberties 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 335 
 
 of the Grallican Church, and of excluding from the throne the 
 descendants of Hugues Capet, in favor of the princes and fam- 
 ily of Lorraine, the supposed posterity of Charlemagne. The 
 feeble court, meanwhile dreading and distrusted by either pai> 
 ty, at one time attempted to govern both by holding the bal- 
 ance between them, and at another time were seriously en- 
 gaged in devising with an adventurer, Poncet by name, who 
 had studied the science of government in Turkey, a scheme for 
 establishing in France the naked despotism of the Sublime 
 Porte. Nor was there wanting the interference of that formi- 
 dable potentate, the press, which, in the form of pamphlets and 
 of journals, was propagating some of those maxims which we 
 now revere as the corner-stones of all constitutional politics, 
 but which were, in that age, denounced as incitements to an- 
 archy and sedition. 
 
 In this labyrinth of intrigues and conflict of passions, there 
 was one ground alone in which the antagonist ranks were not 
 at variance. They all agreed in demanding an assembly of 
 the States-General. It promised to the Catholic Leaguers a 
 sanction, or at least an apology, for their treasonable compact. 
 It promised to the Protestant and Political confederacy the re- 
 forms, civil and religious, for which they were associated. It 
 promised to Catharine and her son Henry a solution of the per- 
 ilous problem, to which of those hostile forces it would be the 
 more safe and expedient for them to adhere ; and to the liter- 
 ary dictators of the age it promised a broad channel and an ef- 
 fective agency through which their doctrines might be the most 
 readily diffused and the most widely disseminated. 
 
 The States were accordingly summoned to meet ; and on the 
 6th of December, 1576, 326 deputies appeared at Blois in obe- 
 dience to that citation. In the flower of his youth, and in all 
 the pomp of royalty, Henry III. presided over them. To those 
 historians who, penetrating the inmost hearts of the men of 
 former times, resolve all the enigmas of them more confidently 
 than most of us are able to decipher the secrets of our own, it 
 belongs to explain what were the dominant passions which 
 united, and held together in the same bosom, those apparently 
 irreconcilable propensities by which the last of the house of 
 Valois seems to have been governed. His youth of noble dar- 
 ing was followed by an imbecile and voluptuous manhood 
 
336 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 The ability both to express and to win all the kindly affections 
 was combined in him with an habitual and inanimate selfish- 
 ness. His devotion in all religious observances was fervent, 
 even to extravagance ; yet was he destitute of any perceptible 
 respect for the restraints or for the duties which religion en- 
 joins. Though faithful to his worthless associates and ill- 
 chosen friends, even at hazards which might have daunted the 
 bravest, he was faithless to his subjects when both honor and 
 prudence exhorted him to fidelity. Grifted with energy an x 
 with talents of no common order, he was yet the constant sport 
 of outward circumstances, and the passive instrument of minds 
 holding a far lower place than his own in the scale of intellect. 
 He died the victim of principles falsely imputed to him, and 
 became the martyr of the very cause which, from the com- 
 mencement to the close of his life, he had relentlessly perse- 
 cuted. Who but he whose inalienable prerogative it is to be 
 the Searcher of hearts may discover the true reconcilement of 
 these contradictions ? And yet what diligent observer has not 
 remarked in others what honest self-observer has not occa- 
 sionally detected in himself some inconsistencies not wholly 
 dissimilar from those of Henry ? For who has not had occa- 
 sion to trace the progressive victory of what is sensitive, sens- 
 uous, and sensual, over what is moral, intellectual, and spir- 
 itual in the nature of every man who, having, like Henry, been 
 'subjected to the fiery trial of what we miscall prosperity, has 
 been exempted, by the too easy condition of his life, from the 
 strenuous competition, the laborious self-denial, the invigorat- 
 ing rebukes, and- disappointments, and sufferings, which pre- 
 pare the less-favored children of fortune to scale the obstinate 
 heights of honest fame and enduring usefulness ? 
 
 To such an elevation, indeed, Henry occasionally made some 
 approach, and especially when he appeared as a public speak- 
 er ; for his presence was noble, his voice clear and liquid, and 
 his elocution destitute neither of. dignity nor of pathos. Take, 
 as an example, the following passage from his address to the 
 States-General of Blois on the opening of their sessions. "In 
 all the events of these later wars, nothing," he said, " has giv- 
 en me so much sorrow, or affected me so deeply, as the oppres- 
 sion and the distress under which my poor people have labored. 
 Often uas rny commiseration for them moved me to implore 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 337 
 
 (rod to deliver them from their calamities ; or, if not, then that 
 he would be pleased in this, the flower of my age, to terminate 
 at once my reign and my life, with a reputation befitting the 
 descendant of so long a line of magnanimous princes, rather 
 than allow me to grow old, protracting, in the midst of irre- 
 mediable troubles, a reign to be remembered in future gener- 
 ations only as a reign of public misfortunes." 
 
 Kind and kingly words ! but not the only words uttered by 
 Henry on this occasion. He had met the States- G-eneral with 
 the earnest hope that they would sanction the war which he 
 desired to wage against his^ Protestant subjects ; for he hated, 
 with all the energy of which his enervated mind was still ca- 
 pable, the Reformers over whom he had triumphed in his youth 
 at Jarnac and at Montcontour. But, without the concurrence 
 of the representatives of the French people, he could not ven- 
 ture to raise his standard in such a war ; and his aspirations 
 for their support in this enterprise were privately expressed in 
 the form of a parody on the ancient philanthropic wish that 
 the Romans had but one neck among them, that so they might 
 all be decapitated at a blow. " Would," exclaimed Henry, 
 "that the deputies of the Three Estates (I must substitute 
 a periphrastic for a literal version) were joined together bodily 
 in such sort that a single kick might drive them all at once to 
 vote for the establishment of uniformity of religion in France." 
 The king thus spoke in his cabinet from the heart. On his 
 throne he had spoken from his lips. But they to whom he had 
 spoken needed .no royal voice to stimulate their antipathy to 
 the Calvinists and their leaders. The States-General prompt- 
 ly gratified the wishes of their sovereign, though without any 
 such unseemly external impulse as he had meditated. Among 
 their earliest resolutions was a vote that Henry should be moved 
 to reunite all Frenchmen in the same faith and worship. 
 
 Thus far they were unanimous. But with regard to the 
 use, either of the stake or of the sword, for the propagation 
 of the faith, the deputies differed. The majority of the mem- 
 bers of the Tiers Etat, when told by the head, proposed to add 
 to the address to the king a protest against the adoption of 
 such methods. The majority of the twelve governments or 
 committees into which the Tiers Etat were divided, voted, on 
 the other hand, against any such qualification of the address. 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 It was, therefore, presented to Henry in a form which was un^ 
 derstood by him and "by the whole assembly as a declaration 
 of war against the Huguenots. 
 
 The immediate result of this vote was probably unforeseen 
 by any of the authors or the promoters of it. Henry had 
 found remaining energy enough to imprecate the destruction 
 of the heretics of his kingdom ; but, on receiving this formal 
 summons to draw the sword against them, his resolution fal- 
 tered. He saw in it merely an opportune and welcome deliv- 
 erance from the responsibility of so momentous a decision, and 
 rejoiced in the opportunity of casting on the States- General 
 themselves the reproach of reviving hostilities, and on the Re- 
 formers the odium of refusing peace. To purchase this relief 
 from his duties as a king, he was content to sacrifice the high- 
 est prerogative of his crown. He was willing that the depu- 
 ties should assume the office of negotiators with those whom 
 he and they concurred in denouncing as public enemies, and 
 he answered their address by expressly inviting them to en- 
 gage in the proposed treaty with the Huguenots. The invita- 
 tion was promptly and gladly accepted. Envoys proceeded 
 from the States-General to Henry of Navarre, to Conde, and 
 to the other Protestant leaders with proposals of reconciliation 
 But these proposals had been studiously conceived in such a 
 spirit, and framed in such terms, as to provoke and to insure 
 the indignant defiance with which they were received. Thus 
 the States- General, having been permitted to assume one of 
 the functions of the royal government, had used it in such a 
 manner as to involve the king and the people of France in a 
 renewal of the civil war. 
 
 But in the mind of Henry III. unkingly passions counter- 
 poised each other. "When thus invited to satiate his hatred 
 of his Protestant antagonists, he became paralyzed by his 
 dread of his Catholic allies. He abhorred the Huguenots as 
 the open enemies of the Church to which he was supersti- 
 tiously devoted. He dreaded the Leaguers as the secret ene- 
 mies of his own royal authority, to which his devotion was not 
 less absolute. Oscillating between these emotions, he rushed 
 into the precise dangers which he desired to escape, and 
 brought himself into subjection to the very heretics whom he 
 thirsted to destroy. 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 339 
 
 The objects of the Catholic League were the deposition of 
 Henry, the surrender of the liberties of the Gallican Church, 
 and the extermination or the exile of the Calvinists. Yet 
 Henry now announced himself to the States-General of Blois 
 as the head of that traitorous association. He idly hoped to 
 foil the Duke of Guise by thus wresting from his grasp the 
 keenes't of the weapons with which that ambitious prince was 
 assailing his crown and dynasty. With his own hand he sub 
 scribed the written act of their traitorous confederacy. He re- 
 quired the deputies to subjoin their signatures to his, and dis- 
 patched several of them to solicit in his name the subscriptions 
 of the governors, nobles, and seigneurs in every province of 
 his realm. Descending from his station as King of France to 
 that of a titular leader of a fanatical faction, he rendered him- 
 self the slave of the audacious agitator whom he had hoped to 
 supersede, and whetted the daggers which were, ere long, to 
 be plunged into the bosom of Guise and into his own. 
 
 Thus the hopes with which the Leaguers had anticipated the 
 assembly at Blois were at least partially gratified. The court, 
 also, had obtained their expected deliverance from the torment 
 of irresolution, and were committed to a war with the Hu- 
 guenots to the knife. It remains to inquire how far the hopes 
 of the party called Political were accomplished. 
 
 They had proposed to themselves various reformations in the 
 government, and had resolved to stipulate for new or enlarged 
 popular franchises, in return for what pecuniary aids might 
 be granted to the sovereign ; but, again, this projected inter- 
 change of benefits was defeated by the inexorable parsimony 
 of the States-General. The king demanded of them funds to 
 sustain the war into which they had plunged him. But his 
 demands were disregarded. The Nobles proffered their swords, 
 but nothing more. The Clergy refused any grants until the 
 royal encroachments on their spiritual power should have been 
 withdrawn. The Tiers Etat insisted that the king would 
 find an ample revenue in the practice of a wise economy. 
 Long, vehement, and futile were the debates which follow- 
 ed, until the deputies, believing that Henry was tamed by 
 fatigue and poverty to submission, proposed at last to assist 
 him with the necessary funds, but only on the extreme con- 
 dition that he should impart the force and authority of law to 
 
340 THE STATES-GENERAL OP 
 
 every resolution which all the Three Estates should unani- 
 mously adopt, 
 
 The offer was indignantly rejected. To Henry, and prob- 
 ably to the States themselves, it appeared nothing less than 
 an abdication of his royal office. Yet to avoid, if possible, a 
 total failure of the supplies indispensable to the impending 
 war, he proposed that no measures which the States- (General 
 should recommend for his adoption should be rejected, except 
 on the advice of a commission to be composed Of an equal 
 number of his own privy counselors and of deputies to be 
 selected for that purpose by the States themselves. 
 
 To this compromise the Clergy and the Nobles would have 
 acceded ; but it was firmly resisted by the Tiers Etat. They 
 maintained that they had no right to delegate to others their 
 own delegated powers ; that they had no right to reduce the 
 States-Greneral from a large popular assembly to a private and 
 innumerous chamber ; that they had no right to admit the 
 officers of the crown into such a participation of the privileges 
 of the representatives of the people ; and that, in the proposed 
 commission, there would be neither liberty of speech, nor any 
 real exemption from the corrupting influences of the court. 
 
 Thus the offers of the States having been rejected by the 
 king, and the offers of the king having been rejected by the 
 States, the negotiations reached their close. The deputies 
 quitted the king with sullen and menacing remonstrances. 
 The king quitted the deputies declaring indignantly that he 
 would not engage in a war, for the expenses of which they 
 had refused to provide, but would conclude peace with the 
 Huguenots on the best terms which his pecuniary necessities 
 would permit him to obtain. 
 
 None of the hopes of the political reformers were, therefore, 
 fulfilled by the States of Blois. That assembly had repeated 
 the error of their predecessors at Orleans in demanding every 
 thing and in conceding nothing. Yet their labors were not 
 altogether fruitless. Two years after the close of their session, 
 Henry promulgated a law, which was called the Ordonnance 
 de Blois, because it purported to give effect to the cahiers of 
 the States-G-eneral holden in that city. It is a curious monu- 
 ment of the learning of the lawyers, and of the inefficacy of 
 the laws of that age. It is pronounced by the most competent 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 341 
 
 judges to be an admirable exercise in what may be called the 
 art of didactic jurisprudence ; a vast accumulation of rules in* 
 dicating what ought to be done on many subjects of the high- 
 est social interest, but of rules destitute of those executory 
 principles, without which every enactment must be useless 
 and unprofitable. 
 
 From the dissolution of the States- General of Blois, the 
 downward course of the life of Henry was tracked by crime, 
 by disaster, and by shame. The hostilities with the Hugue- 
 nots, which he had invoked with such wanton levity, and dis- 
 avowed with such petulant impatience, became inevitable ; 
 and, for the seventh time, war was proclaimed against an en- 
 emy whom he was powerless alike to conciliate or to conquer. 
 After a brief campaign, they extorted from his weakness or 
 his fears the pacification of Fleix. But any peace with the 
 Reformers involved, of course, the toleration of their opinions 
 and their worship ; and, in the judgment of the Leaguers, the 
 toleration of such heretics was an offense not less unpardona- 
 ble than heresy itself. Nor did they affect to pardon it. No 
 indignity, however contumelious no calumnies, however 
 hateful, were wanting to their revenge. The pulpits and the 
 presses of Catholic France rang with fierce and unmeasured 
 invectives against the recreant king. The Pope declared him- 
 self the protector of the League. The Leaguers entered into 
 a treaty with Philip II. of Spain for excluding the heretical 
 branches of the house of Bourbon from the succession to the 
 throne of France. The' Cardinal of Bourbon, claiming, in vir- 
 tue of that treaty, the rank of heir presumptive to the French 
 monarchy, nominated the Dukes of Guise and of Lorraine to 
 be joint lieutenant generals of the kingdom; and those princes, 
 in virtue of that nomination, levied troops, embodied an army, 
 and took possession of several of the royal fortresses. 
 
 While his throne was thus menaced from within and from 
 without by the rising tempest of treason and revolt, what 
 were the pursuits of the King of France ? With a basket full 
 of curious spaniels hanging from his neck, he busied himself 
 with the frolics of the monkeys and the clatter of the parro- 
 quets which filled his menagerie, or took refuge from ennui in 
 marriage fetes, in ecclesiastical processions, or even in funeral 
 ceremonies, and squandered on these effeminate pastimes sums 
 
342 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 which, otherwise employed, might have placed him at the 
 head of a force sufficient to overwhelm his enemies. Those 
 enemies at once despised and enjoyed his degradation. They 
 seized on the government of Paris. They organized a revolu- 
 tionary committee for each of the sixteen sections of the city, 
 and they summoned the Duke of Guise to the command of 
 the insurgent forces of the capital. He assumed it, and ex- 
 torted from the feeble Henry the treaty of Nemours. It con- 
 stituted the duke general in chief of the royal forces and gov- 
 ernor of twelve fortified towns. It granted him the sum of 
 700,000 crowns as an indemnity for his past expenses in the 
 royal service. It pledged the king to revoke all his conces- 
 sions to the Huguenots, and it bound him (destitute as he was 
 both of men and money) to renew the war against them. 
 
 For the eighth time, therefore, that war was proclaimed by 
 Henry. It plunged him into irretrievable losses, defeat, and 
 shame, while it conducted Henry of Navarre to at least one 
 signal triumph, and Guise himself to new successes and to 
 increased popularity. 
 
 The storm now raged against the unfortunate king with re- 
 kindled and yet greater fury. The Sorbonne declared that 
 his deposition would be in accordance with the divine laws. 
 The Duke of Guise, marching into Paris and entering the 
 Louvre, insulted and bearded him to his face. The citizens 
 established an insurrectionary government, gained possession 
 of Vincennes and the Bastile, threw up barricades, defeated 
 and disarmed the Swiss who guarded the person of their sov- 
 ereign, and compelled him to escape to Chartres, a despised 
 and solitary fugitive. To Chartres he was followed by the 
 now triumphant Guise, who dictated there, to the degraded 
 king, what was thenceforward called the Treaty of Union of 
 July, 1588. It forgave, or rather it applauded, all the out- 
 rages of Paris. It declared all heretics incapable of any pub- 
 lic trust, office, or employment. It excluded the heretical 
 members of the house of Bourbon from the line of succession 
 to the crown. It raised the duke to the office of lieutenant 
 general of the kingdom ; and it provided for the immediate 
 convention of the States- General of France. To the observ- 
 ance of these terms Henry pledged himself in the most solemn 
 forms of adjuration. 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 343 
 
 Again, therefore, the States-General were summoned tc 
 meet at the city of Blois ; and on the 16th of October, 1588, 
 505 deputies were assembled to listen to the inaugural oration 
 of the king. " Among them," says the contemporary histori- 
 an Matthieu, " was conspicuous Henry, duke of Cruise, who, 
 as great master of the royal household, sat near the throne, 
 dressed in white satin, with his hood thrown carelessly back- 
 ward ; and from that elevated position he cast his eyes along 
 the dense crowd before him, that he might recognize and dis- 
 tinguish his followers, and encourage with a glance their reli- 
 ance on his fortune and success ; and thus, without uttering 
 a word, might seem to say to each of them, ' I see you ;' and 
 then (proceeds Matthieu) the duke, rising, with a profound 
 obeisance to the assembly, and followed by the long train of 
 his officers and gentlemen, retired to meet and to introduce the 
 king." The lofty consciousness of his royal character still im- 
 parted some dignity to Henry's demeanor. Addressing the 
 States with a majestic and touching eloquence, he asserted 
 his title to the gratitude of his people, claimed the unimpair- 
 ed inheritance of the prerogatives of his ancestors, pronounced 
 the pardon of those who had already entered into traitorous 
 conspiracies against him, and threatened condign punishment 
 of all who might in future engage in any similar attempts 
 Even Cruise listened, with evident discomposure, to this un- 
 expected rebuke and public menace from the lips of his sov- 
 ereign. It was, however, the single gleam of success with 
 which Henry was chee'red in his intercourse with the repre- 
 sentatives of his people ; and the rest of the history of the 
 States-General of 1588 is little else than a record of the hu- 
 miliations to which they subjected him. 
 
 He spoke, as we have seen, with royal indignation of the 
 outrages of Paris and of Chartres ; but he was compelled to 
 omit all those passages of his address in his subsequent publi- 
 cation of it. He publicly claimed for himself the cognizance 
 of all questions respecting the verification of the powers of the 
 deputies ; but he was constrained, with equal publicity, to re- 
 tract that pretension. He entertained an appeal from one of 
 the members of the Tiers Etat against a decision of his order ; 
 but he was sternly reminded that the States had met at Blois, 
 not as supplicants to obey, but as counselors to advise him. 
 
344 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 He pardoned the Dukes of Soissons and Conti their having 
 borne arms under the Huguenot standards, that so they might 
 be qualified to take their places among the order of the Nobles ; 
 but the validity of his pardon was contemptuously denied. 
 He resisted, as an insult, the demand of the States that he 
 should repeat, in their presence, the oath he had already taken 
 to observe the Treaty of the Union ; but he was taught that 
 submission was inevitable. He demanded that the States 
 should, in their turn, swear fidelity to himself, and to the 
 fundamental laws of the realm ; but he was obliged to with- 
 draw that demand. He insisted that the exclusion of Henry 
 of Beam from the succession to the throne should be preceded 
 by an invitation to that prince to return into the bosom of the 
 Church ; but his proposal was inflexibly and scornfully resist- 
 ed. He commissioned two of his officers to lay before the or- 
 der of the Clergy his objections to the acceptance of the decrees 
 of the Council of Trent ; but his officers were driven away with 
 insult. He solicited pecuniary aid for carrying on the war 
 against the Huguenots ; but the suit was answered by a de- 
 mand for his surrender of a large part of his actual revenue. 
 
 This long series of indignities was readily traced by Henry 
 to the guidance of a single hand. Cruise was but too success- 
 fully exerting his influence at Blois to dethrone the king by 
 degrading him. The crown, which must inevitably fall from 
 the grasp of a prince whom all men had been taught to despise, 
 might readily be transferred to the brows of a prince to whom 
 all were looking with admiration. 
 
 Yet it was a hazardous policy. The king who had con- 
 quered at Jarnac and Montcontour, and who had concurred in 
 devising the massacre of St. Bartholomew, was not a man to 
 be restrained by the voice either of fear, of humanity, or of 
 conscience. The friends of Cruise saw, and pointed out to him 
 the danger of provoking the dormant passions of the enervated 
 Henry ; but he received their remonstrances with contempt, 
 and habitually and ostentatiously placed himself within the 
 powers of the sovereign whom he at once despised, exasperated, 
 and defied. 
 
 It was at the hour of eight in the morning of the 23d of 
 December, 1588, that Cruise was summoned from the council 
 room at Blois to attend Henry in his private chamber. He 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 345 
 
 entered it alone and unguarded, and had scarcely crossed the 
 threshold "before he fell beneath the daggers of assassins who 
 had been stationed there for his destruction. His brother, the 
 Cardinal of Cruise, immediately followed, and fell by the same 
 hands. The Cardinal of Bourbon, and all the other partisans 
 of the house of G-uise, were arrested. An officer of the royal 
 household, commanding an armed force, then entered the 
 chamber of the Tiers Etat, and seized as state prisoners the 
 president and three others of the most conspicuous of the 
 Leaguers comprised in that body ; and when the work of blood 
 and treachery had been thus consummated, the palace gates 
 were thrown open, and Henry, presenting himself to his dis- 
 mayed but indignant subjects, exclaimed, " At length I am a 
 king." 
 
 But " he that soweth iniquity," says the wise man, " shall 
 reap vanity, and the rod of his anger shall fail." 
 
 Within a few days of the slaughter of the Duke and Cardi- 
 nal of Cruise, Catharine, the mother of Henry, and, perhaps, 
 the only human being who really loved him, was summoned 
 from the world, where, except himself, there probably remained 
 not one who did not execrate her memory. In a few weeks, 
 Paris, and the greater part of France, had solemnly renounced 
 all allegiance to him. In less than eight months, the League 
 had avenged the assassination of their chiefs by the knife of 
 the fanatic Jacques Clement. But in the midst of this gen- 
 eral indignation, the States-Greneral, and they alone, were, in 
 appearance at least, unmoved. Occasionally, indeed, and even 
 earnestly, they solicited the release of the prisoners. But they 
 breathed not so much as a single remonstrance to the king 
 against his enormous infringement of their sacred character 
 and privileges in the persons of their colleagues. "With an al- 
 most incredible abjectness, they addressed themselves at once 
 to the ordinary business of the session, and discussed with 
 Henry amendments in the law of treason, schemes for the 
 admission of his officers to join in their deliberations, and plans 
 for bringing to account all public defaulters. They presented 
 to him, not indignant defiances, but humble descriptions of the 
 sufferings of his people, and meek supplications for the redress 
 of them ; and continued, during a whole month after the death 
 of the Princes of Lorraine, to prostrate themselves befoie the 
 
346 THE STATES-GENERAL OF 
 
 king, as in the presence, not of an assassin, but of a ccnquercr. 
 The session then closed with the royal audience customary on 
 such occasions ; when, in the hope of propitiating his favor tc 
 the imprisoned deputies, they addressed him in a speech in 
 which his royal virtues, and especially his clemency ', were lav- 
 ishly extolled. On the 16th of January, 1589, they at last 
 took their leave of their sovereign and of each other ; when 
 " we parted," says their great orator and memorialist, Bernard, 
 " with tears in our eyes, bewailing what had passed, and look- 
 ing forward with terror to what was yet to come ; and observ- 
 ing that, in our separation, France had an evil augury that she 
 herself was about to be torn in pieces." 
 
 The augury was but too well verified. The States-General 
 of France never again assembled till they met ineffectually in 
 the reign of Louis XIII. , to be then finally adjourned till the 
 eve of the French Revolution. 
 
 "When our own Charles I. (whom the utmost malignity of 
 faction never degraded by a comparison with Henry III.) at- 
 tempted to arrest, in the House of Commons, the leaders of his 
 revolutionary opponents, there were yet living among his court- 
 iers many who remembered the seizure of the deputies at 
 Blois as one of the tragical occurrences of their youth. Some 
 of them may, perhaps, have drawn from the passive acquies- 
 cence of the Tiers Etat in that outrage an argument in favor 
 of that disastrous imitation of the policy of the French king. 
 The remembrance of the fatal apathy of the States- General 
 may, perhaps, also have suggested to our ancestors in the House 
 of Commons, as it may now explain and vindicate to ourselves, 
 that stern resentment, which no subsequent concessions could 
 either appease or mitigate. Happy would it have been for the 
 Commons of France, in a far later age, if they also had dili- 
 gently meditated this passage in their national annals. The 
 history of the States-General of Blois, well pondered, and right- 
 ly understood by the French people, might have averted the 
 monstrous progeny of revolution, of wretchedness, and of crime, 
 which, exactly two hundred years afterward, sprang from the 
 too prolific womb of the States- General of 1789. 
 
 From age to age, assemblies of the representatives of the 
 people of that kingdom, had but repeated the exhibition of the 
 
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 347 
 
 same imposing but delusive spectacle. Arrayed in all the 
 theatrical pomp of an ancient monarchy embellished with the 
 noblest names and the most illustrious titles connected, by no 
 doubtful traditions, with the national comitia of Clovis, of 
 Charlemagne, and of St. Louis elected by a substantially freo 
 and an almost universal suffrage, what was wanting to enable 
 the States-Greneral to establish a constitutional government? 
 And yet, what did they really accomplish for the freedom of 
 their nation, during the long centuries in which they had so 
 often been summoned to meet and to advise their sovereigns ? 
 
 It is to be acknowledged in their favor that they constantly 
 and faithfully laid bare the diseases of the realm, and depicted 
 in the most vivid colors the wrongs of their constituents ; that 
 they pronounced orations of surpassing eloquence ; that they 
 gave birth to many brilliant aphorisms ; that they recognized 
 the most profound principles ; and that they formed and an- 
 nounced the loftiest designs. Nor is that all. They have the 
 farther merit of having occasionally made some constitutional 
 franchises, and of having lent their authority to codes of laws 
 which have immortalized the compilers of them. Their con- 
 demnation is, that they left all these diseases unhealed ; that 
 their eloquence proved to be at last but so many sonorous dec- 
 lamations ; that their aphorisms, their principles, and their 
 projects were gradually relegated from the senate to the schools ; 
 that the laws enacted at their instance remained dormant and 
 ineffectual ; and that the abuses which they condemned sprang 
 up, after each renewed' censure of them, with even greater vig- 
 or than before, like so many noxious plants, pruned, but not 
 eradicated. 
 
 And whence this 'continually recurring frustration of so 
 much public spirit, though animated by so much ability, and 
 exerted, as it was, with such assiduous diligence ? That pub- 
 lic spirit was profitless because the three orders of the States 
 met there, not as allies, but as antagonists ; because the im- 
 passable barriers of privilege, and rank, and prejudice prevented 
 their fusion into one harmonious body, the different members 
 of which could co-operate together for the general good ; be- 
 cause, on the contrary, the king always found in one or other 
 of those members a counterpoise against the authority of the 
 rest ; because they contentedly acquiesced in the humble of- 
 
348 THE STATES-GENERAL, ETC. 
 
 fice of suggesting and imploring remedies, and left to the king 
 the higher function of enacting, and, therefore, the means of 
 defeating them ; because the embarrassing multitude and the 
 rhetorical vagueness of their proposals afforded always a pre- 
 text, often a justification, for the royal disregard of the greater 
 number of their complaints ; because the possession of a usurp- 
 ed, but undisputed legislative power enabled the king to avoid 
 the meetings of the States- Greneral, except at some great, in- 
 frequent, and distant intervals ; and because, during the many 
 intervening years in which the representatives of the people 
 exercised no superintendence or control over the executive and 
 legislative government, the French monarchs committed, and 
 the French people expiated, those habitual and grievous faults, 
 from which, in the exercise of unrestrained authority, man nev- 
 er has been exempt, and never will be exempted, unless, in- 
 deed, the nature of man himself shall hereafter be delivered 
 from the corruptions and the infirmities to which it has hith- 
 erto been in bondage. 
 
 Are we then to conclude that the States- General were an 
 unprofitable element in the constitution of the French Mon- 
 archy ? Assuredly not. For, first, they moderated and re- 
 strained in practice, as well as in theory, the reckless increase 
 and the prodigal expenditure of the public revenue. It had 
 been a maxim of the Feudal age that no impost could be law- 
 fully levied on free men except with their own consent ; and 
 reverence for that maxim was kept continually alive by the 
 meetings of the representatives of the people, or by the tradi- 
 tions of such assemblies. In process of time, indeed, the kings 
 of France triumphed over this, as well as all the other con- 
 stitutional principles of earlier generations, and promulgated 
 edicts under which new imposts were exacted and old imposts 
 were increased at the royal pleasure. But in the very pleni- 
 tude of the power of Louis XIV., such edicts were condemned, 
 even when they were not resisted, as a lawless usurpation. 
 
 But the conservation of this great principle till the maturity 
 of the time in which it was to revive as a fundamental law of 
 the French Commonwealth is but one among the many similar 
 benefits which the States-Greneral of France conferred on the 
 French people. It might not be difficult to dwell at length on 
 the detail of them, But, at the present moment, such a 
 
TI/E SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT, ETC. 349 
 
 cussion would be as inconvenient as, happily, it is useless ; for, 
 in one of those energetic and comprehensive periods which il- 
 luminate every page of M. Guizot's philosophical speculations, 
 he has said, in a few words, whatever really remains to be 
 said on this subject, and with those words I close my present 
 lecture. 
 
 " From one epoch to another (writes that great author), the 
 States- General were a living protestation against political serv- 
 itude an impassioned announcement of some great tutelary 
 principles. Among those principles were the exclusive right 
 of the nation to impose whatever tribute the nation was to 
 pay ; the right of the people to a voice in the conduct of their 
 own affairs ; and the responsibility of the rulers to those over 
 whom they rule. For the continued vitality of these and sim- 
 ilar doctrines in France, we are chiefly indebted to the States- 
 General of the kingdom ; nor is it a trifling service to any 
 people thus to have cherished in their bosoms, and to have per- 
 petuated in their habits, the remembrance and the love of free- 
 dom." 
 
 LECTURE XIII. 
 
 ON THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 
 
 WHEN, in June, 1787, Louis XVI. required the Parliament 
 of Paris to register his edict for raising a revenue by stamps, 
 that body, assisted by the dukes and peers of France, resolved 
 that the right of imposing taxes on the people belonged to the 
 States-General, and to them alone ; and that the Parliaments 
 were not competent to sanction any fiscal ordinances. How 
 then did it happen that the Power of the Purse, which the the- 
 ory of the French Constitution thus ascribed to the national 
 representatives, never yielded, in that kingdom, its legitimate 
 fruit of constitutional freedom ? The present and the follow- 
 ing lecture will be devoted to the investigation of that prob- 
 lem. I must, however, approach it by what, I fear, may seem 
 a circuitous and a wearisome path. 
 
 The revenue of the kings of France may be considered as 
 having been either ordinary or extraordinary. Under the head 
 
350 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 of ordinary revenue may "be comprised all the possessions or 
 proprietary rights which each monarch in his turn inherited : 
 1st, as seigneur of the royal domain ; 2dly, as supreme suze- 
 rain of the realm ; and, 3dly, as administrator of the central 
 government. Under the head of extraordinary revenue will 
 consequently be included only the produce of such imposts, 
 direct or indirect, as were levied upon the people, or upon any 
 class of them, under positive enactments. Proposing this as 
 a methodical and convenient rather than as an exact and log- 
 ical arrangement of the subject, I proceed, in pursuance of it, 
 to inquire, What were the component parts of the ordinary rev- 
 enue of the French kings ? and, first, what were their posses- 
 sions, or proprietary rights, as seigneurs of the royal domain ? 
 
 In the days of Hugues Capet and of his earliest successors, 
 the royal domain was but a convertible term for that great fief 
 (the Duchy of France) which he had inherited from his ances- 
 tors ; but, by the conquest and cession of various other fiefs, 
 the domain was progressively enlarged, until at last it em- 
 braced by far the greater part of the kingdom of France. 
 Some provinces, however (Dauphine, for example), were reu- 
 nited to the crown without being annexed to the domain. 
 
 As seigneurs of the royal domain, the French kings might, 
 in the language of our own law, be said to have been seised 
 of various corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments within its 
 precincts ; that is, they were owners in possession of extensive 
 lands, buildings, forests, and navigable streams situate there; 
 and they were entitled to the feudal dues arising in each of 
 the seigneuries within the same limits. Those dues, though 
 differing in many fiefs, had a great general similitude in all. 
 
 The nature and the amount of such dues depended on the 
 rank of the vassal of whom they were claimed. If he were no- 
 ble, he owed to the royal seigneur a Relief, or Droit de Quint, 
 on every change in the ownership of his fief. During his mi- 
 nority, the king was entitled to the guardianship of his estate 
 and person, and, therefore, to what was called the Droit de 
 Garde. In some seigneuries the noble vassals also rendered 
 to the king, as their feudal lord, an annual tribute on their for- 
 est lands, varying from year to year with the estimated prod- 
 uce of the forests. 
 
 Every bishop and abbot, whose church was within the roy- 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 351 
 
 al domain, paid, on his appointment, a Regale; that is, a 
 tribute to the king, corresponding with the Relief, or Droit de 
 Quint, payable on the change of ownership in a noble lay fief. 
 
 An ignoble vassal or roturier, holding lands within the royal 
 domain, owed to the king as his seigneur, 1st, a personal Cens, 
 or capitation tax ; 2dly, an annual Cens, or quit-rent on his 
 land ; 3dly, Lods et Ventes, that is, a fine on every change of 
 ownership ; 4thly, Corvees, that is, the performance of man- 
 ual labor on the public roads and works of the seigneurie dur- 
 ing a certain number of days in each year ; 5thly, the obliga- 
 tion of grinding his corn at the mill, and of baking his bread 
 at the oven, of his royal seigneur, and not elsewhere ; 6thly, 
 fees for licenses to authorize his marrying, or hunting, or fish- 
 ing ; 7thly, the Droit de Gite, that is, the duty of supplying 
 board and lodging to the king and to his suite while on a royal 
 progress ; and, Sthly, the Droit de Prise, or the duty of sup- 
 plying to the king on credit, during a certain period, such ar 
 tides of domestic consumption as might be required for the 
 royal household. 
 
 The revenues of the king, as seigneur of the royal domain, 
 differed from those of his great feudatories, not in kind, but in 
 amount. His receipts were greater than any of theirs, in the 
 proportion in which his fief exceeded in extent and value any 
 of their fiefs. 
 
 The preceding statements will demand material qualifica- 
 tions as we descend the stream of history. Some of the most 
 oppressive of the privileges of the royal seigneur had fallen into 
 disuse before the accession of the house of Valois. Some of 
 them had been expressly abolished ; and, in some cases, those 
 charges on the land which varied with its changing value had 
 been commuted into fixed money payments. 
 
 It was a general principle of law that the reigning sovereign 
 had not an absolute property in the royal domain, but was 
 merely entitled to the usufruct of it, and that it was there- 
 fore inalienable. Nevertheless, in process of time, it was great- 
 ly diminished by apanages to the younger members of the 
 royal house ; by gratuitous donations to other persons ; by 
 sales to purchasers ; and by mortgages to creditors. In every 
 Dasre of the financial history of France we meet with the rec- 
 
 r o < 
 
 ord of strenuous efforts to arrest this evil. The judge? omit- 
 
352 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 ted no opportunity of inculcating the doctrine that all gifts and 
 conveyances of crown estates were invalid. The States-Gren- 
 eral, when solicited by the king for money, never failed to call 
 on him to resume the patrimony of his crown from those to 
 whom it had been improvidently given or illegally sold. Nor 
 were such resumptions infrequently made. But it was im- 
 possible so to set aside conveyances of any part of the royal 
 domain, when effected for valuable considerations, without en- 
 tirely depreciating all future sales of any similar property. It 
 became necessary, therefore, in order to restore the confidence 
 of purchasers, to guarantee them by royal ordinances against 
 any such breach of the public faith ; and thus, at length, the 
 crown lands were sold under conditions so stringent, that nei- 
 ther Sully nor Colbert were able to struggle successfully against 
 the pressure of them. Such was the extent of those sales, that, 
 in the reign of Louis XIV., the royal domain no longer ranked 
 among the chief of the fiscal resources of the state. 
 
 Secondly. As supreme suzerains of the realm, the kings 
 of France derived various proprietary rights from that princi- 
 ple of the feudal law which bound together all the successive 
 titles to a fief in an unbroken chain of dependencies, descend- 
 ing from the king himself, through all the intermediate seign- 
 eurs, down to the lowest of their sub-feudatories. An un- 
 authorized change in the tenure of any such fief might be 
 prejudicial to the king, considered as the last and highest of 
 the feudal lords, in the series ascending above the author of 
 the innovation. He by whom any such injurious act was 
 done was therefore said abreger son fief . 
 
 Now a fief might be so abreg-e by granting it to the Church 
 in mortmain ; for such a grant would extinguish the fines 
 which, if it had remained in lay hands, would have been pay- 
 able on alienations, or on the deaths of each successive tenant. 
 This was the ground, or the pretext, for a long series of ordi- 
 nances regulating, restraining, or prohibiting grants in mort- 
 main to ecclesiastical corporations, whether sole or aggregate. 
 The effect of those laws was, at length, entirely to interdict to 
 every seigneur in the realm the granting of any fief in that 
 manner, except with the express license of the king as supreme 
 suzerain. For such licenses the king demanded large dues, 
 which collectively were called the Droit d 1 Amortissement. 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 353 
 
 In virtue of the same principle, the king, as supremo suze- 
 rain, acquired what was called the Droit de Franc Fief; that 
 is, the right to exact dues on every transfer of a fief from a 
 noble to an ignoble tenant. In support of this claim, it was 
 maintained that, by such a transfer, a fief was abrege, because 
 there was at least a legal presumption that the new owner, a 
 roturier, would be less competent than the preceding owner, 
 a noble, to perform the obligations on which the fief was holden. 
 The real and the better reason was that to which I referred in 
 a former lecture. To facilitate the sales of seignorial estates 
 during the fever of the Crusades, it had been decided that, by 
 acquiring a noble fief, a roturier was himself ennobled. The 
 king's license for such an acquisition was consequently indis- 
 pensable, since otherwise the privileges of nobility might, 
 without his consent, have been conferred on any one or more 
 of his subjects. For every such consent he was accustomed 
 to demand a fine, varying from three years' purchase to one 
 year's purchase of the fief. 
 
 It was on the same principle that the kings of France, as 
 supreme suzerains, became entitled to the Droit cPAubain; 
 that is, the right to succeed to the estate, movable or immov- 
 able, of any alien dying within the realm. I had formerly 
 occasion to remark that, under the first two dynasties, laws 
 were not local, but personal. A stranger was, therefore, not 
 entitled to the rights enjoyed by the denizens of the place to 
 which he came ; and in any such place he had no means of 
 effectually asserting the rights which he was supposed to bring 
 with him. He therefore sought for himself and for his prop- 
 erty some powerful protector. In every feudal seigneurie the 
 lord claimed the privilege of affording that protection, and of 
 affording it on his own terms. He therefore rescued the 
 stranger from the oppression of others, but it was in order to 
 render him a prey and a bondsman to himself. Against such 
 wrongs the sufferer could find redress only by avowing him- 
 self to be the liegeman of the king; and the king was ever 
 ready to acknowledge that relation. Gradually, and after 
 many a struggle, it was thus at length established, that all 
 aubains in France were royal vassals, and were not in vassal- 
 age to the inferior lord within whose seigneurie they might be 
 living. The financial consequence of this doctriae has already 
 
 Z 
 
354 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 been noticed. Until toward the end of the eighteenth century, 
 the French kings still retained, and carried into effect, this 
 absurd and inhospitable pretension. 
 
 I do not pause to notice other minor sources of revenue, 
 such as escheats and treasure-trove, to which the king was 
 entitled, as what was called le souverain fieffeux. They are 
 of importance only as indicating the progress which, by the 
 aid of feudal doctrines, was continually made in the subjec- 
 tion of the seignorial to the royal fisc. But, 
 
 Thirdly. The kings of France had many prerogatives and 
 many consequent pecuniary rights, neither as members, nor as 
 the heads of the feudal hierarchy, but as administrators of the 
 central government. 
 
 Thus the Droit de joyeux Avenement was the right of each 
 successive monarch, on his accession, to a tribute for confirm- 
 ing ih his privileges every person in possession of any special 
 advantages in virtue of any royal grants. Among such per- 
 sons were all bodies corporate, whether commercial or muni- 
 cipal ; all naturalized aliens ; all legitimated bastards ; and all 
 holders of public offices. 
 
 The crown wa also entitled to the Droit de Maitrise. 
 This was a charge payable by every one who, after having 
 served his apprenticeship in any commercial guild or brother- 
 hood, sought to become a master workman in it on his own 
 account. Nor were these formal or trifling dues. An ordi- 
 nance of the year 1687 fixed at 3000 livres the Maitrise pay- 
 able by any man on his admission to trade as a Draper. In 
 the case of a Druggist, the same ordinance assessed the charge 
 at a sum varying from 5000 to 6000 livres. Dispensations 
 from serving the apprenticeship at all might also be obtained ; 
 and, in such cases, the tariff was higher still. 
 
 The Droit de Greffe was the right of selling various offices 
 connected with the custody of judicial records or notarial acts. 
 This was an ancient privilege of the French kings, and became 
 the basis of a series of remarkable encroachments. First, they 
 asserted the right to sell other public offices of far higher im- 
 portance. Then they created offices for the express purpose 
 of selling them. Then, in the absence of voluntary purchasers, 
 they selected persons of wealth, who were constrained to buy 
 this royal merchandise at a fixed price. But in all cases, un- 
 
THE REVENUES OP FRANCE. 355 
 
 til the reign of Henry IV., the office was made redeemable at 
 a sum which was ascertained either by an express or by an 
 implied condition in the original contract. 
 
 Against this fatal abuse, the States-General, the Parliament 
 of Paris, and the most eminent statesmen and writers of France 
 (Montesquieu is the eminent and singular exception) never 
 ceased to remonstrate with all the weight of their authority 
 or their reason. But, till the eve of the Revolution, that abuse . 
 proved inveterate and incurable. In the time of Louis XIV., 
 the number of vendible, and, for the most part, superfluous 
 places, exceeded 4000, and the prices of some of them were 
 enormous. Toward the close of the seventeenth century, half 
 a million of livres was exacted for each of the offices of secre- 
 tary of state, of captain of the royal guards, and of first gen- 
 tleman of the royal chamber. The office of great chamberlain 
 was sold for more than twice that sum. In the catalogue of 
 marketable employments we find more than 1900 seats in the 
 different Parliaments and ether royal tribunals. These were 
 for wealthy and ambitious purchasers. To the less aspiring 
 were offered the offices of controllers of the royal butter, tast- 
 ers of the royal cheese, inspectors of the royal piggeries, and 
 so on. Nor were these bad investments of money. The min- 
 isters, counselors, and judges, if ignoble, acquired, in virtue 
 of their purchases, most of the privileges, and all the immuni- 
 ties of the Noblesse. The guardians of the palate and diges- 
 tion of their sovereign also acquired an exemption from the 
 burdens and indignities to which other roturiers were subject, 
 such as the performance of corvees, the payment of tallies, and 
 the lodging of soldiers in their houses. Eventually, as we 
 shall hereafter see, the greater part of the vendible offices in 
 the courts of justice became hereditary in the families of the 
 purchasers on the condition of the payment of an income tax, 
 usually known as the Paulette. 
 
 As administrator of the central government, the King of 
 France also derived a large revenue from the control which he 
 exercised over the coinage. Under the early Capetians, indeed, 
 every great feudatory struck and issued money of his own for 
 circulation within his own fief. But this power was gradually 
 taken from them and transferred to the crown by a series of 
 ordinances, commencing with the reign of Louis IX., and term- 
 
356 THESOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 inating with that of Charles VIII. In virtue of this 
 tive, the king received, on all new coins, a seignorage, which 
 represented, and which was supposed to correspond with, the 
 cost of fabricating them. In the days of St. Louis that sup- 
 position was probably well founded ; for, in later days, his 
 management of the royal mint was always appealed to as the 
 equitable standard for the observance of his successors. Those 
 popular reclamations were, however, long ineffectual. To call 
 in the outstanding specie, and to issue it again of a debased 
 quality, but at the old nominal value, was one df the common 
 resources of the treasury at all periods of great national dis- 
 tress. It was adopted in the disastrous reigns of John and of 
 Charles VI., and amid those calamities which overcast the 
 evening of the life of Louis XIV. It was employed, without 
 any such apology, by Philippe le Bel, so recklessly as to earn 
 f6r him the sobriquet of Philip the Forger. Nor were these 
 dishonest acts declined by our Henry V. during his temporary 
 administration of the government of France. Thus the seign- 
 orage properly due on gold and silver money was a legitimate, 
 though not a very important method of recruiting the royal 
 revenue. But the changes of the intrinsic worth of that money, 
 which were made under the shelter of that prerogative, were 
 at once among the most scandalous and, the most lucrative of 
 the means by which the treasury was replenished. 
 
 Fourthly. I pass on to the consideration of the extraordi- 
 nary revenues of the French kings. These were composed of 
 the proceeds of the taxes levied under the authority of fiscal 
 ordinances. 
 
 Direct taxes, that. is, the exaction of pecuniary payments 
 for the support of the royal fisc, originated, first, in those serv- 
 ices, military or servile, which the vassals, noble or ignoble, 
 owed to their feudal lords ; and, secondly, in their obligations 
 to offer a certain tribute to him on the marriage of the lord's 
 eldest daughter, and on the admission of his eldest son to the 
 dignity of knighthood. All these burdens were, in process of 
 time, commuted for money payments or tallies, and such tallies 
 were voted, as occasion required, by the court or Parliament 
 of the Fief. The municipal vassals enjoyed, under their char- 
 ters, the double privilege of granting or refusing such imposts 
 at their pleasure, and of being exempt from the liability to 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 357 
 
 make .such, grants at all beyond the limits of a certain pre- 
 scribed maximum. 
 
 The tallies thus drawn by the seigneurs from their vassals 
 within their respective seigneuries, were also drawn by the 
 king from his vassals within the royal domain. It was not 
 till the twelfth century that, in order to promote objects of 
 common interest to the nation at large, he ever received or de- 
 manded such a tribute from all the provinces of the kingdom 
 It was then raised by the intervention and ministry of the great 
 feudatories, and of their respective feudal courts. They im- 
 posed, and received, and paid over to the king what was thence- 
 forward called the royal faille, in contradistinction from the 
 seignorial tattle. 
 
 Philippe le Bel (as I formerly had occasion to observe) was 
 the author of another and more momentous innovation. He 
 first raised a royal taille under the authority of grants made, 
 or supposed to be made, by the representatives of the Noblesse, 
 the Clergy, and the Commons. That practice (as we have 
 seen) afterward became common, and even habitual. But it 
 was comparatively unusual to convene for this purpose the 
 States-Greneral of the whole kingdom. The more frequent 
 habit was to summon separately the States either of Langue- 
 doi'l or of Languedoc, or of the particular provinces. 
 
 In the origin of this system, the States, whether general or 
 provincial, were accustomed to collect, by officers of their own 
 appointment, the supplies which they granted for the service 
 of the crown. Nine deputies, that is, three from each of the 
 three orders, were constituted superintendents. Subordinate 
 to them were commissioners and receivers-general for the dif- 
 ferent provinces ; and other officers called Elus, who appor- 
 tioned the charge among the cities, communes, parishes, and 
 individuals liable to it. The Elus were so called, because 
 they were elected by the contributors. 
 
 In the reigns of Charles V. and of Charles VII., however, 
 all these appointments were superseded by royal nominations, 
 except indeed that, in what were called the Pays cPEtats, the 
 Elus still retained their independent origin and powers. The 
 Pays cPEtats were composed of those provinces in which the old 
 provincial States were still accustomed to assemble. The rest 
 of France were divided into what were called Pays d? Election. 
 
358 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 The taille was a tax imposed at once in rem and in per- 
 sonam ; that is, each contributor was rendered personally li- 
 able to pay a sum proportionate to the estimated value of his 
 immovable property. It was not, however, levied equally in 
 all places. All free cities (as we have already noticed) enjoyed 
 a peculiar immunity as to the amount of this impost. Many 
 cities, and some rural districts, were permitted to purchase a 
 permanent and total exemption from it. In the reigns of the 
 sons of Henry II. such sales were especially numerous. Nei- 
 ther was the taille levied equally on all persons. The nobles 
 were free from it, partly because it was originally a tax paid 
 to them, and not by them ; partly because they (as it was al- 
 leged) rendered personally, in the field, the services from which 
 their vassals were discharged by the payment of this tax ; and 
 partly because to engage in any kind of commerce would have 
 worked a forfeiture of their rank ; and yet, without such com- 
 mercial dealings, they could not acquire the money necessary 
 for acquitting themselves of such a liability. The clergy were 
 also exempt, not only because they too were unable to enter 
 into any trade, but chiefly on account of the privilege which 
 they enjoyed, and on account of the duty which they invari- 
 ably performed, of imposing on themselves their share of the 
 public burdens of the state. The members of the sovereign 
 courts, as a new though inferior noblesse, and the officers of 
 the crown, ori account of the dignity of their employer, par- 
 ticipated in this valuable privilege. The result was, that the 
 taille was a property tax affecting the roturiers exclusive^. 
 During long ages they bore this burden with an impatience 
 which exhibited itself sometimes in indignant expostulations, 
 sometimes in bitter jests or satirical songs, often in tumults 
 and seditions, and always in that estrangement between the 
 privileged and unprivileged classes, which was destined, in the 
 fullness of time, to overwhelm all the privileges and all the 
 institutions of the monarchy in one common ruin. 
 
 The Capitation tax was another direct impost, which orig- 
 inated in the wars and financial embarrassments of the reign 
 of Louis XIY. It was designed to afford an impressive con- 
 trast to the aristocratic injustice of the taille. For the purpose 
 of this impost, the people of France were divided into twenty- 
 two classes, in the first of which stood alone the Dauphin and 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 359 
 
 the other princes of the blood. From the rate at which they 
 were assessed, to the rate which attached to the smallest con- 
 tributors, the scale descended by regular gradations through 
 each successive class, the rich paying according to their wealth, 
 and the poor according to their poverty. But between this 
 equitable theory and the actual practice there was a wide dis- 
 tinction. The clergy were permitted to purchase an entire 
 exemption from this burden on easy terms. The noblesse 
 were permitted to choose assessors for themselves from their 
 own body. The Pays dEtats were allowed to commute the 
 tax for a fixed- contribution. The burden thus fell, as usual, 
 with the heaviest pressure "on the roturiers and on the Pays 
 d> Election ; that is, on the persons and on the places which 
 were unprotected by any peculiar franchises. 
 
 The Dixieme was, in substance, identical with the income 
 tax, with which we are ourselves so familiar, the rate being 
 the same as with us during the later years of the last war. 
 It was payable on incomes of every kind ; and it affected alike 
 all classes of society, not excepting even the members of the 
 royal house. The people of France at first cheerfully endured 
 it as a burden necessary for enabling Louis XIV. to repel the 
 threatened humiliations of Grertruydenberg. When that dan- 
 ger had passed away, incomes derived from land were relieved 
 from this burden. In its altered form and diminished range 
 it became, like all other direct taxes in France, a charge from 
 which the privileged orders were, to a great extent, permitted 
 to withdraw. ^v r ' 
 
 In addition to the direct imposts, which were thus payable 
 by the contributors in money, there were others which were 
 levied on them indirectly ; that is, in the form of duties on 
 articles of general consumption. 
 
 Aides (a word for which the expression, " duties of excise," 
 is the best equivalent in our own fiscal vocabulary) were first 
 inflicted on the French people in consequence of the iniquitous 
 wars and invasions of Edward III. They had, indeed, been 
 paid before that time in particular fiefs and during brief peri- 
 ods ; but thenceforward they became both permanent and uni- 
 versal. The States- General of 1355 extended them to the sales 
 of every description of merchandise. 
 
 The constitutional jealousy of the States and of the people 
 
560 THS SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OP 
 
 of France, even when most wakeful on other subjects, slum 
 bered strangely when their kings assumed the right to impose 
 taxes, not on the persons, but on the property of their people. 
 Their acquiescence in the assertion and exercise of so danger- 
 ous a prerogative is best explained by the aristocratic contempt 
 in which merchants and their pursuits were so long held among 
 them, and by the consequent aristocratic habit of regarding 
 trade as a matter which might be abandoned, without anxiety 
 or inconvenience, to the absolute authority and regulation of 
 the crown. In this, however, as in all other respects, the 
 Pays cPEtats seem to have been in advance of the rest of the 
 kingdom. They habitually, if not invariably, maintained the 
 practice of sanctioning, by votes of the provincial States, every 
 imposition of aides within their respective provinces. 
 
 There were, of course, great variations from time to time, 
 both as to the rates at which the aides were payable, and as 
 to the articles on which they were charged ; but in general it 
 may be said that wine and other liquors were the chief or only 
 commodities on the retail of which such taxes were imposed ; 
 other goods being assessed for this purpose only when sold by 
 wholesale) and then at a much lower rate ad valorem. 
 
 The aides were almost invariably leased out to farmers ; 
 and the granting of such leases was a source of lucrative pat- 
 ronage to the crown, and of grievous oppression to the people 
 for, even in the collection of these indirect duties, the spirit of 
 privilege and exclusion was not altogether dormant. It was 
 in a manner peculiar to themselves that the clergy and nobles 
 paid them on merchandise purchased for their own consump- 
 tion ; and the inhabitants of particular districts were allowed 
 to purchase a permanent exemption from them. 
 
 The Douanes, or revenue of customs, originated in France 
 on political rather than on fiscal or commercial grounds. The 
 great feudatories were accustomed to forbid the removal, from 
 their respective fiefs, of wine, corn, or any other of the neces- 
 sary articles of life, until they were satisfied that a supply 
 existed within those precincts adequate to the wants of the 
 inhabitants. Whatever they regarded as in excess of those 
 wants they permitted the owners to export ; requiring, how- 
 ever, that in every such case the exporter should be furnished 
 with a license, for which he paid such a price as the seigneur 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 361 
 
 saw fit to exact. In imitation, though, on a larger scale, of 
 this example, the kings of France interdicted the removal, 
 from the kingdom itself, of any raw or manufactured produce, 
 except by their own special authority. The price paid, whether 
 for the seignorial or for the royal license, constituted in real- 
 ity, though not in name, duties of export. 
 
 In process of time, that name, les Droits d 1 Exportation, 
 followed the substance and denned it. Export duties were 
 then distinguished into four classes. These were, 1st, the 
 Droit de Haut-passage ; that is, the payments due for licen- 
 ses to export goods "beyond the realm ; 2dly, the Droit de Reve; 
 that is, the per centage payable on goods bought for exporta- 
 tion by any alien ; 3dly, the Droit d' Imposition foraine, which 
 was, in fact, an enhancement of the two former demands to 
 meet certain occasional exigencies ; and, 4thly, the Droit de 
 Domaine foraine, which was first imposed by Henry II. in 
 substitution for the three former, and which differed from a 
 modern tariff of export duties in nothing except, first, that it 
 applied not to all the realm, but only to the greater part of it : 
 and except, secondly, that it applied not to a few only, but to 
 all of the articles which could be exported thence. 
 
 Duties of import, Droits d 1 Importation, were of much later 
 introduction in France. Till the sixteenth century there was 
 little or no domestic industry demanding protection, or capable 
 of receiving it. But, in the reigns of Henry II. and Henry 
 III., the import duties were established by royal ordinances, 
 which fixed such imports on almost all articles, at the same 
 uniform rate of two per cent, ad valorem. What I have 
 farther to state on this subject of Douanes will, however, be 
 best reserved till we reach the administrations of Sully and of 
 Colbert. 
 
 The Octrois were originally duties which, by the permission 
 of the seigneur, any city was accustomed to collect on liquors 
 and some other goods, brought within its precincts for the con- 
 sumption of the inhabitants. What was thus paid was at first 
 appropriated to the civic expenditure. Afterward the king 
 authorized the imposition of octrois, to enable the municipali- 
 ties the more easily to raise the aides necessary for his own 
 service. In still later times, Charles IX. himself imposed a 
 tax on all wines brought into any fortified places, with the de. 
 
362 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT UP 
 
 sign, as it seems, of substituting that local charge for the yet 
 more unpopular taille. The imposts levied at the city gate 
 having thus ceased to be exclusively a civic fund, either in 
 their, origin or in their use, the way was opened for that final 
 innovation of which Emeri, one of the superintendents of 
 finance during the minority of Louis XIV., was the author. 
 By an ordinance of that period, the octrois throughout France 
 were made payable to the royal treasury ; and, to indemnify 
 the citizens for the loss, they were authorized to impose on 
 themselves similar duties of equal amount, as a provision for 
 their own local charges. When we shall have advanced to the 
 time of Colbert's ministry, it will be necessary to recur to this 
 subject, and to explain the sequel of this invasion of the priv- 
 ileges and the property of the Bourgeois of the kingdom. 
 
 The Droit de Timbre, or stamp duties, formed, in the six- 
 teenth century, a part of the annual budget of every French 
 minister of finance. They were imposed on bills of exchange, 
 on paper, cards, dice, gold and silver plate, and wrought iron. 
 
 The Gabelle, in the modern and more contracted use of the 
 term, was the duty on salt, which seems to have provoked 
 more frequent commotions and a more bitter resentment than 
 any other article in the long catalogue of the fiscal burdens of 
 the people. The salt mines and marshes of France were orig- 
 inally wrought by licenses from the seigneurs of the fiefs in 
 which they were situate ; but, in the fourteenth century, all 
 the salt gathered in any part of the royal domain was made 
 the subject of a royal monopoly. Under the superintendence 
 of crown officers were established depots, where alone that 
 article could be sold by those who had collected it, or pur- 
 chased by those who were desirous to consume it. The royal 
 salt merchant paid the producers of salt according to a tariff, 
 which was from time to time adjusted between them, by ref- 
 erence to the average prices at the retail markets. Another 
 tariff determined the rate at which the consumer was to re- 
 ceive his supplies ; but no one was allowed to exercise his own 
 discretion as to the purchase or rejection of this commodity. 
 Four times in each year every householder was compelled to 
 buy as much salt as a third tariff determined to be the proper 
 quantity, regard being had to the number and to the ages of 
 the members of his family. 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 363 
 
 It is superfluous to point out the vexations and absurdities 
 of such a system. To enhance them, the usual inequalities 
 were maintained in the execution of it. The privileged orders 
 were permitted to supply their own domestic wants by deduct- 
 ing what was requisite for that purpose from the produce of 
 their own salt-mines or marshes. In various provinces total 
 or partial exemptions from the gabelle were established, and 
 the charge was consequently rendered at once more oppressive 
 and more invidious in those places in which the weight of it 
 was entirely unmitigated. It was, nevertheless, too lucrative 
 an impost to be abandoned, even by the most equitable and 
 magnanimous of the statesmen of France under the old mon- 
 archy. Sully, Richelieu, Colbert, and many others, introduced 
 or attempted various modifications of the system ; but it re- 
 mained to the last a grinding and offensive monopoly of one 
 of the absolute necessaries of human existence. 
 
 In 1664 another article was subjected to similar restric- 
 tions ; and, though they affected no small proportion of the 
 whole people, I am aware of no proof that, in this instance, 
 any serious discontent, or even any grave remonstrances, were 
 ever provoked by the demand. By a sort of universal consent, 
 in which even the consumers of tobacco themselves acquiesce, 
 the legislator of every civilized country is encouraged to sub- 
 ject it to duties of the highest possible amount, which wil] 
 really produce the highest possible revenue. For this purpose, 
 the importation of it into France was entirely prohibited, ex- 
 cept at a few specified 'ports. When imported there, it was 
 received into the stores of the government, and the privilege 
 of retailing it was then sold to the farmers -general for the 
 benefit of the treasury. The indigenous growth of tobacco 
 was forbidden ; not, indeed, absolutely, but in all cases in 
 which the cultivator did not observe various restraints and 
 precautions designed for the prevention of the contraband trade. 
 
 In the preceding enumeration of the sources of the revenue 
 of the French kings, I, of course, have not attempted to in- 
 clude them all, but only such of them as were the most pro- 
 ductive, or such as are most frequently mentioned by the 
 French historians. It was not, however, from any of the ways 
 and means already noticed that a king of France was accus- 
 tomed to provide for the most importunate .wants of his ex- 
 
364 THE 10 URGES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 chequer. To meet the greater casualties of war, and not sel- 
 dom to provide for the luxuries and extravagance of his court 
 and household, he raised loans at his pleasure, to whatever ex- 
 tent he could procure them, on the pledge either of the whole 
 or of any particular branches of his revenue. This is not the 
 proper occasion to refer to the calamities which resulted from 
 the habitual use and abuse of the public credit. But it may 
 be convenient to observe that the Rentes sur V Hotel de Ville, 
 of which we so constantly read, were the dividends which, by 
 the terms of any such contract, were payable at the Hotel de 
 Ville either of Paris or of any other city. That locality was 
 chosen for the convenience of the rich citizens, and as an ad- 
 ditional inducement to them to lend their money. But the 
 term does not necessarily imply that the Rentes were to be 
 discharged out of civic funds, or even by civic officers ; al- 
 though on some occasions, and to a certain extent, those funds 
 might be pledged, and those officers employed for that purpose. 
 
 To this very imperfect summary of the elements of the pub- 
 lic revenue in France, I proceed to add a still more imperfect 
 statement of the methods by which it was collected, expended, 
 and audited. That unavoidable imperfection will not, howev- 
 er, I trust, in either case, defeat my immediate object, which 
 is merely that of elucidating several passages in the history of 
 that kingdom, which must always be obscure to those who have 
 not a general acquaintance with, at least, the outline of these 
 financial and fiscal arrangements. 
 
 Under the Capetian dynasty the earliest administrators of 
 the finances of the crown were the great chamberlain and the 
 other high officers of the royal household. To them succeed- 
 ed the baillis and the prevots, who, within their respective 
 jurisdictions, were not only judges in all revenue cases, but 
 also receivers, paymasters, and administrators of the produce 
 of all dues and imposts owing to the king. The baillis and 
 prevots were themselves accountable to the Royal Council, or 
 to the committee of that body which ultimately acquired the 
 distinctive title of the Chambre des Comptes. 
 
 As in many other respects, so in this, St. Louis was at once 
 an original, an enlightened, and a cautious reformer. By him 
 was given the first example of an effectual separation of the 
 judicial and the financial departments from each other. His 
 
THE REVENUES OF FRANCE. 365 
 
 measure, indeed, applied only to the city of Paris ; but it af- 
 forded at once the principle and the precedent for similar in- 
 novations in the other parts of the royal domain. His suc- 
 cessors, in imitation of it, gradually but completely excluded 
 the baillis and prevots from all direct intervention in the re- 
 ceipt or expenditure of the public money, and committed that 
 duty to a new class of officers called Receivers. 
 
 Still farther to centralize the fiscal economy of France, 
 Philippe le Bel created a new ministry. At the head of it he 
 placed an officer of high rank, entitled the Superintendent 
 General of Finance ; and, in subordination to him, he appoint- 
 ed other officers designated as Treasurers. 
 
 In the time of Charles V. there appear to have been only 
 three such treasurers. Of these one was stationary at Paris, 
 while the other two migrated throughout the different provin- 
 ces, which, at that time, were embraced within the royal do- 
 main. In those circuits they investigated the conduct, exam- 
 ined into the contracts, and inspected the books of the various 
 local receivers, and of all other persons through whose hands 
 the public money passed. 
 
 The treasurers rendered their own accounts to the Chambre 
 des Comptes. 
 
 The Chambre des Comptes had much in common with the 
 Parliament of Paris, which, to a certain extent, participated in 
 its functions. But the concord of those bodies was not much 
 promoted by the kind pf partnership which thus existed be- 
 tween them. The Parliament regarded the powers of the 
 Chambre des Comptes with constant jealousy, and habitually 
 endeavored to abridge them. 
 
 The Chambre des Comptes, on the other hand, asserted for 
 themselves the attribute of judicial sovereignty ; that is, they 
 maintained that their judgment in fiscal suits or prosecutions 
 could neither be reversed, amended, nor reviewed by any other 
 tribunal. The Parliament denied to them this privilege, and 
 insisted that they were themselves entitled to receive appeals 
 from any such judgments. This dispute was at length settled 
 by Charles VI. in favor of the Chambre des Comptes and 
 against the Parliament. Again, however, arose a contest be- 
 tween them respecting the revision of the sentences of the sub- 
 ordinate financial officers or judges, either court claiming an 
 
366 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT OF 
 
 exclusive authority to receive appeals from such sentences 
 and again the pretensions of the Chanibre des Comptes were 
 supported by the king. Yet it was impossible to draw with a 
 firm hand every part of the line defining the respective provin- 
 ces of the two courts. The interests of the public revenue 
 were so intimately blended with the interests of other branches 
 of the public administration, that the members of each tribunal 
 often met in the same place, and deliberated and acted in com- 
 mon upon questions falling at once within the appropriate prov 
 inces of each of them. There were also occasions when such 
 of the members . of the Chambre des Comptes as were in holy 
 orders abdicated their places to lay members of the Parliament, 
 as when a public accountant was to be tried for a crime which 
 might induce a capital punishment. 
 
 In those provinces which, though reunited to the crown, did 
 not form a part of the royal domain, there were separate Cham- 
 bres des Comptes, and from their adjudications an appeal might 
 be brought to the Chambre des Comptes at Paris. 
 
 In the fifteenth century, however, the jurisdiction of that 
 chamber was materially abridged. Till then, like our own 
 Court of Exchequer, it had been at once an office for auditing 
 the public accounts and a tribunal for deciding all contentious 
 cases affecting the revenue of the crown. The incongruity of 
 these functions was sooner perceived and more frankly acknowl- 
 leged in France than in England, and to obviate the inconve- 
 niences of it another committee of the royal council was con- 
 stituted, with the title of the Com des Aides. To the Cham- 
 bres des Comptes were reserved its ancient administrative 
 functions, the judicial duties of that chamber being transfer- 
 red to the new committee. 
 
 The Cour des Aides was declared by Charles VII. to be sov- 
 ereign, in the sense in which I have already explained that ex- 
 pression. The difficulty, however, of finding an exact line of 
 demarcation between the attributes of the different chambers 
 was rather increased than diminished by this enlargement of 
 their number. The Chambre des Comptes continually object- 
 ed that the Cour des Aides were taking cognizance of questions 
 really administrative, and in name only judicial. The Parlia- 
 ment were not less prompt to object that the Cour des Aides 
 took cognizance of cases as involving a fiscal accountability to 
 
THE REVENUES OP FRANCE. 367 
 
 the crown, which really fell within their own jurisdiction, as 
 involving a breach of the general penal law. How completely 
 these controversies refused the solution of any precise and def- 
 inite rules, may "be inferred from an ordinance of Francis II., 
 of the year 1559, which directs that " les causes connexes" 
 should be " traitees par les deux cours fraternellement et 
 aimiablement" 
 
 It would be a great error to draw from the preceding state- 
 ments the inference that, as early as the fourteenth and fif- 
 teenth centuries, the fiscal administration of France had been 
 reduced into a comprehensive, a well adjusted, or a regular sys- 
 tem. Of the regulations to which I have reverted, few were 
 in force beyond the precincts of the royal domain. In each of 
 the provinces not within those precincts there were laws or 
 customs more or less peculiar to itself, for regulating the re- 
 ceipt and expenditure of the public money, and the audit of 
 the public accounts. "With the increase of the national re- 
 sources in the sixteenth century came a proportionate increase 
 of the pecuniary embarrassments of the court and of the bur- 
 dens of the people, and in the train of those burdens came so 
 rapid a succession, and so great a variety of schemes for the 
 management of the royal revenue, that it would be idle to at- 
 tempt to compress, within the time at my disposal, any intel- 
 ligible account of them. I must confine myself to a brief no- 
 tice of such of those changes as it is most necessary to under- 
 stand, with a view to the correct apprehension of the history 
 of France. 
 
 1st. Then ; in the reign of Charles VII. , the proceeds of the 
 royal domain were all made payable into the hands of one of 
 the treasurers, who thenceforward acquired the title of Chan- 
 g-curs du Tresor. The proceeds of the whole revenue of im- 
 posts were at the same time made payable to an officer desig- 
 nated as the Receiver- general. 
 
 2dly. Francis I. added to the two last-mentioned officers 
 a third of the same general description, who was entitled the 
 Tresorier de VEpargne, to whom were made payable all the 
 proceeds of what was collectively called the casual revenue. 
 
 3dly. It was not till long after the sixteenth century that 
 any approach was made in France to the national system of 
 establishing a consolidated fund of the whole income of the 
 
i>68 THE SOURCES AND MANAGEMENT, ETC. 
 
 crown, from which to defray the whole of the public expend- 
 iture. Each particular branch of the revenue was at that 
 time appropriated to particular charges. Consequently, the 
 Changeurs du Tresor, the Receiver-general, and the Tresorier 
 de FEpargne, each applied his receipts in satisfaction of those 
 particular demands for which each was separately responsible. 
 
 4thly. But the Tresorier de FEpargne soon greatly sur- 
 passed his two colleagues in the comparative importance of 
 his functions. He became the keeper of a chest, into which 
 the joint receipts of himself, of the Changeurs du Tresor, and 
 of the Receiver-general were all accumulated, though not all 
 blended together. Such was the importance of his office, that 
 Francis I., the author of it, expressly enacted that it should 
 never be vendible. 
 
 5thly. To the same monarch was owing the division ol 
 that part of France which was called the Pays d' Election int( 
 sixteen districts, called Generalites. They were so called be- 
 cause each constituted a financial department of Recettes Ge- 
 n5rales, at the head of each of which was placed a receiver- 
 general. To each receiver-general were made payable, in the 
 first instance, the proceeds arising within his generalite from 
 the revenue of the royal domain, from the revenue of imports, 
 and from the casual revenue. 
 
 6thly. Henry II. attached to each generalite a treasurer- 
 general for the assistance, and a controller-general for the su- 
 pervision, of the receiver-general. 
 
 7thly. Henry III. established at Paris a financial council, 
 called the Bureau Central des Finances. It was composed 
 of two treasurers and of two receivers-general. In each gene- 
 ralite he created similar offices. These institutions, though 
 probably at first established for much more extensive pur- 
 poses, do not appear to have been intrusted with any real pow- 
 er in the administration of the revenue. They seem rather to 
 have been called into existence by the jealousy with which, in 
 that disastrous reign, the king regarded all the ministers of 
 his own authority, and to have been employed chiefly or ex- 
 clusively as inspectors and checks upon the malversations of 
 other officers of finance. 
 
 Sthly. The Chambre dcs Comptes, amid all these vicissi- 
 tudes, retained the general audit of the public accounts But 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 369 
 
 Francis I. invented, and his successors continued, a device by 
 which that audit was rendered ineffectual in respect of any 
 money which it was the pleasure of the king himself to spend 
 for his own personal gratification, or, as it was expressed, for 
 his menus plaisirs. For such issues the public accountant 
 acquitted himself, by producing to the court a simple order or 
 check for the money, under the royal sign manual. Such 
 orders acquired the name, so ill-omened in French history, of 
 Ordonnances de Comptant. 
 
 The subsequent changes in the financial institutions of 
 France will be most conveniently noticed when we reach the 
 administrations of Sully, of Richelieu, and of Colbert. The 
 preceding retrospect of the methods by which the revenue of 
 the French kings was raised, received, expended, and audited 
 in earlier times, tedious as it may have been, will yet, I trust, 
 derive some interest from the light which it will throw on the 
 subject to which I propose to direct your attention when we 
 shall next meet. I shall then endeavor briefly to indicate the 
 chief passages in the financial history of France, in the hope 
 that they will conduct us to the solution of the question which 
 I proposed at the commencement of this lecture the question, 
 that is, How did it happen that the Power of the Purse, which 
 the theory of the French Constitution ascribed to the national 
 representatives, never yielded in France its legitimate fruit of 
 constitutional freedom ? 
 
 LECTURE XIV. 
 
 ON THE POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 THE rapid sketch which I laid before you when we met last, 
 of the sources and of the management of the revenue of the 
 kings of France, will now enable me to advance to a review, 
 not less abridged, of some of the more remarkable incidents in 
 the financial history of that country ; after which I hope to 
 make intelligible my answer to our proposed inquiry, " Why 
 the growth of the Monarchical Despotism was not arrested by 
 that Power of the Purse, which in theory at least belonged to 
 the Seignorial Courts and to the States-General." 
 
 A A 
 
370 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 When Hugues Capet ascended the throne, and converted his 
 vast hereditary estates from a mere fief or county into the do- 
 main of the crown, and into the only independent source of the 
 royal revenue, the exigencies of his times and of his position 
 constrained him to alienate no inconsiderable part of it in favoi 
 of his more powerful vassals. He forbade his successors to im- 
 itate his own example. But necessity overcame the remem- 
 brance or the authority of this prohibition. Like himself, each 
 of his early descendants transmitted to his heir the royal do- 
 main shorn and narrowed by grants of very inconvenient mag- 
 nitude. 
 
 The early Capetian kings, impoverished by these donations, 
 were compelled to apply to their greater feudatories, or tenants 
 in capite, for aid to meet the indispensable exigencies of the 
 public service. On such occasions each lord convened the 
 feudal court or assembly of his vassals. Having ascertained 
 what was the amount of the funds required from them to meet 
 the demand, they apportioned that amount among all the per- 
 sons and the estates within the seigneurie which were liable 
 to contribute to it. Such tailles, raised by means of such as- 
 semblies, constituted the only extraordinary resource of the 
 earlier kings of the race of Hugues Capet in any war which 
 his own ordinary resources were inadequate to support. 
 
 When Louis le Gros conferred charters of emancipation on 
 the communes in the duchy of France, those kings for the first 
 time acquired a regular revenue, not measured by, nor depend- 
 ent on the legal obligations either of their immediate or of their 
 more remote vassals. Within those communes, the citizens, by 
 the terms of their charters, became liable to equip and main- 
 tain a militia for the king's service in his wars, or to pay to 
 him an annual tribute in money. 
 
 The pecuniary wants of the royal government increased with 
 its increasing strength. They were especially augmented by 
 the heavy charges which the public treasury incurred for the 
 support of the Crusades. It therefore became necessary to ex- 
 plore new financial resources ; and, under the pressure of such 
 difficulties, Louis VII., for the first time, hazarded the impo- 
 sition, by his own authority, of a tax of one tenth of the esti- 
 mated income of every free layman in France. The apology 
 for this great usurpation was found in the sanctity of fche oV 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 371 
 
 ject in view. It was to defray the expense of the expedition 
 of Louis to the Holy Land. The complaints were general and 
 vehement ; but, for a time, they were silenced by the supposed 
 piety of the motives of the royal innovator. In that faith the 
 people submitted to the burden, and a considerable sum was 
 collected. 
 
 Such a precedent could not, of course, long remain unfruit- 
 ful. Accordingly, Philippe Auguste imposed on his subjects 
 what was called the Saladin Tithe ; that is, an annual tax of 
 the tenth of every man's income, to be applied to the deliver- 
 ance of Jerusalem from the power of Saladin. Warned, how- 
 ever, by the clamors which the impost of Louis VII. had ex- 
 cited, Philippe Auguste obtained, from an assembly of prelates 
 and barons, their sanction for this tribute. During the first 
 year it was paid with a reluctant acquiescence ; but, when 
 the demand was repeated, the resistance of the people at large 
 became so stern and resolute, that even that powerful mon- 
 arch was constrained to prohibit the farther collection of the 
 Saladin Tithe. 
 
 This disappointment induced him to devise a new and less 
 invidious source of revenue. I refer to the exaction of money 
 from the Jews. Strange as it may sound to ourselves, this 
 henceforth became a regular and important part of the ways 
 and means of the royal exchequer. In that age, as it has 
 been often observed, a Jew was a kind of sponge, continually 
 imbibing a rich moisture, to be as continually wrung out by 
 the rapacious grasp of power. The Venetians, the Genoese, 
 and the Pisans had at this time the entire conduct of naviga- 
 tion, as the Lombards had an exclusive enjoyment of com- 
 merce. But the Jews maintained an absolute and undisputed 
 possession of the money-market. Their consciences were not 
 affected by the denunciations of usury by the Church ; and 
 the law which forbade their acquiring land drove them to in- 
 vest their property in whatever other forms were most easily 
 portable. The risks attendant on the loan of such property 
 occasioned, and even justified, the enormous rates of interest 
 which they demanded. To diminish that risk, it was their 
 custom to admit some needy but powerful patron into a part- 
 nership in their profits ; and the king, who depended on them 
 for advances of money on the credit of his future revenue, was 
 
372 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 secretly well pleased that, in their dealings with others, they 
 should obtain advantages which, in their dealings with him- 
 self, enabled them to assist him with the greater facility and 
 on the easier terms. 
 
 In that ignorant age, the Jews and the Lombards were alone 
 possessed of the arts of arithmetic and book-keeping. They 
 thus became, in most European countries, the managers of 
 the public revenue. From their real or supposed abuses of 
 this power came into use the word mal-tolte, so frequent in 
 French history a word compounded, according to the Latin- 
 ity of the times, of the two words mala and tolta. "What they 
 thus usuriously gained, they held, of course, on the most pre- 
 carious tenure ; and to escape, as far as possible, the exactions 
 to which they were exposed by the cupidity of the king and 
 the bigotry of the people, the Jews became the inventors of 
 commercial bills of exchange a device which enabled them 
 to withdraw their funds out of any country without the haz- 
 ard of the transmission of specie, and without the necessity 
 of their own personal appearance within the jurisdiction of 
 their royal oppressors. 
 
 Thus the Jewish people formed a secret monetary league, 
 the ramifications of which extended throughout the whole of 
 Christendom, and which was covertly and indirectly favored 
 by all the sovereign princes of Europe. Defenseless by the 
 law, hated for their religion, and envied for their wealth, they 
 yet, by the strength of that confederacy, became the universal 
 bankers of the civilized world. They endured and baffled all 
 varieties of torture, indignity, exile, and massacre, and proved 
 that commerce, as well as religion, may thrive upon persecu- 
 tion. 
 
 From the fiscal tyranny of the whole of the royal line to 
 which he bore the relation either of heir or of ancestor, St. 
 Louis presents a memorable exception. Six measures signal- 
 ize his reign. 1. The one step which he took for increasing 
 the ordinary revenue of the crown was that of reserving to him- 
 self the Droit d'Amortissement ; that is, the right, when land 
 was conveyed to any ecclesiastical body, sole or aggregate, to 
 be compensated, by an annual money payment, for the loss of 
 those feudal dues which, if the land had remained in lay hands, 
 would have been payable on each alienation of it, or on the 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 37? 
 
 deaths of all the successive tenants. 2. Instead of preventing 
 the frauds of the receivers of the royal revenue by burning 
 Jews, St. Louis established for that purpose those tribunals 
 which were afterward called the Chambres des Comptes. 
 3. To relieve his people from the oppressions of those great 
 feudatories who possessed the droit regalien of coining money, 
 he obtained their concurrence in an edict which not only fixed 
 a common standard for all coins, whether issued from the royal 
 or from the seignorial mints, but which authorized him to pun- 
 ish all offenses committed against the coinage laws in any part 
 of the kingdom. 4. For the defense of the contributors to the 
 royal or seignorial tailles, he forbade the imposition of any 
 burden of that nature until after an assembly of the vassals 
 of the fief on which it was to be levied had been held, to de- 
 liberate, not only on the grant itself, but on all the details of 
 the measure. 5. He required that, within the domain of the 
 crown, the contributors to every such tax should freely choose 
 nominees, from whom his own officers were to select such as 
 were best qualified to make an equitable apportionment of the 
 charge among the persons and the lands liable to it. 6. It 
 had been customary for the feudal lords to prevent the export 
 or import of grain, or other commodities, beyond the frontiers 
 of their seigneuries, except by persons willing to purchase 
 licenses for the purpose ; and, by issuing such licenses in fa- 
 vor of particular traders only, the seigneurs converted this trade 
 into an oppressive and lucrative monopoly, j St. Louis forbade 
 this practice, and required every seigneur to lay out, on the 
 repair or defense of the public roads, the produce of all the tolls 
 levied on goods or, on passengers traversing them. Humble 
 cares these, if contrasted with some of those which have excited 
 the enthusiasm of historians and the applause of nations ! pro- 
 saic virtues, perhaps, when drawn into comparison with the 
 superhuman achievements so liberally ascribed to the real or 
 imaginary heroes of the Roman calendar yet cares such as, 
 in the thirteenth century, could have engaged no ordinary in- 
 tellect, and virtues surely to be preferred to the most sublime 
 prodigies of self-conquering asceticism. 
 
 To Philippe le Hardi, the son and successor of St. Louis, is 
 due, as a financier, the single credit of having invented a new 
 source of revenue, in the sale of letters patent of nobility. 
 
374 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 Philippe le Bel improved on this invention. He sold not only 
 such patents, but, with them, the privilege of exemption from 
 all public taxes in future an anticipation of the revenues of 
 the crown which, in the long catalogue of the desperate plunges 
 of financiers in distress, is hardly to he rivaled for unthrift. 
 But to have been thus the author of an exemption eventually 
 so fatal to his country and his race, was not the single, nor 
 even the most scandalous of the devices to which Philippe le 
 Bel is indebted for the conspicuous, though inglorious place 
 which belongs to him in the financial history of France. 
 
 First, the prerogative of altering, at his pleasure, the stand- 
 ard of the coin of the realm, which St. Louis had taken from 
 his barons and repudiated for himself, was exercised by Philippe 
 le Bel without decency and without restraint. His resort to 
 this iniquitous method of raising money may be traced in the 
 Ordonnances des Rois de France throughout almost every year 
 of his reign. "When he had large payments to make, he de- 
 creased the weight and fineness of the specie. When he had 
 large payments to receive, he augmented both. He thus ha- 
 bitually provided for the public service and for his own selfish 
 expenditure by a flagrant and undisguised robbery ; and though 
 even then sarcasm and ridicule had begun to exercise in France 
 some part of that mighty power to which they afterward at- 
 tained there, yet the sobriquet of Philippe le faux Monnoyeur, 
 which he earned from his people, has come down to us only as 
 a record of their ineffectual indignation. 
 
 Of Philip's contest with Boniface VIII. of his consequent 
 convention of procureurs or syndics of the cities to meet the 
 prelates and barons of the realm of his assembling the depu- 
 ties of all those three orders of the imposts which followed on 
 the dissolution of the last of those meetings on the insurrec- 
 tions which followed, and on the various provincial charters, 
 and especially the Charte aux Normans, by which at length 
 those disturbances were allayed, I briefly touched when ad- 
 dressing you on the subject of the States-General in the four- 
 teenth century. 
 
 It remains to observe that, in the progress of the controver- 
 sy, Philip discovered a mode of imposing on his people a bur- 
 den, and of securing for himself and his successors a source of 
 wealth, of far higher importance than those duties rn the sale 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 375 
 
 of merchandise, which had so vehemently provoked the public 
 indignation. 
 
 In the indistinctness which, in that age, hung over the lim- 
 its of the royal authority, it was assumed by Philip, and was 
 generally admitted by his subjects, that the regulation of trade 
 was a royal prerogative, the limits of which no one could de- 
 fine, and with the exercise of which no one could properly in- 
 terfere. The king therefore published an ordinance prohibit- 
 ing the exportation from France of any goods, whether raw or 
 manufactured. Having established this general rule, he pro- 
 ceeded to sell licenses for dispensing with it in particular cases. 
 A large income was thus easily raised ; and thus was gradu- 
 ally, though imperceptibly, established a real, though not an 
 avowed, tariff of export duties of customs ; for the customs 
 were nothing more than the substitution of a fixed sum, pay- 
 able on all exported goods by any person whatever, for the 
 fluctuating sums demanded on licenses for specific exportations 
 by particular persons. And to this modification of the rule or 
 practice another still more momentous addition was to be ulti- 
 mately made by virtue of the same prerogative. Licenses 
 were required for importing as well as for exporting goods, 
 and the sale of such licenses at a fixed price was precisely the 
 same thing as the exaction of duties of import. 
 
 The financial policy of Philippe le Bel was adopted by Louis 
 X. He also attempted to raise money by debasing the coin, 
 and by imposing ad valorem taxes on the sale of merchandise. 
 But the French people' had now learned the efficacy of an 
 armed resistance to fiscal extortion. They compelled Louis 
 to recede from his attempt. They exacted from him a pledge 
 that he would never resume it ; and they demanded and ob- 
 tained the public execution of Marigny, the superintendent of 
 finances, to satiate the popular revenge, and to admonish all 
 future financiers of the danger of provoking it. 
 
 Louis X. was, however, but an inapt scholar in the great 
 art of conciliating his people. He did not, indeed, attempt to 
 revive the ad valorem duties, but, with a perverse ingenuity, 
 endeavored to raise money by the sale of judicial offices. The 
 impolicy and unpopularity of the measure were enhanced by 
 the disingenuous, or, rather, by the false pretexts under which 
 it was taken. The offices of the judges could not be sold un- 
 
376 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 til they had first been vacated. It was resolved, therefore, to 
 expel the actual holders of them from the bench. With that 
 view the king appointed commissioners charged to inquire into 
 their judicial conduct. It was a device by which no one was 
 blinded ; and as one royal judge after another was removed 
 on the report of this royal inquest, all who heard it knew that 
 they were really removed, not for any fault of theirs, but only 
 that their seats might be transferred to the highest bidder for 
 the succession. . 
 
 The wants of the crown were, however, insatiable. To 
 supply them, Louis X., with characteristic duplicity, resorted 
 to another artifice, the success of which curiously illustrates 
 a great truth the truth, I mean, that, in the distribution of 
 her favors, Fame is at least as capricious as Fortune, and still 
 more unjust ; and especially so when she awards the laurel of 
 philanthropy. 
 
 The want of money, and the determination to raise it by 
 hypocritical pretenses when other means were unavailing, 
 have procured for Louis no vulgar place among the benefactors 
 of mankind. The abolition of slavery is the ground on which 
 immortal renown is claimed (and claimed, in some cases, on 
 very doubtful or slender grounds) for not a few of those who 
 have flourished as philanthropists in our own times. In Louis 
 X. of France they had a predecessor in that work, and a par- 
 taker in that glory, whom, however, they would have been 
 very reluctant to acknowledge as an associate in their labors 
 or in their reputation. 
 
 He enacted a law for the emancipation of all slaves within 
 the domain of the kings of France. It is impossible to read 
 this ordinance without admiring the unbroken continuity of 
 character and of style the indication of character which has 
 prevailed among the legislators of France during the last five 
 centuries. Who would doubt that the following enactment 
 was a quotation from one of the paper constitutions which 
 have been ratified by as many constituent assemblies in the 
 same country since the year 1789? "Since" (it begins), "ac- 
 cording to the law of nature, all men ought to be free, we, 
 considering that our kingdom is called and named France, and 
 desiring that the fact may coincide with the word, and that 
 all Frenchmen may be free men, do ordain that throughout 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 377 
 
 our realm the servile condition do give place to thr state of 
 liberty." Braver words could not be wished. But, to reach 
 the true sense of them, some other aid is necessary than that 
 of the dictionary. In order to carry the law into effect, Louis 
 nominated a body of commissioners, and to those commission- 
 ers he gave instructions, which still remain as the most lu- 
 minous commentary on the ordinance itself. 
 
 In France as in Rome, every slave was permitted to acquire 
 a peculium, the amount of which seems ; however, to have been 
 limited either by custom or by law. The commissioners of 
 Louis were to ascertain what was the amount of the peculium 
 of 'every slave. They were to insist on that amount being 
 paid by each as the price of his emancipation. If the slave 
 belonged to the king himself, the whole price was to be paid 
 into the royal treasury. If he belonged to any seigneur hold- 
 ing of the king, the commissioners were to deduct, for th.3 
 benefit of the seigneur, as much of the money as would fairly 
 represent the loss which he would sustain by the enfranchise- 
 ment. Similar laws appear to have been made in imitation 
 of this in the fiefs of the greater feudatories. Slavery was in 
 this manner abolished, not, indeed, at the expense of the royal 
 treasury as with us, but at the expense of the slaves them- 
 selves. The end which was thus accomplished was indeed 
 so estimable as to reconcile us to the want of munificence, of 
 justice, and even of sincerity, in the means adopted for the 
 purpose. If a wiser man than Louis X. had then governed 
 France, or if the pecuniary necessities of Louis had been less, 
 the land might have yet had to endure the curse of slavery 
 through many succeeding years. It is not always to the wise 
 or to the good that society is indebted for the greatest socia) 
 improvements. 
 
 Philip the Long inherited the wants of his brother and pred- 
 ecessor Louis X., but wrestled with them in a bolder and 
 more generous spirit. He began by the suppression of im- 
 provident pensions, and by the revocation of ill-judged grants 
 of the royal domain; a measure which, as might have been 
 anticipated, excited to an equal extent the resentment of the 
 grantees, and the delight of the people at large. But on the 
 people, as well as on the grantees, the financial ingenuity of 
 Philip the Long pressed heavily, Many a generation was to 
 
378 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 pass away before their descendants were to cease to groan un- 
 der the "burden which he transmitted to them. His melan- 
 choly distinction as a financier is to have been the author of 
 the gabelle, or salt tax. He imposed that impost without the 
 concurrence of the States- General, but, as it is conjectured, in 
 substitution for some other duties which he remitted. This, 
 however, is but an hypothetical explanation of the undoubted 
 fact that the tax was accepted without hostility, and endured 
 with no apparent impatience. Perhaps this general submis- 
 sion may have been a tribute of the confidence reposed in 
 Philip the Long by his subjects, for his memory is unblemish- 
 ed by the reproaches which attach to the names of his prede- 
 cessors. He was animated by wise and patriotic purposes, 
 and labored with zeal, if not with any eminent success, to pro- 
 mote a wise economy and a faithful administration of the pub- 
 lic treasury by his revenue officers. 
 
 Under the reign of Charles le Bel, the revenue of customs, 
 which had originated in the time of Philippe le Bel, in the sale 
 of licenses for the exportation of goods, was first levied in the 
 more direct form of export duties according to a settled tariff; 
 an absurd and suicidal impost; for it fell on all the main ar- 
 ticles of primary necessity, such as grain, hay, cattle, leather, 
 wine, salt, and herrings cured by French fishermen, and ren- 
 dered the producers of such articles in France unable to com- 
 pete, on equal terms, in any other country, with foreign pro- 
 ductions of the same kind. 
 
 Nineteen years had now elapsed since the last convention of 
 the States-Greneral of France. During all that time the royal 
 power had been striving in vain to secure an adequate public 
 revenue without recognizing the right of the contributors them- 
 selves to grant or to withhold it. But in the year 1332, Philip, 
 the sixth of that name, and the first king of the unhappy house 
 of Yalois, was compelled by stern necessity to reour to that 
 constitutional resource. The pretensions of Edward III. to the 
 crown of France, though little supported or favored by the peo- 
 ple of that kingdom, had yet suggested the obvious policy of 
 conciliating them ; for, in England, maxims of government, 
 entirely repugnant to those of the French crown, had already 
 taken deep root, and the claims of Edward might, therefore, 
 be supported by a dangerous appeal to the example and the 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. S79 
 
 principles of his hereditary states. Philip accordingly sum- 
 moned the prelates and barons of his realm, and, as it is said, 
 the deputies of his good cities, to meet together at Paris. The 
 assembly was propitiated at their meeting, as usual, by a sacri- 
 fice to public anger or prejudice. Pierre de Montigny, the su- 
 perintendent of finance, had acquired immense wealth, which 
 contrasted invidiously with the wants of the public treasury. 
 "Whether justly or otherwise, he was supposed to have grown 
 rich by the plunder of the public revenue, and died on the scaf- 
 fold to gratify the vindictive jealousy provoked by his wealth 
 and imputed crimes. 
 
 The progress of the arms of Edward, however, rendered it 
 necessary to conciliate the public favor by sacrifices far more 
 costly than the life of a superintendent of finance. In the year 
 1338 an ordinance was therefore promulgated by Philip, at the 
 request of the barons, clergy, and commons, in which he de- 
 clared that " the kings of France would thenceforward never 
 levy any extraordinary tribute from the people without the con- 
 sent and grant of the Three Estates ; and that each of his suc- 
 cessors should swear, on his coronation, to the observance of 
 this engagement." I infer, however, from the terms of the or- 
 dinance, that it referred, not to the whole of France, but to 
 Languedoil only. 
 
 In deference to the authority of the best judges, I exclude 
 the assemblies of 1332 and of 1338 from the catalogue of the 
 States-General of France. There is, I believe, no extant proof 
 that either of them was an elected body, though persons as- 
 suming the character of deputies of the Tiers Etat appear to 
 have been present at the first, if not at the second of those con- 
 ventions. 
 
 So unsettled were the ideas of mankind at that time regard- 
 ing the real nature and limits of the respective provinces of the 
 different members of the Legislature, that, almost immediately 
 after the solemn pledge of the year 1338, Philip himself, with- 
 out the consent of the States, or any reference to them, estab- 
 lished custom-houses and duties of customs in many parts of 
 France, which till then had been exempt from that burden. 
 Yet this innovation does not appear to have been resented as 
 a breach of faith, or even to have been regarded in that light. 
 Apparently, the States abandoned to the king the regulation 
 
380 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 of commerce as a matter too insignificant to merit their own 
 attention. The duties of customs were paid by the Lombards, 
 and the nobles, clergy, and commons of France seem to have 
 regarded royal exactions, of whatever amount, from those mer- 
 chants with complacency, as transferring so much of the pub- 
 lic burdens from the denizens to the foreigner. That the Lom- 
 bards repaid themselves in enhanced prices, at the expense /)f 
 the consumers, however familiar a conclusion to ourselves, 
 seems not to have occurred to the political economists of thai 
 age. 
 
 Under the pressure of the wars with England, the conven- 
 tions of the States-Greneral for financial purposes became the 
 frequent and almost the habitual resource of Philip of Yalois. 
 But he labored to defeat their encroachments by dividing their 
 power. He rarely, therefore, convoked the States of the whole 
 realm collectively. At one time he summoned the Clergy, the 
 Noblesse, or the Tiers Etat apart from each other ; at another, 
 the States of Languedoc or of Languedoil only, and frequently 
 the States of particular provinces alone. In all the different 
 forms in which they were called together, these assemblies 
 granted subsidies to the king. They consisted chiefly in ad 
 valorem duties on the sales of merchandise, and especially of 
 liquors. 
 
 The royal prerogative of regulating trade was meanwhile 
 maintained and extended. In exercise of it, Philip established 
 that monopoly of salt to which I referred in my last lecture. 
 It was a measure so universally distressing and distasteful as 
 at length to provoke an inquiry into the basis of the royal au- 
 thority, real or supposed, in pursuance of which it had been 
 taken. The States remonstrated with the king, and the king 
 answered their complaints by the assurance that the trade in 
 salt should be free as soon as Edward should have retreated 
 from France. To Edward the financial embarrassments of his 
 rival afforded a ground for merriment as well as for exultation. 
 " He is indeed," said the English king, " the inventor of the 
 Salic law ;" a play on words memorable partly as perhafps the 
 only recorded jest of its celebrated author, and partly because 
 it is so near akin to the sarcasm by which the Romans avenged 
 themselves on the censor who introduced the salt tax among 
 them, whom they punished with the title of Livius Salinator. 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE 381 
 
 At Rome as at Paris, it was regarded as a kind of outrage on 
 society to impose any such burden on the consumption of an 
 article so indispensable to the health of man, and so widely 
 diffused by the bounty of nature an outrage to be expiated 
 in France by ridicule when no other vengeance was to be had. 
 
 But even among that laughter-loving race, all mirth was for 
 the moment extinguished by the gloom in which the sun of 
 Philip Valois was setting. His subjects were crushed beneath 
 the weight of tailles, tithes, depreciations of ths coin, forced 
 loans, maltoltes, and continually-increasing taxes. The battle 
 of Crecy and the loss of Calais had been followed by famine, 
 by pestilence, and by the yet more fearful scourge of hosts of 
 undisciplined soldiers, who, roving over the land in armed 
 bands, filled it with spoil, and outrage, and desolation. 
 
 In the midst of these calamities the crown descended to 
 John. On a former occasion I intimated, as fully as the time 
 at my disposal permitted, what was the progress of the finan- 
 cial and constitutional struggle by which France was agitated 
 during that unfortunate reign during the regency of Charles 
 V. throughout the wars and the insanity of Charles VI. 
 under the usurpation of Henry V. and amid the triumphs of 
 Charles VII. In reviewing the proceedings of the States- Gen- 
 eral convened by those various monarchs, and by Louis XL, 
 and during the minority of Charles VIII. , I indicated the gen- 
 eral progress of the financial history of France until the com- 
 mencement of the Italian wars. My design was then, as it is 
 at present, merely to draw an outline which might be filled up 
 by your own studies and reflections. I proceed to the comple- 
 tion of it. 
 
 On the departure of Charles VIII. from France for the con- 
 quest of Naples, he was compelled to make many costly sacri- 
 fices for securing his dominions from external enemies during 
 his absence. He purchased that advantage by large territorial 
 cessions to the empire and to Spain, and by large payments of 
 money to England. To raise that money, and to defray the 
 expenses of the armament destined for the conquest of Naples, 
 he was compelled to borrow largely from the bankers of Genoa 
 and Milan. Such, however, as we learn from Philippe de 
 Comines, was the difficulty of effecting those loans, that one 
 of the Genoese merchants stipulated for interest on his money 
 
382 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 at the rate of 42 per cent, per annum. By the aid oi those 
 advances Charles first won his brilliant though momentary 
 triumph, and then, by the irreparable exhaustion of them, he 
 was compelled to allow the French garrisons of his Italian 
 conquests to waste away in sickness, in misery, and in famine. 
 He returned to France with the shattered relics of his gallant 
 army, and with the profound conviction that a complete reform 
 in his financial system was indispensable to the accomplish- 
 ment of his dreams of extended dominion. He had firmly 
 resolved to effect such reformations, when death proved the 
 fatal antagonist of this, as of so many other wise and patriotic, 
 though tardy intentions. Charles bequeathed his good designs 
 as a legacy to Louis XII., his successor. 
 
 Louis frankly accepted and faithfully discharged the obli- 
 gation. In the long line of Capetian kings, three only have 
 earned or merited the praise of a self-denying economy of the 
 public treasure, and they may all be said to have been elevated 
 to the number of the Saints. They were Louis IX., who was 
 canonized by the Church ; Louis XVI., who was canonized by 
 the compassion and esteem of the whole Christian world ; and 
 Louis XII., who may be said to have been canonized by his 
 people when they bestowed on him the glorious title of their 
 Father. But they to whom public monuments are decreed in 
 France must needs be distinguished from other men, not only 
 by memorable achievements, but by memorable sayings also ; 
 and Louis XII. fulfilled each of these conditions of an endur- 
 ing celebrity. It was his just and emphatic, though homely 
 boast, that in his days a poor man might safely let his poultry 
 loose into his paddock. Anticipating Elizabeth of England in 
 refusing a grant of money proffered by his subjects, he also 
 anticipated her in the wise and kind remark, that the money 
 would yield more fruit in their keeping than in his. In the 
 same homely but honest spirit he was accustomed to say, that 
 a good shepherd would always have fat sheep ; and, in a more 
 lofty strain, that he would rather make his courtiers laugh at 
 his parsimony, than his people weep at his extravagance. Nor 
 were these generous and warm-hearted phrases mere exercises 
 of the wit of the royal speaker. They were the genuine in- 
 terpretations of his habitual policy. 
 
 He commenced his reign by refusing to collect the Droit de 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 383 
 
 joyeux Avenement. His troops were paid with so exact a 
 punctuality, that he was able to punish severely, whon he 
 could not altogether repress, their customary exactions from 
 their fellow-subjects. Although the noblesse claimed, and 
 had exercised, the privilege of exemption from the aides or 
 excise duties on liquors sold and retailed by them on theii 
 own account, he compelled them to sustain that burden. 
 Though retaining the gabelle or salt tax, he abolished the 
 monopoly of the sale of salt. He remitted a third of the talli- 
 ages ; and, in the collection of the remaining two thirds, he 
 effectually interdicted the ajbuses which the royal officers had 
 been accustomed to practice with impunity for their own ben- 
 efit. Haunted as he was with his predecessor's phantom of 
 Italian conquests, he yet rejected, even in aid of that object, 
 the vulgar expedient of taxation, and defrayed the expenses 
 of that warfare by funds honestly borrowed on the security 
 of the royal domain, and honestly paid to the lenders of it. 
 
 Louis XII. was, perhaps, hardly entitled to the general 
 character of an enlightened sovereign. But he enjoyed that 
 degree of mental illumination which probity and singleness 
 of heart will afford to the simplest. He had the capacity to 
 devise, and the integrity to observe, a policy both fiscal and 
 political, by which his subjects were protected in the honest 
 accumulation of wealth, and in the peaceful enjoyment of it. 
 He was rewarded by their gratitude and benedictions. "With- 
 out so much as a> solitary addition to their public burdens, he 
 enjoyed a revenue exceeding, in the proportion of three to one, 
 that of the most affluent of the kings who preceded him. The 
 number of his subjects, the splendor of his cities, the agricul- 
 tural produce of France, her maritime power, her commercial 
 capital, and the profits of her trade, foreign and domestic, all 
 rapidly increased during the reign of the Father of his people 
 They mourned his death with genuine lamentations, and trans- 
 mitted to their children's children the memory of his virtues. 
 
 There is a strange fatality in the affairs of the world, by 
 which the rulers of it not seldom sow a harvest of future dis- 
 aster even by measures conceived in the most upright, humane, 
 and philanthropic spirit. And so it was with some of the acts 
 of Louis XII 
 
 Thus, for example, he required every public accountant, on 
 
384 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 his appointment to office, to deposit in the public treasury a 
 sum of money as a security against his possible defaults. 
 Nothing could have been either better designed or more un- 
 fortunate. These preliminary deposits gradually passed into 
 a price paid for the office ; and thus the venality of public 
 employments, one of the greatest of all abuses, resulted from 
 the honest attempt to protect the revenue against abuse. 
 
 So again Louis XII., in the very spirit of Jeremy Bentham, 
 had made the public revenue liable to the payment of all the 
 expenses of civil actions. The burden proving enormous, he 
 then ordained that each suitor should pay his own fees. Noth- 
 ing more reasonable ; but observe the result. In those days 
 it was the fashion (I know not how else to express it) for a 
 successful litigant in a lawsuit to present to the judge a box 
 of sweetmeats ; a mark of pleasant courtesy on the one side, 
 and of good-humored condescension on the other. But when 
 the royal edict was promulgated, expressly rendering the pay- 
 ment of his judicial fees the legal obligation of every suitor, 
 judicial commentators on that edict determined, first, that the 
 box of sweetmeats was a fee ; secondly that the payment of it 
 was no longer optional, but obligatory ; thirdly, that it might 
 be commuted for a money payment ; and, finally, that the 
 amount of pecuniary remuneration might be assessed between 
 the successful suitor and the judge, at whatever sum they 
 might mutually consider reasonable. The effect of this read- 
 ing of the new law was, that, in the highest tribunals of 
 France, favorable judgments were openly and unavowedly 
 purchased of the judges, and the word epices (by which the 
 box of sweetmeats had been always known) acquired a con- 
 ventional meaning synonymous with that of the word bribe. 
 
 In these and some other cases it must be admitted that the 
 integrity of Louis was not directed by a far-sighted prescience. 
 He is one of the many rulers of the world who have demon- 
 strated how easy it is to be at once a very honest man and a 
 very unskillful legislator. His honesty, however, imparted to 
 him the knowledge of many truths which are often hidden 
 from the most sagacious monarchs, and among them the truth 
 that, in the government of a great nation, there can be no real 
 patriotism without an habitual parsimony. 
 
 It was a truth not revealed to his more celebrated successor, 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 38f5 
 
 Francis I. Affecting every species of glory to which the world 
 renders an idolatrous homage, Francis accepted the worship of 
 his flatterers, and repaid it by the spoliation of his subjects 
 His ambition aspired to attain, and his vanity was flattered by 
 the assurance that he had actually attained, to the union in 
 his own person of three characters, never seen in perfect com- 
 bination before that, as a prince, he was the most powerful ; 
 as a cavalier, the most accomplished ; and as a patron, the 
 most munificent of all the heroes of his own generation. To 
 sustain this three-fold dignity, Francis surpassed all his pred- 
 ecessors in extravagance, creating public offices as mere arti- 
 cles of merchandise, and squandering the price of them with 
 the most wanton profusion. Yet who shall dare to assume the 
 prophetical office, unaided by actual inspiration ? As some of 
 the most upright measures of Louis XII. led the way to results 
 which that patriotic prince would have most anxiously depre- 
 cated, so some of the most indefensible of the acts of Francis 
 *ed to consequences over which the Father of his people would 
 have most cordially rejoiced. 
 
 I have already attempted to explain how the collection and 
 management of the various branches of the royal revenue 
 were, in those times, distributed between the superintendent 
 of finance, the provisional collectors, the receivers-general, the 
 farmers-general, the tresoriers de France, and the tresoriers de 
 1'epargne. There was then no central treasury, no unity of 
 principle, and no established system of disbursing and account- 
 ing for the proceeds of the various duties levied for the use of 
 the crown. No remedy could be more obvious, and none ap- 
 parently more easy, than that of subordinating the receivers- 
 general, and all their inferior officers, to one common head. 
 But that reform alone, though it would have secured the rev- 
 enue from the waste of so many distinct administrations of it, 
 would have brought no immediate aid to the ever-necessitous 
 Francis. Such aid might, however, be obtained by the crea- 
 tion and sale of ten new receiver-generalships ; and to bring 
 those offices into the market to the best advantage, it was de- 
 sirable to render their powers as extensive, and their emolu- 
 ments as large as possible. With this view, and apparently 
 with no higher view, all the inferior collectors were subordin- 
 ated to the receivers-general, and the receivers-general were 
 
 BB 
 
386 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 themselves placed in subordination to the tresorier de 1'epargne, 
 who thus became the centre and the regulator of the whole 
 financial system. Thus concentration was effected in that 
 branch of the public service. Selfishness accomplished the 
 work of public spirit. The new receivers-general acquired, by 
 their money, the powers which ought to have been gratuitous- 
 ly imparted to their whole body, from a regard for the public 
 interest. 
 
 Nor was this centralization of the fiscal duties of the gov- 
 ernment the most important advantage of the creation and sale 
 of the new offices. Until that time, respect had been practi- 
 cally shown to the ancient theory, which dedicated the extra- 
 ordinary revenue of the royal domain to the public service, 
 but placed the ordinary revenue of it at the absolute disposal 
 of the king, according to his unfettered discretion. But that 
 distinction was abandoned, both in practice and in theory, when 
 the various sources of the royal income, being all made to flow 
 through the same official channels of the receivers-general, 
 were all brought under the control of the same superior offi- 
 cer, the tresorier de Pepargne. Thenceforward the whole re- 
 ceipt of the treasury was equally charged with the defense and 
 government of the nation. Thenceforward the Parliament 
 maintained that their ancient feudal control over the proceeds 
 of the royal domain had, by this change, been virtually extend- 
 ed to the whole mass of the revenue with which those proceeds 
 had been thus inextricably consolidated. By the creation of 
 ten new receiver-generalships, Francis had sought, and had ob- 
 tained, a round sum of money. As an undesigned consequence 
 of that innovation, he imparted unity and method to the finan- 
 cial system of France; he narrowed his own absolute domin- 
 ion over his own revenue ; and he enlarged the fiscal powers 
 of the single body in the state, whose authority was, to any 
 extent, a counterpoise of his own. 
 
 His other financial measures were equally contracted in their 
 design, but were not equally beneficial in their consequence?. 
 Some of them merit particular notice. 
 
 First. As auditors of the public expenditure, the Chambre 
 des Comptes had been accustomed to consider the public ac- 
 countants as entitled to an acquittance for all money which 
 they had paid over to the king, in order that the king himself 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 387 
 
 might employ such moneys in the public service. The chain 
 ber held it indecorous or unconstitutional to inquire into tha 
 tctual use made of such funds by the royal receiver of them. 
 Availing himself of this courtly reserve, Francis became the 
 inventor of that species of check, the mention of which so fre- 
 quently occurs in French history under the name of Bons. A 
 Bon was an order addressed to the tresorier de Pepargne, un- 
 der the royal sign manual, in the following brief and emphatic 
 words : " Bon pour mille (or any other number of) livres." 
 Such orders were more accurately called "Acquits de Comp- 
 tant," because, in the Chambre des Comptes, they were admit- 
 ted as a valid acquittance of the accountant. Every one an- 
 ticipates the result. To the objects of the royal favor and to 
 the ministers of the royal pleasures, Bons were distributed with 
 reckless prodigality, and the funds which should have support- 
 ed the most important public services were thus irretrievably 
 diverted to useless, or, rather, to injurious purposes. 
 
 Secondly. To Francis is to be ascribed the unenviable dis- 
 tinction of having founded the national debt of France ; for, 
 in the annals of his reign, we meet for the first time with the 
 rentiers on the Hotel de Yille of Paris ; a class of public cred- 
 itors whose claims, even then, amounted to 60,000 livres per 
 annum, payable out of the revenue which was collected in that 
 city, and which was properly applicable, not to royal, but to 
 civic purposes. 
 
 Thirdly. Francis was also the author of that enormous in- 
 crease of the amount of the tailles to which popular resent- 
 ment gave the name of la gmnde Crue. 
 
 Fourthly. To any one who has ever vexed his soul in 
 hunting a point of law through our excise aots, it may be 
 some consolation to be told that the edicts of Francis were as 
 copious as the statutes of Greorge the Third, and much more 
 original, in all the mysteries of cellar-searchers, inventories, 
 and permits. 
 
 Fifthly. Francis had the farther credit or responsibility of 
 having rendered the gabelle as oppressive in practice as it was 
 always absurd in theory. 
 
 Finally. He is one of the earliest of the protectionists 
 known to modern history, and one of the most consistent. Not 
 content to protect the silk fabrics of Lyons against Italian and 
 
388 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 Spanish weavers, and the groceries of France against the 
 sweet products of other lands, he made laws to shelter French 
 drugs against the medicines of the foreigner; a consequence 
 of the doctrine of universal protection for home-bred commod- 
 ities, from which, I suppose, the sternest of its modern advo- 
 cates would shrink. 
 
 To employ these cold financial tints in depicting Francis I. 
 may seem a kind of profanation. In our popular histories he 
 is the hero of the Renaissance. In those pages, arts, sciences, 
 and literature revive under his auspices. There he is the in- 
 domitable antagonist of Charles Y. He is sententious and 
 sublime in the lowest depths of adversity. In an age of dull 
 utilitarians and angry polemics, he is still a gallant Trouba- 
 dour, now breaking a lance with the bravest, and then doing 
 knightly homage to the most beautiful. But when we turn, 
 as turn we must, from this brilliant historical romance to our 
 dry financial annals, the splendid mirage passes away, and 
 nothing is left in sight but the sands of the desert arid, 
 barren, and unprofitable. The Paladin becomes an extortion- 
 er. The Maecenas turns into a Sardanapalus, wringing funds 
 from the miseries of his people to pamper dissolute wom- 
 en and effeminate courtiers ; reveling in selfish waste in the 
 very centre of the distress which his own follies had created ; 
 squandering on fetes the funds denied to his half-starved arm- 
 ies; imposing on his subjects burdens till then unheard of in 
 their national history ; and repaying their sacrifices by such 
 disasters and defeats as that history had never before recorded. 
 
 The celebrity of Francis I. is the tribute rendered to him 
 by the venal authors whom he honored and maintained. But 
 such celebrity is calamitous to every people among whom it 
 is diffused. He really bequeathed to his subjects nothing bet- 
 ter than the memory of wars waged during twenty-eight years 
 to gratify a puerile and criminal ambition ; of two fruitless 
 invasions of Italy ; of the destruction of two gallant French 
 armies in that vain enterprise ; of his own captivity and broken 
 faith ; of the abandonment of Naples and the Milanese ; of the 
 surrender to Spain of Flanders and Artois ; of the hostile in- 
 vasion of his northern provinces ; of the insults offered by the 
 invaders to his capital; of a permanent national debt; and 
 of fiscal burdens exceeding eight-fold the revenue which had 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 389 
 
 enabled his immediate predecessor to maintain the kingdom 
 in prosperity and in peace. Yet to this hour the illusions 
 which surrounded the person of Francis in his own day are 
 thrown around his name by the popular literature of his native 
 land, and each successive sovereign, or aspirant for the sover- 
 eignty of that too sensitive race, is thus, in his turn, admon- 
 ished that the single condition on which Frenchmen will ac- 
 cept the services or pardon the offenses of any ruler is that he 
 shall govern them in such a manner as shall enhance the na- 
 tional self-esteem, and as shall satiate, on whatever terms, the 
 national thirst for glory. 
 
 The faults of the four immediate successors of Francis have, 
 therefore, received .no such absolution as has been pronounced 
 over his own ; for their reigns were inglorious, from the com- 
 mencement to their close, in whatever light they may be 
 viewed, and are especially inglorious if we advert to their 
 financial operations. 
 
 At the commencement of the reign of Henry II., Poitou, 
 Guienne, Grascony, and five other less considerable provinces 
 rose in arms against the oppressions of the salt tax. The re- 
 bellion was fierce, and eventually successful; for when the 
 sword and the ax had exhausted their powers, Henry was 
 satisfied or happy to exempt the insurgent states completely, 
 and forever, from the obnoxious impost, in return for a large 
 sum of ready money. This important branch of the royal rev- 
 enue thus ceased to be productive through a large part of the 
 kingdom, while, in the provinces which still labored under the 
 burden, the productiveness of it was greatly diminished by the 
 scarcely less improvident increase of the number and emolu- 
 ments of the collecting officers. 
 
 In the creation and sale of useless employments, Henry was 
 not content to imitate his father's example. He followed it 
 with a recklessness so strange as might seem to have promised 
 a speedy and overwhelming ruin. And yet, in obedience to 
 one of those strange anomalies in human affairs to which I 
 have so lately referred, in which folly and wisdom employ each 
 other's weapons, some of the financial measures of Henry II., 
 which, in their motive, were the least defensible, were in their 
 result not merely innoxious, but productive of permanent and 
 considerable advantages to his people. 
 
390 POVER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 I formerly explained how the Sieges Presidiaux gradually 
 superseded the royal courts in the provinces of France. By a 
 single stroke of his pen, Henry created sixty such tribunals ; 
 and as each of them was composed of nine judicial officers at 
 the least, and usually of a still greater number, this measure 
 enabled him to bring to market 600 judgeships at the same 
 moment. It is difficult to suppose a financial resource more 
 obnoxious to weighty and unanswerable objections. Yet, in 
 reality, it had an effect resembling, as closely as possible, that 
 of the law so recently enacted by our own Parliament for the 
 establishing county courts in all the considerable towns of 
 England ; a law of which I may, in passing, observe, that it 
 is manifestly destined to be the germ of the greatest social 
 revolution ever advisedly produced among us by any deliber- 
 ate act of our Legislature. 
 
 In the same spirit, Henry II., as we saw when we met last, 
 attached the offices of treasurer-general and of controller-gen- 
 eral to each of the sixteen generalities or fiscal districts into 
 which Francis I. divided that part of France which was called 
 the Pays d' Election. So far as appears, Henry's views were 
 limited to the emolument to be derived from the sale of those 
 offices ; but there seems no doubt that the creation of them 
 materially increased the method and regularity with which 
 the public accounts were kept and audited. 
 
 I have already had occasion to explain the grounds on which 
 I think that the invasion of the liberties, internal, judicial, and 
 financial, of the Church of France, tended not to the increase, 
 but to the destruction of the political liberties of the kingdom. 
 I might at first sight, therefore, appear bound to add to the cat- 
 alogue of the good works, or good designs of Henry II., his pe- 
 cuniary dealings with the clergy of his realm. The concordat 
 between Francis I. and Leo X. had authorized Francis to de- 
 prive them of a large part of their ancient jurisdiction, inde- 
 pendence, and patronage. Accordingly, in the year 1539, the 
 chancellor, G-uillaume Poyet, framed an ordinance, which ac- 
 quired from him the title of la Gmllelmine, and which inflict- 
 ed that disadvantage on the whole clerical order of France. 
 Abandoned by the Pope, and at the mercy of the king, they 
 proposed to repurchase their lost privileges at the enormous 
 price of 3,000,000 of gold crowns according to one account, or 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 391 
 
 of livres according to another. Henry accepted the offer, and, 
 after receiving as much money as the churchmen could raise 
 by the sale of their plate, he proceeded, with their concurrence, 
 to enact two ordinances. The first secured the "balance due to 
 him by an annual tax on every belfry in the kingdom. The 
 second revoked the Gruillelmine. Both ordinances were sent 
 to the Parliament for registration. They accepted the first 
 and rejected the second. Acquiescing in both of their decis- 
 ions, Henry entered into possession of the belfry tax. It had 
 been imposed as a security for raising 3,000,000 livres. It was 
 continued in force until it had actually yielded him 12,000,000. 
 But the G-uillelmine was also continued in force ; and thus the 
 Church of France was plundered, by the King of France, of 
 12,000,000 of livres, without receiving any equivalent what- 
 ever. 
 
 The next of Henry's financial projects, if less promising, was 
 also less dishonest. The accounts of the revenue officers at- 
 tached to the army, the treasury, and the royal household were 
 in arrear, and their balances had accumulated in their hands. 
 To prevent the recurrence of such irregularities, Henry doubled 
 the number of those offices. Each accountant was to serve 
 only in the alternate years, and each, during his year of inac- 
 tion, was to bring up the accounts of his year of active service. 
 Such was the avowed motive and apology for the change. The 
 real motive was, that it enabled Henry to put up to sale as 
 many offices in all these departments as he had found estab- 
 lished there. 
 
 The last of his financial devices is, at first sight, not only 
 blameless, but commendable. It consisted in imposing duties 
 of import in cases where, till then, duties of export only had 
 been levied. But ignorance and folly would not abdicate their 
 established authority, even in doing an act which wisdom it- 
 self recommended ; for many of the provinces of France itself 
 were, for the purposes of this tax, placed on the footing of for- 
 eign countries ; and the import duties thus in effect became 
 prohibitions of intercourse between the different districts of 
 the same state, to the extreme prejudice of the trade and pros- 
 perity of them all. 
 
 In the reign of Francis, the successor of Henry, the melan- 
 choly art or science of taxation altogether languished. For the 
 
392 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 first and last time it was then numbered among the artes per- 
 ditce. Yet such were the wants of his treasury, and such the 
 sufferings of his people, that, as we formerly saw, he was con- 
 strained to adopt the remedy so hateful in royal eyes, of con- 
 vening the States-Greneral after they had fallen into disuse, if 
 not into oblivion, during a period of more than seventy years 
 They were accordingly convoked in the city of Blois, and were 
 holden there, though not by him, but by his brother and suc- 
 cessor, Charles IX. Of that meeting, and of the second con- 
 vention of the States in the same city under Henry III., I have 
 already offered such an account as I have thought it necessary, 
 or rather as I have found it possible, within these narrow lim- 
 its of time, to lay before you. Passing over, therefore, the sub- 
 ject of those assemblies for the present, I observe that, as a 
 financier, Charles is chiefly memorable for two innovations : 
 
 First, he established, with impartial injustice, taxes paya- 
 ble to the crown by all suitors for redress in the judicial tri- 
 bunals ; a subject on which, indeed, an English commentator 
 on the fiscal laws of our neighbors must moderate his zeal and 
 temper his invective ; for the youngest of my audience is old 
 enough to remember the time when, despite our ancient boasts 
 and hereditary reverence for the Great Charter, similar im- 
 posts were levied on all suitors in "Westminster Hall. 
 
 But, secondly, if we have imitated Charles in his first ex- 
 ample of exacting contributions from the distressed in the mo- 
 ment of their difficulties, we have not yet copied his second 
 example, of striking at the prosperous in the hour of their tri- 
 umph. That blow was aimed at the public accountants. It 
 was judged, and probably it was rightly judged, that they had 
 all fattened on ill-gotten gains. To have tried and punished 
 them would have been praiseworthy. To have imposed on 
 them heavy mulcts might have been not unreasonable ; but 
 to subject them to a large future annual impost (the method 
 actually taken) was but indirectly to authorize their future 
 extortions, on the tacit understanding that, by means of the 
 new tax to which they were subjected, the king himself was 
 to participate in the plunder. 
 
 Difficult as it is to find any subject for eulogy in the disas- 
 trous reign of his successor, Henry III., we may safely applaud 
 two of the three additions which he made to the burdens of 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 393 
 
 his people. The first was a tax on the retailers of spirituous 
 liquors ; the second, a tax on all appointments to public offices. 
 The profits both of the vintner and of the employe may well 
 have admitted, and may often have demanded, such a reduc- 
 tion. But the maitrise, or tax on admission into any trade, 
 was, in effect, the creation of a monopoly. The purchasers of 
 such licenses therefore regarded the price paid for them, not 
 with patience merely, but with complacency and favor. It 
 protected them against the competition of all traders who could 
 not afford to make similar payments, and who were, therefore, 
 prevented from passing from the condition of apprentices into 
 that of masters. 
 
 I gladly emerge from these wearisome details, and from the 
 dark era to which they relate, into brighter times and more 
 interesting topics. 
 
 When the house of Valois had become extinct, and Paris 
 had at length submitted to Henry IV., the miseries of France 
 had reached a height far exceeding even that of the woes by 
 which it was visited two centuries afterward, during the agony 
 of the great revolution. The victims of the religious wars had 
 not been much, if at all, less than a million souls. Nine great 
 cities had been demolished. Two hundred and fifty villages 
 had been burned. The number of houses destroyed was cal- 
 culated at 128,000. Commerce, manufactures, and even agri- 
 culture had been abandoned through extensive districts, and 
 were languishing in all. The single branch of industry which 
 flourished was that of the tax-gatherer. The single class of 
 people who lived in abundance were the great lords and chat- 
 elains, who, with their armed followers, wrung the means of 
 subsistence from the terrified and half-starved peasantry. 
 
 From the letters of Henry himself, we may best gather what 
 was at this time the distress of the royal treasury. " I have," 
 he says, " neither a horse to ride, nor a saddle and bridle to 
 put on him if I had. All my shirts are in rags, and all my 
 doublets out at elbows. My kettle is often empty, and on the 
 last two days I have been dining with one and another as I 
 could, for my purveyors say that I have nothing to put on my 
 table." From the Memoirs of Sully, and from the work of his 
 contemporary Fromenteau, might be drawn a vivid picture of 
 the financial embarrassments amid which the first of the Bour- 
 
394 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE 
 
 bons ascended the throne of his ancestors. The national debt 
 amounted to 345,000,000 of the livres of that age, or to about 
 15,000,000 of pounds sterling, of which a large part bore in- 
 terest at the rate of 12 per cent, per annum. The gross amount 
 of the taxes annually collected was 170,000,000. The annual 
 net receipt of the treasury was only 30,000,000, of which 
 19,000,000 were absorbed for the interest of the debt. Thus 
 of each 170 livres which the people paid, the proportion actu- 
 ally applied to the service of the state was only 11 livres. 
 
 Henry first attempted to remedy these evils by appointing 
 a revenue board of eight officers. The following is his own 
 account of the result of that experiment : " Instead of one gor- 
 mandizer, whom I had before, I have helped myself to eight. 
 These rogues, and the swarm of subordinates whom they have 
 brought after them, manage, by one trick and another, to eat 
 up the whole hog. They have already made away with 100,000 
 crowns, with which I could have driven the Spaniards out of 
 France." 
 
 Sully then came to his master's aid. Our chancellors of the 
 exchequer, laborious as they may be, never dream of such toils 
 as fell to his lot. His sword was as necessary to him as his 
 pen, for he had to challenge to mortal combat, or accept the 
 challenges of the noble antagonists of his economical reforms. 
 His stud of thorough-bred horses were his most effective sub- 
 alterns, for he had to gallop from one end of France to the 
 other to detect abuses and to fill his treasure wagons. The 
 passages of his house were blocked up with bags of silver and 
 with suitors for a share of it, until, with rough words and still 
 rougher blows, he had defended the coin and beaten back the 
 suitors. The gallant baron also, when occasion required it, 
 had to be as expert as the best disciple of Loyola in pious 
 frauds, to circumvent the knaves who were attempting to cir- 
 cumvent him ; as, for example, when he lamented to some 
 revenue officers his irreparable loss of a long series of vouch- 
 ers, which, however, he triumphantly exhibited to them as soon 
 as, in the belief of his statement, they had sufficiently falsified 
 their accounts and exposed their knavery. 
 
 The tone in which the great financier chuckles over his ad- 
 dress in baffling rogues at their own weapons is, however, more 
 pardonable than his exultation in the ruse which lie played off 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 395 
 
 on the Assembly of Notables at Rouen, whom Henry hal con- 
 vened to aid him with their advice as to the improvement of 
 his finances. They proposed that a committee of their own 
 body should take on them the administration of half of the 
 royal revenue, leaving the other half to be administered by the 
 king. Sully states himself to have warmly and successfully 
 advised the acceptance of this proposal. But the sagacious 
 minister took care, as he informs us, so to divide the revenue 
 as to reserve to himself the productive and least unpopular 
 sources of it, assigning to the more ignorant committee the 
 proceeds of all the taxes which were most unpopular and least 
 profitable. He tells, with infinite glee, how distinctly he fore- 
 saw the inevitable result, and with what pleasure he witnessed 
 it ; how the committee, bewildered, harassed, and fatigued, fell 
 into disgrace with the people, and became disgusted with their 
 undertaking ; how he,' on the contrary, sustained triumphantly 
 his share of the burden which he had so ingeniously divided 
 between his shoulders and theirs ; and how gladly they at 
 length abdicated their ungracious office, leaving him without 
 a rival in the administration of the finances of France. 
 
 They could scarcely have been transferred into hands more 
 worthy of such a trust. His character was not, indeed, cast 
 in a very sublime mold. It was composed of none of those 
 qualities which we ardently love or passionately admire. He 
 rose to the eminent station he fills in history by homely vir- 
 tues, which might seem to be within the reach of most men 
 by calm self-possession by a courage which nothing could 
 daunt by an industry ,which nothing could fatigue by a 
 perseverance from which caprice never diverted him by a 
 heart-loyalty to the king he served by an honest zeal for the 
 welfare of his country, and by an habitual sympathy with the 
 weak and the oppressed. Yet there was not a spark of enthu- 
 siasm in his nature. Neither the gayety of youth nor the ex- 
 perience of old age could ever withdraw him from the path, 
 however irksome or invidious, by which his own wealth and 
 greatness might be best secured. He first introduces himself 
 to us in his Memoirs in the character of an amateur horse- 
 dealer in the camp of Henry, and he takes his leave of us in 
 possession of dignities which might have satiated the ambition 
 of a Guise, and of wealth which might have quenched the cu- 
 
396 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCIS. 
 
 pidity of a Law. His Protestantism seems to have been little 
 more than a domestic tradition, a party badge, and a point of 
 honor. But if Sully did not live in very high latitudes of 
 thought or sentiment, he lived under the guidance of clear good 
 sense and of many honest instincts. He could never have been 
 the founder of a school of wisdom, or of any independent do- 
 minion, political, military, or intellectual ; but he has be- 
 queathed to the wise an example from which they may draw 
 many a useful lesson for the successful conduct of life in the 
 highest and most arduous of all subordinate secular employ- 
 ments. 
 
 Sully and his master quitted together the war which they 
 had so long waged against the Catholics, to fight side by side 
 against the jobbers, impostors, usurers, and depredators of 
 their age. His " Economies Roy ales," and " Le Secret des 
 Finances" by Fromenteau, exhibit the whole plan and conduct 
 of those later campaigns. The following brief epitome of them 
 may be enough to stimulate your curiosity to consult those 
 originals. 
 
 The financial career of Sully began, it must be confessed, 
 with an imitation of the worst examples of the worst of his 
 predecessors. He increased the public debt, he raised the salt 
 duties, he extorted a forced loan from the public accountants, 
 and he created and sold many public offices. But the folly 
 of one period is often the wisdom of another. Wretched as 
 these resources were, none other could immediately be found 
 to rescue Paris from the danger, and France from the invasion, 
 which the surrender of Amiens to the arms of Spain portended. 
 To meet that alarming crisis, political economy, and all other 
 economies, were most judiciously given to the winds. But 
 the Treaty of Yervins, which restored peace to Europe, re- 
 stored also to Sully the means of acting on more enlarged and 
 permanent principles. 
 
 The first of those principles was, in his own words, that the 
 land, and the labor bestowed on the land, sont les deux mam- 
 elles de Vet at. His inferences from this doctrine were, first, 
 that agriculture should be relieved, to the utmost possible ex- 
 tent, from all fiscal burdens ; and, secondly, that the expendi- 
 ture of the state should, as far as possible, be thrown on the 
 non-agricultural classes of society. 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. $97 
 
 Pursuing this theory to its practical consequences. Sully 
 remitted to the landholders arrears of tailles amounting to 
 20,000,000 of livres. He reduced the tailles for future years 
 to two thirds of their former amount. He exempted all the 
 instruments, animate or inanimate, of agricultural labor, from 
 the liability to seizure for debt. He discharged the cultivators 
 of the soil from the burden of maintaining the king's troops ei- 
 ther on their march or in their quarters. He prohibited all 
 local taxation by the governors of provinces or by the lords of 
 seigneuries ; and he abolished all duties on agricultural prod- 
 uce when sold in the public markets. The cry of agricultural 
 distress has seldom been met with a response so cordial. 
 
 To remit taxes is, however, an easy and a grateful task. To 
 combine this hazardous luxury with a just regard for the pub- 
 lic service, and a conscientious respect for the public credit, is 
 the crucial test of a minister of finance. It is a test by which 
 Sully may be tried and not be found wanting. I find no less 
 than five great measures of economy by which he justified his 
 remission of duties. 
 
 First. He suppressed every superfluous office of emolument, 
 beginning with those which he had himself created and sold. 
 But these reductions were invariably made with a cautious 
 regard to the public faith which had been pledged to the pur- 
 chasers. 
 
 Secondly. He effected a saving of 600,000 crowns per an- 
 num by paying directly from the public treasury the interest 
 of a debt for which certain specific revenues had been mort- 
 gaged. The creditors had, till then, been in receipt of the 
 mortgaged revenues, and had, of course, discovered that the 
 costs of the collection swallowed up whatever remained after 
 the discharge of their own annual interest. 
 
 Thirdly. Sully, in the same manner, enforced the restitu- 
 tion to the crown of crown estates of vast value, which he 
 found in possession of public creditors, as a security for the 
 loans advanced on the mortgage of them ; but, at the same 
 time, he repaid, by means of a temporary loan, the whole of 
 the principal sums which were really due on that security. 
 
 Fourthly. He expunged from what was called the Great 
 Book of France public debts amounting to 6,000,000 of livres 
 per annum. A " commission of inquiry" (I have more than 
 
398 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 once had occasion to remind you that there is no new thing 
 under the sun) enabled him to effect this operation, by prov- 
 ing that many of the public creditors held under invalid titles, 
 or had been inscribed as creditors against the public for valu- 
 able considerations which had been nominally, and not really, 
 paid. 
 
 Fifthly. The same inexorable avenger of frauds doubled 
 the receipt of the treasury from the farms of the customs and 
 salt tax, by setting up those farms to auction, after having 
 first distinctly ascertained that the existing leases had been 
 obtained by false representations of the real produce of those 
 branches of revenue. 
 
 To these measures of economy is to be added the imposition 
 of a solitary tax to sustain the public credit and expenditure. 
 It borrowed the name of La Paulette from Charles Paulet, the 
 projector of it. At that time public offices had become do- 
 mestic inheritances. The evil was as irremediable as it was 
 grievous. Paulet therefore proposed to impose a tax upon all 
 public offices, amounting to one sixtieth part of their annual 
 emoluments. It was an impost welcome to the office-holders 
 themselves, as it secured the permanency of their titles. It 
 was welcome to Sully and to the public as being a kind of 
 salvage, where the wreck and loss would otherwise have been 
 total. 
 
 It remains to mention the last of Sully's financial measures. 
 It consisted, first, in devising a new system of rendering and 
 keeping the public accounts as a security against the frauds 
 which had, till then, found shelter under the ancient confused 
 and irregular system of accounting. It consisted, secondly, in 
 establishing the all-important rule (which to this hour is not 
 in full force among ourselves) that no public money should be 
 issued by any collector of it except in pursuance of a royal 
 ordinance. But here he paused. It was one of the errors of 
 this great man to despise commercial interests, and one of his 
 infirmities to dislike commercial men. When, therefore, a 
 great merchant of Bruges, Simon Stephen by name, interpret- 
 ed to him the counting-house mystery of double entry, and 
 advised him to adopt it into the financial accounts of France, 
 Sully rejected, with ignorant contempt, the best possible se 
 curity against the frauds with which he was warring. 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 Such are the operations on which the financial fame of Sully 
 depends. They attest his courage, constancy, and vigorous un- 
 derstanding, but they do not indicate any profound insight 
 into the principles of political government and political econ- 
 omy. Such studies were, indeed, foreign alike to the man 
 and to his generation. So defective was he in these sciences, 
 that he even increased those transit dues, which placed the ad- 
 jacent provinces of France in the same mercantile relation to 
 each other as to foreign countries ; extending, for example, the 
 customs duties on goods borne across the Loire to many arti- 
 cles till then exempt from them; exacting a tribute on aL 
 merchandise entering or quitting the city of Lyons ; and re- 
 quiring that all goods sent from that city to distant markets 
 should be carried either through Vienne or St. Colombe (how- 
 ever great the deviation), because in those two places, and 
 there alone, were stationed collectors of the export duties. It 
 is with still greater surprise that we read that Sully was the 
 single opponent of the proposal for retaliating against the ships 
 of foreign nations in French ports the heavy charges to which 
 French ships were subject in the ports of any such nation ; 
 that we find him resisting the introduction of Dutch and Flem- 
 ish artisans to teach, in France, the arts which had enriched 
 their own countries ; and that we learn that he discouraged 
 both the growth of mulberry trees and the manufacture of 
 silks, brocades, and satins, because the tendency of such arts 
 was to foster an enervating luxury. 
 
 The influx of precious metals from South America had, in 
 his age, so augmented the price of all articles of general con- 
 sumption, that the royal revenue became continually less and 
 less adequate to sustain the charges to which it was liable. 
 Sully had recourse to many remedies to arrest this unwelcome 
 change in the value of money. At one time he altered the 
 money of account. At another he forbade the importation of 
 foreign coins. Then he prohibited the export of specie, and 
 finally he raised the nominal value of all the gold and silver 
 coins current in France. It is needless to say that he labored 
 in vain. The world had yet to learn that gold and silver, 
 whether with or without the impress of a national mint, obey 
 the same laws which regulate the prices and the interchange 
 s>f all other merchantable articles. 
 
400 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 "We must admit, therefore, that Sully was ignorant of many 
 economical truths with which the striplings of our own times 
 are familiar, but he understood the great science of elevating 
 a ruined people into a prosperous nation. Under the house of 
 Valois, France had been plunged into what might have seem- 
 ed an abyss of irreparable calamities ; under the administra- 
 tion of Sully it was restored to peace, to order, and to wealth. 
 He found the revenue overwhelmed with debt ; he not only left 
 it unencumbered, but amassed a vast treasure for the defense 
 of the nation or for foreign conquest. He found the French 
 liable to annual taxes amounting to 30,000,000; but he re- 
 duced that amount to 26,000,000 per annum. He found the 
 royal palaces in decay; he restored them to splendor. He 
 found the fortresses of the kingdom dilapidated ; he renewed 
 their strength and increased their number. Churches, hos- 
 pitals, and other public edifices arose on every side. The 
 highways and bridges were repaired. The Pont Neuf, the 
 quays of Paris, and some of the principal, streets of that city, 
 attest, at this hour, the grandeur to which the parsimony and 
 thrift of the real ruler of France, in the reign of the first of the 
 Bourbons, were subservient. The royal arsenals were filled 
 with munitions of war. A navy was rising in the French 
 dock-yards. A vast system of internal navigation was in prog- 
 ress for connecting the Seine with the Loire, the Loire with 
 the Saone, and the Saone with the Meuse ; and rewards, be- 
 coming the dignity of the King of France, were bestowed on 
 all who had attained to eminence in art, or science, or in the 
 public service. If Henry's celebrated wish, that the poorest 
 peasant in his kingdom might eat meat every week-day, and 
 have a chicken in his pot for his Sunday's dinner, was not ex- 
 actly fulfilled, yet no slight advance had been made toward the 
 fulfillment of it. In his reign the cultivators of the soil were 
 rescued from many of the worst tyrannies of the noblesse, of 
 the soldiery, and of the tax-gatherers. Every man planted in 
 quiet and reaped in safety. The artisan received the hire of 
 his labor. The merchant gathered in the profits of his capital. 
 Astrsea had not, indeed, revisited the land ; but the iron age 
 of war, and famine, and fiscal oppression had passed away. Re- 
 lieved of the burdens beneath which they had so long groaned, 
 flie French people sprang forward in the path of improvement 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 401 
 
 with a youthful elasticity of spirit, indicating that all the no- 
 bler organs of social life in France still retained their healthful 
 tone and their unimpaired vitality. 
 
 And yet neither Henry nor his great minister restored to 
 uieir nation any security against the recurrence of the abuses 
 which they had so arrested. In later times those evils reap- 
 peared, if not with equal intensity, yet in a character sub- 
 stantially the same. Two centuries were yet to pass without 
 a serious effort to introduce constitutional freedom ; nor could 
 the power of the purse, which, in theory at least, still belong- 
 ed to the representatives of the French people, yield that its 
 legitimate fruit throughout the whole of that protracted pe- 
 riod. 
 
 I proposed at the outset to inquire, What was the true cause 
 of the failure of a hope which the experience of other nations 
 might teach us to regard as so reasonable ? Throughout the 
 preceding details, and in my former lecture on the Sources and 
 Management of the Finances of France, I have attempted to 
 prepare the way for what I suppose to be the true solution of 
 that problem. 
 
 First, then, the principle that the people could not be law- 
 fully taxed except by their own consent, given by their own 
 representatives, was at all times recognized much more as a 
 theory with which to polish rhetorical periods, than as a prac- 
 tical rule for the government of the different members of the 
 state. The substitution of splendid phrases for plain sense and 
 for practical measures is 'one of the inveterate maladies of the 
 national mind of France. 
 
 Secondly. As I attempted to show in a former lecture, this 
 principle was barren of its proper fruits, hecause the repre- 
 sentatives of the French people were not summoned except in 
 extreme exigencies ; because, when summoned, they were con- 
 tent to remonstrate and petition, instead of insisting on their 
 right to legislate and to act ; and because they failed in the 
 skill now to yield and now to resist, at the right time and in 
 the right measure. Or, more briefly, all the reasons which, as 
 we have formerly seen, rendered the States-General incompe- 
 tent to their other functions, rendered them also unfit to wield 
 the power of the purse as a weapon of constitutional liberty. 
 
 Thirdly. The assumption by the kings of France of the 
 
 C c 
 
402 POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 
 
 legislative power was fatal to the popular power of the purse ; 
 for although the recognized theory still refused to the king the 
 right to make a revenue law, yet the distinction between the 
 different classes of enactments was not easily drawn by the 
 most upright sovereigns, and was very easily obliterated by 
 all the rest. 
 
 Fourthly. The assumption by the Parliaments of the right 
 to an pffective veto on the royal enactments had a direct and 
 powerful tendency to render the popular power of the purse 
 sterile of constitutional freedom ; for, in consequence of that 
 assumption, the Parliaments combined their judicial powers 
 with a share in the legislative authority. When, therefore, 
 they had assented to a law as legislators, they were at once 
 able and bound to give effect to it as judges. And that assent 
 was, in fact, easily obtained even to a royal ordinance, which 
 illegally imposed new and unconstitutional tributes on the peo- 
 ple at large ; for as the Parliaments comprised no representa- 
 tive or popular element in their composition, they were seldom 
 either well disposed or well able to oppose more than a faint 
 and irresolute resistance to the royal will ; and their resist- 
 ance, even when most resolute, could be imperiously overruled 
 at a lit de justice. 
 
 Fifthly. The want of a really independent system of judi- 
 cature deprived the people of France of any means of arresting 
 the assumption by the crown of any fiscal prerogatives to which 
 it from time to time laid claim, though such claims were often 
 invalid, and were not seldom destitute of any foundation what- 
 ever. 
 
 Sixthly. Those royal prerogatives, especially in whatever 
 related to trade, whether internal or external,- were so vast as 
 always to rescue the kings of France from much of the de- 
 pendence on the good will of their people, into which they 
 might otherwise have been brought, and as usually to afford 
 them the ready means of corruption by a patronage which, at 
 the moment, might seem to cost themselves nothing. 
 
 Seventhly. The wars with England, the Italian wars, the 
 rivalry with the house of Austria, and the wars of religion, 
 which, from 1337 to 1598, that is, during more than 260 years, 
 subjected France to such calamities and such waste of treasure 
 as no other European state has ever had to sustain, while they 
 
POWER OF THE PURSE IN FRANCE. 403 
 
 proved the marvelous extent and elasticity of her resources, 
 proved also a fatal obstacle, or rather a succession of fatal ob- 
 stacles, not only to economy in the management of the public 
 revenue, but also to any use of the power of the purse as a 
 counterpoise to the powers of the sceptre and of the sword. 
 
 Eighthly. The establishment of a standing army under 
 Charles VII., and the permanent appropriation to its support 
 of the seignorial tailles, were among the disastrous results of 
 those wars, and enervated all the efforts by which, from that 
 time forward, the popular party ever sought to restrain the au- 
 thority of the king and to assert their own. The taille, though 
 charged by the States- General of Charles with an annual lia- 
 bility of 1,200,000 livres only for this purpose, became virtu- 
 ally liable for it to an indefinite extent. 
 
 Ninthly. The exemption of the privileged classes from the 
 tailles, and from some other of the more oppressive taxes, by 
 destroying all community of interest between the different 
 ranks of contributors to the public treasury, prevented their 
 ever adopting any decisive and unanimous measures to arrest 
 the bursal encroachments of the crown upon the people. Or, 
 rather, the crown could hardly make any such encroachment 
 without finding active allies in one or more of the orders of the 
 state. 
 
 Tenthly. The isolation of the Clergy from the Nobles and 
 the Tiers Etat in whatever related to taxation, was a privilege 
 which the Church possessed and boasted at the expense of the 
 secular interests of her own members, and of the common- 
 wealth at large. Her gratuitous gifts were gratuitous only in 
 name ; but they enabled the king first to disregard, and then 
 to overrule, the more prudent resistance of his secular subjects 
 to his most exorbitant demands upon them. 
 
 Eleventhly. The right, or supposed right, of the crown to 
 anticipate the royal revenue by loans made without the con- 
 sent of the States-Greneral, or even of the Parliaments, was 
 among the most habitual and the most fatal of the causes of 
 the impotency of those bodies to oppose any effectual obstacle 
 to the expenditure and to the financial independence of their 
 sovereigns. 
 
 Twelfthly. The ill conduct and ill success of th<3 popular 
 insurrections by which, at different times, the people attempt- 
 
404 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 ed to fetter the hands of their wasteful monarch; , not only 
 counteracted the designs of the insurgents, but strengthened 
 the power which they had so fruitlessly endeavored to coerce. 
 
 Thirteenthly. When, occasionally, fiscal reforms were ex- 
 torted from the crown, they were invariably destitute of any 
 effectual guarantee for the faithful observance of the conces- 
 sions so made to the public voice. To such disappointments 
 succeeded disgust and indifference, if not despondency, among 
 the most zealous reformers. 
 
 Fourteenthly. The same results were induced by the want 
 of any effective plan of rendering and auditing the accounts 
 of the kingdom. The abuse of the acquits de comptant was 
 itself enough to baffle every attempt to bring the government 
 into any due subordination to the people in the use of the funds 
 raised for the civil and military service of the kingdom. 
 
 Finally, as I shall attempt to show in future lectures, pub- 
 lic opinion, as expressed by the most eminent of the French 
 authors, did nothing and attempted nothing to strengthen the 
 foundations or to explain the importance of the great consti- 
 tutional doctrine of the French monarchy. 
 
 I have thus endeavored to compress into the shortest possi- 
 ble compass my answers to the problem with which I com- 
 menced the present lecture. Your own study of French his 
 tory will, I trust, enable you both to appreciate the accuracy 
 of those answers and to multiply their number. 
 
 LECTURE XY. 
 
 ON THE REFORMATION AND THE WARS OF RELIGION. 
 
 To have emancipated the human mind from the errors of 
 Papal Rome is but one of the many triumphs of the Reforma- 
 tion. In alrtiost every part of the Christian world, that great 
 religious enfranchisement was followed by civil liberty, as at 
 once its offspring and its guardian. But in France it was oth- 
 erwise ; and I proceed to inquire how it happened that the pro- 
 test made by so large a part of the French people against the 
 tyranny of the Roman Church was not followed by any effect- 
 
THE WARS OP RELIGION. 405 
 
 ual resistance to the despotism of the reigning dynasty. Tc 
 render the answer to that question intelligible, it is necessary 
 that I should indicate some of the principal steps of the prog- 
 ress of the Reformation in that kingdom ; and, if that preface 
 should appear disproportionately long, I would bespeak your 
 indulgence till it shall appear what are the uses to which it 
 is to be at length applied. 
 
 For the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century has 
 been claimed a spiritual lineage, ascending, in unbroken suc- 
 cession, through the Moravians, the disciples of Huss and of 
 Wickliffe, the Albigenses, and the Paulicians, until it reach- 
 es the primitive ages of Christianity. For another race of 
 Reformers has been traced a different genealogy, ascending 
 through Savonarola, Grerson, D'Ailly, and Bernard of Clair- 
 vaux, until it reaches the Fathers of many ancient synods, 
 who clung with passionate fondness to the Church which they 
 endeavored at once to purify and to maintain. To subdue the 
 first of these generations of men by terror, and the second by 
 blandishments, had, daring many ages, been the office of the 
 Papacy, when a new and irresistible power interposed as the 
 arbiter in that protracted strife. The human mind, aroused 
 from the slumber of centuries, announced, in ten thousand dif- 
 ferent but concurring voices, that the dominion of ignorance 
 and of superstition was drawing to a close. Luther made that 
 proclamation to the potentates assembled at Worms in the year 
 1521 ; and, in the same year, the doctrines of Luther were, 
 for the first time, publicly announced in France. The city of 
 Meaux, which was destined to become, in a future age, the 
 episcopal seat of the greatest of all the opponents of the Ref- 
 ormation, enjoyed, at that time, the nobler distinction of be- 
 coming the cradle of the Reformed faith in the French mon- 
 archy. 
 
 Of that faith James Lefevre and William Farel were the 
 earliest confessors. Lefevre had nearly completed his seven- 
 tieth year, Farel had not quite attained the age of twenty- 
 four. Each of them had derived his new opinions from the 
 study of the Scriptures, and they lived together in the inter- 
 change of that touching affection which occasionally unites the 
 aged and the young. The contemplative spirit of the old man 
 and the fervor of his youthful associate were blended together 
 
406 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 in harmonious concert and mutual co-operation. Nor were 
 they long dependent only on each other's aid. They found at 
 once a patron and a fellow-laborer in "William Briqonnet, the 
 bishop of the diocese. He assisted them in publishing a trans- 
 lation of the Evangelists, and in preaching the Evangelical doc- 
 trines. Nor did they preach in vain. So extensive and so last- 
 ing was their influence, that, throughout the first half of the 
 sixteenth century, a "heretic of Meaux" became the popular 
 name in France for an antagonist of the See of Romp. 
 
 But against such heretics the voice of the Sorbtnne was 
 raised with a resentment whetted by the keen sense of some 
 galling indignities. They had lately published a decree in 
 which Luther was compared to Mohammed ; and Melancthon 
 had derided it as "the wild production of certain Parisian The- 
 ologasters, of doctors under whose guidance it was the ill for- 
 tune of France to be placed." Such doctors were not, how- 
 ever, to be laughed at with impunity. They cited Bishop Bri- 
 9onnet before the Parliament of Paris, and extorted from him 
 a humiliating retraction of his imputed, errors. John le Clerc, 
 another of the heretics of Meaux, became, on this occasion, the 
 protomartyr of the Reformation in France. Farel fled into 
 Dauphine, where he preached in the dry beds of winter tor- 
 rents, or in the mountain fastnesses, until he was compelled 
 to seek refuge in Basle. Lefevre escaped to Nerac, there to 
 close his long life under the protection of Marguerite of Valois. 
 
 That lady holds an eminent place in the history both of the 
 literature and of the reformation of her native land. Every 
 one will, indeed, gladly cherish the disbelief of her authorship 
 of the collection of Tales for which she is celebrated, for they 
 egregiously violate the delicacy of her sex and the decencies 
 of society. Or, if the evidence on which they are ascribed to 
 her pen should be thought irresistible, let us not refuse to her 
 memory the excuse afforded by the manners of her times, nor 
 forget how nobly the fault was repaired by the sanctity of her 
 later writings, and by her generous protection of all who in her 
 days were persecuted for conscience sake. 
 
 She was the only sister and the cherished friend of Francis 
 I. ; but it is difficult to say to which of the conflicting creeds 
 of their generation either of them was really attached. Fran- 
 cis, indeed, was a worshiper of the idol " Grlory." He sought 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 407 
 
 to propitiate that capricious power by many costly offerings 
 by eclipsing the achievements of Charles Y. by rivaling the 
 splendor of Henry VIII. by combining all the majesty of the 
 first of European kings with all the gallantry of the first of Eu- 
 ropean gentlemen and by a munificent patronage of letters 
 and of art. Yet le Roi Chevalier was rather a great actor than 
 a great agent in the affairs of the world. His principles of 
 conduct were continually overborne by the gusts of his trans- 
 itory passions ; and, both in the religious and the political con- 
 troversies of his times, he changed his position and his alliances 
 with the promptitude and the fickleness characteristic of all 
 such unruly emotions. Marguerite, on the contrary, although 
 her own personal belief seems to the last to have been unset- 
 tled, was inflexible in her zeal for the defense of the persons 
 and the doctrines of the Reformers. Sometimes her influence 
 with Francis arrested his severities toward them, and some- 
 times his influence with her prevented her acceptance of their 
 opinions. Many years of their lives were passed in this affec- 
 tionate contest, which seems to have cemented, instead of di- 
 minishing, the love which they bore to each other. Ill fared 
 it with any who, presuming on the superstitious weaknesses 
 of either, dared to bring that affection to any hazardous test. 
 
 Thus Marguerite, having introduced sundry Reformed preach- 
 ers into the pulpits of Paris, the whole clerical body of the city 
 revenged themselves against her for the insult. At the Col- 
 lege of Navarre, the monks exhibited a play, in which she un- 
 derwent a metamorphosis from a student of the Bible into a 
 daemon enveloped in flames. The more serious Sorbonne pro- 
 mulgated a decree censuring her writings as heretical ; and a 
 Cordelier had the hardihood to recommend that she should be 
 tied up in a sack and thrown into the Seine. Monks, doctors, 
 and Cordeliers were instantly sentenced by the indignant king 
 to humiliating punishments ; though scarcely had his wrath 
 been appeased by their sufferings, when his passions veered 
 round to the precisely opposite quarter. 
 
 The day-dream of the life of Francis was the conquest of the 
 Milanese. An alliance with the Tuscan and the Papal courts 
 appeared to promise the fulfillment of that hope ; and such an 
 alliance might, as it then seemed, be cemented by the marri- 
 age of Henry, the eldest son of Francis, to Catharine of Medio, 
 
408 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 the niece of Clement VII. That pope having arrived in per- 
 son at Marseilles, Francis therefore hastened thither to con- 
 clude with him this double compact, nuptial and political ; and 
 then, animated with a new zeal for the Papacy, he returned to 
 Paris to gratify the unfortunate monks, doctors, and Cordeliers, 
 by silencing their opponents and dispersing their flocks. The 
 Reformers did not endure these wrongs with their accustomed 
 equanimity. In an evil moment they covered the walls of 
 Paris, and even the door of the royal chamber, with placards 
 containing unmeasured invectives against the mass, and the 
 other observances and doctrines peculiar to their antagonists. 
 Such an outrage on his religion and his person kindled an un- 
 quenchable fury in the soul of Francis, who commanded the 
 immediate seizure and persecution of all the heretics ; and 
 either arranged, or assented to a religious procession, which was 
 designed to enhance the solemnity of his proceedings against 
 them. 
 
 In most countries fetes are but the idle pastimes of an idle 
 day. In France it is often otherwise. The Fete of Paris of 
 the 29th of January, 1535, was as momentous in its results as 
 it was imposing in its ceremonial. In the midst of a count- 
 less assemblage, thronging every street and house-top, appeared 
 the king, preceded by all the sacred relics of his capital, and 
 by all the ecclesiastical dignitaries who bore them, and fol- 
 lowed by the princes of his blood, and by the various counsel- 
 ors and courts, guilds and companies of the city. Mass had 
 been sung, and a royal banquet had been served, when, ascend- 
 ing his throne in the presence of his people, Francis solemnly 
 announced his resolution to punish all heresy with death, and 
 not to spare even his own children if they should be guilty of 
 it. " Nay," he exclaimed, as he raised aloft his arm, " if this 
 hand were infected with that disease, this other hand should 
 chop it off." Such words, from such a speaker, were not ad- 
 dressed in vain to such an audience. I advance reluctantly to 
 the close of the narrative. The festivities of the day were, 
 ended by suspending six heretics from as many beams, which 
 turned horizontally on a pivot in such a manner that the revo- 
 lutions of each beam brought the sufferers, one after another, 
 over a furnace, into which they were successively plunged, 
 until, by repeated immersions in that bath of fire, they were 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 409 
 
 all at length destroyed. On that hideous spectacle Francis 
 himself deliberately gazed. The people of Paris, maddened by 
 this taste of blood, gave way to a ferocity which, during five 
 successive reigns, scarcely ever ceased to offer new victims to 
 Moloch in the name of the Prince of Peace. From this era, 
 their fierce and unrelenting hostility to the Reformers takes its 
 commencement. The fanaticism which was then aroused was 
 satiated, at the distance of twenty-seven years, by the massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew. 
 
 But, notwithstanding his domestic and political alliance with 
 the Pope, Francis had concluded with the Protestant League 
 at Smalcalde another confederacy, of which the object was the 
 depression of the house of Austria. The intelligence of the 
 persecutions of their brethren at Paris excited the liveliest re- 
 sentment among the members of that league ; and they indig- 
 nantly intimated to Francis their purpose of making common 
 cause with the emperor against himself, as the deadliest enemy 
 of the faith of the Reformers. To avert the displeasure of his 
 German allies, Francis made concessions, promises, and apolo- 
 gies. He assured them that the victims of the Fete of Janu- 
 ary, 1535, had been punished, not for their religion, but for 
 their offenses against the state ; and, availing himself of the 
 ever ready weapon supplied by the disunion of the Reformers, 
 he added the assurance that they were not Lutherans, but 
 Sacramentarian s . 
 
 This defense of the recent atrocities of Paris was read at 
 Basle by John Calvin.' To defend his persecuted brethren 
 against the calumnies of their persecutors, he published, in Au- 
 gust, 1535, his Christian Institutes. It announced to the world 
 that the Reformation in France had at length found a leader 
 and a head. 
 
 At the age of twelve (such were the habits of the times) 
 Calvin had received the presentation of an ecclesiastical bene- 
 fice ; but, by the diligent study of the Bible, he became a zeal- 
 ous adherent and teacher of the Reformed faith before he had 
 completed twice that number of years. Having been com- 
 pelled, by the doctors of the Sorbonne, to fly for his life from 
 Paris, he taught the Grospel in Poitou ; and there may yet be 
 seen near Poitiers a cave, bearing his name, in commemoration 
 of his having been accustomed to celebrate divine worship 
 
410 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 within its dark recesses. Driven from this and every other 
 place of refuge in France, he at length found shelter at Basle. 
 
 In a future lecture I shall have occasion to discuss the lit- 
 erary merits of the great work which he published in that city. 
 The religious influence which attended it is incalculable. It 
 was received by the whole body of the Protestants in France 
 as the standard around which they might all rally. It ascer- 
 tained their doctrine, determined their discipline, and regulated 
 their ecclesiastical organization. 
 
 "Within a year from the appearance of his Institutes, Calvin 
 was nominated to be a minister of the Grospel at Geneva, and 
 a professor of the college at that city. There he established, 
 in his own person, a theocratic sovereignty ; while by his books, 
 his letters, and his missionaries, he governed the Reformed 
 churches in France. The heretics of Meaux now assumed the 
 name of Calvinists. 
 
 So vast were the literary, ministerial, and public labors of 
 Calvin, that the history of them would appear altogether fab- 
 ulous, if it did not rest partly on his existing works, and partly 
 on the authority of his intimate friend and constant associate, 
 Theodore Beza. It is a tale which reduces to a comparatively 
 dwarfish stature the most imposing of the giants of intellectual 
 industry, on whom we are accustomed to gaze with the live- 
 liest admiration. His moral and religious character are free 
 from any recorded stain except the execution of Serve tus, on 
 which subject, however, no one is entitled to pronounce a per- 
 emptory judgment until he shall have read the elucidations of 
 it, for which we are indebted to MM. Guizot and Mignet, and 
 which will be found under the head of " Calvin," in the Musee 
 des Protestants celebres. The faults or infirmities usually 
 imputed to him are the love of power, the impatience of con- 
 tradiction, and a disposition irascible, severe, and reserved. 
 As he says of himself that he was a naturel sauvage et hon- 
 teux, I will not venture to undertake the defense of his temper 
 against his own self-condemnation. But it is hardly a reason- 
 able ground of censure that power should have been dear to a 
 man, who, by the immediate gift of the Creator himself, had 
 been invested with so eminent and unapproachable a superior- 
 ity over his fellow-men. Neither is it intelligible why any 
 one who had devoted such an intellect as his to studies of such 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 411 
 
 surpassing energy and perseverance, and who had derived from 
 them such immutable convictions as he posseseed, should be 
 blamed for a stem disregard of those garrulous gainsayers, to 
 whom patience of thought was an unknown mental exercise, 
 and in whose mouths freedom of thought was an empty and 
 unmeaning boast. 
 
 Judge, however, of Calvin as we may, it is impossible to 
 deny him a place among the most illustrious of the conquerors 
 whom history has recorded of the conquerors whose weapons 
 were intellectual only, and whose dominion had its seat in the 
 minds of their own and of succeeding generations ; for in him 
 the Protestants of France, of Switzerland, and of the seven 
 United Provinces of Scotland, and of New England, with the 
 Puritans, the Presbyterians, and the Independents of the other 
 American states and of our own country, have ever recognized, 
 or have been bound to recognize, their spiritual patriarch and 
 ecclesiastical dictator. In the age in which he lived, such a 
 dictatorship was indeed indispensable. If left without the 
 guidance of some commanding intellect, the Huguenots of 
 France could never (as far as mere human observation ex- 
 tends) have maintained their inevitable contest with their 
 secular and spiritual antagonists. 
 
 It was a contest, not for toleration, but for existence. The 
 ever versatile Francis had, indeed, occasionally assumed the 
 office of protector of the Reformers in Germany, but he never 
 failed recklessly to abandon it whenever such a change was 
 required by his apparent interests. Thus his alliance with 
 the confederates of Smalcalde was forgotten as soon as his new 
 policy prompted that other alliance which, under the mediation 
 of Paul III., he concluded with Charles V., for the extermina- 
 tion of heresy throughout their respective dominions. And 
 fearfully was that engagement fulfilled, when, in the year 
 1545, the Baron Ompeda (emulous, as it might seem, of the 
 infamy of Simon de Montfort), under the sanction, or, at least, 
 the supposed sanction of Francis, massacred the last remnant 
 of the Waldenses in Provence. The story of their sufferings 
 is too shocking to be needlessly recited. It provoked a cry of 
 indignation from one end of the kingdom to the other, for the 
 religious wars had not as yet steeled the hearts of the French 
 people to every sense of humanity. It agitated the dying mo- 
 
412 THE REFORMATION AND . 
 
 ments of Francis himself, who, maintaining that Ompeda had 
 far exceeded his orders, bequeathed to his son, Henry II., with 
 the crown of France, the duty of punishing that imputed trans- 
 gression. 
 
 Henry invoked in vain the sentence of the Parliament of 
 Paris against Ompeda. But in his reign the Huguenots might 
 bear with greater patience the impunity of their enemies, since 
 they then rejoiced in a vast and unforeseen increase in the 
 strength and number of their friends. It was the era of the 
 highest prosperity of the Reformation in France. Many of the 
 greatest provinces, and of the chief provincial capitals, became, 
 in appearance, Protestant a change to be chiefly ascribed to 
 the profound conviction, then generally diffused throughout 
 the land, of the truth of the new doctrines, but not to that 
 cause exclusively ; for it is peculiar to the French Reforma- 
 tion, and characteristic of it, that the converts from the old 
 opinions were chiefly made, not among the poor and illiterate, 
 but among the wealthy, the learned, and the great. Many 
 secular motives concurred with higher impulses in recommend- 
 ing to them such a change. The provincial nobles had long 
 cherished a deep resentment against the sacerdotal order, as 
 usurpers of their territorial rights and seignorial privileges. 
 The judges and lawyers were jealous of the encroachments of 
 the ecclesiastical on their own forensic authority. The mer- 
 chants had discovered that there was, in the other parts of 
 Europe, some mysterious link between the Protestant opinions 
 and the prosperity of trade. The men of letters, whether lay 
 or clerical, naturally turned their eyes to that quarter in which 
 the range of speculative inquiry was enlarged, and the domin- 
 ion of the human intellect extended. 
 
 Thus neither authors, nor presses, nor money were wanting 
 to the diffusion of the Calvinistic creed. United into one 
 great secret society by a system of arbitrary signs, the Re- 
 formers traversed the country secure of a hospitable shelter ; 
 holding their assemblies in barns, or caves, or forest glades ; 
 and disseminating books and pamphlets throughout the whole 
 of France, under the cover of mercantile consignments or of 
 peddler's packages, while the ladies of the new faith increased 
 its influence by exhibiting in their own persons a severe mode] 
 of all the virtues of the female character. " I shall turn Hu- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 413 
 
 guenot myself (exclaimed Catharine of Medici, in one of her 
 sportive moods), that I also may pass for a prude and a devote." 
 
 Her husband Henry harbored no such fancies either in earn- 
 est or in jest. He had completed his twenty-ninth year when 
 he ascended the throne of France an elevation which, if 
 crowns were won by royal qualities alone, he never could have 
 attained. He was formed to enjoy, and to diffuse around him 
 the delights of society in its' most brilliant and luxurious forms, 
 and to shine among the foremost of the graceful, accomplish- 
 ed, good humored, and indolent votaries of pleasure. In the 
 dance or the tournament, as a carpet knight, he might have 
 safely indulged his feeble dependence on friends and favorites. 
 In the council chamber, as a king, he indulged it to the ruin 
 of his kingdom. Abdicating to Anne de Montmorenci, to 
 Francis, duke of Guise, and to Diana of Poitiers, the real 
 sovereignty of France, he laid the basis of those factions which, 
 during the reigns of each of his sons, desolated the kingdom 
 with misery and bloodshed. 
 
 Of the wrongs and cruelties done upon our earth, how vast 
 is the proportion for which easiness of temper is responsible ! 
 Too obliging to refuse any thing to his mistress and his favor- 
 ites, Henry II. gratified them by the first of that long series 
 of iniquitous edicts against the Huguenots which deform tha 
 collection of the laws of the French kings. Enacted in 1551, 
 and called the edict of Chateaubriant, it decreed that any on? 
 accused of heresy might be tried, in succession, both by the 
 secular and by the spiritual courts ; that, if convicted by either, 
 the offender should at once be executed, even pending his ap- 
 peal from that conviction ; that no one should intercede for his 
 pardon ; that a third of his estate should be the reward of the 
 informer ; and that every one suspected of heresy should incur 
 these penalties, unless he should, by sufficient evidence, prove 
 that suspicion to be unfounded. It might have been supposed 
 that the wickedness and folly of such a law could be surpassed 
 only by the wickedness and folly with which it was carried 
 into execution. But the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Sorbonne, 
 and Pope Paul IV. meditated a yet lower depth of iniquity. 
 In the name of that pontiff, but at their instance, appeared in 
 1557 a bull establishing the Inquisition in France. In the 
 name of Henry, and at the instance of the same advisers, ap- 
 
414 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 peared a royal edict to carry that bull into execution. But 
 there were yet some limits to the subserviency of the French 
 people. The Parliament of Paris refused to register the edict, 
 although the king himself in person commanded it. They were 
 inflexibly firm, and he characteristically flexible ; and the con- 
 test, therefore, ended in the deliverance of his kingdom from 
 the infamy and the woes which his fatal facility of disposition 
 would otherwise have inflicted on ft. 
 
 But, confident in their new and continually increasing 
 strength, the French Reformers were roused by these injuries 
 to a measure of self-defense and of self-assertion, which, to all 
 who could read the signs of the times, announced the swift 
 approach of a deadly conflict between the hosts which arranged 
 themselves under the opposite banners of Geneva and of Rome. 
 Hitherto the Calvinists had met and worshiped together, at 
 whatever times and places, and with whatever forms the con- 
 veniences or exigencies of the passing moment suggested. 
 Now they resolved to constitute themselves into a great national 
 church, with ascertained laws, a regular organization, and pre- 
 determined observances. Accordingly, on the 25th of May, 
 1559, a general synod of all the Protestant congregations of 
 the kingdom was solemnly convened and deliberately holden 
 in the city of Paris. 
 
 The ecclesiastical system adopted by this assembly was dic- 
 tated by their great patriarch Calvin. It was prefaced by a 
 general confession of the faith of the Reformed churches of 
 France, and that confession was nothing else than an epitome 
 of the doctrine taught in his own Institution Chretienne ; the 
 great fundamental article of all being that the supreme rule 
 and single criterion of truth among them was to be the revealed 
 word of God. Then proceeding to the organization of their 
 ecclesiastical polity, this solemn compact provided that, when- 
 ever the faithful were living contiguously to each other in num- 
 bers sufficient to form a separate local church, they should 
 unite in electing a consistory (that is, a body of ruling elders), 
 in calling a minister, and in providing for the celebration of 
 the divine ordinances. All subsequent vacancies among the 
 consistory or in the ministry were to be filled up by the elders, 
 but subject to an effective veto on the part of the congregation. 
 A certain number of local churches were each to elect an elder, 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 415 
 
 who, with the respective ministers of all, were to form the con- 
 ference of that locality. The kingdom of France being then 
 divided into provinces (sixteen was the usual number of them), 
 a provincial synod was to be holden annually in every province, 
 composed of all the ministers within its precincts, and of one 
 elder to be elected by each of the local churches which the 
 province might comprise. At the summit of this hierarchy 
 was placed a national synod, which was to meet once in each 
 year, and to be composed of two ministers and of two elders 
 representing each of the provincial synods. The conferences 
 were to govern, in the first instance, the local churches within 
 their several limits. The provincial synods were to have a 
 jurisdiction at once concurrent with, and superior to, that of 
 the conferences. The national synod was to be both the ulti- 
 mate tribunal and the supreme Legislature of the whole body 
 of the Protestant Church of France. Substitute for these titles 
 the words presbyteries, kirk sessions, and general assembly, 
 and you have here a complete prototype of the existing Na- 
 tional Church of Scotland. 
 
 A great social revolution had thus been effected. Within 
 the centre of the French monarchy Calvin and his disciples 
 had established a spiritual republic, and had solemnly recog- 
 nized as the basis of it four principles, each germinant of re- 
 sults of the highest importance to the political commonwealth 
 Those principles were, first, that the will of the people was the 
 one legitimate source of the power of their rulers ; secondly, 
 that power was most properly delegated by the people to their 
 rulers by means of elections, in which every adult man might 
 exercise the right of suffrage ; thirdly, that in ecclesiastical 
 government the clergy and the laity were entitled to an equal 
 and co-ordinate authority ; and, fourthly, that between the 
 Church and the State no alliance or mutual dependence, or 
 other definite relation, necessarily or properly subsisted. The 
 ultimate results of this decisive advance of the Calvinistic 
 party will be considered hereafter. The immediate conse- 
 quence of it was to bring to light the fact that in the bosom 
 of the Parliament of Paris were concealed many of the follow- 
 ers of Calvin who had hitherto wanted courage to avow them- 
 selves. 
 
 Of this number was Anne Dubourg, himself a magistrate c f 
 
416 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 eminent learning, and the descendant of a family illustrious 
 among the magistracy of Franco, In his place in the Parlia- 
 ment, and in the presence of Henry, he now ventured not only 
 to invoke a national council for the reform of religion in France, 
 but even to denounce the persecution of heretics as a crime 
 against Him whose holy name they were accustomed to adore 
 with their dying breath. Dubourg expiated this audacity with 
 his death. But, before the grave had been opened for him, it 
 had closed on his royal persecutor. The accidental stroke of 
 the lance of Count Montgomery, at the tournament of June, 
 1559, terminated the reign and life of Henry, and transferred 
 his crown to his eldest son, Francis II. 
 
 Francis ascended the throne of his ancestors when he had 
 scarcely completed his sixteenth year ; and the possession of 
 the real government of France, under the name of the young 
 and feeble king, became the prize for which three unscrupu- 
 lous rivals eagerly contended. 
 
 First in rank, as in just pretensions, was the queen-mother, 
 Catharine of Medici. She is one of those persons on the his- 
 torical portraitures of whom it is painful and humiliating to 
 dwell. None of them throw any doubt on her courage, her 
 energy, or her commanding talents, and none of them ascribe 
 to her any of the qualities we love, or of the virtues we esteem. 
 They represent her to us as a living impersonation of the ideal 
 prince of her countryman Machiavelli ; as engaged, through- 
 out her long life, in the unremitting pursuit of dominion of 
 dominion on any terms, but as best pleased to obtain it by 
 craft, by treachery, and by intrigue ; as rendering every other 
 desire subservient to this one master passion ; as sacrificing to 
 it even her conjugal and her maternal affections ; and as ex- 
 hibiting the frightful aspect of a woman who, without human 
 sympathies or religious principles, submitted herself to the des- 
 potism of a blind selfishness, which shame could never daunt 
 and conscience could never restrain. For the sake of our com- 
 mon nature, let us trust that these pictures have been discol- 
 ored by the too natural indignation and abhorrence of those 
 from whom we have received them ; though, even if the colors 
 be really too dark, it is, I fear, too late now to attempt any cor- 
 rection of the error. 
 
 The second of the aspirants for the government if the king 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 417 
 
 and of his kingdom was Francis, duke of Cruise. Just forty- 
 six years before this time, his father, Claude of Lorraine, had 
 quitted that duchy in search of better fortunes in France ; 
 bringing thither, as the Protestant writers say, " nothing more 
 than a stick in his hand, and one servant behind him." In 
 France he became the father of four daughters and of six sons, 
 of whom Francis, duke of Guise, was the eldest, and Charles, 
 cardinal of Lorraine, was the second. The duke was a skill- 
 ful, high-spirited, irascible, and unscrupulous soldier, who had 
 achieved great glory by the defense of Metz, by the capture of 
 Calais, and by the victory of Renty. The cardinal, on the oth- 
 er hand, was so remarkable for personal cowardice, that he was 
 himself accustomed to make it the subject of his own pleas- 
 antry. It was united (no unfrequent union) to a graceful elo- 
 cution, insinuating manners, a penetrating foresight of coming 
 events, and exquisite subtlety in the conduct of affairs. But 
 the cardinal was also the victim of that chronic fever of am- 
 bition from which timid men are usually exempt, and was 
 haunted by importunate visions of the French crown resting 
 on his brother's head, and of the Papal tiara alighting on his 
 own. 
 
 The third candidate for the administration of the govern- 
 ment of France was Antoine, the head of the house of Bour- 
 bon, and therefore the first prince of the blood royal next after 
 the brothers of the king. He bore the titl'e of King of Na- 
 varre in right of Jane d'Albret his wife, who was the titular 
 queen of that almost nominal sovereignty. The chief purpose 
 of the otherwise purposeless existence of Anthony was to ex- 
 change his empty title of King of Navarre for the dominion of 
 some real kingdom in any place and on any terms. He was 
 one of those men whose characters shift with the shifting events 
 of each successive day, or with the uncertain mood of each 
 new associate. With the Calvinists he would chant hymns in 
 the Pre-aux-Clercs at Paris, and with the Catholics he would 
 attend a Calvinistic auto-da-fe at the Place de Grreve. 
 
 Such having been the three aspirants to the regency, it re- 
 mains to notice their great antagonist, Graspard de Coligny, 
 the military hero of the French Reformation. He was the sec- 
 ond of the three sons of the Comte de Chatillon and of the sis- 
 ter of the Constable Montmorency. Having either acquired 
 
 DD 
 
418 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 or confirmed his religious opinions by the study of the Scrip- 
 tures during a protracted captivity which he underwent as a 
 prisoner of war after the battle of St. Q,uentin, he regarded the 
 honors and emoluments of the world with a holy indifference, 
 and, with the exception of his titular office of Admiral of 
 France, renounced all the high and lucrative employments in 
 the state which he had previously enjoyed. In the domestic 
 privacy to which he retired, he became an example of the most 
 severe self-discipline, united to a fervent and habitual devo- 
 tion. In the civil wars into which he was afterward drawn, 
 nothing was wanting to his glory except success ; for he was 
 an unfortunate commander, and, though a braver man never 
 drew his sword even in the armies of France, yet, in the crit- 
 ical moments of battle, he was deficient in promptitude and 
 decision. His younger brother D'Andelot was also a gallant 
 but ill-fated officer in the Huguenot ranks ; while his elder 
 brother, Odet Chatillon, who had become a cardinal in his sev- 
 enteenth year, and had married in his more maturer days, end- 
 ed his life in England as an exile. 
 
 Coligny and his friends were the dupes of the artifices by 
 which Catharine paved her sure, though slow and cautious 
 path to the nominal regency and real sovereignty of France. 
 To conciliate their favor, she assumed the appearance of a 
 humble inquirer into the grounds of their doctrines, and they, 
 with glad credulity, hailed her as a new Esther, born for the 
 deliverance of the persecuted votaries of the truth. 
 
 The Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine pursued a 
 more direct and ingenious course than hers. Having effected 
 the marriage of the king to their niece, Mary, queen of Scots, 
 they seized upon all the highest stations of public trust and 
 authority, the duke becoming general in chief of the royal for- 
 ces, the cardinal assuming the superintendence of the royal 
 finances. Never had the throne of France been more com- 
 pletely overshadowed by those who had mounted on its foot- 
 steps since the Merovingian kings had bowed to the supremacy 
 of the mayors of their palace. 
 
 The powers thus gained by the Princes of Lorraine were 
 zealously employed for the destruction of the Calvinists. In 
 every Parliament in the kingdom they established Chambers, 
 charged with the especial office of trying, and consigning to 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 4 19 
 
 the flames, all persons guilty of heresy ; and which, for that 
 reason, received the appropriate title of Chambres ardentes 
 The Calvinists, while exasperated by these persecutions, were 
 brought into frequent intercouse with the military suitors of 
 the treasury, whose just but unwelcome demands the cardinal- 
 superintendent had repelled with intolerable indignities. Mu- 
 tually cherishing each other's resentments against then* com- 
 mon enemies, the two parties concerted together a plan for 
 subverting, by their united arms, the usurped power of the 
 duke and cardinal. The casuists of the Huguenots encour- 
 aged the design, teaching that such resistance would not be 
 unlawful if conducted under the guidance of a prince of the 
 blood royal, and if sanctioned by the States-Greneral of the 
 realm. Louis de Conde, the brother of the King of Navarre, 
 consented to fulfill the first of these conditions ; and it was re- 
 solved by the confederates that, in due time, the second also 
 should be accomplished. With their passions excited and theii 
 consciences tranquilized, they therefore resolved to seize the 
 persons of the king, the cardinal, and the duke, in order that 
 justice might be done upon the new mayors of the palace, and 
 that the new Childeric might be transferred to a more faithful 
 guardianship. 
 
 The conspiracy of Amboise (for so the project was called, 
 from the place at which it was to be carried into effect) was 
 defeated by the treachery of one of the conspirators. The pun- 
 ishments which followed are too horrible for description. Hun- 
 dreds perished by the 'hands of the public executioners, and 
 hundreds, bound hands and feet together, were thrown into the 
 Loire. And thus, in the year 1560, were exactly anticipated 
 the Noyades of the Revolution ; except, indeed, that a prince 
 of the Church,- Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, took the place of 
 the butcher Carrier ;' and except that Catharine of Medici, and 
 her ladies of honor, assumed, in this dismal tragedy, charac- 
 ters to which, even in the phrensy of the Reign of Terror, the 
 vilest of the Poissardes of Paris would scarcely have descended. 
 
 Nor were these the only disasters in which this ill-concerted 
 scheme involved the Huguenots. They soon learned with ter- 
 ror that it had supplied the Duke of Cruise with a pretext for 
 assuming the office of Lieutenant Greneral of France, and for 
 extorting from the king a promise to sanction whatever acts 
 
420 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 he might do in that capacity ; and that it had afforded the 
 Cardinal of Lorraine an excuse for establishing, "by the royal 
 edict of Romorantin, an episcopal tribunal in every diocese of 
 the realm for the trial and punishment of heresy. 
 
 But deep called unto deep. The alarmed and exhausted 
 Huguenots, confident in their strength, or deriving courage 
 from despair, rose in many parts of France to repel, or at least 
 to punish their antagonists. Throughout the south arid west 
 of the kingdom, a large proportion of the churches were seized 
 for their use, and devoted to their public worship, while in 
 Dauphine and Provence they celebrated that worship sword 
 in hand, and then pillaged the property of the Catholics, and 
 abused the persons of their priesthood. Anarchy and civil wai 
 were brooding over the distracted land. 
 
 In the midst of these tumults was raised a voice, earnestly 
 and pathetically inculcating toleration and peace. It was thf 
 voice of the party called Les Politiques, of which the Chancel 
 lor 1'Hopital was the head. They spoke with all the energ} 
 of wisdom and of truth, and with all the authority of the high- 
 est rank and reputation to which any statesman of that age 
 had risen in France by their own unaided and personal merits 
 Nor did they speak altogether in vain ; for not even Guise 01 
 his brother could resist their instances that the Huguenots 
 hould at least be heard in their own vindication. 
 
 In August, 1560, therefore, Coligny appeared before the kini> 
 and an assembly of Notables, who had been convened for that 
 purpose at Fontainebleau. Presenting to them the written 
 petition oi khe wkole Reformed Church of the kingdom, he de- 
 manded the royal assent to their request for the free perform- 
 ance of their public worship. "Your petition," replied the 
 king, "bears the signature of no one." " True; sire," rejoined 
 Coligny ; " but if you will allow us to meet for the purpose, I 
 will, in one day, obtain in Normandy alone 50,000 signatures." 
 Even if the number was exaggerated, it was an exaggeration 
 which, from such lips, indicated a reality full of danger. Long 
 and anxious were the debates which followed. They resulted 
 in a decision to convene both the States-General of the king- 
 dom and a National Council, to decide what should be the re- 
 ligious faith of the French people. Neither they, nor any other 
 leople, had as yet learned that any such absolute unity of be- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 421 
 
 lief and of worship was not really possible, and was, perhaps, 
 not even to be desired. 
 
 I attempted in a former lecture to explain the general mo- 
 tives which had induced all the four great political parties in 
 France to concur in the convocation of the States-General of 
 Orleans. But there was yet a farther motive which recom- 
 mended that measure to the Princes of Lorraine. It promised 
 them a favorable opportunity for the execution of two atrocious 
 treasons. Assuming that the convention of the representatives 
 of the kingdom would lull the Huguenots into a false security, 
 they meditated a military massacre, which, by destroying many 
 of them in every province, was to strike at the very roots of tht 
 new heresy. Assuming, also, that the two princes of the house 
 of Bourbon would present themselves at Orleans unprotected 
 by any armed force, they had arranged a plan for the seizure 
 and destruction of them both. This part of their project was 
 at least partly accomplished ; for, when Louis of Conde entered 
 the city, he was arrested by the followers of G-uise on a charge 
 of participation in the conspiracy of Amboise. His brother, 
 Anthony of Navarre, who accompanied him, was introduced 
 into the presence of the king, where assassins stood ready to 
 plunge their daggers into his bosom as soon as Francis had 
 given the appointed signal. The heart of the royal boy, howev- 
 er, revolted at the last moment from the contemplated mur- 
 der, and Anthony survived that perilous interview. Very short- 
 ly afterward Francis was mercifully removed, by a sudden 
 death, from the snares which environed his path. His less 
 happy brother, Charles IX., succeeded him. 
 
 This event was in effect a revolution. The Princes of Lor- 
 raine, no longer allied to the sovereign, retired into a compar- 
 ative obscurity. Their contemplated massacre was postponed 
 to the day of St. Bartholomew. Conde was discharged from 
 prison, and absolved of his imputed crimes ; Anthony of Na- 
 varre became Lieutenant General of France ; Montmorency 
 resumed his high office of Constable ; and the queen-mother, 
 becoming regent, governed the person and kingdom of her in- 
 fant son. 
 
 The States-General of Orleans, though not productive of 
 any direct measure in favor of the Reformers, materially pro- 
 moted the interest of the Reformation. They had recognized 
 
122 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 the great principle of religious tolerance, and had, therefore, 
 given new courage to the disciples of Calvin. Ever watchful 
 of such changes, Catharine of Medici once more presented her- 
 self in the character of a devout inquirer into the truth of the 
 new opinions. The halls of her palace of Fontainebleau were 
 thrown open to a Huguenot preacher. " It seemed," says the 
 Jesuit Maimhourg, " as though the whole court had become 
 Calvinist. Though it was mid Lent, their tables were covered 
 with meat, and they made sport of images and indulgences, 
 of the worship of the saints, of the ceremonies of the Church, 
 and the authority of the Pope." In the midst of such scenes, 
 the Reformers gave way to a not unnatural enthusiasm. Some- 
 times they addressed eulogies to the queen-mother and the 
 King of Navarre, and sometimes exhortations. Troops of mis- 
 sionaries from Greneva traversed the kingdom, and occupied 
 the pulpits of France. Devotional and controversial writings 
 were scattered from the Rhine to the Pyrenees as thickly as 
 the leaves of autumn ; and the more sanguine Huguenots be- 
 lieved in the approaching triumph of Calvin and his creed. 
 
 This exultation aroused the vigilance and reanimated the 
 hopes of the Princes of Lorraine. The famous courtesan, Di- 
 ana of Poitiers, was still living, the ready instrument of any 
 intrigue, and by her intervention was cemented that memora- 
 ble alliance to which the French historians gave the name of 
 the " Catholic Triumvirate." The whole military strength of 
 France was under the command of St. Andre, a dissolute sol- 
 dier, and of Montmorency the Constable. To each of them 
 Diana proposed an alliance with Guise ; to each were offered 
 great pecuniary advantages ; while, to stimulate the family 
 pride of Montmorency, he was assiduously reminded of the 
 welcome legend that his great ancestor was the first baron and 
 first Christian of France, and that he himself was, therefore, 
 the hereditary defender of the faith and hierarchy of Rome. 
 
 This new confederacy restored to the house of Lorraine the 
 military strength of which the death of Francis had deprived 
 them, and enabled G-uise to reappear, with renewed courage, 
 in the Royal Council chamber. His returning influence there 
 was speedily manifested. It gave occasion to the enactment 
 of what was called the Edict of July, 1561 ; an edict which 
 bespoke his unrelenting, yet cautious animosity to the Hugue- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 423 
 
 nots : for, while it forbade their public assemblies, it tolerated 
 their private exercise of social worship, forbade all injuries 
 against them on the ground of their religious opinions, and in- 
 timated a national council for adjusting the religious contro- 
 versies by which the realm was agitated. Such a synod ac- 
 cordingly met at Poissy within a month from the date of this 
 edict. 
 
 The days of chivalry were giving place to the days of po- 
 lemics, and the jousts of knights armed cap-a-pie were su- 
 perseded by the theological tournaments of men of the gown. 
 The one combat was, however, almost as unprofitable as the 
 other. "When the controversialists met at Poissy, they found 
 all the most essential laws of their battle-field wholly unde- 
 termined, and incapable of any determination. "What were to 
 be the questions to which the debate was to be confined ? The 
 Huguenots insisted that the whole compass of doctrinal opin- 
 ion was to be open to attack and defense. The Catholics, that 
 the authority of the Church and the Real Presence must be 
 finally decided before any other point was handled. "What 
 was to be the test of faith ? " Holy Scripture alone," ex- 
 claimed the reforming party. " Holy Scripture as interpreted 
 by primseval traditions, and by the Fathers and Councils," re- 
 joined the adherents of the Papacy. "Who are to adjudicate the 
 victory between the disputants ? " The Civil Government," 
 answered the Calvinists. " The Hierarchy of the Church," 
 replied their antagonists. To what good end, then, debate at 
 all, in the face of such irreconcilable disputes as to the terms 
 of the disputation ? To that question the common answer of 
 both parties was, we debate, not in the hope ef conquering 
 our antagonists, but in the belief that we shall encourage our 
 friends ; and we take this method of appealing from our prej- 
 udiced opponents to the world at large against the calumnies 
 of which our persons are the objects, and by which our doc- 
 trines are daily misrepresented. 
 
 To the Doctors of the Sorbonne, indeed, such an appeal ap- 
 peared eminently unwise. Twelve of them presented them- 
 selves before Catharine, at Poissy, with a protest against it. 
 Such discussions, they said, did not tend to edification, and 
 especially when carried on in presence of a king whose tender 
 years made him so peculiarly obnoxious to error. " I have 
 
424 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 good reasons for what I have done," answered Catharine : 
 " and it is too late to recede now ; but (she added significant- 
 ly) do not disturb yourselves all will go well." It was a 
 prophecy of which (in the sense of which it was made} she 
 had taken good care to insure the fulfillment. 
 
 In the refectory of the great convent at Poissy appeared, 
 therefore, on the 9th of September, 1561, King Charles IX., a 
 boy of eleven years of age, seated on his throne, having on one 
 side of him the members of his family, the officers and ladies 
 of his court, and on the other side six cardinals, with a vast 
 array of bishops and of doctors. The boy-king addressed them 
 in a formal speech ; the Chancellor 1'Hopital in a conciliatory, 
 wise, and almost Protestant oration. At the close of these ha- 
 rangues, the Huguenots were, for the first time, introduced. 
 Twelve of them were ministers, and the remaining twenty - 
 :wo lay-deputies of the Calvinistic churches. Calvin himself 
 was absent, because the French court had refused to give the 
 securities for his safety which the Republic of Geneva had de- 
 manded. In his stead appeared Theodore Beza, at once the 
 most intimate of his friends and the most eminent of his dis- 
 ciples. Nor was it a substitution to be regretted by their ad- 
 herents ; for, however much inferior to Calvin in other respects, 
 Beza far surpassed him in all the graces of elocution, and still 
 retained the captivating amenity of manners for which he had 
 been distinguished in his early years, and in the courtly cir- 
 cles in which those years had been passed. 
 
 The grave and simple habiliments of Beza and his associates 
 contrasted strangely with the gorgeous apparel of their mitered 
 antagonists. Nor were those humble-looking men received 
 into the presence of that royal and ecclesiastical pageantry as 
 colleagues to deliberate on equal terms, but rather as culprits 
 standing at the bar to undergo a trial. Undaunted by the in- 
 dignity, Beza first knelt down, and audibly implored the di- 
 vine blessing on the assemblage ; and then, amid the profound 
 attention of his audience, proceeded to recite and to interpret 
 the articles of the Calvinistic creed. His eloquence had been 
 progressively winning a signal triumph, until it reached a pas- 
 sage in which, though admitting the real presence of Christ 
 in the Eucharist, he denied his bodily presence there. " His 
 body," he exclaimed, "is as remote from bread and wine aa 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 425 
 
 heaven is remote from earth." Indignant clamors interrupt- 
 ed, though they did not eventually silence, the speaker , and, 
 after an adjournment of seven days, the synod was again as- 
 sembled to listen to the answer which, in the interval, had 
 been carefully prepared for the Cardinal of Lorraine. He 
 maintained, with great applause, first, the supreme authority 
 of the Church ; and, secondly, the doctrine of transubstantia- 
 tion ; and concluded by demanding that, before the debate pro- 
 ceeded any farther, his opponents should prove their candor by 
 subscribing each of the two propositions which he had thus 
 demonstrated. The demand was of course ineffectual. An 
 insuperable obstacle to any farther proceedings having thus 
 been quickly, and perhaps fortunately discovered, the synod 
 was brought to an early and premature conclusion. 
 
 The theologians who had composed it remained, however, 
 two weeks longer at Poissy, and held some private conferences 
 there in a smaller chamber of the convent. Their meetings 
 were productive of a few passages rather more exhilarating 
 than either the theme itself, or the characters of those who han- 
 dled it, might have seemed to promise. Thus, for example, 
 the Cardinal of Lorraine tendered to Beza for his signature 
 certain articles respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation 
 extracted from the Confession of Augsburg, to which, therefore 
 (sarcastically observed the cardinal), there can, of course, be 
 no objection. " Your eminence will therefore begin," answered 
 Beza, "by attaching your own signature." "Not I," replied 
 the cardinal ; "I am not bound to subscribe to the declarations 
 of any master." " You will scarcely then expect us," rejoined 
 Beza, " to accept the very confession which you have yourself 
 rejected." Bossuet reproaches the Calvinistic disputant with 
 escaping the dilemma by a subtlety. He might, with equal 
 reason, have reproached the cardinal for the subtlety with which 
 he had attempted thus to avail himself of the dispute between 
 the Lutheran and the Calvinistic churches. 
 
 A far more formidable opponent than the cardinal next pre- 
 sented himself in the person of lago Laynez, the second gen- 
 eral of the Jesuits, at once the most eloquent, learned, and 
 astute of all those in union with whom Loyola had laid the 
 foundation of his order. But, on this occasion, Laynez lost 
 himself, like many a great orator before and since his time, in 
 
426 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 the mazes of a long and intractable metaphor, and afforded to 
 Beza the triumph, so dangerous to the most eloquent adversa- 
 ry, of raising a general laugh at his expense. 
 
 Catharine listened to these debates with a secret contempt 
 for the dispute and the disputants. She thought that they 
 were contending about words only ; and she inferred that they 
 would consequently rejoice to terminate their warfare by a 
 verbal compromise. At her instance, therefore, a formulary 
 was prepared respecting the real presence in the Eucharist, 
 with which Beza was reasonably, and the Cardinal of Lorraine 
 indolently, satisfied. The Doctors of the Sorbonne, more learned 
 and more sincere than the cardinal, however, rejected it with 
 indignation. And now rhetoric and learning, pleasantry and 
 double-mindedness, having each in turn attempted to bring the 
 interlocutors at Poissy to some agreement, and having all at- 
 tempted it in vain, the meeting broke up. It had distinctly 
 convinced most men that such a dispute could not be adjusted 
 by any weapon less keen than the sword. To L'Hopital and 
 his partisans it had suggested the far more important conclu- 
 sions that, in such a dispute, neither the sword nor the pen 
 could really gain a final victory, but that mutual forgiveness 
 and toleration might render any such victory superfluous. 
 
 Yet, on the whole, the result of the synod or conference of 
 Poissy was advantageous to the Calvinists. They had been 
 publicly admitted into the presence of their sovereign to explain 
 and to justify their doctrines. They had been heard with at- 
 tention, if not with deference. The two religions had been 
 allowed to stand so far on a footing of equality, that each had 
 invoked in its support, not material force, but the reason of man 
 illuminated by the written or unwritten revelations of (rod. 
 In every part of France large accessions were consequently 
 made to the number of the Reformers. Urgent demands for 
 additional teachers were addressed to the Swiss and Gfenevese 
 churches. Farel, now far advanced in years, reappeared in his 
 native country, and preached the Gfospel to large and enthusi- 
 astic assemblages. In the immediate vicinity of Paris itself, 
 Beza addressed congregations which his followers estimated as 
 sometimes rising to 40,000 people, and which his enemies ac- 
 knowledged to have been seldom less than 8000. He even 
 celebrated the marriage of the Count and Countess of Rohan, 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 427 
 
 in the presence of the Q,ueen of Navarre and oi Conde ; and 
 Coligny presented to the queen-mother a list of 21 50 Reformed 
 congregations, over each of which separate ministers presided. 
 The numbers of the Huguenots at that time in France was 
 believed by some to amount to a*half, and by the least sanguine 
 to a tenth, of the whole population of the realm. L'Hopital 
 is said to have inferred, from all the facts within his reach, 
 that the population of the Huguenots to the Catholics was as 
 one to three. But such calculations or conjectures must al- 
 ways, and every where, be delusive. They proceed upon two 
 fundamental errors : the first, that every member of society 
 holds some fixed and deliberate religious belief; the second, 
 that all who do not avowedly reject the established faith are 
 among its real adherents. But, all the world over, the formal 
 assenters to that faith outnumber the avowed dissenters from 
 it ; and in religious, as well as in political controversy, the 
 world is ever governed by minorities. 
 
 Thus the Hugu not minority in France had become, at the 
 close of the conferences of Poissy, effective enough to defy the 
 laws which had been made against them, and to exact an 
 amendment of the laws which had been made in their favor. 
 They took possession of many of the churches of the Catholics, 
 destroyed the relics, the images, and the crucifixes with which 
 they were embellished, and demanded an enlargement of the 
 privileges which had been granted to themselves by the edict 
 of the Duke of Cruise, of July, 1561. For, while that edict 
 tolerated their private meetings, it forbade their public assem- 
 blies ; and such a prohibition the Calvinists would no longer 
 obey in practice, nor patiently endure in principle. The de- 
 mand was successful. L'Hopital, the ever-zealous patron of 
 religious liberty, proposed to an assembly of the Notables the 
 enactment of a new law, which authorized the public celebra- 
 tion of the Reformed worship on the easy conditions that it did 
 not take place within the walls of any fortified city ; that the 
 worshipers did not assemble in arms ; and that they permitted 
 the attendance of any officer of the crown who might require 
 to be present. On the other hand, it was provided that the 
 Huguenots should restore the churches which they had usurped, 
 and that they should not give scandal to the Catholics by break- 
 ing their images or crucifixes, or by any similar outrage. This 
 
428 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 law was called the Edict of January, 1562. It was willingly 
 registered by the Parliaments in the south and west of France, 
 and peremptorily rejected by the Parliament of Dijon. The 
 Parliament of Paris at first refused to accept it, and accepted 
 it at last only in obedience to repeated and positive commands 
 from the king, and not even then without a protest that they 
 did so in submission to necessity, without approving the new 
 opinions, and awaiting the time when it might be possible to 
 make other and better arrangements on the subject. By the 
 Huguenots themselves, the edict of January, 1562, was received 
 with gratitude, or rather with exultation. Except that they 
 were still excluded from public preaching within the fortifica- 
 tions of walled towns, they had at length, by many grievous 
 sufferings, acquired whatever was necessary to the freedom of 
 their worship and to the diffusion of their doctrines. For such 
 a victory they rightly judged that the lives of their martyred 
 brethren had not been an excessive price. 
 
 Nothing, however, was more remote from the designs of the 
 Triumvirate than that they should enjoy that victory in peace. 
 Calling to their aid Philip II. and the Papal legate, they now 
 assailed the Huguenots on the most vulnerable point of their 
 defenses. It was their calamity to have been acting under the 
 ostensible guidance and protection of Anthony of Navarre ; and 
 to detach him from their cause, weak and frivolous as he was, 
 would be to transfer to the side of their enemies all the exten- 
 sive powers with which that prince was invested as lieutenant 
 general of the kingdom. To accomplish his conversion to the 
 faith of Rome, it was requisite to appeal, neither to his under- 
 standing nor to his conscience, but simply to his egregious and 
 well-known vanity. For this purpose, the highest dignitaries 
 of Europe condescended to become parties to one of those farces 
 in real life which the French call mystifications. Anthony's 
 dominant idea and day-dream was that of an exchange of his 
 nominal sovereignty of 'Navarre for a real crown and real sub- 
 jects. The Pope, therefore, tempted him with proposals lor a 
 divorce from Jane d'Albret, his wife, on the ground of her noto- 
 rious heresy, that he might be free to marry Mary, queen of 
 Scots, and in her right to reign over Scotland. Philip II. offer- 
 ed him the choice of a new kingdom in Africa or Sardinia, or 
 the restitution of Navarre itself, One easy but indispensable 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 42$ 
 
 condition only must be first performed. He must embrace the 
 faith and communion of the Holy See ; and that this embar- 
 rassing measure might be reconciled to his royal honor, it was 
 proposed that a conference of Huguenot and Catholic doctors 
 should be holden in his presence, when he might gracefully, 
 and with dignity, surrender himself to the convictions which 
 would naturally follow on the argumentative triumph of the 
 advocates of the religion of his forefathers. Every act of this 
 projected comedy was exactly performed, and the head of the 
 house of Bourbon, the father of Henry IY. of France, gave to 
 his son the example of purchasing a crown by the public aban- 
 donment of the faith of his early and of his mature life. The 
 difference was, that the glittering prize actually rested on the 
 brows of the son, while it only mocked the eager grasp of the 
 father. 
 
 The secession of Anthony of Navarre gave to* the Triumvi- 
 rate a feeble ally indeed, but a great accession of power. It 
 placed at their disposal the armies which obeyed him as Lieu- 
 tenant General of France ; and it disquieted their antagonists, 
 by teaching them how precarious was the trust they habitu- 
 ally reposed in princes. In all the presumptuous confidence 
 inspired by these new resources, the Princes of Lorraine now 
 bound themselves, by a traitorous treaty with Philip II., to 
 concur in the introduction into France, and in the employment 
 there, of the forces of Spain, for the extermination of heresy. 
 To this compact Anthony gave his sanction, and, in further- 
 ance of it, he requested the Duke of Cruise to join him in a 
 meditated attack on the Huguenots in Paris. 
 
 On his way through Champagne for this purpose, the duke, 
 passing near Yassy, heard the ringing of the church bells of 
 that little town ; and, on inquiring about the cause, was an- 
 swered that they were rung to call together the Huguenots to 
 their religious exercises. " They shall soon," exclaimed the 
 duke, "Huguenotize (Huguenot era) in a very different man- 
 ner." Then riding up to the place of meeting, followed by 
 about 300 of his retainers, they fell on the unarmed congrega- 
 tion, killing three, and wounding others of them. The Hugue- 
 nots defended themselves with the stones lying on the ground 
 before them, with one of which the duke himself received a 
 blow. In the indignation of the moment, he gave to his fol- 
 
430 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 lowers commands which they too well obeyed. At his bidding, 
 and in his presence, they slew 60 and wounded 200 of the de- 
 fenseless assembly. There was but little booty to be gained 
 from such a foe ; but a volume was found which, till then, the 
 duke had never seen. " Look," he exclaimed to his brother, 
 the Cardinal of Lorraine, who had sheltered himself, during 
 the slaughter, beneath an adjacent wall, " look, here is one of 
 the books of these Huguenots." " There is no harm in this 
 book," answered the cardinal ; " it is the Bible." " The Bible !" 
 replied the learned adversary of the new faith ; " how can that 
 be ? You see it is not a year since this book was published, 
 and they say that the Bible was published more than 1500 
 years ago." 
 
 The massacre at Yassy was a direct infringement of the 
 Edict of January, 1562. It was a defiance of all law by one 
 of the chief nobles of France. It was an outrage so intoler- 
 able and so full of menace, that if it should pass unpunished, 
 there was an end to every hope of safety or of peace. Conde 
 solemnly denounced the author of it to the queen-mother as a 
 murderer, a conspirator, and a traitor. Beza appealed to her 
 for protection, and his flock invoked the aid of the governor of 
 Paris the Constable Montmorency. Catharine listened with 
 terror, and answered with equivocations ; while, with all the 
 zeal of a renegade, Anthony of Navarre defended the conduct 
 of the duke, and apologized for the massacre. " Remember, 
 sire," prophetically answered Beza, "that the Church is an 
 anvil on which many a hammer has been broken." 
 
 Guise, however, was now irrevocably committed to a deadly 
 strife with that invincible antagonist. Entering Paris amid 
 the acclamations of the fanatical multitude, who hailed him as 
 a new Judas Maccabeeus, he seized Catharine and Charles, and 
 kept them in a strict though gentle captivity, first at Fontaine- 
 bleau, and afterward at Melun and Yincennes. The triumph 
 of the Triumvirate and of their domestic and foreign allies was 
 short-lived. It was a triumph promptly and fearfully expi- 
 ated. With the massacre of Yassy and the seizure of the king 
 commenced the wars of religion of all the dark tragedies which 
 have been enacted in France, the darkest and the most disas- 
 trous. Agrippa d'Aubigne, a contemporary historian, in his 
 reviow of these events, recapitulates, in the following indig- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 431 
 
 nant terms, the vindication of the Huguenots for plunging their 
 country and themselves into those dismal hostilities. " So 
 long," he says, " as the adherents of the new religion were de- 
 stroyed merely under the forms of law, they submitted them- 
 selves to the slaughter, and never raised a hand in their own 
 defense against those injuries, cruel and iniquitous as they were. 
 But when the public authorities and the magistracy, divesting 
 themselves of the venerable aspect of justice, put daggers into 
 the hands of the people, abandoning every man to the violence 
 of his neighbors ; and when public massacres were perpetrated 
 to the sound of the drum and of the trumpet, who could forbid 
 the unhappy sufferers to oppose hand to hand, and sword to 
 sword, and to catch the contagion of a righteous fury from a 
 fury unrestrained by any sense of justice ?" 
 
 If, as is but too probable, I shall appear to have been se- 
 duced by the preceding narrative from the problem which I 
 proposed to myself at the commencement of this lecture, I 
 can, for the present, only answer that it appears to me an in- 
 dispensable preliminary to the solution of that problem. I do 
 not think it possible to explain, intelligibly, why the protest 
 made by so large a part of the people of France against the 
 tyranny and the errors of the Roman Church was not follow- 
 ed by any effectual resistance to the despotism of the reigning 
 French dynasty, without first indicating what was the nature 
 and what the principal stages of that great controversy. I 
 hope to resume and to close that inquiry in my next succeed- 
 ing lecture. 
 
 LECTURE XVI. 
 
 ON THE REFORMATION AND THE WARS OF RELIGION. 
 
 THE inquiry into the causes which rendered the Reforma- 
 tion incapable of securing the constitutional liberty of the 
 French people has conducted me to the commencement of the 
 wars of religion. The history of those wars yet remains to be 
 written. If, indeed, you turn to the Abbe Anquetil's Esprit 
 de la Ligue, you will find there a catalogue of writers who 
 
432 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 have contemplated those events in almost every conceivable 
 point of view, and under the bias of every conceivable prepos- 
 session. But they have never yet been the subject of any com- 
 prehensive narrative informed by the research and illuminated 
 by the philosophy which characterize the great historical au- 
 thors of the present age. M. Mignet's promised work, the fruit 
 of twenty-five laborious years, will, I trust, ere long supply 
 that deficiency. 
 
 The historian of the wars of religion, whenever he shall ap- 
 pear, may perhaps consider them as comprising three distinct 
 periods, each of which has an aspect and a hero peculiar to it 
 self. The first would embrace the ten years which elapsed 
 between the seizure of Orleans by Conde in 1562, and the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 years memorable for 
 the too successful treacheries of Catharine de Medici. The 
 second period, commencing from that fearful tragedy, and ter- 
 minating with the assassination of Henry III. in August, 1589, 
 would exhibit the triumph and the fall of the great command- 
 er of the League, Henry, the second Duke of Guise. The 
 third period would be that of the gallant struggle of Henry 
 IV. against the Leaguers and their foreign allies, and would 
 conclude with his purchase of the crown of France by the 
 abandonment of the faith to the defense of which his life had 
 been so solemnly consecrated both by his mother and by him- 
 self. On each of these epochs I have a few observations to 
 offer. 
 
 First, then, the supposition that Catharine was a deliberate 
 infidel, who had firmly rejected every religious creed, is sup- 
 ported by no proof, and is opposed to all probabilities. Fanat- 
 icism is the only disease of the human mind which could have 
 so utterly extinguished in her bosom all the sympathies of the 
 human heart. She must be supposed to have transcended all 
 the known limits of the wickedness of our fallen race, if, dur- 
 ing long years, she really meditated the crimes which signal- 
 ize her name, without at the same time invoking the narcotic 
 aid of some plausible sophistry. Doubtless she believed (for 
 how common has ever been the belief?) that she was doing an 
 acceptable service to God by the destruction of those whom 
 she regarded as his enemies. Doubtless the habitual profliga- 
 cy of her life and manners was not really incompatible (for 
 
THE WARS OP RELIGION. 433 
 
 how often has such guilt been reconciled ?) with an earnest 
 desire to propitiate the Divine favor. She was at once a ci uel, 
 ambitious, dissolute woman, and a zealous Catholic. 
 
 Nothing, therefore, could be more grateful to her than the 
 events of the first war or campaign, which was closed by the 
 peace of Amboise. In the eleven months over which it extend- 
 ed, both the Catholic and the Huguenot rivals of her favor had 
 been overthrown. G-uise had fallen at the siege of Orleans by 
 the hand of Poltrot ; Anthony, king of Navarre, had been slain 
 before the walls of Rouen ; and on the field of Dreux St. An- 
 dre had lost his life. Montmorency had been captured by the 
 troops of Conde, and Conde himself had been made a prisoner 
 of war by the troops of Montmorency. When false tidings 
 from the battle announced to her that the Calvinists had con- 
 quered, she calmly answered, " Well, then, we must say our 
 prayers in French." When better intelligence assured her of 
 the triumph of the Catholics, she still dressed her countenance 
 in smiles, though with a more serious purpose. 
 
 Conde was in her power. In common with the whole race 
 of Bourbon, he was the slave of disorderly passions, and of 
 that servitude the queen-mother well knew how to avail her- 
 self. He had relished the society of his Calvinistic brethren 
 in arms very much as our Charles the Second had enjoyed 
 that of the Covenanters in Scotland ; and now spells were laid 
 on him by the Armida of the French court, resembling those 
 which, in a later age, were woven by the same court for that 
 voluptuous member of the family of Stuart. She amused his 
 captivity by splendid fetes ; she threw in his way temptations 
 to more guilty pleasures ; and she fired his ambition with the 
 promise of succeeding to the office of lieutenant general of the 
 kingdom, which the death of the King of Navarre had vacated. 
 Such allurements proved irresistible. Regardless of the re- 
 monstrances of many of the captains, and of all the ministers 
 of the Huguenot armies, Conde, as the head of their party, 
 and in exercise of the general powers with which they had in- 
 vested him, signed the treaty of Amboise. It gave to the Re- 
 formers a precarious peace, but it deprived them of the right 
 which they held, under the edict of January, 1562, of worship- 
 ing in public every where beyond the walls of fortified cities. 
 Thenceforward they were to meet together for that purpose 
 
 E E 
 
434 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 only in a single place within every bailliage of France which 
 was inhabited by Protestant nobles and their retainers. 
 
 Yet Conde awaited in vain the promised wages of his infi- 
 delity. To have raised him to the office of lieutenant general 
 of France would have been to elevate him to a power not in- 
 ferior to that of the regent of the kingdom herself, and Catha- 
 rine would hazard no such competition. She therefore caused 
 the majority of Charles IX. to be announced in his fourteenth 
 year ; and a king reigning in his own right could not, of course 
 (as it was urged), divide his authority, either with a regent 
 or with a lieutenant. Palpable as was the duplicity of such 
 an evasion of her promises, Conde could not even yet escape 
 the fascinations which the queen-mother so well knew how to 
 exercise over him. Gratified by other and less costly honors, 
 he still took his place among the courtiers, and consented to 
 preside at a meeting of the Royal Council for the promulga- 
 tion of an edict which abridged even the narrow concessions 
 on the subject of public worship, which his own Treaty of 
 Amboise had made in favor of the Huguenots. After such an 
 acquiescence Conde had ceased to be formidable ; and he si- 
 lently witnessed the departure of Catharine and her son on a 
 royal progress, in which she meditated yet farther encroach- 
 ments on the hardly-earned privileges of the Reformed pastors 
 and their flocks. 
 
 At R-oussillon, accordingly, the name and the authority of 
 Charles were employed for that purpose ; and an edict of the 
 4th of August, 1564, which took its title from that place, re- 
 strained the hitherto unlimited freedom of the worship of the 
 Calvinists in private houses. Theirs was, at this time, the 
 only power in the state which balanced that of the sovereigns ; 
 and both the ambition and the bigotry of Catharine demanded 
 an absolute conquest of all such competitors. To insure it, 
 she advanced with her son as far as Bayonne, where, as the 
 representative of Philip II., the Duke of Alva awaited them ; 
 and with him she held long and secret consultations, the still 
 extant records of which point, though darkly and dubiously, 
 at the horrible catastrophe of St. Bartholomew. "Whether the 
 design was really then projected or not, it is at least certain 
 that astrology never scared mankind with a more sinister con- 
 junction than that which thus, for the first and last time, 
 
THE WARS OP RELIGION. 435 
 
 brought into the presence of each other the three deadly per- 
 secutors of those times, Italian, French, and Spanish. 
 
 The terrors inspired by that ill-omened meeting, and the 
 resentment kindled "by the successive violations of the Treaty 
 of Amboise, stimulated the Huguenots to take up again the 
 arms which, in submission to that treaty, they had reluctantly 
 laid down. They addressed remonstrances both to Conde and 
 to Catharine. To him they complained of his desertion of 
 their interests. Of her they demanded the exact fulfillment 
 of the terms of pacification. It was a demand to be evaded 
 only by the weapons which never failed her by falsehood 
 and by guile. "The time",'' she said, "had now arrived (I 
 quote, not the words, but the substance of her answer), when, 
 laying aside their dissensions with each other, Frenchmen 
 should all unite in guarding the independence of their native 
 land. Alva was marching along the eastern frontiers of France 
 wi^ji an army which, though avowedly destined to repress the 
 seditious Flemings, might turn aside to invade the domin- 
 ions of the house of Valois. All faithful subjects of that house 
 should, therefore, arm to avert such danger and disgrace from 
 the noble kingdom, of which all were the common children." 
 Such appeals were never made in vain to Frenchmen. The 
 Huguenots offered to raise and arm, at their own expense, 
 several regiments for the patriotic service. Coligny advised a 
 direct breach with Philip, and the reunion to the crown of 
 France of its ancient fief of Flanders. The queen-mother ap- 
 plauded their public spirit, but courteously declined their ad- 
 vice. " "Without imposing on the adherents of the new religion 
 any such heavy burden, she could herself (she said) levy and 
 equip the forces demanded by the occasion." Such forces 
 were accordingly summoned, and they thronged round the 
 royal banner with all the alacrity of that warlike people. It 
 was a controversial age ; yet no religious differences disturbed 
 the ranks of these zealous combatants, for no Huguenots had 
 been admitted into them ! While they believed that Catharine 
 was arming against Spain, she had been bringing together an 
 army of Catholics to act against themselves. Laying aside her 
 mask, she hailed Alva as a deliverer, succored him as an ally, 
 and prepared to enforce, by his assistance, a new edict for the 
 entire suppression of the ritual and the faith of the Reformers, 
 
436 THE REFORMATION AN0 
 
 The imminent danger roused them from their credulous re- 
 liance on the faithless Italian. Conde, awaking from his tor- 
 por, attempted, at the head of a hasty assemblage of his ancient 
 followers, to seize the persons of the queen-mother and her son 
 at Mon9eau, and, after pursuing them in their flight to Paris, 
 found himself, on the 10th of November, 1567, in the presence 
 of the royal forces, under the command of the Constable Mont- 
 morency, on the great plain of St. Denys. In the sanguinary 
 battle which followed the Catholics triumphed, but their leader 
 fell ; events for each of which Catharine expressed an equal 
 gratitude. Her dominion could no longer be disputed by any 
 rival, for the Constable had been the last survivor of the Tri- 
 umvirate ; nor could it henceforward be menaced by any relig- 
 ious faction, for the strength of the Huguenots, as she will- 
 ingly believed, was forever broken. 
 
 A few weeks revealed to her the vanity of this exultation. 
 The force of the vanquished Reformers seemed to thrive upon 
 defeat. Retreating toward the Meuse, the remnant of their 
 shattered bands effected a junction with the Grerman levies, 
 which had marched to their support under the command of 
 John Casimir, the son of the Elector Palatine, and from one 
 extremity of France to the other the civil war again raged, 
 but with redoubled fury. In turning over 'the dark records of 
 that merciless age, the eye is painfully arrested by one most 
 unwelcome incident. "We may neither deny nor conceal that, 
 in the city of Nismes, the Huguenots slaughtered, in cold 
 blood, 120 Catholics, of whom no less than 72 were defense- 
 less prisoners. It was, indeed, the act of a savage populace, 
 against which their ministers and commanders expostulated 
 in vain ; but, after such an act, we can not denounce the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew as a crime altogether without 
 provocation or without example. 
 
 It was, however, a crime which might, perhaps, have now 
 been averted by the capture of Paris itself, if Conde, who had 
 once more approached and straitened the city, had not once 
 more also been the victim of Italian intrigue. With the cour- 
 age which never failed her, Catharine herself appeared in his 
 camp, there to verify the customary boast that her tongue and 
 her pen were more than a match for the lances of her enemies. 
 Never had that tongue been more profuse of blandishments or 
 
THE WARS OP RELIGION. 437 
 
 more successful. " She came the messenger of peace to heal 
 the wounds of their bleeding country. For that end, what 
 sacrifice she asked could be excessive ? An amnesty for all 
 the past offenses, an unconditional acquiescence in all their 
 present demands, were the only terms she could propose to the 
 loyal, though misguided subjects of her son ; and guilty, in- 
 deed (she argued), would be the ambition which should induce 
 their chiefs to incur the responsibility of rejecting such pro- 
 posals, and of protracting such a war." It no longer rested 
 with those chiefs to refuse or to accept them. At the voice of 
 the siren, their followers rapidly disbanded ; and on the 20th 
 of March, 1568, the mere letter of her promises was fulfilled 
 by the signature of a new act of pacification. From the place 
 at which it was signed, it was called the Treaty of Longjumeau ; 
 but from the jesters of the times it received the more appropri- 
 ate name of the traite boiteux et mal assise, one of the negotia- 
 tors having been lame, and the other having borne the name of 
 Malassise. Mezerai dismisses it with the more serious remark, 
 that it left the Huguenots to the mercy of their enemies, with 
 no better guarantee than the word of an Italian woman. 
 
 But, though the Treaty of Longjumeau added nothing to the 
 real security of the Reformers, it effectually accomplished the 
 real purpose of the queen-mother. It raised the threatened 
 blockade and siege of Paris, and it dispersed the too credulous 
 Calvinists and their commanders. But it neither crushed nor 
 dispirited them. To Conde and Coligny, and to their followers, 
 La Rochelle afforded an- impregnable defense, and there they 
 negotiated with Elizabeth for supplies both of forces and. of 
 money. 
 
 The time had, however, now arrived, when, by one vigorous 
 effort, Catharine might not unreasonably hope to bring these 
 protracted hostilities to a close. "Weakened by their own pre- 
 cipitate disbandment, and abandoned by their German auxil- 
 iaries, the Huguenots could no longer contend on equal terms 
 with the royal armies, supported as they were by the zealous 
 co-operation both of the Spanish and of the Papal crowns. The 
 queen-mother, on the other hand, relieved by the death of the 
 aged Montmorency from the encumbrance of his unskillful 
 command, might now kindle the flame of French chivalry, and 
 gratify her own feelings, by placing the conduct of the war in 
 
438 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 the hands of the Duke of Anjou, her third and favorite son 
 then a youth in his eighteenth year ; while, to avert the dan^ 
 gers of his inexperience, Strozzi, an officer of some celebrity 
 as the leader of Italian Condottieri, might be appointed to su- 
 perintend and guide his operations in the field. 
 
 The campaign of 1569 was opened with these hopes, and, 
 ere long, the justice of them was triumphantly vindicated. On 
 the 16th of March of that year, Conde fell in the battle of Jar- 
 nac, after witnessing the defeat of the forces under his orders. 
 The body of the prince was treated with base indignities by 
 Anjou. His conduct of the Protestant cause passed as a mel- 
 ancholy, and, as it seemed, an undisputed inheritance to Co- 
 ligny. when another and still more celebrated member of the 
 house of Bourbon appeared as his successful competitor. 
 
 At the town of Saintes, then the head -quarters of the Hu- 
 guenots, Jane d'Albret presented herself, leading by either hand 
 a boy, each of whom she came to devote to the sacred cause in 
 which Conde had just fallen. One of those youths was his 
 own son, and was now the heir of his title. The other, Henry 
 of Beam, was the son of Jane herself, and of her deceased hus- 
 band, Antoine, king of Navarre. Though he had not yet com- 
 pleted his fifteenth year, the Calvinistic troops hailed him with 
 acclamations as their general-in-chief and as the protector of 
 their churches. The gallant boy welcomed the perilous com- 
 mission, and answered by an oath to persevere in the struggle 
 for religious liberty until either death or victory should have 
 brought the contest to a close. 
 
 Victory, however, was long to be wooed in vain by Henry of 
 Navarre. Within a few weeks from his solemn vow and self- 
 dedication, the hostile armies met on the field of Montcontour. 
 Of all the combats of the Huguenots, it was the most disas- 
 trous. Not more than 8000 of them escaped, leaving behind 
 them more than twice that number of their comrades, either 
 killed or prisoners, and carrying with them Coligny himself, 
 covered with wounds and overwhelmed with sorrow. D'An- 
 delot, his brother, was among the slain. A reward of 50,000 
 crowns was offered for his own head. His house was burned, 
 his estates pillaged, the wreck of his forces were in mutiny, 
 and a large number of his friends had both abandoned and re- 
 proached him. In the midst of these troubles, and within a 
 
THE WARS OP AELIGIOff. 43S 
 
 fortnight from the loss of the battle, he raised himself from his 
 sick-bed to write the following letter to his children: " We 
 will not (he said to them) repose our hopes on any of those 
 things in which the world confides, but will seek for something 
 better than our eyes can see or our hands can handle. "We will 
 follow in the steps of Christ our commander. Man, it is true, 
 has deprived us of all that man can take away, and, as such 
 is the good pleasure of God, we will be satisfied and happy. 
 Our consolation is, that we have not provoked these injuries 
 by doing any wrong to those who have injured us, but that I 
 have drawn upon me their hatred by having been employed by 
 God for the defense and Assistance of his Church. I will, 
 therefore, add nothing more except that, in His name, I ad- 
 monish and adjure you to persevere undauntedly in your stud- 
 ies and in the practice of every Christian virtue." 
 
 While Coligny was drawing these lessons of parental wis- 
 dom from his defeat, it was celebrated with rapturous exulta- 
 tion at Paris and Madrid, and with Te Deurns at Rome. But 
 scarcely had those triumphant strains died away before the in- 
 domitable Huguenot was approaching the gates of Paris at the 
 head of an army still more numerous, and better appointed than 
 that which had been overthrown at Montcontour. At the tid- 
 ings of that disaster, the mountaineers of the south and east 
 of France, and the auxiliaries of Germany, had crowded to his 
 standard, and the commander who, but a few months before, 
 had witnessed the annihilation of his army, was now prepar- 
 ing the blockade of his enemies in their capital. Against such 
 undying energy Catharine could contend no longer, and, on the 
 8th of August, 1570, she assented to the treaty of St. Germain's, 
 which not only restored to the Huguenots the freedom of pub- 
 lic worship, but placed in their keeping four cities (in the im- 
 mediate vicinity of their resources and allies), to serve as a 
 guarantee for their peaceable enjoyment of their new privileges. 
 
 Within two years and sixteen days from the treaty of St 
 Germain's, Coligny himself was assassinated, and the streets 
 of Paris were deformed by the slaughtered bodies of the vic- 
 tims of the day of St. Bartholomew. If we rely on Davila, that 
 treaty was signed by Catharine as a means of alluring the 
 heretics into her toils, and of devoting them to the extermina- 
 tion which he says had been so often meditated and so often 
 
440 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 postponed. But Davila is the constant dupe of his own sub- 
 tletv, and of his belief that the avowed and the real motives 
 of Drinces can never be the same. The hypothesis that the 
 massacre was the result of so protracted a series of artifices is 
 certainly gratuitous, and is, I think, incredible. 
 
 In August, 1570, Catharine had many motives for a sincere 
 reconciliation with the Huguenots. They had proved them- 
 selves invincible, and yet there was no longer any reason to 
 dread that they would be victorious. They had invariably 
 been defeated in the field. Their numbers had diminished, 
 and were still diminishing. Except to the south of the Loire, 
 they were every where in a decided minority. Even there they 
 were chiefly composed of the territorial lords and their rural 
 retainers. The civic populations of France were almost ex- 
 clusively Catholic. Paris was their intrenched camp, their 
 arsenal, and their treasury. 
 
 But over Paris and in the other great cities of the kingdom 
 the house of Guise was rapidly regaining the influence which 
 had raised them, in the reign of Francis II., to a dominion re- 
 sembling that of the ancient mayors of the palace. Unless she 
 could balance that power, Catharine had but little security for 
 retaining her own, and an alliance with Coligny and his fol- 
 lowers promised her that advantage with but little apparent 
 hazard. 
 
 Charles himself was the heir of the ambition of his grand- 
 father, Francis I. To gratify it he had but to anticipate the 
 policy of Richelieu, by placing himself at the head of the Prot- 
 estant against the Austrian powers of Europe. In that posi- 
 tion he might regain for his crown the ancient French fief of 
 Flanders ; the whole population of which, in revolt against 
 Philip II., were passionately invoking his aid, and proffering 
 to him their allegiance. But to that end the zealous support 
 of his Protestant subjects was indispensable. 
 
 "With such motives for fair dealing, why suppose Charles 
 and his mother to have been treacherous ? Or if we imagine 
 that truth could never find harbor in her bosom, even when it 
 would best promote her selfish purposes, how shall we explain 
 the events which actually followed the treaty of St. Germain's ? 
 It is not a conjecture, but a fact beyond all dispute, that Co- 
 ligny urged on Charles the policy of acquiring Flanders by a 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 441 
 
 declaration of war against Philip, and that Charles listened to 
 that advice with his characteristic eagerness. Active diplo- 
 matic communications followed with the Protestant princes of 
 Germany. A secret convention pledged the French king to 
 supply succors to Louis of Nassau. Privateers were fitted out 
 at La Rochelle against the fleets of Spain. Ships of war were 
 stationed off the coast of Brittany, to intercept the succors 
 destined for the relief of Alva, and an army was sent to the 
 north of France with the same apparent object. A new edict 
 was made to prevent the interference of the Catholics with the 
 education of the children of Protestants. Coligny was indem- 
 nified for all his losses in the war. Marguerite, the sister of 
 Charles, was given in marriage to Henry of Navarre ; and 
 Charles himself, rejecting the offered hand of the daughter of 
 Philip, wedded a German princess. To ascribe all these acts, 
 not to the obvious motive of gratifying the ambition of a young 
 and high-spirited prince, but to the desire of blinding the eyes 
 of the Huguenots to the fate impending over them, is an error 
 into which no one will fall who has had to do with public af- 
 fairs, not merely as a commentator, but as an agent in them ; 
 for, to every such man, how often and how clearly has the se- 
 cret been revealed that the world is governed by improvisations 
 and by improvisator!, not by prescient calculations nor by far- 
 sighted diviners of futurity ? 
 
 Doubtless, however, the massacre of St. Bartholomew was a 
 crime committed by Catharine and her sons, .and her counsel- 
 ors, deliberately and with premeditation. Nor is it difficult, 
 at least, to conjecture why or when the tide of her favor toward 
 her new Protestant allies first became refluent. "When, in the 
 spring of 1572, the approaching marriage of Henry of Navarre 
 and Marguerite had filled Paris with the adherents of both re- 
 ligions, the agents of Philip drew the attention of the queen- 
 mother to a danger to which she seems to have till then been 
 insensible. They informed her that, in the secret deliberations 
 about the affairs of the Netherlands, to which Coligny had 
 been admitted by Charles, he had counseled the young king to 
 emancipate himself from the thraldom in which she held him, 
 and that measures were in progress for removing her from any 
 farther participation in the government of France. They bade 
 her observe how universal was the enthusiasm of tho capital 
 
442 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 in favor of the ancient faith and ritual, and how rancorous the 
 antipathy with which the citizens regarded the innovators on 
 it. They pointed out to her how her own and her son's attach- 
 ment to the person of Coligny, and, as it was suspected, to his 
 cause, was rapidly destroying their popularity, and elevating 
 the Princes of Lorraine to a power which would soon become 
 too formidable for restraint ; and they appear to have suc- 
 ceeded in convincing her that the only condition on which she 
 could prolong her reign in France was that of employing the 
 house of Guise and the Catholics as her agents to crush the 
 Huguenots, that so she might at once predominate and triumph 
 over both. The documents of that time (so far as I have any 
 acquaintance with them) seem to me to trace, with sufficient 
 clearness, to such considerations as these, the departure of 
 Catharine, in August, 1572, from the policy which, in August, 
 1570, had dictated the treaty of St. Germain's. Although the 
 methods taken at last to assemble the whole Huguenot aris- 
 tocracy at Paris, and so bring them within her power, may 
 indicate that she cherished an insidious design against them 
 during some weeks before the actual perpetration of the mas- 
 sacre, we need not suppose it to have been preceded by a de- 
 liberate hypocrisy, maintained during two whole years of 
 avowed and seeming friendship. 
 
 It is for the credit of us all not to exaggerate the darkness 
 of a crime which has left so foul and indelible a disgrace upon 
 our common nature ; for, horrible as was the act itself, the 
 subsequent celebration of it was even yet more revolting. 
 Pope Gregory XIII. and his cardinals went in procession to 
 the church of St. Mark, not to deprecate in sackcloth and ashes 
 the divine vengeance on a guilty people, but " to render solemn 
 thanksgivings to God, the infinitely great and good (such is 
 the contemporary record), for the great mercy which he had 
 vouchsafed to the See of Rome and to the whole Christian 
 world." A picture of the massacre was added to the embel- 
 lishments of the Yatican, and by the pontiff's order a golden 
 medal was struck, to commemorate to all ages the triumph of 
 the Church over her enemies. The Pope found meet compan- 
 ions of his joy among the players. In all the cities of France 
 ihey frequently exhibited a tragedy called the death of Colig- 
 ny, in which he and his brother D'Andelot were represented 
 
THB WARS OF RELIGION. 443 
 
 enduring the fearful torments and cherishing the malignant 
 passions with which the imagination of Dante has arrayed the 
 place of future punishment. 
 
 Burdened as the heart is with the remembrance that the 
 princes who executed this butchery, -that the priests whc 
 thanked God for it in their masses, that the mimes who 
 chuckled over it in their ribaldry, and that the crowds who 
 night after night applauded them, were all our brethren, re- 
 flecting to us in their actual guilt our own possible criminali- 
 ty, I know not whether the apology which some recent French 
 historians have offered for their ancestors be not even yet more 
 offensive. It is, they tell lis, a mere prejudice to blame any 
 one. Man is but the creature of the age in which he lives. 
 He is borne onward by the irresistible current of events, the 
 sport of a fatality with which it is not given him to contend, 
 the helpless victim of those passions which infect and agitate 
 the social system of which he happens to be a member. This 
 doctrine, which a great historian of the French Revolution 
 brought to light to shelter its atrocities, has been adopted by 
 meaner, though not unpopular hands, to reconcile us to those 
 of St. Bartholomew. It is sufficient to answer, if indeed to 
 such profane extravagance any answer be due, that if fate 
 compelled Catharine and her sons, and their subjects, to com- 
 mit such offenses, and constrained Pope Gregory XIII. and his 
 cardinals to celebrate them with festive adorations, the same 
 inexorable fate imposes upon us the necessity of holding their 
 deeds and their memories in everlasting abhorrence. The in- 
 vocation of this stern deity from the Homeric Hades can nev- 
 er shed any real light over the ways of this upper world. In- 
 stead of affording a real or a plausible solution of the myste- 
 ries which surround us, it does at best but encumber the at- 
 tempt to resolve them by the interposition of an unmeaning 
 word. It is one of those many refuges of lies, the real pur- 
 pose of which is to dethrone the Creator from the moral gov- 
 ernment of his creation. 
 
 With the massacre of St. Bartholomew closes the first of the 
 three periods of the wars of religion. The era of treacheries 
 was now to give place to the era of conspiracies the domin- 
 ion of Catharine to the supremacy of Henry, duke of Guise. 
 France may be considered as having henceforward resolved 
 
444 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 itself into four encampments sometimes warring, sometimes 
 intriguing with each other, but each maintaining a separate 
 policy, and aiming at distinct objects. 
 
 First. The Huguenots, acknowledging as their joint chiefs 
 Henry of Navarre and his cousin, the younger Conde, were 
 composed of two dissimilar sections the Consistoriaux and 
 the Grentilshommes. The Consistoriaux comprised nearly all 
 the Calvinistic ministers and their disciples of low degree. 
 They had associated themselves together with the single ob- 
 ject of vindicating their freedom of private conscience and pub- 
 lic worship. They took up arms, even for that purpose, slow- 
 ly and with reluctance ; but they were not less reluctant to 
 lay them down again until it had been accomplished. The 
 Grentilshommes, on the other hand, were men of rank and for- 
 tune, with whom Huguenot erie was a family religion, a party 
 watchword, or a point of honor, but was seldom able to tri- 
 umph over their selfish interests or personal ambition. 
 
 Secondly. The Politiques had originally been combined to- 
 gether as a party by the Chancellor PHopital ; and, after his 
 disappearance from the world, they regarded as their chief 
 Damville, the governor of Languedoc, the second of the three 
 sons of the Constable Montmorency. The Politiques all pro- 
 fessed the religion of Rome, but were desirous, by mutual tol- 
 eration, to unite all Frenchmen to each other, and to engage 
 them all in resistance to the Papal despotism. They num- 
 bered in their ranks the governors of several provinces, a large 
 part of the magistracy, and some ministers of the Royal Coun- 
 cil, who abhorred the carnage of St. Bartholomew, and were 
 indignant at the degradation into which the court of France 
 had fallen. 
 
 Thirdly. The Catholic League was a union, under the pres- 
 idency of Henry, duke of Ghiise, of many local societies, which 
 had been formed in some of the chief cities of France for the 
 defense of the ancient faith. But the purposes of these asso- 
 ciations, when thus combined together, acquired a precision 
 and an audacity unknown to the designs of any of those sep- 
 arate bodies. The credit or responsibility of having thus ma- 
 tured so many different projects into one great and consistent 
 conspiracy belongs to David, an advocate, who, in the year 
 1576, proposed to Pope Gregory XIII. a plan, which that pon- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 445 
 
 tiff ultimately sanctioned, and promised to reconcile to the con- 
 sciences of the people of France. It was nothing less than the 
 deposition of the house of Valois in favor of the house of G-uise, 
 on condition of their engaging to annul all edicts of toleration ; 
 to exterminate all forms of heresy ; to accept the decrees of 
 the Council of Trent ; to acknowledge their own spiritual al- 
 legiance to the Papacy ; and to obtain from the States- General 
 of France a similar acknowledgment. Even in the commis- 
 sion of such a treason, the advocate could not renounce his pro 
 fessional solicitude to be fortified by legal arguments, and Da- 
 vid therefore conducted Gregory to the desired conclusion by 
 the following chain of reasoning : 
 
 First ; Pepin, he said, had acquired the crown of France 
 from the donation of Pope Zachary. Secondly ; together with 
 that temporal right, Zachary had conferred upon Pepin an ap- 
 ostolical benediction. Thirdly ; Hugues Capet had, six hund- 
 red years before, usurped the secular sovereignty which his 
 descendants still retained. But, fourthly, neither he nor they 
 had inherited, or could usurp, the apostolical benediction which 
 was indispensable to the spiritual character of every legitimate 
 dynasty. Fifthly ; the right of the successors of St. Peter to 
 confer that benediction, and with it that spiritual character 
 and legitimate power, was indefeasible and imprescriptible. 
 Sixthly ; it was their duty to confer it on the most worthy. 
 Seventhly ; the superiority of desert plainly belonged to Hen- 
 ry, duke of Guise ; and, finally, if Gregory would bestow on 
 him the spiritual title to 'the French crown, the mere temporal 
 right must follow as a comparatively unimportant but insep- 
 arable accessory. 
 
 Of David's biography I know nothing, but it seems impos- 
 sible that so astute a lawyer should have missed of distinction 
 in the Palais de Justice. His esoteric doctrines were long re- 
 served for those who were initiated into the higher mysteries 
 of the League. His exoteric teaching was propagated in the 
 form of an act of association, through almost every province, 
 city, and hamlet of France. Many different forms of it, indeed, 
 seem to have been in use, but in each of them the subscribers 
 bound themselves by three distinct pledges the first, to assist 
 all the other members of the confederacy ; the second, to ren- 
 der an absolute obedience to its chief ; and the third, to devote 
 
446 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 every thing, life itself included, to the extermination of the her- 
 etics, and to the exclusion from France of every religion other 
 than that of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman See. 
 
 There was no age, or sex, or profession, or trade, or rank in 
 France which did not contribute many members to this Holy 
 League. But foremost in zeal were the Clergy. The bishop 
 and chapter of every cathedral, the abbot and monks of every 
 monastery, the brethren of every religious order, and the in- 
 cumbents of every parish church, were organized into a com- 
 pact spiritual militia, with garrisons in every city, and de- 
 tachments in every village of the kingdom, ever ready to ani- 
 mate the zealous and to rebuke the languid in the same sacred 
 cause, and to cheer, with assurances of present pardon and 
 future peace, every one who hazarded his life in defense of it. 
 
 Second only to the Clerical were the Civic partisans of the 
 League, and, among all cities, Paris was pre-eminent for her 
 devotedness. The ancient corporate institutions of the capi- 
 tal became the basis of the new political or religious organi- 
 zation. The prevots of the merchants in their respective dis- 
 tricts became lieutenants of the League in each. Every guild 
 resolved itself into a committee for promoting the success of 
 that holy alliance. The Dixaniers, or officers of the town 
 guard, were all placed at the head of companies, which might 
 be convened at the first sound of the tocsin. The Q,uarteniers, 
 or chiefs of the sixteen quarters of Paris, had each the com- 
 mand of a regiment of Leaguers ; and the Sections, to which, 
 in a later age, the revolutionary leaders gave so fearful a ce- 
 lebrity, were called into action for the first time, not by them, 
 but by the Leaguers of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Religious enthusiasm, though the most active, was not the 
 single principle of their association. Their leaders were skill- 
 ful to touch all the chords to which the plebeian mind habit- 
 ually vibrates ; and they did not attempt the subversion of an 
 ancient dynasty by the hands of the people without themselves 
 cultivating the character and the arts of demagogues a char- 
 acter which no magnanimous man will ever assume, and arts 
 which no honest man will ever practice. Although neither 
 magnanimous nor honest, or rather because he was neither, 
 Guise excelled all men in the power of winning the popular 
 confidence and of controlling the popular will. Gifted with 
 
THE WARS OP RELIGION. 447 
 
 illustrious hereditary rank, a noble presence, a frank and court- 
 eous bearing, invincible courage, sympathy, or the resemblance 
 of sympathy, with the suffering many against the prosperous 
 few, and prodigal without stint in promises of reform, he was 
 the favorite courtier of the multitudes who, from his lips, ea- 
 gerly accepted their accustomed tribute of lavish flattery ad- 
 dressed to themselves, and of bitter invective directed against 
 their superiors. Proposing to become the Napoleon, he com- 
 menced by becoming the Mirabeau of his generation. The 
 League, therefore, under his orders, distributed manifestoes 
 echoing all the grievances of the States- General. It demand- 
 ed, not merely an absolute unity of religion in France, but the 
 abolition of taxes, the independence of the Parliaments, and 
 triennial States- General. It became a great Democratic Con- 
 federacy for the overthrow not merely of the heresies of the 
 Huguenots, but of many of the prerogatives of the royal house, 
 and of many privileges of the seignorial families. 
 
 And yet some of the noblest of those families continued to 
 increase both the power and the numbers of the confederates. 
 By joining their ranks, the Dukes of Nevers, Mercoeur, Aumale, 
 and Elbeuf, with a long list of inferior grandees, rose to mili- 
 tary commands, to civic governments, and to offices of emolu- 
 ment. Nor were there wanting magistrates of eminent wis- 
 dom, nor even men of undisputed moral worth, to impart to 
 the League the weight of their judicial authority and of their 
 personal virtues. -:.' 
 
 The most efficient allies, however, of Guise and his follow- 
 ers were the pontiffs who, in that age, occupied the chair of 
 St. Peter. That Gregory XIII., who had chanted eucharistic 
 masses in honor of the darkest crime which stains the annals 
 of Christendom, should have been the willing dupe of the 
 sophisms of the advocate David, is not surprising ; but from 
 his successor, Sixtus V., better things might not unreasonably 
 have been expected, for he holds no mean rank among the 
 magnanimous princes who, at no infrequent intervals, have 
 worn the Papal tiara. The amusing account of his life by 
 Gregorio Leti, which most of us may have read either in Ital- 
 ian or in English, must be considered rather as a romance 
 than as a history ; for the biographer of Sixtus lacked either 
 the diligence to study, or the capacity to appreciate, the eleva- 
 
448 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 tion and the dignity of his hero. Though no canonized Than 
 maturgist, Sixtus wrought architectural miracles, which tc 
 this hour astonish and delight every visitor of Rome, and ia 
 celebrated by Ranke as among the wisest of the legislators, 
 and the most vigorous of the administrators, by whom the 
 Ecclesiastical States have been governed. Ho was a celebra* 
 ted preacher, a laborious scholar, and a liberal patron of litera- 
 ture ; and the edition of the Holy Scriptures, which was print- 
 ed during his reign at his own press, was throughout corrected 
 by his own hand. He labored at the internal reformation oi 
 the Church over which he presided ; and the best attestation 
 of his personal worth and piety ? is, that he enjoyed the affec- 
 tion and esteem of St. Charles of Borromeo. And yet, such is 
 the power of our corrupt passions when engaged in any cause 
 which is supposed to sanctify the indulgence of them, thai 
 Sixtus encouraged and applauded, and became responsible for, 
 crimes which " might have wounded the conscience of a buc- 
 caneer." 
 
 In Philip II. of Spain the Leaguers had yet another associ- 
 ate, whose zeal for their cause burned fiercely, though his at* 
 tachment to their persons and to their political privileges was 
 but equivocal. In his letters, for the publication of which the 
 world is indebted to M. Capefigue, he exhibits himself in a 
 character for a resemblance to which all the preceding history 
 of mankind may be traced in vain, till we ascend to the mo- 
 rose and gloomy solitude of Tiberias at Caprese. From his 
 silent retreat at St. Lorenzo, Philip contemplated the outei 
 world in a spirit in which the dark melancholy of Johanna, 
 and the boundless ambition of Charles, his two immediate 
 predecessors, were combined with the marble-hearted fanati- 
 cism and the austere devotion of St. Dominic, to the mainte- 
 nance of whose institutes he and they had been devoted. En- 
 dowed with unrivaled wealth, and power, and talents, and 
 constancy of purpose, he employed them all to establish the 
 two cardinal principles by which, as he judged, this fair world 
 and every province of it ought to be governed ; the one, the 
 absolute dominion of the See of Rome in all spiritual matters, 
 the other the absolute dominion of the crown in all secular 
 affairs. To use or to assert the right of private judgment waa 
 treason against the Tiara. To refuse a passive and implicit 
 
THE- WARS OP RELIGION. 449 
 
 obedience to the prince was treason against the Diadem. To 
 those ecclesiastical and temporal chiefs, and to them alone, it 
 belonged to direct the conduct of mankind. To all other men 
 it belonged only to submit themselves to that supreme guid- 
 ance. The tide of mental and political freedom was rising on 
 every side around him, and to their proud waves he opposed 
 the stern and inflexible resistance of those maxims, boldly as- 
 serted in theory, and as boldly reduced to practice. 
 
 The democratic tendencies of the Holy League had, there- 
 fore, excited the jealousy of Philip, even while he aided with 
 complacency the death struggles in which it was engaged 
 with Protestantism. And thus it happened that, while lavish 
 in promises to the confederates, he actually afforded them his 
 support with wary and hesitating steps. His true design may 
 clearly be traced in his correspondence. It was first to unite 
 the Leaguers and the king for the destruction of the Hugue- 
 nots in France, and then to enlist them both in his own more 
 comprehensive project for exterminating all the heretics in Eu- 
 rope by a union of the Catholic powers, acting under his own 
 direction in the cabinet, and under the command of Alexander 
 Farnese and his other generals in the field. 
 
 Far as the event fell short of his anticipations, they were 
 not wholly unfulfilled. But his success was purchased at the 
 expense of the imperishable hatred of his own name, of the 
 debasement of his descendants, and of the degradation which 
 from that age to our own has overspread his once prosperous 
 and formidable kingdom.' 
 
 The fourth and last of the parties into which France was 
 divided was composed of the king, the queen-mother, and the 
 adherents of their court. It is difficult to characterize this 
 body without touching on topics on which it is irksome to 
 dwell, and the particular mention of which might involve some 
 impropriety. Charles IX. had died within a few months from 
 the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and it seems more chari- 
 table with his enemies to believe, than with his partisans 
 to deny, that his last hours were consumed in agonies of re- 
 morse. Henry III., his brother and successor, excited equal 
 wonder by his superstition and his licentiousness. Sometimes 
 he might be seen traversing the streets as a flagellant, with 
 baro head and feet, and with shoulders which afforded the 
 
 FF 
 
450 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 most unequivocal proofs that his whip had not fallen on them 
 idly or in sport. At other times he would join in a religious 
 procession, accompanied by Sibillot, his favorite fool, who par- 
 odied, in grotesque antics and irreverent songs, the ceremonial 
 and the chants of that devout solemnity. The next hour would 
 find him bestowing the most costly and extravagant favors on 
 the youths by whom he was surrounded, or outraging not only 
 the dignity of his crown, but the decorous gravity of manhood, 
 by the exaggeration, in his own person, of their debauched 
 manners and effeminate appearance ; or even descending so 
 low as to amuse them by assuming female attire, and repre- 
 senting before them equivocal female characters. And yet 
 among these lawless revelers (Mignons was the name they 
 familiarly bore) were many who, with all the light-hearted 
 gallantry of their native land, could dally with danger and 
 with death on the field of battle ; and two of them, the Dukes 
 de Joyeuse and D'Epernon, rose to eminence both as military 
 commanders and as statesmen. 
 
 Catharine, the queen-mother, though in the decline of life, 
 retained all her ancient passion for power, for treachery, and 
 for intrigue ; but, adapting her machinations to the now di- 
 minished authority of the crown, she won adherents to the 
 royal cause by the same shameful arts in which the Princes 
 of Midian were instructed by the Chaldean prophet. Follow- 
 ed by a train of maids of honor, than whom no ladies ever less 
 merited that title, she used them as her too ready instruments 
 of seducing those whom she could not otherwise subdue, not 
 scrupling to spread such toils even for her own son-in-law, 
 Henry, the brave but too ductile and self-indulgent King of 
 Navarre. 
 
 The history of France, during the second period of the wars 
 of religion, is composed of the intrigues and conflicts by which 
 these four parties, the Huguenots, the Politiques, the League, 
 and the Court, endeavored to deceive, to conciliate, or to con- 
 quer one another. The successive involutions of their policy 
 are developed in the annals of their age with a rapidity like 
 that with which the scenes are shifted in a mimic theatre. 
 At one time the Huguenots alone successfully resist the royal 
 arms. Then, entering into a traitorous conspiracy with each 
 other, the Huguenots and the Politiques establish a state with- 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 45] 
 
 in a state, and by their combined forces extort from the king 
 an almost unconditional acquiescence in their joint demands. 
 The next act of the drama finds the crown and the Politiques 
 allied against the Huguenots, and compelling them to surren- 
 der most of their recently acquired privileges. The League 
 now appears on the crowded stage, constraining the court to. 
 subscribe a compact with them for the utter extirpation of 
 heretics and of heresy from the land. The papal thunders are 
 then heard in the distance, excommunicating "the bastard and 
 detestable race of the Bourbons," and depriving them of the 
 succession to the crown of France an insult which Henry of 
 Navarre answers by the destruction of the Catholic army at 
 Coutras, while Cruise avenges that loss by overwhelming the 
 Protestant army of German auxiliaries. Those events are 
 followed by the barricades of Paris, the flight of the king to 
 Chartres, his humiliations at that city, the second States- Gren- 
 eral of Blois, and the assassination of Cruise by the command 
 and in the presence of his sovereign. The Royalists, the Pol- 
 itiques, and the Huguenots, then forming a temporary alliance, 
 assemble a vast army for the capture of Paris and the anni- 
 hilation of the League. But at that critical moment the knife 
 of the monk Jacques Clement retaliates the murder of Cruise 
 by the assassination of his royal murderer, and changes the 
 whole conduct and character of the war. In that age of ter- 
 ror the deed excited but little abhorrence, though even that 
 iron generation must have been appalled to hear that Pope 
 Sixtus V., calling himself the vicar of Christ on earth, had, in 
 the full consistory at Rome, hazarded the frightful avowal 
 that he regarded the self-devotion and martyrdom of Clement 
 as admitting of no unequal comparison with the self-sacrifice 
 which had been endured at Calvary. 
 
 The house of Yalois. Iwas now extinct. Those bloody and 
 deceitful men had not lived out half their days. Henry II. 
 perished in the prime of life by the lance of Montgomery. His 
 eldest son, Francis II., did not complete his nineteenth year. 
 The unhappy Charles IX., his second son, had not reached the 
 age of twenty-four when he died, in strange and fearful tor- 
 ments. At the same early period, the Duke d'Alenpon, the 
 fourth son of Henry, fell a victim to intemperance. Henry 
 III., his only other son, was assassinated in his thirty-eighth 
 
452 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 year. Francis of G-uise met the same fate, while in the fall 
 vigor of his manhood ; and Henry of Guise had not accomplish- 
 ed his thirty-seventh year, when he, also, was struck down hy 
 the daggers of hired murderers. It was not without an intel- 
 ligible and an awful purpose that a retributive providence thus 
 openly rebuked the persecutors of their brethren ; and yet the 
 condemnation which impartial history must pronounce on all 
 the later sovereigns of the house of Yalois may, perhaps, be 
 justly mitigated by the belief that the madness of their pred- 
 ecessor, Charles YL, was, to some extent, hereditary in his 
 race. It is a welcome escape from conclusions hardly other- 
 wise to be avoided, but which the reverence due to our com- 
 mon humanity must make every one anxious to avoid. 
 
 /The third and last period of the wars of religion belongs to 
 the military rather than to the civil annals of France. It has 
 been sung by the French Yirgil in the French ^Eneid ; and 
 they who have read the.Henriade (if, indeed, any of us can 
 honestly say that they ever did or could read it) would hardly 
 endure a prosaic account of that merciless controversy. De- 
 spite all the enthusiasm of Yoltaire, I must, however, doubt 
 whether his ^Eneas was really a great captain ; and I regard 
 it as beyond all dispute, that his story, like that of his Trojan 
 prototype, is rather disfigured than embellished by the Didos 
 who occupy so conspicuous a place in it. But no wit or genius 
 can ever rescue the real catastrophe of the French epic from 
 shame, and regret, and indignation. 
 
 Henry IY. had been trained in the Calvinistic creed by his 
 mother, Jane d'Albret. D'Aubigne, who knew her well, says 
 of her, that though perfectly feminine in every other respect, 
 she possessed a masculine intrepidity of soul ; that her capac- 
 ity was equal to the most arduous duties, and her heart in- 
 vincible by the greatest calamities. Her son was the heir of 
 her courage and her understanding, but not of her devotion or 
 lier constancy. The early impressions of her maternal love 
 and wisdom were, probably, never altogether obliterated from 
 his mind, even by the habitual licentiousness both of his early 
 and of his mature life. Yet such license never was, and never 
 can be, associated with the faith which prepares man P by self- 
 conquest, to become the conqueror of the world. So far as any 
 real religious convictions can be ascribed to Henry, he seems 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 453 
 
 to have been a Protestant to the last ; but that no such con- 
 victions had a very firm hold on his mind is the inference to 
 be drawn from almost every passage of his life. When at last 
 he preferred the abandonment of his creed to the loss of his 
 crown, it may perhaps have appeared to himself, as it evidently 
 did to his friends, that he was rather incurring an imputation 
 on his honor as a gentleman than inflicting a wound on his 
 conscience as a Christian. To this day the apostasy is defend- 
 ed and the dishonor denied by many of his countrymen, on 
 grounds against which a protest must be made by every one 
 to whom truth and integrity are something better than empty 
 words. 
 
 " Consider," it is said, " the consequences which hung on 
 his decision. By adhering to the Reformed Church, he must 
 have prolonged the most disastrous of all civil wars he must 
 have seen the dismemberment of France between the League 
 and Philip II. he must himself have been superseded in favor 
 of the Duke of Mayenne, by the States- General whom the duke 
 had convened at Paris he must thus have abdicated the throne 
 of the Bourbons to the house of Guise, and must have delivered 
 up the Huguenots as defenseless victims to the bigotry of the 
 Leaguers and their head. On the other hand, by returning to 
 the bosorn of the Church of Rome, Henry," proceed his apol- 
 ogists, " had the certainty, not only of escaping these dangers, 
 but of restoring peace to his kingdom, of transmitting the 
 crown to his posterity, and of securing toleration to his ancient 
 Protestant adherents. With what reason of humanity," they 
 ask, " could he, in the prospect of such consequences, persist 
 any longer in maintaining a religious creed, and observing an 
 ecclesiastical ritual, to which, after all, he had never given 
 more than a hesitating and thoughtless preference ?" 
 
 To the question thus stated may first be opposed another 
 question, What is the depth of criminality thus imputed to 
 Henry IV. by those who represent him as conducting, during 
 many successive years, the most deadly civil war recorded in 
 the History of Christendom for the establishment of a religion 
 to which neither his heart nor his understanding yielded any 
 genuine allegiance ? His accusers have never raised so heavy 
 an accusation against him as is thus preferred by his apologists. 
 The reverence due to the memory of so great a man, and aL 
 
454 THE REFORMATION ANl> 
 
 the probabilities of the case, require us to reject the hypothesis 
 that he was a hypocrite, even when leading the Huguenots in 
 the fields of Coutras and of Ivry. His real responsibility is 
 that of having acted on the belief that, by disavowing his 
 faith, he would best promote the interests of his people, of his 
 descendants, and of himself. His error was that of elevating 
 the human above the Divine prescience, and of claiming for 
 the foresight of man a higher authority than for the immuta- 
 ble laws of Grod. Doubtless it was not without some plausible 
 sophistry that he reconciled to himself so willful and so solemn 
 a departure from the sacred obligations of truth. Doubtless 
 he believed it to be, on the whole, expedient for others and for 
 himself. But that it was really inexpedient we know, be- 
 cause we know that, by the divine law, it was unequivocally 
 forbidden. 
 
 What the future history of France would have been if Henry 
 had clung to his integrity, is known only to the Omniscient ; 
 but, with the annals of France in our hands, we have no diffi- 
 culty in perceiving that the day of his impious, because pre- 
 tended conversion, was among the dies nefasti of his country. 
 
 It restored peace, indeed, to that bleeding land, and it gave 
 to himself an undisputed reign of seventeen years ; but he 
 found them years replete with cares and terrors, and disgraced 
 by many shameful vices, and at last abruptly terminated by 
 the dagger of an assassin. It rescued France, indeed, from 
 the evils of a disputed succession, but it consigned her to two 
 centuries of despotism and misgovernment. It transmitted the 
 crown, indeed, to seven in succession of the posterity of Henry, 
 but of them one died on the scaffold, three were deposed by 
 insurrections of their subjects, one has left a name pursued by 
 unmitigated and undying infamy, and another lived and died 
 in a monastic melancholy, the feeble slave of his own minis- 
 ter. The grandson of Henry, Louis XIV., amid the splendors 
 which surrounded him, may appear to have been a brilliant 
 exception from the dark fatality which waited on the other 
 sovereigns of the house of Bourbon ; but even he, by the licen- 
 tiousness of his personal habits, by the arbitrary system of his 
 government, by his wild extravagance, by his iniquitous wars, 
 and by his remorseless persecutions, paved the downward path 
 to the ruin of his name, of his dynasty, and of his race. If 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 45' 
 
 any prophetic voice could have disclosed to Henry the events 
 really depending on his purchase of his crown by apostasy, 
 would that purchase have been made ? If he had sought for 
 guidance in the sacred book, which was the corner-stone of 
 the faith he abandoned, would it not have reminded him that 
 ; ' the lip of truth shall be established forever, but that a lying 
 tongue is but for a moment ?" 
 
 It must not, however, be forgotten, that one of the results 
 of Henry's renunciation of the Reformed faith was glorious 
 to himself, and was, for a time, eminently advantageous to his 
 people. It enabled him, in April, 1598, to promulgate the 
 Edict of Nantes the great Charter of Protestantism in France. 
 It commenced by an acknowledgment that God was adored 
 and worshiped by all the French people, if not in the same 
 forms, yet with the same intentions ; and it was then declared 
 to be a perpetual and irrevocable law, the chief foundation of 
 the union and tranquillity of the state First, that all men 
 should enjoy, in private, full liberty of conscience. Secondly, 
 that the free public celebration of the Protestant worship should, 
 in all future times, be permitted in every place in which it had 
 been actually celebrated, immediately before the date of that 
 edict. Thirdly, that all superior lords might hold meetings for 
 public worship within the precincts of their chateaux, and that 
 every inferior gentleman might receive as many as thirty vis- 
 itors at his domestic worship. Fourthly, that the Protestants 
 should participate in all the benefits of public employments, 
 schools, hospitals, and charities. Fifthly, that they should pos- 
 sess five academies for the education of youth. Sixthly, that 
 they might convene and hold national synods ; and, seventhly, 
 that they should occupy several fortified cities, for securing to 
 them the faithful observance of these concessions. That they 
 were ill observed is indeed true, and that at length the grand- 
 son of Henry revoked his " perpetual and irrevocable" law is 
 also true. Yet, during eighty-seven years, it remained the 
 measure and the rule, if not the effectual bulwark, of the rights 
 of the Protestant population of France. 
 
 How, then (to resume the question with which I commenced 
 my last preceding lecture), did it happen, that the protest made 
 by so large a part of that population against the spiritual tyr- 
 anny of the Roman Church was not followed by any effectual 
 
456 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 resistance to the despotism of the Bourbon Dynasty ? The de- 
 tails with which I have hitherto detained you will now, I trust, 
 enable me to bring into a narrow compass my answer to that 
 inquiry. 
 
 That answer in general is, that the Reformation was unpro- 
 ductive of civil liberty in France, because the Reformed Church 
 in that country was never able to attain to more than a tem- 
 porary and precarious toleration. The more precise answer, 
 in my judgment at least, is, that this ill success is to be at- 
 tributed to the eight following causes : 
 
 First. The Calvinistic type which Protestantism assumed 
 in France was alien from the national character. While yet 
 a novelty, indeed, it was also a fashion. To sing the hymns 
 of Marot in the Pre-aux-Clercs, or to join the multitude which 
 thronged the pulpit of Theodore Beza, was the mode in a coun- 
 try where that capricious power has ever erected the chief seat 
 of her dominion. But, ere long, the national spirit reasserted 
 its indefeasible authority. Turning away from the cold, un- 
 impressive worship of Greneva, the great, the noble, and the 
 rich, followed by the crowd which usually follows them, joined 
 again in theatrical processions to the shrines of their patron 
 saints, and knelt as before around the altars, where the dra- 
 matic solemnities of the mass were celebrated amid clouds of 
 incense and strains of sacred harmony. In religion, as in ev- 
 ery thing else, the craving of the French mind for spectacle, 
 for representation, and for effect, is, and ever has been, insa- 
 tiable. 
 
 Secondly. The Calvinistic system was distinguished from 
 that of all the other Reformed churches by the extent to which 
 it rejected ecclesiastical tradition, and erected the whole super- 
 structure of belief and worship on the Holy Scriptures, as in- 
 terpreted by Calvin himself. Not content to sever those bonds 
 which, reaching back to the most remote Christian antiquity, 
 should hold together the churches of every age in one indis- 
 soluble society, he imposed on his disciples, and on their spir- 
 itual progeny in all future time, other bonds, wrought by him- 
 self from his study of the Bible, and embracing the whole com- 
 pass, not of theology alone, but of moral philosophy also. His 
 Christian Institutes claimed and acquired for a season, in his 
 Church, an empire resembling that which the logic and ethics 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 457 
 
 of Aristotle had so long enjoyed in the schools. But Calvin 
 was not an Aristotle. His vivacious, inquisitive, skeptical fel- 
 low-countrymen were not schoolmen. Ere many years had 
 passed, they became impatient of the dogmatism even of their 
 great patriarch himself. By attempting to "bring all moral 
 science within the sphere of theology, and "by converting sci- 
 entific principles into articles of faith, he had exposed to the 
 attacks of that ingenious and versatile people a long line of 
 positions, many of which, even when found to he defenseless, 
 could not be abandoned with safety to the rest. The reaction 
 which took place hurried the insurgents from one extreme to 
 the other. Servetus may be said to have at length obtained 
 his revenge. The doctrines for which he died were widely dif- 
 fused throughout the churches founded by the author of his 
 death ; for, in the history of Calvinism in France, we have the 
 most impressive of all illustrations of the truth, that no Chris- 
 tian society can sever itself from the ancient and once univer- 
 sal commonwealth of the Christian Church, except at the im- 
 minent risk of sacrificing the essence of Christianity to the 
 spirit of independence. The Socinianism of the later Protest- 
 ant Church of France was at once the proof of its inherent 
 weakness and the cause of its farther decline. 
 
 Thirdly. The Reformation in France became comparative- 
 ly barren of constitutional freedom and of its other legitimate 
 fruits, because the Reformed Church there soon and widely de- 
 parted from its appropriate character, to assume the office of a 
 party in the state. The alliance of the Huguenots with the 
 Politiques was fatal at once to the religious discipline of the 
 former and to their personal sanctity. Their preachers fore- 
 saw the contaminating influence of that association, and earn- 
 estly, but vainly, dissuaded it. Thus the treaty of Milhau, of 
 December, 1573, between the Protestants and Politiques, was 
 little, if at all, less than a deliberate treason. Thus, also, the 
 still more intimate connection between the Consistoriaux and 
 the Grentilshommes, in the ranks of the Huguenots themselves, 
 was formed at a grievous detriment to the severer virtues by 
 which the early Reformers had baen distinguished. It is the 
 testimony of a writer of their own age and party, that the flame 
 of piety among the Calvinists had been effectually extinguished 
 by the dissolute and scandalous examples of their more world- 
 
458 THE REFORMATION AND 
 
 ly associates, and that debauchery advanced and overflowed 
 among them far and wide, like an uncontrollable torrent. 
 
 Fourthly. The virtue, and with it the energy and the suc- 
 cess, of the Protestants was farther impaired by the seductions 
 to which their chiefs and leaders were exposed from their too 
 frequent contact with Catharine and her court. Rank, office, 
 and all the other allurements of royal patronage were employed 
 to shake their fidelity ; and Mezerai asserts that more Hugue- 
 nots were converted in four years by these methods, than had 
 been induced to abandon their religion in forty years by the 
 terrors of the scaffold and of the sword. 
 
 Fifthly. Even yet more fatal to the religious spirit, and, 
 therefore, to the moral and political influence of the Hugue- 
 nots, were the sanguinary habits they contracted during many 
 years of civil warfare. The atrocities of that dark era were 
 not confined to the Catholics. As the contest proceeded, the 
 parties on either side became gradually bereft, not only of the 
 spirit of Christianity, but of the feelings of our common hu- 
 manity ; while the moral sense was paralyzed, if not deadened, 
 by the sight and the perpetration of remorseless cruelties. To 
 men stained with such crimes, however sorely provoked to the 
 commission of them, it was not given to raise aloft the cross 
 of the Redeemer, and to announce the tidings of peace and 
 reconciliation. By the lips of such heralds, even the Gospel 
 itself was proclaimed in vain. 
 
 Sixthly. The relations between the Huguenot Church and 
 the state being always those of antagonists, there subsisted 
 between them no alliance to arrest that instability of religious 
 opinions to which independent ecclesiastical bodies are so much 
 addicted, or to infuse into the body politic those principles of 
 social equality and of mental freedom by which the Protestant 
 Churches are habitually distinguished. 
 
 Seventhly. It was the error and the misfortune of the 
 French Protestants to confide the conduct of their cause to the 
 princes of the house of Bourbon. The first of them, Anthony 
 of Navarre, deserted and betrayed it in the visionary hope that 
 the Triumvirate would reward him by the exchange of his 
 nominal crown for a real sovereignty. His brother, Louis de 
 Conde, deserted and betrayed it in the persuasion that Catha- 
 rine would confer upon him the office of lieutenant general of 
 
THE WARS OF RELIGION. 459 
 
 France. The younger Conde deserted and betrayed it to res- 
 cue his life from the assassins of St. Bartholomew. Henry IY. 
 twice abjured the Protestant creed, first for the preservation of 
 his life, and then for the preservation of his crown. These 
 treacheries of the four Bourbons, whom the Huguenots fol- 
 lowed in the civil wars, were only less fatal to their interests 
 than the unrelenting persecutions of the thre*e Bourbons, who 
 successively occupied the French throne between the death of 
 Henry IV. and the accession of Louis XVI. For, 
 
 Eighthly. It is to the persecutions to which the Protestants 
 were exposed, from the time of their first appearance in the 
 city of Meaux till the near approach of the French Revolution, 
 that we must chiefly ascribe their failure to acquire the author- 
 ity and influence necessary to their propagation of constitution- 
 al liberty in France. The story of these persecutions, so mer- 
 ciless, so unrelenting, and so continuous, fills vast volumes 
 which have been dedicated to the memory of the sufferers by 
 the martyrologists of their own party. It is a story which no 
 man would either willingly read, or repeat, or even abbreviate. 
 It exhibits our common nature in its most offensive aspect. It 
 pervades every era of the French annals. It assumes every 
 conceivable form of cruelty and injustice, and many forms in- 
 conceivable to the darkest imagination, unaided by an actual 
 knowledge of those horrible details. If the most terrific act of 
 this prolonged tragedy was the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
 the most revolting was the Dragonnades of Louis XIV. Cath- 
 arine and her son had at least the excuse of believing that the 
 enemies they destroyed were dangerous to their own safety, 
 and their offense was not committed under the veil of any em- 
 inent devotion. Madame de Maintenon and her husband, on 
 the other hand, neither felt, nor affected to feel, any dread of 
 the myriads of helpless victims whom they impoverished, ban- 
 ished, imprisoned, and destroyed. But it was at the bidding 
 of their confessors with the cordial support of their priest- 
 hood with prayers continually on their lips and in the name 
 of the Prince of Peace, that they daily offered up these human 
 sacrifices. The blood of the martyrs has, indeed, been the seed 
 of the Church, but not when the hearts of the persecutors have 
 been sufficiently steeled against all lassitude, compunction, and 
 remorse In almost every part of Europe, which at this day 
 
460 rOWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 acknowledges the spiritual dominion of the Papacy, the sword, 
 the scourge, the brand, and the ax, wielded by the secular pow- 
 ers, under the guidance of their spiritual advisers, have effect- 
 ually arrested the progress of the Reformation. In France, 
 those weapons were but too successfully employed, by the 
 houses of Valois and of Bourbon, to crush religious liberty, 
 and with it to eradicate the seeds of constitutional freedom. 
 But they were also, however, unconsciously employed to pre- 
 pare the way for the convulsions by which two whole genera- 
 tions of mankind have been unceasingly agitated, and by which 
 the Capetian Dynasty has again and again been subverted from 
 its once immovable foundations. 
 
 LECTURE XVII. 
 
 ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 AT the commencement of these lectures, I observed that it 
 was the high office of History to trace out the progress of pub- 
 lic opinion in molding the character and the condition of the 
 nations ; and I added that to indicate some of the steps of that 
 progress in France was the arduous task which I had ventured 
 to propose to myself. It is, indeed, a task so arduous, that I 
 ought, perhaps, to apologize for undertaking it at all. The lei- 
 sure and the studies of a whole life would scarcely be sufficient 
 for following the course of a few only of the many confluent 
 streams by which the current of opinion was fed and swollen, 
 as it shaped out the destinies of the French people. Who, in- 
 deed, shall undertake, with any confidence, to determine what 
 were the political views, or what the moral sentiments, most 
 widely diffused among them at each successive epoch of their 
 national life ? Or who will pretend to such skill in the science 
 of moral analytics as to be able to resolve into their elements? 
 the motives by which they were actuated, or the judgments by 
 which they were guided, at even any one solitary period of the 
 long centuries of their political existence ? If the secrets of 
 any single bosom baffle the keenest human scrutiny, how may 
 we hope to penetrate the mysteries of those great social move- 
 
iOWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 461 
 
 tnents, in the production of which the wills of myriads, if not 
 of millions, of independent agents were concurring ? 
 
 I answer, that all we can expect, and perhaps all that we 
 can desire, is to approximate to the true solution of these enig- 
 mas ; and that, though nothing less than Omniscience can 
 completely resolve them, yet the faculties intrusted to ordinary 
 men may be sufficient to ascertain both what have been the 
 predominant propensities of a great people during the growth 
 and development of their power, and in what sources such na- 
 tional characteristics have chiefly originated. The foremost 
 minds of France have at all times been not only the zealous 
 authors, but the faithful interpreters also, of the thoughts and 
 purposes of their successive generations. In the darkest not 
 less than in the brightest seasons, a voice exhorting, guiding, 
 and animating the French people was ever raised by the 
 Church, through her ministers and in her ministrations by 
 the Parliaments, through their illustrious magistrates by the 
 States-Greneral, through their patriotic leaders -and especially 
 by Literature, through those master spirits who labored, from 
 one age to another, to enrich, to accumulate, and to transmit 
 the intellectual patrimony of their own and of all succeeding 
 times. It was, indeed, a voice which gave utterance to many 
 discordant lessons ; sometimes inculcating either the sacred 
 truths and laws of our most holy faith, or the received doctrines 
 of moral and political philosophy, or the sense of honor, or the 
 love of country ; and, on other occasions, teaching either a fatal 
 Pyrrhonism, or an insatiable thirst for military glory and ag- 
 grandizement, or inexorable national antipathies, or ignoble 
 superstitions, or religious errors. But whatever might be the 
 teaching of those whom, at successive epochs, France acknowl- 
 edged as her spiritual and mental rulers, that teaching was 
 never really ineffectual. It gradually molded the mind of her 
 people, and governed their resolutions. It fostered, when it 
 did not create, in them much of that traditional character, at 
 once so admirable in its beauties, and in its deformities so re- 
 volting. The husbandry bestowed on the hearts and on the 
 understandings of Frenchmen has ever been prolific of an abun- 
 dant harvest. Their faults are not, and never have been, those 
 of men abandoned to the untutored instincts arid brute appe- 
 tites of nature. Even in the wildest paroxy <ms of revolution 
 
462 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 and bloodshed, they have, for example, invariably and Dassion 
 ately maintained that the commonwealth is constituted, not 
 for the advancement of material interests merely, but for 
 higher and nobler, though too often, indeed, for impracticable 
 ends. They have frequently been subjected to the tyranny of 
 the imagination. Sheer nonsense, in the masquerade of sub- 
 lime abstractions, has continually ruled over them. They have 
 bowed down to other tyrannies far baser and more oppressive 
 than those ; but, as a people, they have never taken Mammon 
 for their God. They have not allowed the cares of life to an- 
 nihilate its healthful illusions, or to poison its blameless de- 
 lights. They have ever rendered a voluntary or an unconscious 
 allegiance to those dominant minds of their nation, who have 
 ruled by force of reason or eloquence, of wit or genius, justly 
 or unjustly ascribed to them by the suffrages of the multitude. 
 He, therefore, who would interpret the fate of the dynasties 
 and of the people of France, must study her political by the 
 light of her ecclesiastical, forensic, and literary history. I 
 need scarcely disavow any such ambitious purpose. My aim 
 is far more humble. I design merely to throw out some pass- 
 ing suggestions on the influence exercised over the civil gov- 
 ernment and polity of that kingdom, not either by the Church, 
 the Parliaments, or the States- General, nor even by Literature 
 in general, but by some eminent men of letters. Among the 
 countless authors to whose labors that influence may be more 
 or less truly referred, I shall select a few only ; but those few 
 will be such as, from time to time, attained to a literary su- 
 premacy in their native land. To notice the rest is to me, at 
 least, as impossible as it would be superfluous ; for all the 
 writers who have in turns been elevated to the dictatorship of 
 the Republic of Letters in France have a family resemblance, 
 which attests their mental consanguinity. By means of that 
 resemblance, their descent may be readily traced. Theirs is a 
 lineage which, commencing with the patriarchs of remote ages, 
 is perpetuated in the Gruizots, the Cousins, and the Lamartines 
 of our own days. If we can seize the generic character of that 
 imperial race, we shall sufficiently understand the nature of 
 the impulses which, in successive ages, they have given to 
 public opinion, partly by their own personal exertions, and 
 partly by those of their imitators and disciples. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 463 
 
 The literature of France is of a much earlier date than 
 French literature. From the days of Charlemagne to those of 
 St. Louis, a long series of French authors traversed the whole 
 circle of the sciences ; but they employed for that purpose, not 
 French, but either classical, or scholastic, or rustic Latin. It 
 is, indeed, only in deference to a national prejudice, as un- 
 founded as it is inveterate, that I place Charlemagne and his 
 learned courtiers among Frenchmen. The founders of each 
 of the two imperial dynasties were both aliens from France. 
 Charlemagne was in every sense of the word a German, as 
 Napoleon was, in almost every sense, an Italian ; and the 
 school over which Alcuin presided at Aix-la-Chapelle was no 
 more Grallican, than the academy founded by Richelieu at 
 Paris was Teutonic. 
 
 The rustic Latin (or Roman, as it was called) of France 
 was scarcely the same language to the north and to the south 
 of the Loire. It was ingrafted by the victorious Romans, 
 after the age of Caesar, on the aboriginal tongues spoken on 
 either side of that river. But in Caesar's time those tongues 
 were themselves widely dissimilar. In the Celtic and Belgic 
 provinces of Graul there then prevailed different dialects of that 
 widely-diffused speech which is at this day in use in Ireland, 
 in "Wales, in the north of Scotland, and in Brittany. In Aqui- 
 taine, on the other hand, both the vocabulary and the gram- 
 mar were, at that period, Iberian rather than Grallic. There, 
 also, the Greek of Marseilles and of the adjacent Ionian col- 
 onies, and the Arabic of the Saracenic invaders, each in turn 
 left copious and rich deposits, both of words and of construc- 
 tions ; and the half-civilized Groths of Aquitaine contributed 
 far more than the barbarous Franks of Neustrasia or Austra- 
 sia to ennoble and enlarge the popular speech of the nations 
 among which they had respectively settled. For these rea- 
 sons, and for others which I can not now pause to mention, 
 the rustic Latin of the North was a comparatively meagre and 
 unformed tongue, while the rustic Latin of the South was a 
 tongue comparatively affluent, graceful, and expressive. The 
 northern variety passed into modern French. The southern 
 or Romance dialect became the language of poetry and of the 
 Troubadours. It was at length swept away under the deso- 
 lating crusades which so nearly exterminated the populations 
 of Provence and Langusdoc. 
 
464 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 I do not turn aside from my path to attempt any estimate 
 of the influence of the Romance poetry on the character and 
 polity of the French people, partly because that poetry is sig. 
 nalizecl by no one great and imperishable work, and partly 
 because the problem has been so recently and so completely 
 solved by M. Fauriel in his Histoire de la Poesie Provencjale. 
 He is one of those writers of whom his country may be justly 
 proud. Under a weight of erudition, beneath which most men 
 would stagger, he moves with the graceful ease which might 
 seem to belong only to the lighter sports of fancy ; while all 
 the comprehensive and intricate principles at his command are 
 evolved with that exquisite skill, the distinctive character of 
 which is to hide itself in its own perfection. M. Fauriel is of 
 course an enthusiast in his pursuit, for that was necessary to 
 the success of it ; but his enthusiasm has, unhappily, too 
 much the mastery of him. He has always a smile, if not 
 an apology, at hand for the moral delinquencies of his heroines 
 and his heroes ; and is, I think, never once moved to reprobate 
 that systematic contempt for conjugal fidelity by which the 
 amatory strains he celebrates are habitually warmed and ani- 
 mated. I fully admit that the provinces of the moralist and 
 of the critic are not the same ; but I can not admit that any 
 man, and least of all that any man of genius, may, with im- 
 punity to his own mind, or without injury to the minds of 
 others, treat with indifference, even in his critical capacity, 
 the eternal distinctions between good and evil. 
 
 In proportion to our reverence for that sacred priesthood 
 who, by eucharistic sacrifices of half-inspired verse, celebrate 
 from one generation to another the works and ways of the 
 Creator, joining, each according to his vocation and his gifts, 
 in the unbroken chorus of meditation, of love, of gladness, or 
 of resignation which perpetually ascends from earth to heav- 
 en in that same proportion will, I believe, be our distaste for 
 the lyrics of the Troubadours. I know not, indeed, of any so- 
 cial phenomena more remarkable than that there should have 
 been found in any country a constant succession of men, and 
 of men of no vulgar stamp, who, during more than a century 
 and a half, sang their life-long changes on the same narrow 
 round of amatory thoughts and fancies ' r and that, throughout 
 all that time, such bards should havo still found a ceaseless 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 465 
 
 throng of admirers to follow and to extol them. Not even the 
 magic of M. Fauriel's style seems to me sufficient to rescue 
 the perusal of his specimens of these interminable love-songs 
 from disgust and lassitude. The spirit they breathe is so 
 false, fictitious, and artificial, that their grace and wit are in- 
 sufficient (at least in my judgment) to redeem them from 
 aversion, and even from contempt. On a former occasion I 
 hazarded the opinion that the connection was neither fortui- 
 tous nor obscure, but providential and significant, between the 
 national character to which the Provenqale poetry bears wit- 
 ness, and the destruction of the race for whose delight it was 
 written, and by whose applauses it was rewarded, .i-o'si 
 
 But while in Southern France the most cultivated intellects 
 were whiling away their existence under the narcotic influ- 
 ence of such strains as these, accompanied as they were by all 
 the embellishments of music and the dance, a far sterner dis- 
 cipline was preparing the cultivators of letters in the North 
 for that momentous controversy which was to be carried on 
 there in the twelfth century, upon some of those great ques- 
 tions which the most closely affect the present duties of man- 
 kind and their eternal prospects. The preparation for that 
 debate had been, made long before by many illustrious schol- 
 ars of the Benedictine order, and especially by one of them, 
 whose name I can not pass over in silence, although his writ- 
 ings have long since been laid aside and forgotten. 
 
 About the middle of the tenth century was living, at the 
 monastery of St. Grerauld, in Auvergne, a youth, of whose fu- 
 ture eminence the abbot of that house had formed the highest 
 hopes. His name was Grerbert; and, for the completion of his 
 studies, the abbot (in what we should now call the spirit of an 
 extreme liberality) sent him to Seville and Cordova, where 
 Arabian teachers instructed their pupils in geometry, astron- 
 omy, arithmetic, and algebra. From those celebrated schools, 
 Grerbert returned to France to earn the reputation of a sorcer- 
 er. That he was concerting with Satan some unhallowed de- 
 signs which the heart of man ought not to conceive, and which 
 the tongue of man could not utter, was a belief not unnatu- 
 rally drawn from the mysterious characters, the cabalistic 
 signs, the groups of constellations, and the lines sloping in all 
 directions, and meeting at all angles, which his hand was con- 
 
 G G 
 
466 POWER OF THb PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 tinually tracing. Or, if any reasonable doubt had existed, 
 who could resist conviction when informed, as the world was 
 widely informed, that while Grerbert was predicting all future 
 events, and ascertaining all that had passed in former times, 
 foul demons, in the form of gigantic bats, had been seen to 
 envelop him in their sable wings. 
 
 And yet Grerbert rose to be first a minister in the cathedral 
 church of Rheims, and then to be archbishop of that see. But 
 his love of knowledge was insatiable, and to indulge it he re- 
 signed his mitre, and visited the schools of Italy. There his 
 fame reached the ears of the emperor, Otho the Great, by whose 
 influence he became Archbishop of Ravenna ; until at length, 
 under the name of Silvester II., he ascended the papal throne. 
 The belief in- his magical powers seems to have gathered 
 strength by this last advancement ; and, as far as can now be 
 ascertained or conjectured, it must be confessed that the spells 
 by which he wrought were indeed marvelous. An eloquent 
 and pathetic writer, he stirred up the Pisans to the first expe- 
 dition ever undertaken by the powers of the west for the de- 
 fense of the pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. He studied 
 and wrote upon antiquities, poetry, grammar, and logic. He 
 is said to have taught the use of lofty and sharp-pointed poles 
 as lightning conductors; and he was the author of many 
 books, which are reported to be still in the Royal Library of 
 Paris. One of these, called Rythmomachia, is described as 
 containing a comparison between the Arabic numerals and the 
 algebraic symbols, as far as relates to their respective uses, 
 functions, and powers. In another we are told that he ex- 
 plained, geometrically, the science of harmonics, the structure 
 of clocks, and the various methods of working the keys of the 
 organ by water or by wind. Of his private life, nothing, I be- 
 lieve, is recorded. But enough remains to show that, in that 
 dark age, there was one Frenchman who had the heroism to 
 cherish, and the genius to execute, the design of combining 
 in his own person a two-fold supremacy, and of reigning at 
 once over the ecclesiastical and the scientific c anmonwealths 
 of Christendom. 
 
 In the twelfth century, however, the darkness of those times 
 was to pass away. In that memorable age may be discerned 
 the budding of the most prolific of those ideas, which were to 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 467 
 
 yield their fruit at the era of the Reformation and of the re- 
 vival of letters. Commerce and the arts, philosophy and lit- 
 erature, then began to emerge from the shadows by which 
 they had been so long enveloped. Then was the period of 
 transition from the mediaeval barbarism to the modern civili- 
 zation the crisis at which light and order first began to pene- 
 trate and to organize the preceding chaos. It was in that 
 dawn of the intellectual and social renovation of a yet distant 
 period that France first asserted her claim to be the chief in- 
 strument of Providence in civilizing the European world. Her 
 own monarchy had now become firmly settled in the Capetian 
 race. She had taken the chief conduct of the Eastern cru- 
 sades the stormy source, as we have seen, of personal free- 
 dom, of political and military organization, of commerce, and 
 of learning. Her name had become familiar and formidable 
 throughout the limits of the ancient empire ; and her arms 
 had already diffused, beyond her own shores, some knowledge 
 of her language. It was still, however, imperfectly formed, 
 and was unfit (at least in the judgment of her greatest men) 
 for literary uses. The rustic Latin of the South had indeed 
 been dedicated to such uses by the Troubadours ; but in the 
 North, the rustic Latin, or French, was still superseded by the 
 Latin of ancient Rome, as often as men sought to impart or tc 
 acquire learning or philosophy, whether theological or secular. 
 The throne of philosophy was then filled by a Frenchman, 
 whose name has ever since occupied one of the foremost places 
 in the literary annals of France. William, the son of a peas- 
 ant of Champeaux, a town in Brie, was, in that age, a teacher 
 of theology and logic to a crowd of students, who daily gath- 
 ered round his chair in the cloisters of Notre Dame. Among 
 them was a young Breton, whose short, feeble, and attenuated 
 frame contrasted strangely with a countenance of which the 
 expression (enthusiastic and voluptuous by turns) seemed to 
 announce an habitual conflict between his spiritual and his 
 sensual nature. At one time he poured out, for the delight 
 of his companions, songs of his own composition, or charmed 
 them by his jovial mirth, or entranced them by his mellifluous 
 colloquial eloquence. At another, he startled and repelled 
 them by a manner vehement, unsocial, and abrupt. Though 
 still young, he had traveled far ; passing, as a kind of philo- 
 
468 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 sophical Quixote, through every land in which glory was f to 
 be won in dialectic tilts and tournaments. The youth, whose 
 temperament was at once so joyous, and irritable, and aspir- 
 ing, could not long submit himself to the authority of the 
 grave William of Champeaux. 
 
 Abandoning his master, Abeillard, or Abelard (for such was 
 the name won for him by his honeyed discourse), established 
 first at Melun, and then at Corbeil, a school of his own, where, 
 such was the throng, and such the eager curiosity of his pu- 
 pils, that they were content, during the season of his lectures, 
 to dwell in huts rudely composed of reeds and mud. "With 
 characteristic self-reliance, Abelard commenced his academic 
 course by declaring war on the doctrines of his former master ; 
 and as William of Champeaux had taught Realism, he an- 
 nounced himself as a devoted opponent of that doctrine. From 
 Corbeil he returned to Paris ; and there, taking his place on 
 the mount, and in the gardens of Ste. Grenevieve, he is said to 
 have explained, to no less than 3000 scholars, each in turn of 
 the philosophical systems of his age. 
 
 But philosophy was not his only pursuit. Fulbert, a canon 
 of the Church of Paris, inhabited a house in one of the islands 
 of the Seine, where dwelt with him his niece Loise, or Heloise ; 
 a damsel who, although she had not yet completed her seven- 
 teenth year, was passionately devoted to the pursuit of such 
 knowledge as was then held in the highest esteem in the world 
 of letters. At the mature age of forty, Abelard, then in holy 
 orders, became the guest of Fulbert, and the teacher and se- 
 ducer of Eloise. With virtue they abandoned tranquillity and 
 peace ; and the revolting tale, on which romance and poetry 
 have lavished so many meretricious ornaments, is not an idle 
 fiction, but a melancholy truth. 
 
 In his subsequent seclusion, first at the Oratory of the Par- 
 aclete, and then at St. Grildas, in Brittany, Abelard resumed 
 the office of a preelector, and became the great interpreter, in 
 France, of the philosophical ideas of his own generation. In 
 common with the other schoolmen of that day, it was his office 
 to analyze the truths of Holy Writ by the logic of Aristotle, 
 and to explicate them by the aid of Aristotle's moral and meta- 
 physical doctrines. He was also the author of some books, of 
 which a full account may be seen in the twelfth volume of the 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 469 
 
 Histoire Litteraire de France. The most remarkable of them 
 are said to be the " Hexameron," an allegorical review of the 
 creation, and of the order of the material universe ; and a book 
 on self-knowledge, in which the author is charged with having 
 taught, in its vilest form, the Epicurean opinion that the soul 
 is exempt from all taint and all responsibility, whatever may 
 be the excesses of the merely animal appetites. 
 
 I know nothing of the truth or falsehood of that imputation, 
 for the book in question is not contained in the only series of 
 the works of Abelard with which I have any acquaintance. 
 I refer to the collection of them which was published in 1836 
 by M. Cousin, under the authority of M. G-uizot, then the min- 
 ister of public instruction in France, and which first made 
 known to the world two of the most remarkable and charac- 
 teristic of Abelard's writings. 
 
 I have said that he was a devoted opponent of Realism ; but 
 you will not suppose that I am about to deviate into that great 
 controversy. I advert to Abelard's contribution to it chiefly 
 as illustrative of the remarks which I shall hereafter have to 
 make on the identity of the spirit of the most eminent philos- 
 ophers of France, in ages the most remote from each other. 
 How much there was in common between Abelard and his 
 great successors, Montaigne, Bayle, and Blaise Pascal, may, 
 however, be in some measure inferred, even from the following 
 brief notice of his war with the Realists. 
 
 In his essay " De Greneribus et Speciebus," Abelard ascribes 
 to his master, "William -of Champeaux, and generally to the 
 Realists of his times, a doctrine, which may, perhaps, be suf- 
 ficiently understood from the following specimen or illustration 
 of it, with which he amused his readers and himself. 
 
 Like all other universals, Humanity is a thing essentially 
 one and indivisible. If to that one thing there accedes a cer- 
 tain congeries of forms, the result is to produce the individual 
 man, Socrates. The accession to Humanity of another assem- 
 blage of forms produces the man Plato. The Socratic forms 
 and the Platonic forms may be totally dissimilar ; but beneath 
 that diversity of species is veiled an absolute identity of genus. 
 The same universal man lives in both, though he be enveloped 
 in each by different integuments. 
 
 To this doctrine, or rather to this illustration of the Realist 
 
470 POWER OF THE PEN IX FRANCE. 
 
 doctrine, Abelard answers : " First. If Plato be at Rome, and 
 Socrates at Athens, then the universal man, who is common 
 to them both, must be at the same moment at Athens and at 
 Rome ; that is, he must be in two places at once. 
 
 Secondly. The universal man, who has taken to himself 
 the forms of Socrates, is inseparable from those forms. Wher- 
 ever that universal man is, there also, consequently, must 
 Socrates be. Therefore Socrates is at the same moment at 
 Athens, and at every other place at which the universal man 
 is present, under the forms of any other individual than Soc- 
 rates himself. 
 
 Thirdly. As the universal man is the latent substratum of 
 the forms of all individual men, it follows that wherever any 
 man is found, there also is to be found every man. Indeed it 
 is evident that there is, after all, but one man in the world, 
 who is appearing at each moment in some hundreds of millions 
 of dissimilar aspects, and in as many separate places. 
 
 Fourthly. As the Socratic and the Platonic forms accede 
 to and embrace, not merely the universal man, but also the 
 universal animal, it is evident that if that animal be sick in 
 Socrates, he must at the same time be sick in Plato ; and so, 
 if there be any one sick man, the whole world must be one 
 vast hospital. 
 
 Finally. Seeing that the universal animal, under the spe- 
 cies of certain living things, is rational, and, under the species 
 of other living things, is irrational, and yet is alike enveloped, 
 and alike alive in each of those things, there is no escaping the 
 consequence that every animal is at once rational and irrational. 
 
 The argumentum a cachinatione in this case, as in most 
 cases, proves little more than the vivacity of him who uses it. 
 The Voltaire of the twelfth century, like his great antitype of 
 the eighteenth, was, however, not content to laugh down sys- 
 tems of belief without building up others in their room. But, 
 while contending with Realism, he was unwilling to espouse 
 the antagonist theory of the Nominalists, or to assert with them 
 that all universals, Humanity for example, or Animality, were 
 mere words. In the judgment of his age, and, I suppose, in 
 his own judgment, that doctrine was irreconcilably opposed to 
 many articles of the creed of the Church. That it was really 
 opposed to the article of transubstantiation seems indeed to ad- 
 
POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 471 
 
 rrnt of no doubt whatever. Every consistent Roman Catliolio 
 is a Realist. To avoid the reproach of heresy, therefore, or 
 perhaps for yet better reasons, Abelard devised that compro- 
 mise between the contending parties to which metaphysicians 
 have given the name of " Conceptionism." If universals wera 
 neither real entities nor mere words, they must be so many 
 conceptions of the mind. Even, therefore, if it be admitted 
 that there is no substantive reality except in individuals, yet 
 between different individuals there are various resemblances 
 and analogies which the mind observes and classifies. To the 
 classes so formed, and to them alone, Abelard maintained that 
 the characters either of genera or of species properly belonged. 
 
 M. Cousin, who has most luminously explained this compro- 
 mise, thinks that, by means of it, Abelard rather evaded than 
 solved the difficulty ; and that, either unconsciously or covert- 
 ly, he was to the last, in the proper sense of the word, a Nom- 
 inalist. I do not presume to express an opinion on this very 
 subtle question ; but from Abelard's treatise, called " Sic et 
 Non," I can not but surmise that, though the supposed tend- 
 ency of Nominalism to subvert the foundations of the Christian 
 faith might render him very reluctant to avow himself a Nom- 
 inalist, it might not really much indispose him to the accept- 
 ance of that philosophy. 
 
 The words " sic et non" might, perhaps, be best rendered 
 into English by our homely phrase See-saw. The Benedic- 
 tines, and especially the excellent and learned D'Achery, had 
 a copy of the book, which they laid aside as unfit for publica- 
 tion. I respect the firmer faith in the invulnerability of truth, 
 which has induced M. Cousin to give it to the world, as I ad- 
 mire the charity with which that most eminent philosopher 
 would reconcile Abelard's character as a sincere Christian and 
 an honest man with his publication of such a treatise. M. Cou- 
 sin regards it as a collection of theological problems or contra- 
 dictions, designed to fortify the mind by a salutary skepticism 
 against the acceptance of any narrow and precipitate solutions, 
 and so to prepare it for solutions of a more solid and durable 
 nature. " The skepticism of Abelard," says his editor, " was 
 merely provisional. He proposed, at some later period, to rec- 
 oncile the contradictions which he thus brought together, and, 
 by the power of logic, to reclaim men from doubt to faith and 
 
472 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 orthodoxy." That such was the real though unavowed design, 
 it is at least pleasant to believe, and who would refuse him- 
 self that pleasure when assured by such a critic that he may 
 legitimately indulge it. But, apart from that assurance, I con- 
 fess that I should have thought that, in this case, a less favor- 
 able conclusion was inevitable. 
 
 In the Prologus of the " Sic et K"un," Abelard insists on the 
 difficulty of rightly understanding either the Scriptures or the 
 Fathers, and he traces it to eight distinct causes. These are> 
 first, the peculiarities of their style ; secondly, their employ- 
 ment, on scientific subjects, not of scientific, but of popular 
 language ; thirdly, the corruption of the text ; fourthly, the 
 number of spurious books ; fifthly, the frequent retractations 
 by the Fathers of their own previous statements ; sixthly, their 
 careless use of their profane learning ; seventhly, their habit 
 of describing things, not as they really are, but as they appear, 
 and as they are supposed by the vulgar to be ; and, eighthly, 
 their repeated use of the same words in two or more different 
 senses. He advises that, when the apparent contradictions of 
 the Scriptures can not be explained by any of these considera- 
 tions, we should abandon the manuscripts as inaccurate, and 
 that we should draw a broad distinction between the canonical 
 Scriptures, " in which every thing is of necessity true," and 
 all other ecclesiastical writings between the apostolical and 
 all other scriptures and between the sacred text and all com- 
 ments upon it. 
 
 Then, proceeding to establish the existence of these alleged 
 contradictions, Abelard proposes a series of questions ranging 
 nearly over the whole compass of theology and morals, and sets 
 himself to show, under each, that opposite or inconsistent an- 
 swers to it may be drawn from the Holy Scriptures, or from 
 the Fathers, or from both. Of those questions the following 
 are examples : 
 
 " Quod non sit Deus singularis ; et contra. Quod sit Deus 
 tripartitus ; et contra. Quod sit films sine principio ; et con- 
 tra. Quod nihil fiat casu ; et contra. Quod peocata etiam 
 placeant Deo ; et non. Quod omnia possit Deus ; et non. 
 Quod creatura sit adoranda; et non. Quod nulla de causa 
 mentiri lioeat; et contra," &o., &o. 
 
 On the manner in which the task of arraying scriptural 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 473 
 
 against scriptural, patristic against patristic, authority is thus 
 accomplished, I offer no remark, except that the writer has ev- 
 idently no scruple in asserting on any grounds, however slight, 
 the actual existence of such a conflict. M. Cousin observes 
 that, under the encumbrance of quotations and precautions, 
 both the thoughts and the style of Abelard falter ; but adds 
 that, as he emerges from these defiles, and approaches the end 
 of his work, he resumes his force and freedom, until at length 
 he loudly proclaims his cardinal principle, that; doubt is the 
 true key to w r isdom : " Dubitando enim ad inquisitionem ve- 
 nimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus." 
 
 Notwithstanding the almost irresistible weight of M. Cou- 
 sin's judgment, I confess myself (as, indeed, I have already said) 
 to be unconvinced of the sincerity of Abelard's loud avowals 
 of an implicit faith in the Scriptures. If we look rather to the 
 evident tendency than to the categorical expressions of his 
 book, it seems to me nothing else than an anticipation of the 
 style in which many French, and not a few English, writers 
 have conducted, and are still conducting, their assaults on 
 Christianity. No one can have much acquaintance with the 
 literature of either country who is ignorant that it is among 
 the common artifices of the more recent enemies of our faith 
 to assert their implicit acceptance of its credentials ; to under- 
 take an orthodox interpretation of many passages of its sacred 
 canon ; and even to set themselves to refute objections to its 
 truth ; taking good care, however, in their assumed office of 
 Christian advocates, to throw into their statement of those ob- 
 jections the accumulated weight of their learning, and the 
 whole force of their reasoning powers. 
 
 To the " Dubitando ad inquisitionem, inquirendo veritatem" 
 of Abelard, a voice of incomparably greater force and eloquence 
 even than his answered from the eastern frontiers of France 
 in apostolic language : " Animalis Homo non percipit ea quss 
 sunt Spiritus Dei. Stultitia enim est ei ; et non potest intel- 
 ligere, quia spiritualiter examinatur" It was the voice of 
 Bernard of Clairvaux, perhaps the noblest, and certainly the 
 most persuasive, of all those imperial spirits who have success- 
 ively contributed to mold the intellectual and moral charactei 
 of his and their native country. 
 
 In f he year 1100, Robert, a monk of the order of St. Bene- 
 
474 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 diet, established a religious brotherhood at Citeaux, which was 
 at that time a waste or forest on the confines of Champagne 
 and Burgundy. Under his directions, an oratory, with a group 
 of surrounding cottages, were erected there for that branch of 
 the great Benedictine family which afterward derived from the 
 place the distinctive designation of Cistercian. Within ten 
 years Robert had been succeeded in the government of the 
 monastery by St. Stephen Harding, an Englishman, under 
 whose guidance the monks, as we are assured by their annal- 
 ist, labored with the most austere self-discipline to regain the 
 sacred image in which our race was originally created. They 
 found it, indeed, a rugged path ; for, while their brethren of 
 the princely house of Cluny denounced their ascetic practices 
 as schismatical innovations, disease was hurrying one after 
 another of the new fraternity to premature graves. 
 
 Much perplexed to discover why it pleased the Supreme 
 Disposer of events so to afflict the most devoted of his wor- 
 shipers, St. Stephen (so runs the accepted legend), as he stood 
 by the couch of one of his dying followers, commanded him, 
 in the name of holy obedience, to return, after his death, to 
 Citeaux, with such intelligence as he might be able to obtain 
 in the world of departed spirits as to the Divine pleasure re- 
 garding the Cistercians, and as to the light in which it be- 
 hooved them to consider their own scheme and manner of life. 
 The monk died, and, I need scarcely add, revisited the abbey, 
 bringing with him the welcome intelligence that the convent- 
 ual habits in use there were most acceptable to the Supreme 
 Judge, and authorized to assure them that, ere long, they 
 should see their oratory thronged with new brethren, of whom 
 many should be great, many rich, and many noble, but who, 
 after a temporary abode at Citeaux, should, like so many 
 swarms of bees quitting their native hive, be dispersed on ev- 
 ery side, receiving and imparting benedictions. Falling on 
 their knees, the few survivors of the Cistercian brotherhood 
 implored the fulfillment of this gracious promise ; and, while 
 the prayer was yet on their lips, a procession was seen to ad- 
 vance slowly through the forest to the gates of the monastery. 
 It was preceded by Bernard, then a youth in his twenty-first 
 year, whose commanding form and expressive countenance en- 
 hanced the admiration due to his free and graceful bearing, 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 473 
 
 Casting themselves at the feet of St. Stephen, Bernard and his 
 companions demanded and obtained permission to perform 
 their novitiate at Citeaux ; and then the joyful and now united 
 companies joined in the sacred strain, "Rejoice, thou barren, 
 that bearest not ; break forth and sing, thou that travailest 
 not ; for the desolate hath many more children than she which 
 hath an husband." 
 
 Unless we refuse to listen at all to monastic stories, we 
 must be content to receive them in the monastic style, and 
 with the usual monkish embellishments. But the circum- 
 stances which had moved Bernard to migrate to Citeaux, though 
 scarcely less marvelous than these, are far more authentic. 
 
 Elizabeth, the daughter of the Count of Montbar, bore to 
 her husband Tecelin, the Lord of Fontaines, six sons, of whom 
 Bernard was the third, and one daughter, to whom her parents 
 gave the name of Humbeline. Tecelin was a great captain, 
 and while he took the field at the head of his vassals, Elizabeth 
 instilled into the minds of her children those sacred lessons 
 which maternal love most effectually teaches. One after an- 
 other of her sons, however, in due time, followed their father 
 to the wars, Bernard alone being left to listen to the instruc- 
 tions of his mother. They sank so deeply into his heart, that 
 the kindly discipline of his childhood ripened into the philos- 
 ophy of his declining years ; into that philosophy which dis- 
 covers, in the exercise of love, the foundation of all our knowl- 
 edge, either of divine or of human things. 
 
 From the heavenward aspirations to which he was thus 
 trained from infancy, Bernard derived that fascinating elo- 
 quence which bound, as with an irresistible spell, every one 
 with whom he was brought into communication. To such a 
 mind as his, animated by such filial remembrances, it was nat- 
 ural, and perhaps easy, in the very morning of life, to prefer, 
 to all which this world has to promise, the cell and the aus- 
 terities of an anchorite. Such seeming prodigies admit a very 
 simple and familiar explanation. But to persuade all the mem- 
 bers of his family to assume the same indissoluble fetters re- 
 quired a power of persuasion, in which he probably never found 
 a successful imitator, except, indeed, in the person of Angelique 
 Arnauld, the illustrious abbess of Port Royal des Champs. In 
 obedience to his voice, first Grauldry, count de Touillon, his 
 
476 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 uncle, a renowned soldier, exchanged his coat of mail for the 
 monastic habit. Then Barthelemy, his brother, resigned, at 
 his invitation, the service of the Duke of Burgundy for the 
 life-long obscurity and privations of a convent. Andrew, an- 
 other of his brothers, while listening to his words, had his eyes 
 opened to see their mother smiling upon them from her abode 
 in Paradise, and, laying down his sword, he consecrated the 
 remainder of his days to prayer and meditation. Guido, who 
 was the eldest son of their parents, and the heir to the estates 
 and honors of their house, rendered a still more impressive 
 homage to the eloquence of his brother. Surrendering all his 
 wealth and prospects, he even divorced himself from the wife 
 of his youth, and joined the little band which acknowledged 
 Bernard as their spiritual conductor. Grerard, the second of 
 the sons of Tecelin and Elizabeth, strove, but strove in vain, 
 to resist the universal fascination. And when this last victory 
 had been won, Bernard, attended by Barthelemy, by Andrew, 
 by Gruido, and by Gerard, knelt before Tecelin to obtain his 
 last blessing ere the separation should be completed, which 
 was to leave the widowed father with no child to sustain the 
 infirmities of his age except his daughter Humbeline, and 
 Nivard his youngest son. ,t: ; 
 
 The agony of that parting had just been endured, when, as 
 the five young men were for the last time quitting their parent- 
 al roof, Nivard met them, and, immediately joining his breth- 
 ren, followed the steps of Bernard to the desert. Of thirty per- 
 sons who accompanied him to Citeaux, six were thus members 
 of his own family his uncle and his brothers. Not long after, 
 Humbeline also appeared at the gates of the abbey. She 
 sought, it is said, to win back Bernard to the world which wor- 
 shiped her, and which she at that time worshiped. The words 
 interchanged between them were few, but those few words 
 riveted on her inmost soul such convictions of the vanity of 
 life as made her fly from it to the severe, but, as she now 
 judged, the salutary and peaceful solitude of the cloister. De- 
 serted by all his children, Tecelin himself at last sought, and, 
 let us hope, did not seek in vain, for consolation, by submit- 
 ting himself as a simple monk to the spiritual government of 
 his own child, Bernard, then the Abbot of Clairvaux. 
 
 Clairvaux, a fair valley, as the word implies, lieu between 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 477 
 
 the slopes of two opposite ranges of hills, at the distance of 
 about twelve miles from the city of Bar-sur-Aube. One of 
 the promised swarms of conventual bees had migrated thither 
 from Citeaux, under the guidance of Bernard, and there he 
 passed the whole of his earthly pilgrimage, unless when either 
 the extremity of disease, or his zeal for the interests of the 
 Church, occasionally drew him to a distance. Except by such 
 maladies and such journeys, the monotony of his monastic life 
 was unbroken, and no skill in narrative could render the de- 
 tail of it either interesting or really intelligible. It is almost 
 superfluous to say that strains of unearthly music, audible to 
 no ears but his, would some'times rise and die away along the 
 walls of his monastery ; that celestial visitants descended into 
 his cell ; that Benedict himself came from the abodes of the 
 blessed to hold communion with his illustrious disciple ; and 
 that she who was blessed above women, the very goddess of 
 the place, not seldom presented herself there to the adoring eyes 
 of her enraptured worshiper. Neither was there any lack of 
 miracle. Paralysis and epilepsy disappeared at the bidding of 
 the saint ; and, stranger still, by exclaiming excommunico eas, 
 he caused the instant death of so vast a multitude of flies, who 
 were interrupting the dedication of the church of Foigny, that, 
 says the chronicler, the attendants carried them out by shov- 
 elsful. 
 
 This biography of the cloister is at once so monotonous, and 
 in effect at least, if not in design, so profane, that it may well 
 excite our wonder that So many good men should have repeat- 
 ed, and that so many sane men should have believed it. But 
 not even the coarse handling of those who have undertaken to 
 write the life of Bernard can reduce him to the level of a vul- 
 gar hero of ecclesiastical romance. In the history of mankind 
 there is no passage better attested, and none more worthy of 
 diligent meditation, than that which exhibits him as exercis- 
 ing, over the men of his own and of future times, a moral do- 
 minion more enduring and more extensive than that of the 
 greatest ecclesiastical or secular potentate a dominion ac- 
 quired by his own regenerate soul and magnificent understand- 
 ing, without the aid of any temporal advantages or of any ex- 
 ternal power, except, indeed, that power which he drew frorr 
 his unceasing communion with the eternal fountain of holiness 
 and of light. 
 
178 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 To us of this g3neration, it may appear inexplicable how 
 the ruler of a convent, erected by himself in a wilderness re- 
 mote from cities, and seldom visited by even a solitary traveler 
 should attain to such authority, not only among his own nation, 
 but throughout Europe at large. But, in the days of Bernard, 
 while all other powers were separated from each other by wars, 
 or ignorance, or by the dissolution of ancient kingdoms into 
 petty fiefs, the clerical order was bound together by a closer 
 and a firmer chain of mutual dependencies, and a more regu- 
 lar subordination than at any preceding or subsequent period. 
 Not only had the victories of Hildebrand and his immediate 
 successors attached the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy with 
 increased firmness to Rome, but the Benedictine order, as yet 
 unrivaled by any new monastic institutes, formed a vast cor- 
 poration, the affiliated societies of which, in every state and 
 province, and almost in every canton of the Christian world, 
 lived in constant intercourse with each other and with their 
 common head. In that age, intelligence was diffused, opinion 
 directed, and fame bestowed, partly by those Benedictine con- 
 vents, and partly by the great schools of France and Italy. 
 The accession of Bernard to their order, followed, as it was, 
 by the conquest of all his kindred, was an event well calcu- 
 lated to arrest the attention and to excite the curiosity of the 
 dispensers of reputation in those times ; nor was he really 
 concealed at Clairvaux from the personal notice of some of 
 the most eminent of their number. 
 
 William of Champeaux, the teacher of Abelard, had by this 
 time become bishop of Chalons, and, in the vacancy of the 
 diocese of Langres, had officiated at the consecration of the 
 monastery of Clairvaux. He found in the abbot a Realist 
 quite as zealous as himself, but incomparably his superior in 
 range of thought and energy of speech ; and when the bishop 
 directed Bernard to preach in all the churches of the see of 
 Chalons, the concourse, the delight, and the conversions of his 
 hearers were such as to announce the appearance of another 
 Chrysostom. 
 
 Seven hundred years had then rolled away since the Church 
 had been admonished or comforted by the voice of any of her 
 Fathers. They had disappeared ; those venerable men who, 
 amid the decay of all secular learning, had so long maintained 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 479 
 
 the empire, not of religion alone, but of eloquence also of 
 literature, of philosophy, and of criticism. As age after age 
 passed on, the Church, no longer accustomed to listen to that 
 profound discourse and to those heart-searching exhortations, 
 had ceased to anticipate the revival of them. To the men of 
 the twelfth century, the language of Bernard, at once so ve- 
 hement and so pathetic, came, therefore, not only with all the 
 power of truth, but with all the force of novelty. It seemed 
 to them as if Augustine had once more risen up to resume his 
 ancient and undisputed sovereignty. They regarded their new 
 apostle as one to whom such abundant disclosures had been 
 made by the Father of lights, as rendered himself a kind of 
 living revelation. They venerated him as a saint, whose men- 
 tal vision, unclouded by the dark veil of sense, ranged over all 
 the awful realities of our present and our future existence 
 They believed that the faith by which he had overcome the 
 world, as the foe of his own mental purity, was of power to 
 overcome it, also, as the inveterate enemy of the everlasting 
 Gospel. And bowing down (as our race will ever bow down) 
 before a mind which, in an absolute servitude to the Divine 
 will, has regained and rejoices in its own native freedom, they 
 exalted him to a moral dominion which, at the culminating 
 point of his own greatness, either Julius or Charlemagne might 
 have contemplated with envy. 
 
 It was for these reasons, or for reasons such as these, that 
 the Christian world referred to the arbitration of Bernard the 
 rival pretensions of Innocent II. and of Anaclet II., each of 
 whom was claiming the apostolic throne on the death of Ho- 
 norius in 1130. Anaclet retained possession of Rome and of 
 the other chief Italian cities. He had secured the support of 
 Roger, the Norman duke of Sicily, by the double promise of 
 exchanging his ducal coronet for a royal crown, and of bestow- 
 ing on him the dignity of Patrician of Rome. In Northern 
 Italy, and especially in Milan, Conrad, of the house of Hohen- 
 stauffen, a pretender to the empire, had numerous and active 
 partisans, who accepted or courted the alliance of Anaclet ; 
 and the ever-ready sympathy of the powerful duke and cities 
 of Aquitaine with the free Italian republics, extended the in- 
 terest of Anaclet throughout the whole of the south of France. 
 
 It was in the north of that country that Innocent sought 
 
480 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 for spiritual subjects and for defenders. But Louis le G-ros 
 would neither take up arms in his support, nor undertake to 
 determine whether he was, indeed, the lawful successor of St. 
 Peter. For the decision of that arduous question, he summon- 
 ed a national synod to assemble at Etampes, and himself met 
 there in person the northern bishops, and all the greater abbots 
 of the north. There, also, by the express command or invita- 
 tion of the king, appeared the Abbot of Clairvaux. To him 
 the assembly, with one voice, referred the preliminary investi- 
 gation of this great controversy, as, with one voice, they after- 
 ward assented to his judgment that Innocent was the true pope, 
 and the lawful head upon earth of the Church of Christ. Louis, 
 acquiescing in this sentence, immediately placed his kingdom 
 under the obedience of Innocent, and Bernard became the pa- 
 tron of his cause in all the other states of Europe. 
 
 He enforced it successfully on the kings of England, Scot- 
 land, Arragon, and Jerusalem, in letters conceived (to judge of 
 them collectively from a single specimen) in a tone as authori- 
 tative as had ever been assumed at the palace of the Lateran. 
 To Lothaire, the German emperor elect, Bernard addressed 
 himself in person in Liege. But Lothaire refused to hear the 
 voice of the charmer, charmed he never so wisely, unless the 
 Pope would reward his adhesion by renouncing the long-dis- 
 puted papal title to investiture ; and to such a sacrifice all the 
 confederate powers of earth and hell could not have tempted 
 or terrified the inexorable abbot. Yet defeat did not seem to 
 be among the possibilities of his existence. Intelligence of the 
 union between the partisans of Conrad and the followers of 
 Anaclet arrived in time to induce Lothaire to waive this claim, 
 and to join with Innocent in a common hostility against their 
 common enemies. 
 
 In William, duke of Aquitaine, Bernard next encountered 
 a still more refractory antagonist than Lothaire. The chron- 
 iclers of the age employ their darkest colors in their portrait 
 of the duke. The least of the vices of which they accuse him 
 is the habit of eating habitually, for his own share, as much 
 as would have kept eight stout yeomen in health. His pas- 
 times were still more offensive ; for, if we will believe his ac- 
 cusers, he was accustomed to compel his vassals to fight like 
 gladiators for his amusement. This G-argantua had, however. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 481 
 
 it seems, a heart in his bosom which once and again melted 
 under the burning eloquence of Bernard, but which as often 
 resumed its cold rigidity when that genial influence was with- 
 drawn. At length (so runs the legend) the saint, having pro- 
 nounced the awful words of consecration in a church in which 
 William was worshiping, descended the steps of the altar, his 
 whole countenance glowing as with a radiant flame, and his 
 uplifted hand sustaining the sacred elements as, approaching 
 the obdurate duke, he thus addressed him: "Long have I 
 entreated, and thou hast set at naught my entreaties. Many 
 of the servants of Grod have joined their prayers to mine, and 
 thou hast despised their prayers. Behold, now, the very Son 
 of the Virgin him whom thou persecutest the supreme head 
 and lord of the Church the judge at whose name every knee 
 in earth, in heaven, and in hell must bow ! The soul which 
 now animates thee awaits the sentence of that great Judge, 
 the avenger of guilt. Wilt thou despise Him also, and scorn 
 the master as thou hast scorned his servants ?" 
 
 Falling on his face (proceeds the chronicle) as he listened 
 to this fearful apostrophe, the duke uttered appalling cries of 
 agony, and, on regaining his self-command, not only tendered 
 his homage to Innocent, but, divesting himself of all his do- 
 minions, honors, and estates in favor of his daughter Eleonora, 
 the destined wife of Louis VII., abandoned the world itself, 
 and in his thirty-eighth year retired to some place of religions 
 seclusion, where history loses all farther trace of him. 
 
 I do not pause to winnow the truth from the monkish orna- 
 ments which disfigure this narrative. It best illustrates as it 
 stands, if not the actual occurrences of the times, yet at least 
 the estimation in which Bernard was held by his contempora- 
 ries. We know, from the incomparably more authentic in- 
 formation of his letters, how they received and seconded his 
 labors in the same cause both in the German and the Italian 
 courts. 
 
 From them we learn that, under his influence and by his 
 persuasion, peace was established between Pisa and Genoa, 
 and their respective allies in Lombardy ; a peace which not 
 only brought to an end a long and cruel war, but which open- 
 ed a passage into Italy to Lothaire, who, with Innocent in his 
 camp, was advancing to the mountain? When he crossed 
 
 H ii 
 
482 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 them, no enemy remained to the north of the Apennines to op- 
 pose his progress, for Conrad of Hohenstauffen and his Milan- 
 ese supporters were no longer able to derive either aid or shel- 
 ter from the belligerents who had sheathed their swords at the 
 voice of Bernard. Lothaire therefore advanced to Rome with 
 Innocent, and there received from his hands the papal Unction 
 and the imperial crown. He did not, however, dispossess 
 Anaclet either of the church of St. Peter or of the castle of St. 
 Angelo, but, returning to Germany, left the rival popes to con- 
 tend with each other by spiritual weapons. 
 
 Of such arms Bernard was an absolute master ; and, at a 
 council holden at Pisa, he successfully employed in the serv- 
 ice, and as the representative of Innocent, all the eloquence 
 for which he was renowned, and all the authority which he 
 had acquired by the pacification of Lombardy. The synod, at 
 his instance, solemnly excommunicated Anaclet and his sup- 
 porters. 
 
 Anselm, the archbishop of Milan, was one of the most con- 
 siderable of that number ; and to Milan, therefore, Bernard 
 proceeded to enforce the sentence against him. All the re- 
 sources of hyperbole are exhausted by the chroniclers in their 
 attempt to describe and celebrate his reception in the city of 
 Ambrose. As in the case of that illustrious father, the magis- 
 trates and clergy, followed by a countless multitude of the 
 citizens, thronged the approaches to his residence, resolved to 
 place him by force, if necessary, on the archiepiscopal throne. 
 Never was such advancement so ingeniously avoided. The en- 
 thusiastic crowd was quieted and dispersed by his assurance 
 that, on the morrow, he would mount his horse, and that, if 
 the animal should remain within the city walls, he would ac- 
 cept the proffered mitre, but if it should pass them, he should 
 regard himself as free from any such obligation. The return- 
 ing day found the saint in the saddle, and galloping with his 
 utmost speed through the gates of Milan. A gleam of merri- 
 ment, perhaps, for once lighted up those contemplative fea- 
 tures ; and, ere long, his horse had added to this good service 
 by carrying him from the tumults of Italy to the tranquillity 
 of Clairvaux. 
 
 His repose, however, was but brief. Returning to Ger- 
 many, he induced Lothaire to pass the Alps again at the head 
 
POWER UP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 483 
 
 of a force destined for the conquest of Sicily and for the over- 
 throw of Anaclet. As the emperor drew near to Rome, the in- 
 defatigable Bernard appeared once more to guide and to encour- 
 age him. But the expedition was not successful. The Sicil- 
 ian duke, indeed, sustained a defeat near Salerno, but not long 
 after Lothaire himself died. In the succeeding year he was 
 followed to the grave by Anaclet, by whose cardinals, how- 
 ever, was chosen another pope, who assumed the name of Vic- 
 tor. But with the pretensions, Victor did not inherit the per- 
 severance of his predecessor. He thought the contest either 
 hopeless or sinful, or both; and, presenting himself to Ber- 
 nard, he placed in his hands the abdication of his title to the 
 Papacy. The schism thus reached its close, and, at the end 
 of anxieties and labors which had been protracted through 
 seven succeeding years, the abbot returned to his monastery 
 with no worldly or ecclesiastical wealth or dignities, but yet 
 in the consciousness of having rendered to mankind a service 
 which both he and they regarded as inestimable, and which 
 they repaid by such veneration and by so cordial an applause 
 as had never greeted the most triumphant of military con- 
 querors. 
 
 The repose thus laboriously purchased was, however, to be 
 short-lived. Innocent did not long survive his rival Anaclet, 
 and before March, 1145, three popes had in succession filled 
 the Papal throne. It was then transferred, by the unanimous 
 voices of the College of Cardinals, to Bernard of Pisa, a disci- 
 ple of Bernard of Clairyaux, once a brother of that monastery, 
 where he had been so lightly esteemed, that his appointed of- 
 fice had been to light and feed the fires at which the other 
 monks were to warm themselves when chilled by their noc- 
 turnal devotions. But, on his election, he assumed the name 
 of Eugenius, and quickly proved that the mantle of Urban II. 
 had descended upon him. 
 
 Intelligence of the capture of Edessa by the Moslem had 
 reached and alarmed Europe almost at the moment of tho 
 election of Eugenius. Bernard called upon the Pope to un- 
 sheathe each of the two swords of Peter. Eugenius accord- 
 ingly invoked the aid of the then eldest son of the Church, 
 Louis le Jeune. To him the appeal was happily timed and 
 welcome. The destruction of many of his own subjects in an 
 
484 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCK. 
 
 attack on the city of Yitry hung heavily on his con science, 
 and the crime, as he judged, could not be so effectually expi- 
 ated as by the slaughter of a hundred-fold the same number 
 of Saracens at Edessa. Thus both the spiritual and the tem- 
 poral sovereigns of Bernard joined in addressing to him a com- 
 mission, or rather a command, to preach a new crusade to the 
 faithful in France and Germany. 
 
 Though his body was worn by fatigue, wasted by sickness, 
 and emaciated by fasts and self-discipline, the soul of Bernard 
 rose and expanded itself to the height of this sacred summons. 
 In Easter of the year 1146, his attenuated figure, but still 
 beaming eye, were conspicuous in the front of a lofty stage, 
 erected on the slope of one of those hills which environ the 
 town and plain of Vezelay . There sat the king and his queen 
 Eleonora, and by them stood the great vassals, and prelates, 
 and barons of his realm, with a throng of inferior knights and 
 seigneurs, while in the front of this royal assemblage was 
 gathered a mighty host, crowding the hill sides and the plain 
 below, and all awaiting in breathless silence the voice of the 
 renowned orator who stood before them. 
 
 There is, I believe, no extant record of his speech, though 
 never before or since was eloquence rewarded by so signal a 
 triumph. He appears to have given a rhetorical impersona- 
 tion to the Holy City, and in her name to have been calling 
 on his hearers to rescue her from the grasp of the followers of 
 the False Prophet, when he was interrupted by a shout aris- 
 ing simultaneously from all the countless ranks of that agita- 
 ted multitude, thousands and tens of thousands of voices rais- 
 ing, repeating, and again and again re-echoing the exclama- 
 tion, "It is the will of (rod !" A single soul seemed to have 
 possessed the whole of that innumerable company. Casting 
 himself at the feet of the speaker, the king first received from 
 his hands the cross, which irrevocably bound him who bore it 
 to engage in person in that perilous adventure. Beside her 
 lord, and devoted to the same high enterprise, knelt Eleonora. 
 The princes, bishops, barons, knights, and seigneurs followed 
 her example, and then the commons, wave after wave press- 
 ing forward, in interminable succession, to the immediate 
 presence of Bernard, continued till nightfall, and through the 
 whole of the succeeding day, to besiege him with importunate 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. , 48* 
 
 demands for crosses, until, after exhausting every other re- 
 source, he had torn his own Benedictine habit into shreds, to 
 serve as badges for this noble army of martyrs. 
 
 The great master of the spell, himself inflamed by the enthu- 
 siasm which he thus excited, hurrying from province to prov- 
 ince and from city to city, every where demanded new cham- 
 pions of the Holy Sepulchre. At Chartres, another mighty 
 congregation listened and obeyed, but not without a response, 
 which, little as it was either foreseen or welcomed by Bernard, 
 seems not to have been altogether unreasonable. They de- 
 manded that, exchanging his cowl and tunic for a coat of mail, 
 he should, in his own person, conduct them to the warfare 
 against the infidel. He still retained, however, too much so- 
 briety for this. Perhaps he had already awakened to the truth 
 that, among his half-maddened associates, there were not a 
 few with whom it would ill suit him to contract so intimate 
 a personal alliance. 
 
 Of that number was Rodolph, a German monk, who had 
 taken on himself the task of arousing the zeal of his fellow- 
 countrymen. But Rodolph was one of those men who, when 
 they have once yoked themselves to any principle, are dragged 
 helplessly along by it into the most extravagant of its seeming 
 consequences. It was meritorious to slay the enemies of the 
 Cross in Palestine ; could it then be right or allowable to 
 spare them in Germany? Finding the question unanswer- 
 able, Rodolph, from the sources to the mouth of the Rhine, 
 brought his hearers to prepare themselves for the destruction 
 of the Saracens by the massacre of the Jews. 
 
 I doubt whether the title of any of the saints whom the 
 Church of Rome has raised to her honors of canonization would 
 be justified by any proofs of his having cultivated the virtue 
 of toleration, excepting only in the single case of Bernard of 
 Clairvaux. It was with a noble inconsistency that he dissented 
 from the inexorable logic of Rodolph; for, while himself 
 sounding the trumpet which marshaled the Christian nations 
 of Europe to the slaughter of the unbelieving inhabitants of 
 Asia, he addressed to the German people an encyclical epistle, 
 commending the hereditary enemies of the Gospel to their 
 kindness and forbearance, in terms as eloquent as could have 
 been dictated by Jeremy Taylor, and as wise as could have 
 
486 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 been suggested by John Locke, if those apostles of toleration 
 had then been living. 
 
 Nor was it by his letters only that Bernard taught the Ger- 
 mans to be at once thus merciful and merciless. During many 
 weeks or months he traversed their land in person, attended 
 by some of the monks of his order, who have left us a daily 
 journal of that miraculous peregrination ; for every step was 
 a miracle. So numerous and so stupendous were the prodi- 
 gies which he wrought in stimulating his proselytes to march 
 to the holy war, that death and disease may be said to have 
 retired, like vanquished foes, at his presence. The authors of 
 these narratives, however, select, as the miracle of miracles, 
 the conversion of the Emperor Conrad III., and his assump- 
 tion of the Cross. It may seem presumptuous to dispute their 
 judgment on such a question ; but to myself the most pro- 
 digious of all the prodigies they record, and certainly the best 
 attested, appears to be the fact that, though he was totally 
 ignorant of German, and always preached in French, yet such 
 was the magic of Bernard's discourses, even when utterly in- 
 comprehensible, that, from Constance to Cologne, the Teutonic 
 gravity was every where rapt at his bidding into an immutable 
 resolution to march from the banks of the Rhine to those of the 
 Jordan. I have no doubt of the general good faith with which 
 all these marvels are told ; and these Itinera Germanica seem 
 to me not destitute of a real and appropriate value. They 
 curiously illustrate the strange extent to which vast masses 
 of men, under the sympathetic influence of any profound emo- 
 tion, may become utterly incapable of the natural use, not 
 only of their reasonable understandings, but even of their bod- 
 ily senses. 
 
 Leaving his German proselytes to prepare for their long pil- 
 grimage to the East, Bernard returned to France to expedite 
 the departure of that mighty armament, and then retired to 
 the devout and placid solitude of Clairvaux. There, in due 
 time, he learned that the war which he had so exultingly pro- 
 voked had swept away at least two hundred thousand of his 
 fellow-countrymen and fellow- Christians, the helpless victims 
 of woes as fearful as they were profitless and inglorious. There 
 is still living in the person of the Abbe de Ratisbonne, his latest 
 biographer, at least one devout and zealous apologist of the 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 487 
 
 author of this lamentable carnage ; and from the abbe we may 
 learn, that, in the retrospect of this great catastrophe, Bernard 
 found nothing to disturb the tranquillity of his cell and of his 
 conscience. Adopting what seems to me at once the more 
 probable and the more charitable opinion, I rather conclude 
 that the review of the calamities which his ill-directed zeal 
 had brought on his country and on mankind was the immedi- 
 ate cause which brought his life to an unexpected, though not 
 an early close, not long after the return of Louis with the four 
 fragments of the noblest army which had ever followed the Ori- 
 flamme of St. Denys, under the guidance of a king of France. 
 
 The preceding account of.the mighty influence exercised by 
 Bernard over some of the great movements of his age will not 
 have been misplaced if (as I trust) it shall contribute to render 
 intelligible to you the still more powerful control which he ex- 
 ercised over its opinions. To estimate aright the extent of that 
 authority, it would indeed be requisite to refer to the collection 
 of his letters, almost all of which relate to the questions, polit- 
 ical or religious, by which his generation was chiefly agitated. 
 They show that he was employed day by day, continually, in 
 adjusting the disputes of princes, in considering the complaints 
 of their subjects, in redressing the grievances of the oppressed, 
 in arbitrating between litigants, in founding monasteries and 
 bishoprics, in providing for the wants of all the churches, and, 
 above all, in the decision of controverted points of doctrine. 
 "Aiunt non vos esse Papam" (he says to Pope Eugenius), 
 " sed me, et undique ad me confluunt qui habent negotia." 
 And in this character of a substituted or auxiliary pontiff, 
 elected by general acclamation, we find him ruling the delib- 
 erations and guiding the decisions of almost every ecclesias 
 tical synod of his times, but of none with results more remark- 
 able than those which followed the acts of the council holden 
 in the year 1121, in the city and church of Sens. 
 
 Rallying his strength and spirits after the great calamity of 
 his life, Abelard had resumed his chair in the University of 
 Paris, or rather amid the students whom his reputation still 
 drew round him, on the mount and in the gardens sacred to 
 Ste. Grenevieve, the patroness of that city. His speculations 
 on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity had been communicated, 
 not merely to his pupils, but to the world at large, in a book . 
 
488 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE 
 
 which awakened the alarms and stimulated the zeal of the 
 orthodox Abbot of Clairvaux. If Bernard be accurate, it re- 
 produced and combined the heresies of Arius, of Pelagius, and 
 of Nestorius. But he was too good and wise a man to make 
 any public assault upon the writer of it, until he had first en- 
 deavored, by a private and friendly remonstrance, to convince 
 him of his errors, and to induce him to retract them. The 
 vulgar arts of vulgar controversialists were beneath the genius, 
 and alien from the spirit of St. Bernard ; and winning by his 
 kindness an opponent whom he might probably have exasper- 
 ated by less gentle methods, he induced Abelard at least to 
 promise a retraction. The promise, however, was not fulfilled. 
 On the contrary, Abelard, reverting to his former habits of 
 thought, published other books of the same general tendency, 
 and among them the treatise called " Sic et Non," to which I 
 have already adverted. 
 
 Bernard then broke silence, and, in a letter to Pope Inno- 
 cent II., he denounced, not merely the doctrines of Abelard, 
 but the whole scheme and system of investigation which had 
 conducted him to them, invoking the authority of the Pope to 
 suppress so great a scandal. Abelard answered by equally 
 loud protestations of his innocence and orthodoxy, and appealed 
 to a council then about to be holden in the city of Sens. 
 
 Never had tidings of an approaching tournament excited 
 more universal interest in France than was kindled by the in- 
 telligence of the passage at arms, which was accordingly ap- 
 pointed to take place between the two great doctors and rhet- 
 oricians of that age. Bernard, however, was at first reluctant 
 to engage in the contemplated debate. He answered the sum- 
 mons of the Archbishop of Sens in the words of David : "I am 
 but a youth, and he a man of war from his youth." But he 
 was not permitted so to withdraw from the conflict with the 
 Goliath of Rationalism. It was, he says, with tears in his eyes, 
 that he at length consented to meet this terrible adversary ; 
 but it was with faith and hope in his heart. He strengthened 
 himself by revolving the words of Christ, "Take no thought 
 how or what ye shall speak, for it shall be given you in that 
 same hour what ye shall speak." And again borrowing the 
 language of David, he comforted himself by the words, " The 
 Lord is my strength ; I will not fear what man can do unto 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 489 
 
 me." The event showed that any other preparations for this 
 dreaded encounter would have been superfluous. 
 
 In the great church of Sens appeared all the Fathers of the 
 council, and there also appeared Louis VII. himself, with the 
 chief dignitaries of his realm, ecclesiastical and secular, all 
 animated with the same curiosity to listen to the anticipated 
 debate between the two master spirits of the age. 
 
 It was opened by Bernard. He produced the writings of 
 Abelard, enumerated his imputed errors, and demanded that 
 he should either vindicate or retract them. Expectation was 
 raised to the highest pitch, when, to the surprise and disap- 
 pointment cf the whole assembly, the eloquent Abelard re- 
 mained inflexibly silent. He was either unable or unwilling 
 to utter a sing T e word in his own defense, and at length pre- 
 cipitately quitted the synod, after interposing an appeal to the 
 Pope against their decision. They rejected his appeal, and 
 unanimously condemned his doctrines as heretical. Once again 
 the now victorious Bernard borrowed from David the language 
 in which to express the feelings with which he contemplated 
 the triumphant result of this much-dreaded controversy. " 1 
 myself," he exclaimed, " h&ye seen the ungodly in great pow- 
 er, and flourishing like the green bay-tree. I went by, and, 
 lo ! he was gone ; I sought him, and his place was nowhere to 
 be found." The proceedings of the Council of Sens were then 
 transmitted to Rome, and the Pope, confirming their decision, 
 sentenced Abelard to an eternal silence. 
 
 The defeated philosopher did not prolong the struggle. His 
 spirit seems to have been broken by affliction, and his body 
 worn by labor and excitement. He sought for tranquillity by 
 publishing what has been usually called his retractation, though 
 it would perhaps, with greater reason, be called his apology 
 for his writings. But neither Bernard, nor any of the theolo- 
 gians of the times, pressed hardly on their fallen foe. He was 
 a Sampson Agonistes, terrible even in defeat, and his conquer- 
 ors wisely acquiesced in his retractation, such as it was, and 
 sought by kindness to restore him to the bosom of the Church. 
 Within two years from the close of this dispute, he was sum- 
 moned from the world in which he had accumulated so much 
 knowledge, but had attained to so little happiness. Before his 
 death, the friendship which had once subsisted between Ber 
 
490 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 nard and himself was re-established. Nor can we doubt that) 
 in the contemplation of that great event, both the Realist and 
 the Nominalist derived comfort from the belief that, in pass- 
 ing from the world of shadows into the regions of light, they 
 should both find a far more perfect solution of those deep mys- 
 teries than they had been able to attain either in the cloisters 
 of Clairvaux or in the schools of Paris. 
 
 "To speak it plainly," says M. Ghiizot, "Protestantism is 
 nothing else than the insurrection of the human mind against 
 the spiritual despotism of the sacerdotal order." To the recla- 
 mations of such insurgents in the twelfth century, the Church 
 of Rome opposed not merely the sacred text as interpreted by 
 primaeval and unbroken traditions, but also another authority, 
 less liable than these to be perverted or misunderstood, yet (as 
 she maintained) of an origin not less divine. The Deity him- 
 self (said the Realist and orthodox doctors of that age) has en- 
 graven on the souls of all the children of Adam many legible 
 and most significant characters. These inscriptions, though 
 coeval in each man with his birth, may be obscured by car- 
 nality or worldliness, as, on the other hand, they may be ren- 
 dered more luminous and intelligible by self-discipline, and by 
 habits of devotion and of virtue. But, whether darkened or 
 illuminated, they must still remain indelible in every human 
 bosom, at once bearing witness to the truths which it is the 
 office of the Church to perpetuate, and rendering the accept- 
 ance of them not so much a duty as a law and a necessity of 
 our moral nature a necessity which ceases, indeed, then, but 
 only then, when the soul to which such truths are proclaimed, 
 being blinded by its own pollutions, is effectually deprived of 
 its spiritual discernment. 
 
 Such I believe to be an accurate summary of the doctrine 
 of St. Bernard on this subject. But I would rather present 
 it to you in his own words: "There is," he says, "nothing 
 in the Divine intellect which is not eternal and immutable. 
 Thus those principia rerum, which Plato calls ideas, are not 
 mere mental images. Possessing the attributes of eternity and 
 immutability, they must be realities ; nor does any thing ex- 
 ist, whatever may be the mode of its existence, except by a 
 union to them." 
 
 "A spirit, whose origin and abode is celestial, has ever be- 
 
FOWL A OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 491 
 
 fore her eyes the mirror in which she contemplates all things. 
 She beholds the Divine Logos ; and in the Logos the whole of 
 the creation which the Logos has called into existence. So 
 that she does not draw her knowledge of the Creator from the 
 creation ; nor, when she would attain to the knowledge of cre- 
 ated things, is it necessary for her to descend among them ; 
 for she beholds them all in a position where they exist in a 
 manner more excellent than any in which they do or can exist 
 in themselves." 
 
 " The mysteries of our faith do not depend on human rea- 
 son, but rest on the immutable foundations of truth. What ! 
 ask me to doubt of that which of all things is the most abso- 
 lutely true ? Faith is not an opinion formed in us by our la- 
 borious studies. It is an interior conviction, to which con- 
 science bears its testimony. It is the basis of our reasonings, 
 not their conclusion. It is no inference from our investiga- 
 tions, but is itself an absolute certainty." 
 
 If to this teaching of St. Bernard any one had answered that 
 the innate ideas, which reflect in the human soul, as in a mir- 
 ror, the eternal and immutable realities of the Divine intellect 
 (and especially such of those ideas as relate to our faith as 
 Christians), are, after all, but so many individual revelations, 
 which can be seen only by each man for himself, and which 
 none can exhibit to his neighbor, his answer, as I infer from 
 his habitual tone of thought, would have been, that the sub- 
 stantial coincidence or identity of such ideas in all regenerate 
 men is not without a clear and a conclusive attestation. He 
 would have found such' an attestation in that unity of senti- 
 ment and of belief by which (as he insisted) the several mem- 
 bers of the Catholic Church are held together as one living 
 body, animated by one all-informing soul a union, the sacred 
 harmony of which results from the concord of the innumerable 
 strings vibrating in the spirits of each and of all of those whom 
 it embraces. 
 
 I am very conscious that my feet are but too liable to stum- 
 ble on such mountain tops as I am treading, and that their at- 
 mosphere is too fine for my respiration. Nevertheless, I must 
 request you to accompany me a few steps farther on these gid- 
 dy heights, 
 
 I have already said that Bernard was prepared by maternal 
 
492 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 tenderness for that philosophy the philosophy of Love which 
 he adopted in his more mature years. To make that general 
 statement intelligible, I must touch, though most "briefly, on 
 topics the sanctity of which I might but too probably violate 
 if I presumed to dwell on them at any greater length. I would 
 observe, then, that he found a Sumrna TheologisB in the sub- 
 lime declaration that " the pure in heart shall see Grod." He 
 judged that, when so admitted to the sight of Him who is at 
 once Light and Love, the pure in heart would derive from that 
 beatific vision such an insight into all truth, and so ardent a 
 thirst for perfect conformity to the Divine image, that casting 
 aside, while still denizens of earth, the crutches of human in- 
 vestigation and the thraldom of human passions, they would 
 soar, as on the wings of eagles, into those celestial regions 
 where knowledge is intuitive, and love and wisdom are the 
 very elements of life. Kindling with some such conceptions 
 as these, St. Bernard selected the Book of Canticles as the 
 theme of his most celebrated, though (I suppose) his least in- 
 telligible work. 
 
 To us who know man only in his social state, and have no 
 personal experience of him in his cloistered condition, the vis- 
 ions which peopled the brain of the great St. Bernard may per- 
 haps appear but as so many phantasms, or as air-bubbles, re- 
 flecting gorgeous colors for the amusement of the child who 
 has inflated them. I will not undertake to assert their sub- 
 stantial value, but I am well convinced that even the day- 
 dreams of such a man are entitled to our reverence and ten- 
 derness, and that some knowledge of them is essential to a 
 correct understanding of the growth and progress of philosoph- 
 ical literature in France. 
 
 An anchorite is almost of necessity a Mystic, that is, one 
 who habitually infers the objective from the subjective ; or, 
 in plainer words, one who assumes the existence of realities 
 without him, corresponding with the most cherished of the 
 visionary thoughts within him. The mind, cut off from the 
 common duties, interests, and affections of life, wedded to an 
 emaciated, and enervated, and therefore irritable body, and 
 continually driven inward for occupation, creates for itself sub- 
 stitutes for the objects among which others live, and readily 
 glides into the belief that its own figments are so many innate 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 493 
 
 ideas types of actual entities creatures of a divine original, 
 and of an eternal and immutable existence. To the prisoner 
 of the convent these deliriums may be as innocuous as they 
 are pleasant ; to the denizens of the wide world they are nei- 
 ther the one nor the other. 
 
 St. Bernard was pre-eminently a Mystic ; nor does the term 
 convey any reproach. It is, indeed, ascribed to him, and to 
 the other ascetic heroes and heroines of his age, in the most 
 recent panegyrics of the most eloquent and learned of existing 
 Roman Catholic biographers. In what sense that eulogium 
 is bestowed and is to be understood, may be best explained by 
 referring to the writings in which the most renowned of all 
 his monastic contemporaries has developed the mysteries of 
 those transcendental doctrines, so far, at least, as they can be 
 intelligibly revealed in the language in use among uninspired 
 men. 
 
 In the age of Bernard there was living at the monastery of 
 Boppart, near Bingen, a lady who has since been immortalized 
 under the name of Sainte Hildegarde. His interpretation of 
 the promise that " the pure in heart shall see Grod" is sup- 
 posed by the hagiologists to have received in her its most com- 
 plete accomplishment. During his mission to raise champions 
 of the Cross in Germany, he visited her at her convent, and 
 they ever afterward lived in the habitual interchange of letters 
 with each other. The subjects, and the nature of that cor- 
 respondence, may be learned from his published epistles, or 
 from the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, or from any of the 
 many histories of her life which her admirers have given to 
 the world ; or, better still, from the books in which she com- 
 municated to others the awful disclosures from on high which 
 she believed to have been made to herself. 
 
 From these sources it is to be collected that, in the third 
 year of her life, Hildegarde first became conscious of a brill- 
 iant light, which, being at once material and spiritual, radiated 
 through her body until it had reached and illuminated her soul. 
 These beams, which, of course, were of heavenly origin, reap- 
 peared to her at frequent intervals during the next fourscore 
 years. And surpassingly wonderful was their influence. They 
 imparted to her, as she devoutly believed, a perfect compre- 
 hension of all the Holy Scriptures, rendering transparent to 
 
494 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 her the mysteries which they darkly intimate to others Bis- 
 cerning in the mirror of her own mind many of the eternal 
 and immutable ideas of the Divine intellect, she was enabled 
 to perceive what are the corresponding forms and what thf 
 analogous laws by which this mundane system is pervadec 
 ana governed. The primitive matter of which all things ma- 
 terial are composed was laid bare to her in its elementary 
 state. The soul of man, becoming the object of her spiritual- 
 ized sense, was discovered to be " a celestial harmony." The 
 awful attributes and ineffable nature of the Blessed Virgin be- 
 came to Hildegarde the subject of immediate consciousness. 
 Ascending to the eternal and perennial fountains of life, she 
 surveyed the operations of the creative energy. Descending 
 to this lower world, she beheld unrolled before her the future 
 history and the ultimate destination of our race, and especially 
 the reign of anti- Christ and the ultimate triumph of the Church, 
 which is at once Catholic and Roman. 
 
 If Ste. Hildegarde were now living among us, who would be 
 so cruel as to disturb, who so idle as to listen to her hallucina- 
 tions ? But mental nosology was a science neither understood 
 nor studied in the twelfth century. At that time, Bernard, the 
 greatest of the canonized doctors whom the Church of Rome 
 can claim as peculiarly her own (for the Fathers of the first 
 five centuries belong to the Church Universal), hailed and re- 
 vered the revelations of the prophetess as if she had been an- 
 other Miriam. " They are not," he said, "the work of man, 
 nor will any man be able to understand them whose soul love 
 has not restored to the Divine image and likeness." " They 
 who ascribe these visions to demoniacal suggestions prove that 
 they have no deep acquaintance with heavenly contemplations." 
 
 Nor was this the judgment of Bernard alone. During no 
 less than three successive months, the books of Hildegarde en- 
 gaged the attention of a synod convened by Eugenius at Treves. 
 The Fathers assembled there concurred in the opinions of the 
 Abbot of Clairvaux ; and Eugenius, in an autograph letter, 
 exhorted her " diligently to cherish in her heart the grace 
 which Grod had lavished upon her, but never to divulge, with- 
 out extreme circumspection, what that Divine grace might 
 prompt her to say." Nor was this all. No less than three 
 other infallible Popes, Anastasius IY., Adrian IV.. and Alex- 
 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 495 
 
 ander III., who succeeded Eugenius on the Papal tlirone, each 
 in his turn gave his sanction to the reveries of Ste. Hildegarde. 
 
 If these legends should appear to you too puerile for any se- 
 rious notice, or too remote from our present subject to be no- 
 ticed on this occasion, I answer that the mysticism which they 
 illustrate was really pregnant with the most important results, 
 both speculative and practical. In speculation, it was at once 
 the fruit and the root of Bernard's doctrine of Realism. In 
 practice, it was the too prolific germ of those relentless perse- 
 cutions which have left their sanguinary stain upon almost 
 every page of the annals of the Church of Rome. 
 
 Assume that the state, a the minister of the Church, has 
 power enough to terrify into silence and submission all dis- 
 senters from the established creed, and then three steps only 
 are wanting to perfect the theory of persecution. The first, 
 that the dominant Church is infallibly right ; the second, that 
 the imputed error is fatal to the souls of those who hold it ; the 
 third, that the heretic dissents, not from weakness or error of 
 judgment, but from depravity of will. Now Realism, and 
 Mysticism its offspring, supply each of those steps. 
 
 For if, as Bernard taught, faith is the basis, not the conclu- 
 sion of our reasonings ; and if that basis be itself laid in leg- 
 ible characters, engraven indelibly by the Creator on the souls 
 of his rational creature man, then every one who can read those 
 characters is infallible, so far, at least, as they accompany and 
 conduct him. And if, on comparing those characters with the 
 imputed heresy, he finds that the collision between the two is 
 direct, and that it takes place in the highest regions of these 
 divinely-inspired ideas, then the fatal tendency of it is demon- 
 strated. And, inasmuch as the dissenter can be prevented 
 from discerning in his own mind the same sacred indications 
 of truth only by that blindness which is the result and the pun- 
 ishment of his carnal or worldly pollutions, his dissent is not 
 error, but guilt. The remedy for it is not argument, but the 
 stake. Thus the acceptance by popes and doctors of the in- 
 coherent rhapsodies of an illiterate old woman as e-s idences of 
 so many innate ideas reflecting the eternal verities of the Di- 
 vine intellect, closed the door to all reasoning with those who 
 rejected their creed, or any part of it. The believers and the 
 dissenters had no common premises on which to argue. To 
 
496 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 the imputed heretics, the reflections on the mental mirror of 
 Ste. Hildegarde were but as so many delirious scrawls on the 
 prison walls of a lunatic. To her patrons they were as author- 
 itative as the handwriting on the palace wall of Belshazzar. 
 
 Bernard himself, it is true, though a Realist, and therefore 
 a Mystic, was not a persecutor. His too successful efforts for 
 the destruction of the followers of the False Prophet, whatever 
 may be the censure due to him on account of them, had no- 
 thing in common with the guilt of his brethren of Citeaux, of 
 St. Dominic, and of Innocent III., in their crusade against the 
 Albigenses. Had he lived till then, I fear that his principles 
 must have conducted him to a full participation in those 
 crimes. But he was a wise and a holy man, whose hourly 
 prayer not to be " led into temptation" was not offered in vain. 
 
 I can not claim such an acquaintance with him, as he is 
 exhibited in his own books, as to be able to offer any general 
 criticism upon them. But I know enough of them to under- 
 stand why, in France, the land of eloquence, so high, if not 
 indeed the very highest, place has been assigned to the elo- 
 quence of Bernard. The opinion, or, perhaps, I should rather 
 say the conjecture, which I venture to hazard on his writings 
 is, that they are such as could proceed only from a man whose 
 whole existence had become one prolonged alternation of study 
 and of devotion, who never ceased to worship except to write, 
 and never laid down his pen except to pray. "Whenever he de- 
 scends from the mountain to speak with men, the Shekinah is 
 visible on his countenance. It is, I believe, for this reason 
 chiefly, though not exclusively, that every section of the Uni- 
 versal Church has ever rendered him the homage which usual- 
 ly each reserves for its own heroical men, and for them alone. 
 The testimonies of Protestants in his favor might be drawn 
 from all the countless divisions and subdivisions of the Protest- 
 ant world. It is enough to refer to the two greatest of. the 
 leaders of the " insurrection against the spiritual despotism of 
 the sacerdotal order." Luther says of Bernard that " omnes 
 doctores vincit;" and Calvin, that " ita loquitur ut veritas ipsa 
 loqui videatur." 
 
 No similar veneration has ever waited on the name and mem- 
 ory of Abelard. The sentence which has been passed upon him 
 by posterity may have been severe, but it is now irreversible. 
 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 497 
 
 For some passages of his life no defense is possible, nor shall 1 
 make myself the apologist for much of what he has written. 
 But to the charge that he was the founder of the Rationalistic 
 system in modern Europe, it may, I think, be well answered, 
 that the reproach is too indefinite to convey any precise mean- 
 ing, or to admit of any distinct refutation. 
 
 A Rationalist is usually censured as one who gratifies the 
 pride of our common nature by subjecting all doctrines, those 
 of revelation not excepted, to the scrutiny and judgment of 
 his understanding ; and by making his own reason the stand- 
 ard of truth, or, at least, of his own appreciation of truth. 
 That such pride mingles with most of our thoughts, and there- 
 fore with the thoughts of those who are usually condemned as 
 Rationalists, no one will probably deny. But the same re- 
 buke may, I think, be addressed with equal, or perhaps with 
 greater, force to most of their antagonists. The exultation of 
 Bernard and his adherents, for example, in contemplating 
 themselves as so many living depositaries of the reflected 
 deas of the Creator, was probably more haughty, as it was 
 certainly more unfounded, than the exultation of Abelard and 
 his disciples in contemplating themselves as the depositaries 
 of a power, by the right use of which divine truth might be 
 interpreted or discovered. There is a pride of belief as well as 
 a pride of investigation, and I know not which of the two pas- 
 sions is the more unruly. 
 
 Neither can I perceive that Abelard erred in thinking that, 
 by the constitution of our nature, each man's reason is, and 
 must be, to himself the ultimate judge of truth. That such 
 is the province of our reason is, indeed, most impressively, 
 though unconsciously, admitted in every attempt to disprove 
 it. If you encounter such Rationalism as this by argument, 
 you are appealing to the very reason which it is the object of 
 your argument to silence and dethrone. The stake is the only 
 consistent and practical refutation of the imputed error. 
 
 But, on the other hand, that Rationalism which conducted 
 Abelard, as it has conducted so many others, to the conclusion 
 that human reason is not merely the judge of truth, but is 
 also the one guide to truth, seems to me not only a danger- 
 ous, but a fatal mistake. 
 
 His text, as we have seen, was " Dubitando ad inquisitio- 
 
 Ii 
 
498 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 nem venimus, inquirendo veritatem percipimus." I dissent 
 from each of those positions. 
 
 First. " Dubitando ad inquisitionem venimus" is an apoph- 
 thegm, in deference to which many of the greatest intellects 
 in France, as I shall hereafter have occasion to show, have 
 brought their minds into what is called " a state of provisional 
 doubt ;" and great is the glory which they have won by this 
 achievement. To myself no boast appears more unjust or un- 
 meaning. 
 
 Faith, not doubt, is the indispensable condition and the law 
 of our existence. Life begins with credulity ; and, to the close 
 of life, an implicit trust in the opinions of others is the lot, not 
 merely of the unlearned many, but, to a very great extent, of 
 the most learned among the instructed few. The wisest of 
 the children of men have ever held, and must ever hold, the 
 vast majority of their most important convictions, not on in- 
 quiry, but on trust. 
 
 The true doctrine I take to be rather, " Credendo ad inqui- 
 sitionem venimus." You must take a multitude of things for 
 granted if you would know any thing to the purpose. The 
 child assumes the knowledge and veracity of his parents. The 
 pupil reposes the same credit in his preceptor. The philoso- 
 pher relies on the reports of the experimentalist, and the states- 
 man on the calculations of the statician. Nay, the Divine 
 teacher of all truth among men He who was Himself the 
 impersonation of wisdom taught that obedience is the path 
 to knowledge ; and that we must do the will of our Maker, in 
 order to know of the doctrine ; or, in other words, that we 
 must not provisionally question, but provisionally assume, the 
 authority of our best accessible instructor, in order that we 
 may subsequently verify or correct that assumption by the ex- 
 perience to which it will conduct us. 
 
 Neither can I subscribe to the "Inquirendo veritatem per- 
 cipimus" without large qualifications. Inquiry conducts us, 
 not so much to truth itself as to the best teachers of truth. 
 Life is not long enough, the human mind is not capacious 
 enough, to enable any man to build up a complete system of 
 knowledge and belief by his own investigations. The Author 
 of our being has not left his creature man, with his feeble 
 powers and his short span of life, to grope out, by his own 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 499 
 
 isolated studies, those truths which it most concerns him to 
 reach and to hold firmly. It is not by our own researches that 
 we attain to truth in what concerns our health of body, or our 
 individual or our social interests. In those matters our in- 
 quiries do but conduct us to the best attainable guides, and 
 place us under their direction. The case is not essentially 
 otherwise when we are investigating the great problems of 
 our actual condition in this life, and of our prospects be- 
 yond it. 
 
 I have thus ventured, and certainly in no forgetfulness of 
 the seeming presumption of the attempt, to indicate what I 
 suppose to be the errors of.the Realist and Mystic Bernard on 
 the one hand, and of the Nominalist and Rationalistic Abelard 
 on the other. I have done so because, in the metaphysical 
 style of the modern French language, they were the earliest 
 "expressions," in their native country, of the two great an- 
 tagonistic principles by which, from their days to our own, it 
 has been distracted. These are the principle of faith and the 
 principle of reason. Names and forms have, indeed, passed 
 away. Realism and Nominalism are no longer the inscriptions 
 on the banners of the contending hosts. But that abstruse 
 metaphysical debate, however hidden under new modes of 
 speech, still lies at the root of this immortal controversy. The 
 innate ideas of Des Cartes, the mysterious doctrines of Kant 
 (so far as I have any information respecting them), and Mr. 
 Coleridge's much-cherished distinction of the pure reason and 
 the practical understanding, were but so many republications 
 of the Realism of St. Bernard. At the close of the incompara- 
 ble essay with which M. Cousin has introduced his publication 
 of the Ouvrages Inedits d' Abelard (to which I gladly acknowl- 
 edge myself to be indebted for all that I know on the subject 
 of his doctrines) occurs a passage which explains, with so much 
 beauty and exactness, the permanent importance of the debate 
 on which I have been dwelling, that I can not better terminate 
 this lecture than by attempting to lay it before you in our own 
 language, so far, at least, as it is in my power to find any 
 equivalents in English for his refined and almost Platonic 
 phraseology. 
 
 "A problem (says M. Cousin), which might seem scarcely 
 worthy to be made the subject even of a philosophical revery, 
 
500 POWER OF THE PEN I Jt FRANCE. 
 
 gave birth to different metaphysical systems. Those systems 
 agitated the schools, and, at first, the schools only. Ere Jong 
 they passed from the province of metaphysics into that of re- 
 ligion, and from religion they advanced into the region of poli- 
 tics. Then, taking their place on the historical stage, they 
 interposed in the events of the world, agitated councils, and 
 afforded occupation to kings. William the Conqueror is sum- 
 moned into the field by the English clergy against the Nomi- 
 nalist Roscelin, and Louis VII. becomes the president of the 
 synod in which Bernard, the hero of the age, denounces the 
 Conceptionist Abelard, himself the teacher of Arnaud of Bres 
 cia. All this is, however, but a prelude. Time runs its course 
 Conceptionism, which, during nearly two centuries, has cher 
 ished Nominalism in its bosom, at length sets its charge at 
 liberty; and then this new consequence, or, rather, this re- 
 newed consequence of the same fundamental principle, find- 
 ing the times more favorable, appears with a far different lus- 
 tre, and excites tempests never experienced till then. Occam 
 (a new Roscelin), by once more applying Nominalism to the- 
 ology, and so to politics, checks the power of the Pope, engages 
 a king and an emperor in his quarrel, and, sheltering himself 
 against the lightnings of Rome under the wings of the imperial 
 eagle, is able to say to the head of the empire, with no unbe- 
 coming pride, * Tu me defende gladio ; ego te defendam calamo.' 
 Abandoned by the King of France, but aided by the Emperor 
 of Germany, the indomitable Franciscan, escaping from the 
 dungeon of Roger Bacon, dies in exile at Munich. But he 
 has been a teacher at Paris that prolific soil in which no 
 seeds which have once been committed to it are ever permitted 
 to perish. The University of Paris embraces the proscribed 
 doctrine. Nominalism, triumphant, diffuses the spirit of in- 
 dependence. That new spirit gives birth to the Councils of 
 Constance and of Basle, where appear the great Nominalists, 
 Peter d'Ailly and John Grerson those fathers of the Grallican 
 Church those sage Reformers, whose voices are unheeded, 
 and who are, ere long, replaced by that other Nominalist call- 
 ed Luther. It were well, therefore, not to be so very face- 
 tious on the subject of metaphysics, for metaphysics embrace 
 at once the original principles and the ultimate principles of 
 all things." 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 501 
 
 LECTURE XVIII. 
 
 ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 EMINENT as was the place of Gerbert, of Bernard, and of 
 Ablard in the literature of France, yet, in their days, French 
 literature was still unborn. Neither the theologians, nor the 
 chroniclers, who plied their ^ pens in the Benedictine monaster- 
 ies, nor the Troubadours, who practiced their gay science in 
 the Provencal courts of love, made use of that language which 
 in our own days is vernacular in their native country. Latin 
 in its various forms, classical, scholastic, colloquial, and rustic, 
 was their only instrument of communication with then* own or 
 future ages ; and, for this reason, neither the holy unction of 
 the Abbot of Clairvaux, nor the philosophical acumen of his 
 great rival, nor the songs or romances which once charmed 
 the court of Toulouse, ever retained any permanent hold on 
 the hearts or on the memories of the men of later times. 
 
 The earliest writers to whom that glory belongs are those 
 who, having been present either as actors or as spectators at 
 the great military achievements of their age and nation, re- 
 corded them in narratives in which the styles appropriate to 
 chronicle, to history, and to memoirs are confounded, or, rather, 
 are harmonized with each other. Of that class of writers, 
 three only retain, and probably they alone deserve, at this day, 
 the admiration which greeted them in their own I refer to 
 Joinville, to Froissart, and to Philippe de Comines. 
 
 It is not the least of the glories of the reign of St. Louis that 
 it produced the first fruits of that abundant harvest of glory 
 which was to be gathered in by writers, in his own native 
 tongue, in each generation succeeding to his own. Our ac- 
 knowledgment of the wealth and abundance of that harvest 
 should be made with no niggard hand or grudging spirit ; for 
 if the extent to which the intellectual labors of any people are 
 diffused and welcomed beyond the limits of their own territory 
 and language is the best criterion of their excellence (and I 
 
502 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 know of none less doubtful), we must concede to the great 
 authors of France a pre-eminence above those of any other 
 country in modern Europe. Be that, however, as it may, I at 
 present refer to the influence which they have exercised in the 
 remotest parts of the civilized world, as affording us some indi- 
 cation of the authority which they have possessed at home 
 some measure of that domestic power of the pen, on the right 
 use or abuse of which so much of their good or evil fortunes, 
 as a nation, has been dependent. To understand the workings 
 of that power is to understand not merely the great writers of 
 France, but the people, also, for whom they wrote. 
 
 In that country, as in every other, the authority of men of 
 letters has always consisted in the exactness with which they 
 have succeeded in reflecting in their books the better and more 
 enduring aspects of the character of their nation. They must 
 be the interpreters of the habitual state of mind of those for 
 whom they write, or they must write in vain. They must give 
 utterance to thoughts which their less gifted readers would 
 have uttered if they could. They must bring into the light 
 ideas which, when clothed by them in appropriate terms, oth- 
 ers will recognize, or will suppose themselves to recognize, as 
 so many conceptions which, in inchoate and immature forms, 
 were already struggling for birth in their own minds. It is 
 by means of such services, and of such illusions as these, that, 
 in each generation, the foremost understandings make willing 
 captives of the multitude, and, if they be true to their high 
 calling, mold them into docile and obedient pupils. The ac- 
 tion and reaction of the literature and of the national character 
 of any people upon each other is the true subject of their moral 
 and intellectual history. 
 
 It is especially so with regard to France. Nowhere else have 
 books and men borne so intimate a relation to each other. 
 Whoever has much studied their books must be of a sluggish 
 imagination if he has not seen the land and its inhabitants with 
 his mental eye even before he has actually visited them. Not 
 only their dramatists, their novelists, and their memoir-writ- 
 ers, but their divines, philosophers, moralists, and historians, 
 are ever drawing from the life. The Misanthrope, or the Me- 
 moirs of St. Simon, are not more absolutely French than the 
 Essays of Montaigne or the Discourses of Massillon. Sternes 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 503 
 
 la Fleur is not so thoroughly a Frenchman as Montesquieu. 
 From the literary works, grave and gay, of the French people, 
 which lie in such profusion before us, we may perhaps, there- 
 fore, be able to infer something of the spirit of the land for 
 which they were composed, and of the influence of that spirit 
 on the authors of them. '> *;> 
 
 First, then, every one who is at all conversant with the great 
 writers of France will, I believe, be prompt to acknowledge 
 their superiority to all other European writers, and especially 
 to our own, in the art or the power of perspicuity. Compare, 
 for example, the language of Montaigne, of Pascal, of Bossuet, 
 or of Montesquieu, with the. style of Hooker, or Milton, or Jer- 
 emy Taylor, or Clarendon. How limpid the flow, how clear 
 and logical the sequences of the French how involved, in- 
 verted, parenthetical, and obscure the stately march of the 
 English composition. In the Ecclesiastical Polity, in the 
 Areopagitica, in the Liberty of Prophesying, or in the History 
 of the Rebellion, how few are the periods which fully convey 
 their meaning, until they have been broken up by the student 
 into their elementary sentences. In the Essays of Montaigne, 
 or in the Provincial Letters, or in the Histoire des Variations, 
 or in the Esprit des Lois, how laboriously must the reader 
 search for so much as a single example of involution, inversion, 
 or parenthesis ? I express no opinion on the comparative ex- 
 cellence either of the two schools, or of their respective canons 
 of criticism. I confine myself to the remark that, in this com- 
 petition of the giants, the palm of habitually expressing the 
 most profound thoughts in the most simple and intelligible 
 forms of speech must be awarded, not to England, but to 
 France. 
 
 And such as are the giants in either host, such also, in their 
 measure, are the innumerable dwarfs in each. In later times, 
 indeed, the common herd of writers in both nations have af- 
 fected a sort of chiaro-scuro the convenient shelter for mea- 
 greness of thought and poverty of invention. For this degen- 
 eracy we however are, I fear, far more deeply responsible than 
 our neighbors. Darkened as the literary language of France 
 has so often been by the fumes of undigested metaphysics, 
 there is no author, and scarcely any reader there, who would 
 not stand aghast at the introduction into his native tongue of 
 
504 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 that inorganic language which even Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
 himself tumbled out in some of his more elaborate speculations, 
 and with which the imitators of that great man are at this day 
 distorting and Grermanizing the speech of our progenitors. 
 
 Now, as we are to infer from the style peculiar to France 
 some of the distinguishing characteristics of the national mind, 
 what are those distinctive qualities of the French people which 
 have prescribed clearness and precision as the first and funda- 
 mental law of all good or tolerable composition among them ? 
 I answer, first, that in that law we have a proof of the genial, 
 sympathetic, and communicative spirit which is their inalien- 
 able birthright. The cloud-compelling Jupiter shrouded him- 
 self in darkness, because he dwelt in an abstracted and silent 
 solitude. But the God of day rejoiced in the light, because he 
 was also the Grod of eloquence. Even so a Grerman will so 
 often write obscurely, because his pleasure is in secluded rumi- 
 nation. A Frenchman always writes clearly, because his hap- 
 piness is in social and intellectual intercourse. The first calls 
 up shadowy dreams not less with his pen than with his pipe. 
 The other is engaged in the commerce of thought in his study 
 not less than in the salon. And hence the immeasurable su 
 periority of the French to all other nations in social literature. 
 What can be compared with the ease, the grace, the fascina- 
 ting flow of their familiar letters ? except perhaps their histor- 
 ical memoirs, which are, indeed, but another kind of familiar 
 letters, addressed to society at large, by actors in the scene of 
 public life, who have gladly escaped from its caution and re- 
 serve to enjoy the freedom of colloquial intercourse. 
 
 But such advantages are purchased at a price. The pro- 
 pensity and the power thus to render literature subservient to 
 the embellishment of life are continually tending to a fatal 
 abuse. Recall the long series of men of genius, from Rabe- 
 lais to Voltaire, who, becoming the victims of their own arts 
 of fascination, have so often debased history, philosophy, and 
 religion itself to a frivolous pastime the idle resource of the 
 habitually idle. Remember how Bayle postpones every thing 
 else to the amusement of his readers ; how Montesquieu strews 
 the Esprit des Lois with epigrams ; and how even the illus- 
 trious Paschal illuminates the most awful of all discussions 
 with the charms of his inimitable iron} Conjecture (for it 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 505 
 
 is hopeless to measure) the dimensions of those pyramids ol 
 contes, novels, romances, fictitious memoirs, comedies, and 
 vaudevilles, which the pens of French men and women have 
 piled up with such a prodigality of labor and of talent ; and 
 then confess that, if the passion to captivate and to be captiva- 
 ted has rendered the style of France pellucid, it has also con- 
 tributed not a little to render much of her literature frivolous. 
 
 The exquisite perspicuity of the French written language 
 is farther the index of the predominance in the French mind 
 of the reasoning faculty ; of that faculty which, with truth for 
 its object, and logic for its guide, strives to fathom all the 
 depths, and to scale all the ^eights of human knowledge, and 
 therefore wages an inappeasable war against all the powers of 
 mental darkness. The most subtle of analysts, the French- 
 man dissects his ideas into their component parts with a touch 
 at once so delicate and so firm as almost to justify his exult- 
 ing comparison of his own vocabulary with that of Athens. 
 The most perspicuous of experimentalists, he explores with the 
 keenest glance all the phenomena from which his conclusions 
 are to be derived. The most precise of logicians, he reasons 
 from such premises with the most undiscolored mental vision. 
 The most aspiring of theorists, he fixes an eagle gaze on the 
 highest eminences of thought, and passes from one mountain-top 
 of speculation to another with a vigor and an ease peculiar to 
 himself. And hence it has happened that the writers of France 
 have become either the teachers or the interpreters of science 
 and of philosophy to the world at large ; that their civil juris- 
 prudence forms the most simple and comprehensive of all exist- 
 ing codes of law ; and that their historians, their moralists, and 
 their poets breathe freely in a transcendental atmosphere too 
 rare and attenuated to sustain the intellectual life of grosser 
 minds than theirs. 
 
 And as their luminousness of style results from clearness of 
 conception, and that clearness of conception from logical ex- 
 actness, so that logical exactness, combining with the social 
 spirit of the people, has rendered them the greatest of all mod- 
 ern masters in the art of rhetoric. For eloquence is well 
 defined as "ignited logic;" and to the French speaker, logic 
 supplies the fuel, and a genial sympathy the flame of elo- 
 quence. The sermons of the pulpits of France, the eloges of 
 
506 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 her acadeijiies, the discourses of her judges, the debates of her 
 States- General, of her Parliaments, and of her Legislative As- 
 semblies ; nay, even the declamations of her Revolutionary 
 clubs all attest that, in every age and in every theatre, her or- 
 ators have been gifted with admirable powers of agitating and 
 subduing the wills of the crowds which have gathered round 
 them. 
 
 But this logical structure of the understanding of our neigh- 
 bors, while at once generating their characteristic perspicuity 
 of style, and attested by it, has also given birth to that re- 
 morseless Ergoisme (no language but their own could have 
 found place for such a word) by which they are no less dis- 
 tinguished. The helpless slaves of syllogism, they advance 
 with unflinching intrepidity to any consequence, however start- 
 ling, which seems to them legitimately to emerge from what- 
 ever they regard as well-established premises ; while they re- 
 ject, with equal hardihood, any doctrine, however invaluable, 
 which can not be so demonstrated. They are Rationalists in 
 the correct sense of that much misused expression. That is, 
 they are more than skeptical of all conclusions which unaided 
 reason can not reach, even though they may be reached by the 
 aid of those guides, of which Reason herself has taught the 
 need and the authority. They condemn, as unmeaning or su- 
 perstitious, every opinion which can not be enounced in terms 
 perfectly unambiguous, even when such opinions are conver- 
 sant with topics beyond the range of human observation and 
 of man's experience. He who would estimate the extent to 
 which such Pyrrhonism infects and degrades much of the lit- 
 erature of France, must pass a large part of his life in read- 
 ing books, the knowledge of which a good man would regret, 
 and a wise and humble man avoid. 
 
 In that invariable transparency of style in which the sense 
 of all eminent French writers is conveyed to us, we may, I 
 think, farther discover the ancient, and even yet unsubdued 
 propensity of their nation and of themselves to submit to 
 established authority. In a jargon as new as it is offensive, 
 the sacred right of insurrection has, indeed, been loudly pro- 
 claimed in our own days. But, from the days of Hugues Ca- 
 pet to those of Louis XVI,, it was at once the pride and the 
 habit of the French people to bow to law, or to the semblance 
 
POWER OF THE PEN N FRANCE. 507 
 
 of law, with an almost Oriental subserviency. This national 
 docility was the basis on which the Capetian kings, and the 
 literary dictators of France, alike erected their absolute domin- 
 ion. Hence that subordination of the individual characteristics 
 of French writers to the generic characteristics of French lit- 
 erature. Hence it is that, in their external forms, history, po- 
 etry, philosophy, and even romance, ever correspond in France 
 to certain elementary types, which the law of letters there has 
 prescribed ; and that, like so many crystals, each species is cast 
 in its own normal mold, while all the species exhibit the same 
 invariable transparency. The humblest writer for the tragic 
 stage still works upon the model of the Cid or Athalie. The 
 remembrance of the Misanthrope, or Les Joueurs, restrains 
 him who would impart a new demeanor to comedy. Every 
 new philosopher must imitate the method of Des Cartes ; and 
 Bourdaloue, to this moment, gives the law to all the pulpits 
 of Paris. 
 
 That this conformity of the literature of France to the estab- 
 lished canons of French criticism rescues the inferior artists 
 from much extravagance and from many deformities, can not 
 be disputed ; though it may, not unreasonably, be questioned 
 whether this advantage is not purchased at too dear a rate ; 
 for that docility, and the transparent clearness of style to which 
 all candidates for fame aspire as the one indispensable condi- 
 tion of success, indicate, if they do not also promote, the pre- 
 vailing absence of the higher powers of the imagination. The 
 Ossianic hero, whose dwelling is in the shadows and the mists, 
 is haunted by spectres which are at once his terror, his delight, 
 and his inspiration. As he draws nearer to the south, he 
 quits them for objects more definite in form, more bright in 
 coloring, but of far less power to agitate his bosom or to kindle 
 his enthusiasm. So in those sunny latitudes of thought in 
 which the French intellect finds its habitual and favorite abode, 
 though there be neither clouds to overcast nor vapors to ob- 
 scure the prospect, yet neither are there to be found those 
 magical illusions which impart to more sombre skies their 
 deep and mysterious significance. Though France herself de- 
 nies, yet all other nations with one voice proclaim her inferi- 
 ority to her rivals in poetry and romance, and in all the other 
 elevated fields of fiction, A French Dante, or Michael Angelo, 
 
508 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 or Cervantes, or Murillo, or Grb'ethe, or Shakspeare, or Milton, 
 we at once perceive to "be a mere anomaly ; a supposition 
 which may indeed ba proposed in terms, "but which, in reality, 
 is inconceivable and impossible. 
 
 I trust that I shall not appear to have been seduced by these 
 more alluring topics from my proposed and proper inquiry into 
 the influence of the literature of France upon her civil polity. 
 The first and most essential step toward the solution of that 
 problem is to determine by what peculiarities that literature 
 is characterized. The second is to estimate (in however brief 
 and cursory a manner) the genius of each of those illustrious 
 men who have left upon the national mind the indelible im- 
 press of their imperishable labors. If (as I observed in my 
 last lecture) we can attain to some just appreciation of those 
 patriarchal spirits, we shall understand their less-gifted de- 
 scendants, sufficiently, at least, for the purpose which I have 
 immediately in view ; for the hereditary resemblance, or the in- 
 dispensable imitation, may, as I have formerly stated, be traced 
 with little difficulty from the intellectual ancestor throughout 
 the whole of his intellectual lineage. To this attempt I will, 
 therefore, now address myself. 
 
 Joinville, the son of the Senechal of Champagne, was born 
 near the commencement of the thirteenth century, and was 
 educated at the courts of Troyes and Provins ; where, at that 
 time, minstrelsy and music rendered the homage in which 
 greatness delights, while they received, in turn, the homage 
 which genius demands. Joinville listened to those strains, and 
 probably applauded them ; for he writes as a worshiper of the 
 harmonious and the beautiful ; but he did not imitate them. 
 Having succeeded to the senechaussee of Champagne, he be- 
 came esquire carver to St. Louis, and, at his summons, joined 
 that illustrious host which divided, with their royal leader, all 
 the calamities of his Egyptian campaign and of his inactive 
 exile in the Holy Land. But the enthusiasm of loyalty in 
 Joinville, though sustained by dreams of an Oriental princi- 
 pality, proved less enduring than the enthusiasm of religion in 
 St. Louis, sustained as it was by the unfaltering, hope of an 
 eternal recompense. The senechal, therefore, declined to ac- 
 company his master in his expedition to Tunis ; but in the 
 reign of Louis X., and at the age of more than ninety, dictated 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 509 
 
 to an amanuensis the story, which he had doubtless often tola 
 before to his associates, of his friendship, his conversations, and 
 his campaigns with the canonized king. That story has sur- 
 vived to our own days as a cherished part of the intellectual 
 patrimony of the French people. In those pages, the gallant 
 and affectionate, but worldly-minded knight, and the magnan- 
 imous, pensive, and unworldly king, are so skillfully contrast- 
 ed, and the virtues and infirmities of each are so reflected and 
 relieved by the other, that no one can contemplate them in that 
 exquisite, though unlabored composition, without understand- 
 ing and admiring, without condemning and forgiving, and lov- 
 ing them both. Over the whole picture the genial spirit of 
 France glows with all the natural warmth which we seek in 
 vain among the dry bones of the earlier chroniclers. "Without 
 the use of any didactic forms of speech, Joinville teaches tho 
 highest of all wisdom the wisdom of love. Without the ped- 
 antry of the schools, he occasionally exhibits an eager thirst for 
 knowledge, and a graceful facility of imparting it, which at- 
 test that he is of the lineage of the great father of history, and 
 of those modern historians who have taken Herodotus for their 
 model. 
 
 At the distance of eighty-six years from the completion of the 
 Memorials of Joinville appeared the yet more popular Chroni- 
 cles of Froissart. The son of an heraldic painter, and born at 
 Yalenciennes, he was familiar from his childhood with the em- 
 blems of seignorial dignity, and with the martial achievements 
 on the French and Flemish frontiers. He became, however, 
 not a soldier, but a priest ; and then (such were the habits of 
 his times) obtained distinction as a writer of erotic poetry. His 
 verses appear to have recommended him to the favor of Philip- 
 pa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III., and, by her bounty, 
 he was enabled to travel through France and England, where 
 (as he says) he met with more than two hundred great princes, 
 and collected intelligence on all sides ; for Froissart was the 
 first of those French authors who have followed literature as 
 their chief and peculiar calling. The earlier chroniclers had 
 been either the narrators of what they had seen, or the tran- 
 scribers or abbreviators of what they had read. He, on the 
 other hand, made it the business of his life to gather, from the 
 captains or the princes of his age, the materials for the com- 
 
510 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE 
 
 inemoration of their exploits. Such information could not, of 
 course, be so collected and employed without some sacrifice of 
 historical fidelity. But if he is sometimes unjust in the dis- 
 tribution of praise or blame, he is perfectly accurate in the de- 
 lineation of the world in which he lived. He is not the apol- 
 ogist, but the enthusiast, of the age of chivalry. He does not 
 exaggerate its virtues, for he could conceive of none more ex- 
 alted ; nor does he cancel its faults, for he was blind to their 
 deformity. 
 
 For the task which he had undertaken he was qualified, not 
 only by his restless activity and zeal, but by a retentive mem- 
 ory, a luminous understanding, a creative fancy, and an abso- 
 lute exemption from all national prejudices ; for, though the 
 Duke of Burgundy was the superior lord, and the King of 
 France the suzerain of his native city, yet Froissart considered 
 himself neither as a Burgundian nor as a Frenchman, but as 
 the subject of the Count of Namur, the immediate superior of 
 Valenciennes. He wrote, therefore, not as a partisan, but as 
 a cosmopolite. He also wrote, not as a philosopher, but as a 
 painter of the great military spectacle of his age, in all its shift- 
 ing aspects, in all its brilliant colors, and in all its ceaseless 
 variety ; and on that canvas he had the genius to group all 
 the chivalry and the heroism all the battles and the sieges 
 all the fetes and the tournaments of that agitated period, each 
 in a mellow light, each in its due subordination to the rest, 
 and each with a breadth of touch and a truth of perspective 
 which redeems that vast array of figures and that boundless 
 complexity of action from the reproach of confusion or disor- 
 der. In the art of picturesque writing, Froissart is not only 
 without an equal, but without a competitor. In the art of 
 narrative he has been surpassed by many, though even in his 
 narration the spirit of his native land may be distinguished 
 in the clearness and the natural sequence of his story, in the 
 graceful adjustment of the several parts of it to each other, in 
 the absence both of tumor in his pathetic passages, and of ex- 
 aggeration in his historical incidents, and in the easy and un- 
 ostentatious structure of the language in which his chronicle 
 is composed. 
 
 He is, however, only a chronicler. Philippe de Comines is 
 the earliest writer in the French tongue who was entitled to 
 
POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 511 
 
 assume the loftier title of an historian. Froissart had depict- 
 ed great events ; De Comines delineated great men. The one 
 had contemplated the strife of kings and kingdoms as a spec- 
 tator of the Isthmian games may have gazed at that heart-stir- 
 ring spectacle. The other had watched the schemes of states- 
 men and the conflict of nations with some approach to that 
 judicial serenity which we ascribe to a member of the Am- 
 phictionic Council. Yet De Comines can hardly be said to 
 have been an impartial judge between the princes who suc- 
 cessively enjoyed his aid and his allegiance. He regards 
 Charles the Rash with that affectionate interest which the 
 heroism even of the unwise -will excite in the bosoms of the 
 wisest. He contemplates Louis XI. with that combination of 
 curiosity, of attachment, and of awe, which minds of more 
 than ordinary power so often cherish for each other. The im- 
 ages of the fiery duke and of the crafty king were projected in 
 bold relief in the imagination of this acute and vigilant ob- 
 server, and the truth and distinctness of those images forms 
 the great charm of his retrospect of his own eventful life. The 
 higher charm of a just sensibility, whether to moral beauty 
 or to the absence of it, is, however, wanting in his pages. 
 Whether we study the successive masters of De Comines as 
 described by him, or himself as incidentally pourtrayed in his 
 delineation of those remarkable persons, we are reminded that 
 both they and he were living in an age when Machiavelli was 
 the teacher of princes, and when he numbered among his dis- 
 ciples not only Louis of France, but our own Richard III., and 
 the houses of Borgia and of the Medici. Profound and saga- 
 cious as he was, De Comines could neither serve such a sover- 
 eign, nor breathe the moral atmosphere of such times with 
 impunity. He is the unqualified admirer, if not the unscru- 
 pulous apologist, of his royal master ; and seems insensible 
 alike to the injustice of the ends at which he aimed, and to 
 the baseness of the means by which he pursued them. Yet 
 man is not less inconsistent in his faults and errors than in his 
 virtues ; and thus even the utilitarian De Comines is unable 
 to survey the revolutions in which he so largely participated 
 without an occasional, and apparently a heartfelt acknowledg- 
 ment that, in bringing to pass the disastrous catastrophe of the 
 world's history, the will and the agency of man are but in 
 
512 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 struments by which the Divine will accomplishes its immuta- 
 ble purposes of wisdom and of justice. In the subtlety of his 
 analysis of the great characters of his generation in the force 
 and discrimination of his portraits of them in the sagacity 
 with which he explores, and the perspicuity with which he in- 
 terprets, the hidden causes of the events in which they acted 
 and in his vigorous dispersion of the mists with which ig- 
 norance or passion obscures the true aspects of human affairSj 
 De Comines is emphatically a Frenchman. In the reverence 
 with which, on reaching the impassable limits of human in- 
 vestigation, he ceases to inquire, and pauses to adore, he rises 
 higher still, and becomes, not only a citizen, but a teacher of 
 the great Christian commonwealth. 
 
 This great triumvirate of French literature before the Re- 
 formation ( Joinville, Froissart, and De Comines) were not more 
 exempt than their contemporaries from the bondage of Papal 
 Rome. With the fall of spiritual freedom had fallen also the 
 freedom of the intellect. As religion, which is the love of God 
 and of man, had been darkened by superstition, so philosophy, 
 which is the knowledge of God and man, had been buried 
 under the dialectics of the school. The students of the Mid- 
 dle Ages had been thus inexorably debarred from those bound- 
 less fields of inquiry into the origin, the nature, the duties, and 
 the destination of our race, in which the sages of Greece and 
 the Fathers of the Church had consumed their laborious lives. 
 All moral truths had passed into so many articles of the faith. 
 All articles of faith had been reduced into so many dogmatic 
 formulas, and all those formulas had the syllogism for their 
 common basis. To multiply such formulas by the multipli- 
 cation of such syllogisms was the single exercise left open to 
 inventive minds ; and to minds not inventive it was permit- 
 ted only to accept, to remember, and to repeat those peremp- 
 tory conclusions of the schoolmen. The great end and object 
 of their teaching was to convert the human mind into an in- 
 tellectual mechanism, by which the same or similar conse- 
 quences would infallibly, and at all times, be reproduced from 
 the same established premises ; and while, to satisfy that crav- 
 ing for general principles which is the indestructible instinct 
 of our nature, the Church of Rome thus employed her array 
 of doctors, seraphic and irrefragible, she also employed the 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IIS FRANCE. 513 
 
 scourge, the prison, and the brand to silence those who pre- 
 sumed to quench that sacred thirst by ascending for them- 
 selves to the fountains of truth which God has opened, both 
 in the Book of Life and in his unwritten revelations in the hu- 
 man heart. For these reasons it is that Joinville and Frois- 
 sart skim so lightly, though so gracefully, over the surface of 
 the great social movements which they record, and that even 
 De Comines makes no attempt to draw any solution of the 
 great problems lying in his path from those depths with which 
 the theology and the philosophy of later times have rendered 
 our modern historians even ostentatiously familiar. 
 
 With the revival of letters,^ a mighty change came over the 
 spirit of the literature of France. The first and immediate 
 effect, indeed, was to provoke a rapturous and extravagant 
 imitation of the Greek and Latin models. Gray-headed men 
 went to school to study Cicero and Homer. To satisfy the 
 demand for such knowledge, Henry Stephen and Erasmus be- 
 came at once writers and compositors for the press. Athenian 
 and Roman costumes fluttered through the streets and the sa- 
 lons of Paris. A Macedonian phalanx was enrolled out of the 
 French army ; and, at the approach of death, learned men 
 imitated the dying declamations of Cato and Antoninus. 
 
 But then came the Reformation, not only to sweep away 
 these follies, but also to dispel many other errors far more for- 
 midable than these. The alliance between Christian antiquity 
 and Pagan antiquity triumphed over the fictitious traditions 
 of the Church and the oscillating logic of the School. The 
 Decretals of Isidore, and the Summa Theologise of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, retreated into the limbo of dethroned and departed 
 idols. The human mind once more breathed freely, and men 
 of genius appeared to give utterance to the thoughts and feel- 
 ings of an emancipated world. 
 
 I almost hesitate to pronounce, in immediate juxtaposition, 
 the names of the second great literary triumvirate, who, in the 
 sixteenth century, assumed that high office in France. Yet 
 it is, I think, but an apparent paradox to assert that between 
 Rabelais, Calvin, and Montaigne, the parallelisms are as re- 
 markable as the contradictions. 
 
 Rabelais, the son of an inn-keeper at Chinon, was born at 
 that place in the year 1483. He became a Franciscan friar, 
 
 KK 
 
514 POWER OF THE PEN IN /' RANGE. 
 
 a deacon, and a priest in holy orders ; and then, at the mature 
 age of forty-two, commenced the study of medicine in the col- 
 lege at Montpellier. Various medical treatises were the fruit 
 of those labors ; and the reputation derived from them was 
 sufficient to obtain for him the office of physician to the pub- 
 lic hospital at Lyons. But his professional books proving un- 
 saleable, Rabelais, to indemnify his bookseller, wrote and pub- 
 lished his Pantagruel, or Chronique Grargantuine, of which (as 
 he says) more copies were sold in two months than of the Bible 
 in ten years. Having thus discovered the secret of his power, 
 he next produced the Grargantua ; the work which has secured 
 for him the admiration of all subsequent ages, though the rev- 
 erence of none. It is a romance in which Rabelais may be 
 considered as depicting the habits, opinions, errors, crimes, and 
 follies of that age of religious and intellectual revolutions, in 
 the centre of which he lived. Yet the critics have doubted, 
 and must ever continue to doubt, whether Grargantua and his 
 son Pantagruel are actual portraits of those who led the arma- 
 ments (literary, theological, or military) of those times, or are 
 mere impersonations of those abstract qualities by which the 
 world was then governed ; whether Panurge and Friar John 
 had any living prototypes among the men of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury ; or whether the one is but a name for mediocrity, ceas- 
 ing to be honest as it becomes conspicuous, and the other a 
 name for sensuality, rescued from contempt by a shrewd and 
 jovial spirit. But why investigate these and such other rid- 
 dles, proposed by their author in avowed defiance of any such 
 attempt ? Why, indeed, read at all a book of which not only 
 the general scope, but almost every page, is enigmatical ? Why 
 squander time and patience on a writer who, of set purpose, 
 makes his readers dependent on the guidance of some dull and 
 doubtful commentator ? I have no answer to these questions, 
 or can answer them only by very earnestly dissuading the pe- 
 rusal of the lives of Pantagruel and Grargantua ; for those pas- 
 sages which do reward the toil of the student are separated 
 from each other, not only by this profound obscure, but by foul 
 abysses of impurity, which no skill or caution can always suc- 
 ceed in overleaping. I know not how to describe them in terms 
 at once accurate and decorous, except by borrowing Mr. Car- 
 iyle's denunciation of a work of Diderot's, and saying with 
 
POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 515 
 
 him, or in words resembling his, that he who, even undesign- 
 edly, shall come into contact with these parts of Rabelais's 
 great work, should forthwith plunge into running waters, and 
 regard himself, for the rest of the day, as something more than 
 .ceremonially unclean. 
 
 Yet he whose business or whose determination it is to ap- 
 preciate aright the civil, and therefore the literary history of 
 France, must needs pay this heavy price of knowledge ; for, 
 in that history, the romance of Grargantua is an indispensable 
 link. From the revival of heathen antiquity, Rabelais had 
 gathered a mass of learning resembling the diet of his own 
 Pantagruel, who had 4600 cows milked every morning for his 
 breakfast. From the revival of Christian antiquity, he had 
 learned to despise the authority and the superstitions of the 
 Church of Rome, without, at the same time, learning to rev- 
 erence the authority and the doctrines of the Gospel. He thus 
 traversed the boundless expanse of human knowledge without 
 the chart or compass which may be discovered only in that 
 knowledge which is not human, but divine. He traversed it 
 under the guidance of his own wit, sagacity, and humor ; a 
 wit vaulting at a bound from the arctic to the antarctic poles 
 of thought ; a sagacity embracing all the higher questions of 
 man's social existence, and many of the deeper problems of 
 his moral constitution ; and a humor which fairly baffles all 
 attempts to analyze or to describe it ; for it was the result, not 
 of natural temperament alone, but also of the most assiduous 
 and severe studies. The language of Greece had become as 
 familiar to him as his mother tongue ; and while he learned 
 from G-alen and Hippocrates to investigate the properties of liv- 
 ing or of inert matter, he was trained by Plato to spiritual med- 
 itation, and by Lucian to a skepticism and a buffoonery alike 
 audacious and unintermitted. From the union of such a dis- 
 position and of such discipline emerged the strange phenomenon 
 of a philosopher in his revels. In contemplating it, one knows 
 not, as it has been well said, " whether to wonder most that 
 such wisdom should ever assume the mask of folly, or that 
 such folly should permit the growth and development of any 
 true wisdom." It is, however, an apparent rather than a real 
 difficulty. The wisdom is never sublime, and the folly but 
 selilom abject. Each is but a different aspect of a nature, of 
 
516 POWER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 
 
 which the parts are, indeed, inharmonious, "but not incompati- 
 ble of a genuine Epicurean gifted with gigantic powers, but 
 of cold affections and of debased appetites ; ever worshiping 
 and obeying his one idol, pleasure, though at one time she bids 
 him soar to the empyrean, and at another commands him to 
 wallow in the sty. 
 
 Rabelais was wise in the sense in which any man may be 
 so who delights in the strenuous exercise of a powerful under- 
 standing, and loves thinking for thinking's sake. He was wise 
 to detect popular fallacies and to discern unpopular truths. 
 He was wise to see how the young might be better educated, 
 laws better made, nations better governed, wars more vigor- 
 ously conducted, and peace more securely maintained. He 
 was wise to call down both theology and philosophy from the 
 skies above to the earth beneath us. And he was not more 
 wise than eloquent ; sometimes arraying truth in the noblest 
 forms of speech, though more frequently enhancing her beauty 
 by enveloping and contrasting her with the homeliest. At his 
 prolific touch his native tongue germinated into countless new 
 varieties of expression ; and the mines of wealth, both intel- 
 lectual and verbal, which he bequeathed to future ages, after 
 being Wrought by multitudes in each, still appear inexhaustible. 
 
 The wisdom of Rabelais was, however, of the world, world- 
 ly. It never ascended to the eternal fountains of light, nor 
 descended to illuminate the dark places of the earth. It nei- 
 ther sought to interpret the awful mysteries of our nature, nor 
 bowed down to adore in the contemplation of them. It aimed 
 at no exalted ends, nor did it ever lead the way through any 
 rugged and self-denying paths. It expressed neither sympathy 
 for the wretchedness, nor pity for the sorrows of mankind, but 
 was satisfied to be shrewd, and witty, and comical upon them 
 all. To the keen gaze of Rabelais, the frauds, and follies, and 
 ignorance, and licentiousness of the Papal court and priesthood 
 afforded endless matter of scorn and merriment ; but to his last 
 hour he lived in their outward garb and communion. To that 
 penetrating eye had been clearly revealed the majesty of the 
 truth which the Reformers taught, and the majesty of the suf- 
 ferings which they endured in its defense ; but not one glow 
 of enthusiasm could they ever kindle in his bosom, as they 
 toiled in indigence, and died in martyrdom, to evangelize the 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 517 
 
 world. Secure in the absolution of Clement VII. for whatever 
 he had done and written against the Church, and secure in the 
 license of Francis I. to publish whatever else he might please, 
 Rabelais delighted to assume the character of a chartered liber- 
 tine, or, as it might almost be said, of an intellectual debau- 
 chee. And yet, voluptuary, scoffer, and skeptic as he was, his 
 laughter was so hearty, his glee so natural, his frolic so riotous, 
 and his buffoonery so irresistible, that he became, not merely 
 the tolerated, but the favored and privileged Momus of his times. 
 He became also a proof to all later times that, by the great mass 
 of mankind, any thing will be forgiven or permitted to genius, 
 when, abandoning its native "supremacy, it condescends to un- 
 dertake the strangely inappropriate office of master of the revels. 
 
 In thus dwelling on the literary career of Rabelais, my ob- 
 ject, however, has chiefly been to show how it illustrates the 
 predominance, in all the great authors of France, of the same 
 essential characteristics. His possession and abuse of their 
 logical spirit conducted him to skepticism, if not to infidelity. 
 His possession and abuse of their sympathetic spirit immersed 
 him in a ceaseless bacchanalian riot. Deep and fatal are the 
 traces of his example and of his fame in the literary history of 
 his native land. With him commences the lineage of those 
 eminent spirits who have waged war in France against the moral 
 and religious convictions, and even against the social decencies 
 of the Christian world ; a war productive of some of the sorest 
 troubles, or, rather, let us say, of some of the heaviest chastise- 
 ments which have rebuked the offenses of the nations of modern 
 Europe. 
 
 If it were rny object to show how contrarieties are related, 
 I know not how I could better accomplish it than by the im- 
 mediate transition which my subject compels me to make from 
 Francis Rabelais to John Calvin; for, probably, no two men 
 of commanding minds were ever more curiously contrasted 
 with each other, as certainly no two minds were ever enshrin- 
 ed in bodies more dissimilar. To look upon, Rabelais was a 
 drunken Silenus, Calvin a famished Ugolino. The one emp- 
 tied his bottle befgre he wrote, while he was writing, and after 
 he had written ; the other contented himself with a repast of 
 bread and water once in each six-and-thirty hours. Reposing 
 in his easy chair, the merry doctor was hailed as lord of mis- 
 
518 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 rule by all the jovial spirits of his age ; enthroned in the con- 
 sistory of Greneva, the inexorable divine was dreaded as the 
 disciplinarian of himself and of the whole subject city. The 
 witty physician was L'Allegro, the austere minister II Pense- 
 roso, of their generation. The reader of the Grargantua yields 
 by turns to disgust, to admiration, and to merriment j but 
 Democritus himself would not have found matter for one pass- 
 ing smile throughout the whole of the Christian Institute. To 
 Rabelais, human life appeared a farce as broad as the knights 
 of Aristophanes ; to Calvin, a tragedy more dismal than the 
 Agamemnon of .ZEschylus. And as they wrote, so they also 
 lived. The traditional stories about Rabelais, if true, attest 
 his love, and, even if untrue, they attest his reputed love, of 
 that kind of wit which is called practical ; all the traditions 
 of Calvin represent him as a man at whose appearance mirth 
 instantly took flight. The gay doctor is made in these tales 
 to play off his tricks on the graduates in medicine, on the Chan- 
 cellor du Prat, on the King and Queen of France, and even 
 on the mule of the Pope himself ; while the solemn theologian 
 makes his domiciliatory visits to ascertain that no dinner-table 
 at Geneva was rendered the pretext for levity of discourse or 
 for excess of diet. 
 
 What, then, is the congruity on which to found any com- 
 parison between these most incongruous minds ? The answer 
 is (to borrow the word once more), that they were both de- 
 voted ergoists, each of them being at once a mighty master 
 and a submissive slave of logic. To what strange extrava- 
 gances it conducted or accompanied Rabelais, I have already 
 attempted to show ; the consequences to which it impelled 
 Calvin were of far deeper significance. 
 
 The great Saxon patriarch of the Reformation had known 
 neither the same mastery nor the same bondage. From the 
 Inspired Volume, indeed, Luther had deduced the doctrines 
 of the churches destined to bear his name. But as his medi- 
 tations on it led him farther and farther from the tenets and 
 usages of the Church of Rome, he paused. He had been borne 
 onward till he came in sight of conclusions .against which his 
 heart reclaimed, and of practices against which his conscience 
 protested. At the bidding of those remonstrances, he was con- 
 tent to be inconclusive, if not illogical. He had left no errors 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRA.NCE. 519 
 
 unassailed, but was content to leave many truths undecided. 
 He had drawn from his Bible principles, the more remote con- 
 sequences of which he did not attempt to draw. He had learn- 
 ed many lessons of tolerance and some of indifference ; and, if 
 he were now living among us, would hardly escape being stig- 
 matized as a latitudinarian for that dislike of religious dog. 
 matism, and that disregard of the varieties of external observ- 
 ances in public worship which marked his declining years. 
 
 Most dissimilar were the spirit and the conduct of John Cal- 
 vin. Before him, also, lay the Inspired Volume. He looked 
 on it as containing not merely the chief, but rather the only 
 premises from which the truths of Christianity could be either 
 learned or inferred. "While he was composing his great work 
 Luther was still alive. But they who are, or who claim to be, 
 most familiar with his writings, assert that no mention of the 
 great German Reformer occurs in any part of them. If so, 
 this remarkable silence may probably be referred, partly to the 
 self-complacent nationality and contempt for the foreigner so 
 common to almost all French writers, but still more to his de- 
 termination to traverse the vast ocean of theology unaided by 
 the charts of any preceding navigator. He seems to have 
 adopted the Baconian apophthegm, that " from any one truth 
 all truth may be inferred ;" but with the addition, that these 
 all-embracing inferences must be drawn by no other hand than 
 that of John Calvin himself. There is something even sublime 
 in the courage with which his unaverted eye confronts every 
 difficulty, however formidable, and contemplates every conse- 
 quence, however repulsive*. Without presuming to hazard any 
 opinion on the truth of his peculiar system, and not even pre- 
 tending to understand it aright, I can yet perceive that, from 
 his apparent meaning, any less intrepid logician than himself 
 must have turned aside with many painful misgivings. Yet 
 I so much distrust my own ability to exhibit an exact sum- 
 mary of his doctrines, that, declining any such attempt, I shall 
 entirely rely on the construction which they have usually re- 
 ceived, not less from his friends than from his enemies. He 
 not only advances from the great article of justification by faith 
 alone to a denial of the ground on which the necessity of a holy 
 life had been maintained by the Roman Church, but seems to 
 place that necessity on grounds alike insecure and unintelligi- 
 
520 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 Lie. He seems to deduce from that article the opinion that 
 penitence is impossible to the unregenerate, and useless to the 
 elect. He seems to ascribe to the Holy Scriptures the doctrine 
 of an absolute fatalism. He seems to discover in them the 
 revelation of the awful dogma, that He who is love has called 
 into being a large part of the race of man, foredoomed, by his 
 own immutable decree, to an eternal existence of hopeless 
 misery. He seems to interpret the word of God as teaching 
 that the Church and the State are not two bodies in alliance 
 with, or distinct from each other, but the same body, one and 
 indivisible ; and that, therefore, all legitimate human govern- 
 ment is, in effect, a theocracy. He found, or supposed him- 
 self to find, in his Bible, that episcopacy was a human, a need- 
 less, or an injurious invention ; that holy orders could not be 
 effectually transmitted from one generation of Christian min- 
 isters to another ; that the baptismal font was superfluous , 
 the use of unleavened bread in the holy eucharist supersti- 
 tious ; the reverence of that sacrament as a divine mystery, to 
 a great extent, a human figment ; the festivals of the Church 
 an abuse ; and her ancient ceremonials an unmeaning panto- 
 mime. Thus taking away the support which feeble man de- 
 mands under the burden of a pure and absolute spiritualism, 
 he stood erect and triumphant amid the wreck of the ecclesi- 
 astical opinions, institutions, and observances of by-gone ages ; 
 but not of ecclesiastical opinions alone. Under his guidance, 
 and by a still farther use of his remorseless logic, the secular 
 commonwealth also was shaken to its foundations. Geneva 
 became the cradle of revolt against half the monarchies o^ Eu- 
 rope ; and, under the various names of Presbyterians, Insur- 
 gents, Gueux, Huguenots, and Puritans, his disciples in Scot- 
 land, in the United Provinces, in France, and in England, 
 proved their fidelity to the political doctrines, and even to the 
 example of the great founder of Calvinism. 
 
 If it were admitted that all the links of Calvin's argument- 
 ation were as indissoluble as he supposed them to be, it would 
 still remain to inquire whether his opinions are not refuted by 
 the nature of the inferences with which they were thus preg- 
 nant ; for the reasoning faculty is not the only light, nor is it 
 even the surest of the lights, given to man for his guidance 
 amid the shadows which encircle him. We accept the conclu- 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 521. 
 
 sions of our reason, because the laws and structure of our na- 
 ture render it inevitable. "We accept the assurances of our 
 moral instincts for the very same reason. But there can be no 
 conflicting necessities. There is, indeed, no meaning in any 
 such words. Never yet did Nature say one thing, and Reason 
 say another. Those voices are in eternal harmony, though to 
 us they may occasionally seem at discord. "When such a seem- 
 ing dissonance arises, a wise man will consider whether it is 
 not more probable that his syllogisms are vulnerable, than that 
 his heart misinterprets the law written on it by Grod himself 
 In the strength of our instincts, he has graciously provided a 
 compensation for the weakness of our intellects. The best 
 reasoned is not always the most reasonable conclusion; and 
 when, from any logical conclusion, the soul and conscience re- 
 coil, we may well believe that there is some real, though la- 
 tent error, either in the basis on which we have argued, or the 
 superstructure of argument which we have erected upon it. 
 
 Calvin admitted no such belief. He took no security against 
 the illusions of logic. He vindicated the tyranny of reason 
 over each man, and of the reason of John Calvin over all men. 
 And they who, like him, are by their birthright the intellectual 
 sovereigns of our race, have ever been greeted by the subject 
 multitude with applause, or rather with exultation, even when 
 their lawful authority has passed into a lawless despotism. 
 His Institution Chretienne was, therefore, received with un- 
 bounded delight. We may, indeed, reject the story that a 
 thousand editions of it were sold in his own life-time ; but we 
 can not dispute that, during a century and a half, it exercised 
 an unrivaled supremacy over a large part of Protestant Europe. 
 For that dominion it was indebted, in part, to the novelty and 
 comprehensiveness of the design it accomplished ; to the vast 
 compass of learning, scriptural, patristic, and historical, which 
 it embraced ; to the depth and the height of the morality which 
 it inculcated ; and to the calm but energetic keenness with 
 which it exposed the errors of his adversaries. But the popu- 
 larity and the influence of this remarkable book is also, in part, 
 to be ascribed to its literary merits. Calvin has been described 
 as the Bossuet of his age. Of all the French authors whom 
 France had as yet produced, he was the most philosophical 
 when he speculated, the most sublime when he adored, the 
 
522 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 most methodical and luminous in the development of truth; 
 the most acute in the refutation of error, and the most obedi- 
 ent to that law or spirit of his nation which demands symme- 
 try in the proportions, harmony in the details, and concert in 
 all the parts of every work of art, whether it be wrought by 
 the pen, the pencil, or the chisel. In the ninth chapter of 
 Bossuet's Histoire des Variations may indeed be found the best, 
 as it is a very reluctant, eulogy on the literary excellence of 
 his great rival and predecessor. Even in the haughty gloom 
 which the Bishop of Meaux discovers in the style and tone of 
 the Reformer of Geneva, there is a not inappropriate interest. 
 The beautiful lake of that city, and the mountains which en- 
 circle it, lay before his eyes as he wrote ; but they are said to 
 have suggested to his fancy no images, and to have drawn from 
 his pen not so much as one transient allusion. "With his men- 
 tal vision ever directed to that melancholy view of the state 
 and prospects of our race which he had discovered in the Book 
 of Life, it would, indeed, have been incongruous to have turned 
 aside to depict any of those glorious aspects of the creative be- 
 nignity which were spread around him in the Book of Nature. 
 Whatever else may have been the merits of the Calvinistic 
 system, it at least failed to impart elasticity to the spirits, or 
 freedom to the thoughts of those who first embraced it. After 
 the rise and fall of a few generations, it even failed to retain 
 them within the precincts of evangelical truth, and the doc- 
 trines of Socinus at length superseded those of Calvin, not only 
 in New England, in France, and in Switzerland, but even in 
 his own Greneva. On a future occasion I may, perhaps, at- 
 tempt to show how this degeneracy had its root in the despotic 
 logic of the founder of those churches. My more immediate 
 purpose is to trace out the progress of that despotism in the 
 literature of his native country. si *./ 
 
 As in most other tyrannies, so in this, the immediate effect 
 of the servitude into which Calvin had subdued the minds of 
 his disciples was to provoke a formidable revolt. When he 
 was giving his latest touches to his Institution Chretienne, 
 Michel de Montaigne, then in his twenty-second year, had just 
 taken his seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. That he after- 
 ward became a deputy in the States-General of Blois, though 
 maintained by no inconsiderable authorities, seems to me im- 
 
 
TOWER O.F THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 523 
 
 possible ; but it is clear that his early manhood was devoted to 
 public, and especially to judicial affairs. He was thus brought 
 into contact with the busy world at the moment of a greater, 
 agitation of human society than had occurred since the over- 
 throw of the Roman empire. Marvelous revolutions, and dis- 
 coveries still more marvelous in the world of letters, of politics. 
 of geography, and of religion ; the warfare of inappeasable pas 
 sions ; the working of whatever is most base and of whatevei 
 is most sublime in our common nature ; and calamities which 
 might seem to have fulfilled the most awful of the apocalyptic 
 visions had passed in rapid succession before the eyes of this 
 acute and curious observer. * It was an unwelcome and repuls- 
 ive spectacle. He turned from it to seek the shelter and the 
 repose of his hereditary mansion. In that retirement he in- 
 dulged or cherished a spirit inflexibly opposed to the spirit by 
 which his native country was convulsed. The age was idol- 
 atrous of novelties, and therefore Montaigne lived in the ret- 
 rospect of a remote antiquity. It was an age of restless am- 
 bition, and therefore he passively committed himself and his 
 fortunes to the current of events. The minds of other men 
 were exploring the foundations and criticising the superstruct- 
 ure of every social polity, and therefore his mind was averted 
 altogether from the affairs of the commonwealth. Because his 
 neighbors yielded themselves to every gust of passion, he must 
 be passionless. Because the times were treacherous, he must 
 punctiliously cherish his personal honor. Because they were 
 inhuman, he cultivated ,all the amenities of life. Because ca- 
 lamity swept over the world, he was enamored of Epicurean 
 ease. Heroism was the boast of not a few, and to their vir- 
 tues he paid the homage of an incredulous obeisance. Dog- 
 matism was the habit of very many, and therefore Montaigne 
 must surrender himself to an almost universal skepticism. 
 
 The contrast was as captivating as it was complete. With 
 a temper easily satisfied ; with affections as tranquil as they 
 were kindly ; with a curiosity ever wakeful, but never impet- 
 uous ; with competency, health, friends, books, and leisure, 
 Montaigne had all the means of happiness which can be brought 
 within the reach of those to whom life is not a self-denying ex- 
 istence, but a pleasant pastime. Yet, with him, it was the 
 pastim3 of an active, enlightened, and amiable mind. The 
 
524 POWER OF THE PEN IN. FRANCE. 
 
 study cf man as a member of society was his chosen pursuit, 
 but he conducted it in a mode altogether his own. The indi- 
 vidual man, Michel Montaigne, such as he would be in every 
 imaginable relation and office of society, was the subject of 
 his daily investigation. He became, of all egotists, the most 
 pleasant, versatile, and comprehensive. He produced complete 
 sketches of himself with an air of the most unreserved frank- 
 ness, and in a tone frequently passing from quiet seriousness 
 to graceful badinage. He describes his tastes, his humors, 
 his opinions, his frailties, his pursuits, and his associates, with 
 the most exuberant fertility of invention, and has wrought out 
 a general delineation of our common humanity from the pro- 
 found knowledge of a single member of it ; and, as the variety 
 is boundless, so is the unity well sustained. His essays are a 
 mirror in which every reader sees his own image reflected, but 
 in which he also sees the image of Montaigne reflecting it. 
 There he is, ever changing, and yet ever the same. He looks 
 on the world with a calm indifference, which would be repuls- 
 ive were it not corrected by his benevolent curiosity about its 
 history and its prospects. He has not one malignant feeling 
 about him, except it be toward the tiresome, and especially to- 
 ward such of them as provoke his yawns and his resentment 
 by misplaced and by commonplace wisdom. He has a quick 
 relish for pleasure, but with a preference for such pleasures as 
 are social, inoffensive, and easily procured. He has a love for 
 virtue, but chiefly, if not exclusively, when she exacts no 
 great effort nor any considerable sacrifice. He loves his fel- 
 low-men, but does not much or seriously esteem them. He 
 loves study and meditation, but stipulates that they shall ex- 
 pose him to no disagreeable fatigue. He cherishes every tem- 
 per which makes life pass sociably and pleasantly. He takes 
 things as he finds them in perfect good humor, makes the best 
 of them all, and never burdens his mind with virtuous indig- 
 nation, unattainable hopes, or profitless regrets. In short, as 
 exhibited in his own self-portraiture, he is an Epicurean who 
 knows how to make his better dispositions tributary to his 
 comfort, and also knows how to prevent his evil tempers from 
 troubling his repose. 
 
 The picture of himself, which Montaigne thus holds up to 
 his readers as a representation of themselves, is not sublime. 
 
POWER OP THE PEN N FRANCE. 525 
 
 nor is it beautiful ; but it is a striking and a masterly like- 
 ness. It is drawn with inimitable grace and freedom, and 
 with the most transparent perspicuity ; and they who are best 
 entitled to pronounce such a judgment, admire in his language 
 a richness and a curious felicity unknown to any preceding 
 French writers. Even they to whom his tongue is not native 
 can perceive that his style is the easy, the luminous, and the 
 flexible vehicle of his thoughts, and never degenerates into a 
 mere apology for the want of thought ; and that his imagina 
 tion, without ever 'disfiguring his ideas, however abstract and 
 however subtle they may be, habitually clothes them with the 
 noblest forms and the most appropriate coloring. 
 
 But my more immediate object is to notice the relation in 
 which Montaigne stands to the other great moral teachers of 
 his native land, and to those habits of thought by which France 
 is, and has so long been characterized. The antagonist in every 
 thing of the spirit of his times, he seerns to have regarded with 
 peculiar aversion the peremptory confidence by which the great 
 controversy of his age was conducted, both by the adherents 
 of Rome and by the founder of Calvinism. Because they would 
 admit no doubt whatever, every form of doubt found har- 
 bor with him. Because they were dogmatists, he must be a 
 skeptic. 
 
 In M. Fangere's recent edition of Paschal's Thoughts will 
 be found the famous dialogue on the skepticism of Montaigne, 
 between Paschal and De Sacy a delineation so exquisite, that 
 it seems mere folly to attempt any addition to it. The genius 
 of Port Royal, however, exhibits there its severity not less than 
 its justice ; and a few words may not be misplaced in the at- 
 tempt to mitigate a little of the rigor of the condemnation. 
 Montaigne was a skeptic (as very many are), because his sa- 
 gacity and diligence were buoyant enough to raise his mind to 
 the clouds which float over our heads, but were not buoyant 
 enough to elevate him to the pure regions of light which lie 
 beyond them. His learning was various rather than recondite. 
 It was drawn chiefly from Latin authors, and from the Latin 
 authors of a degenerating age ; not from Cicero or Yirgil, but 
 from Seneca and Pliny. Of Greek he knew but little, though 
 he was profoundly conversant with the translation of Plutarch, 
 with which Amyot had lately rendered all French readers fa- 
 miliar. From such masters Montaigne did not learn, and could 
 
526 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 not have learned, the love of truth. They taught him rather 
 to content himself with loose historical gossip, and with half- 
 formed notions in philosophy. They taught him not how to 
 resolve, but how to amuse himself with, the great problems of 
 human existence. They encouraged his characteristic want 
 of seriousness and earnestness of purpose. From such studies, 
 and from the events of his life and times, he learned to flutter 
 over the surface of things, and to traverse the whole world of 
 moral, religious, and political inquiry, without finding, and 
 without seeking, a resting-place. His aimless curiosity and 
 versatile caprice form at once the fascination and the vice of 
 his writings, though not, indeed, their only vice. In this pres- 
 ence I am bound to add the warning, that the name of Mon- 
 taigne belongs to that melancholy roll of the great French skep- 
 tical writers Rabelais, Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire, and Di- 
 derot who, not content to assault the principles of virtue, have 
 so far debased themselves as laboriously to stimulate the dis- 
 orderly appetites of their readers. 
 
 Yet the skepticism of Montaigne was not altogether such as 
 theirs is. He has none of their dissolute revelry in confound- 
 ing the distinctions of truth and falsehood, of good and evil. 
 He does not, like some of them, delight in the darkness with 
 which he believes the mind of man to be hopelessly enveloped 
 He rather placidly and contentedly acquiesces in the convic- 
 tion that truth is beyond his reach. He could amuse himself 
 with doubt, and play with it. With few positive and no dear- 
 ly-cherished opinions, he had no ardor for any opinion, and had 
 not the slightest desire to make proselytes to his own Pyrrhon- 
 ism. He was, on the contrary, to the last degree, tolerant of 
 dissent from his own judgment ; and, in the lack of other op- 
 ponents, was prompt, and even glad, to contradict himself. Of 
 all human infirmities, dullness, and obscurity, and vehemence 
 are those from which he was most exempt. Of all human pas- 
 sions, the zeal which fires the bosom of a missionary is that 
 from which he was the most remote. "We associate with him 
 as one of the most pleasant of all our illustrious companions, 
 and quit him as one of the least impressive of all our eminent 
 instructors. Into what new forms his skeptical and his social 
 spirit passed in the age next succeeding his own, will be the 
 subject of the lecture which I hope to address to you when we 
 next meet. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 527 
 
 LECTURE XIX. 
 
 ON THE POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 IN my last lecture I observed how Rabelais (the earliest of 
 the three dominant intellects of France in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury) found endless matter for the broadest mirth in the mys- 
 teries of our mortal existence ; how Calvin derived from Holy 
 Writ the peremptory solution of them all ; and how Montaigne 
 amused himself with the inquiry whether such questions were 
 really susceptible of any answer whatever. To that inquiry, 
 his friend, disciple, and imitator, Francis Charron, devoted his 
 once celebrated Treatise on Wisdom. Montaigne had played 
 with the problem " Q,ue sais-je ?" and had inscribed it as a 
 motto on the scales he kept by him. Charron inscribed not 
 only on his book, but on the portals of his house at Condom, the 
 words " Je ne Sai." The torch which had thus been passed 
 from hand to hand was at length grasped by Rene des Cartes 
 a genius who, in profound, intense, and persevering thought 
 surpassed Calvin himself, and rose above Rabelais and Mon- 
 taigne in the expansion of his mind, still more than he fell be- 
 low them in wit, and grace, and playfulness. 
 
 Des Cartes (the son of a counselor in the Parliament of 
 Rennes) was born at La Haye, in Touraine, in the year 1596. 
 As a volunteer at the siege of La Rochelle, and afterward 
 in the army commanded by Prince Maurice in Holland, he 
 studied the passions of man as developed in their wildest ex- 
 citement, and then traveled far and long to observe the man- 
 ners and the prevalent opinions of the various nations of Eu- 
 rope. In one of these journeys, finding himself (as he informs 
 us) in a wild and sequestered scene on the frontiers of Bava- 
 ria, he spent the whole day in a sunny nook, passing from 
 thought to thought till he had at last conceived the desire of 
 reducing his mind to a state of absolute nakedness, in which, 
 divested of all his former ideas and affections, he might retain 
 nothing except the will and the power to investigate truth. 
 
528 POWER OF THE PEN IN FR.NCE. 
 
 This singular wish was as singularly accomplished. He began 
 by inhabiting, in the midst of Paris, a hermitage so inaccessi- 
 ble, that his friends could never discover it, until, after passing 
 two years in that retirement, he became convinced that the 
 Parisian air was possessed by a subtle poison, disposing him 
 to vain and chimerical imaginations. From these intellectual 
 miasmata he therefore escaped to the town of Egmont, in Hol- 
 land, and resided there during the next twenty-five years in a 
 state of unbroken meditation, solitude, and repose. The Uni- 
 versity of Utrecht at length, by preferring against him the 
 charge of atheism, drove him once more to Paris as a place of 
 shelter. But at Paris, also, he sought security in vain, and 
 was compelled to accept from Queen Christina the welcome 
 which both his adopted and his native countries had refused 1 
 him. He died shortly after his arrival in Sweden, a victim to 
 that severe and ungenial climate. 
 
 Of the fifty-four years which Des Cartes thus passed on 
 earth, more than thirty were spent in a state of self-abnega- 
 tion such as no anchorite has ever emulated. It was little 
 that his sleep, and diet, and exercise were exactly regulated 
 by the single purpose of securing, to the utmost possible ex- 
 tent, the independence of his soul on his body. His mental ap- 
 petites were subjugated to a still more rigid discipline. To 
 secure to his reason an undisputed supremacy over all his 
 other faculties, he labored not only to cast down every idol of 
 the cavern, but to consign to oblivion all the interests, the sen- 
 timents, and the events with which either his heart or his im- 
 agination had ever been occupied. He even attempted to eman- 
 cipate himself from the memory of those deceptive languages, 
 Greek and Latin, in which such subtle disguises have been 
 found for so many mental illusions. That he might ascend to 
 the sanctuary of truth, he thus aspired to become a pure ab- 
 straction of defsecated intellect. 
 
 The result of this sublime and persevering effort was to give 
 birth to the Cartesian philosophy, which has so long exercised, 
 and which even yet retains, so powerful an influence over the 
 minds of the educated classes of society in France. The ex- 
 planation of that celebrated system falls within the province of 
 other teachers in the University. I shall attempt only to no- 
 tice one or two of its elementary principles ; and I shall do so 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 529 
 
 in the fewest possible words, because I am well aware that no 
 words of mine, however multiplied, could render intelligible 
 to my audience doctrines which I myself understand so very 
 imperfectly. 
 
 " Cogito, ergo sum," is the massive foundation-stone of the 
 colossal edifice erected by Des Cartes. That famous proposi- 
 tion, though really " the well-ripened fruit of long delay," may 
 perhaps sound not only as a truism, but as of all truisms the 
 most meagre. Such a judgment would, however, prove nothing 
 except the ignorance and incompetency of the judge. 
 
 " I think, therefore I exist," is not the fragment of a syllo- 
 gism which might be reconstructed thus : " Whatever thinks, 
 exists. But I think. Therefore I exist." It is rather an en- 
 thymeme that is, an immediate sequence of two propositions, 
 of which the second is the necessary offspring of the first. " I 
 think" that is, I am conscious of the act of thinking. My- 
 self and my thoughts are a plurality, not a unity. They are 
 the objects of which I am the subject. My consciousness of 
 them is my adjudication that such objects exist. Or suppose 
 that I can doubt even the existence of my own thoughts. 
 Well, even so ; that very doubt is itself a thought of which I 
 am conscious. Let my skepticism be so absolute and so uni- 
 versal as to involve in uncertainty every other conceivable po- 
 sition, yet that very skepticism is the affirmation of myself as 
 a thinking being. 
 
 Here, then, the naked reason has at length set her foot upon 
 one resting-place, narrow if you will, but yet firm and im- 
 movable. Here is one truth which can not be assailed even 
 by doubt itself ; or, rather, here is a truth which doubt itself 
 does but verify and confirm. Nor is this a barren position. 
 It is rather a ground which, when duly cultivated, is prolific 
 of results of the highest moment to every thinking being. 
 
 For, first, it ascertains the fact that, to each man, his own 
 consciousness is the primary evidence and the ultimate test of 
 truth. But each man is conscious of many ideas, and each 
 man, who is accustomed to meditate on the subject, becomes 
 aware that his ideas are separable into two classes, distin- 
 guished from each other by the difference of the sources in 
 which they originate. One class of our ideas we derive from 
 the testimony of our senses, and from the reflections we make 
 
 L L 
 
530 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 on that testimony. All our ideas of this class are more or less 
 fallacious, because they all partake of the infirmities of our 
 bodily organs, and of the weakness of our mental powers. The 
 other class of our ideas do not originate with our senses, be- 
 cause they do not correspond with any thing presented to our 
 notice in the exterior world. They are, therefore, a part of 
 our very existence, and are coeval with it ; not, indeed, act 
 ively, but potentially ; not as thoughts already developed, but 
 as pregnant germs of thought, to be awakened from their 
 slumber, and ripened into maturity in the progress of our lives. 
 The first of these classes of ideas may be called Factitious, the 
 second Innate. 
 
 Now, among our ideas, there is one which challenges pecul- 
 iar attention. It represents to us a Being self-existent, infin- 
 ite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, supremely holy, just, and 
 true, and absolutely perfect. To the object of that idea we 
 give the name of Grod. But in the world of sensible things, 
 nothing exists corresponding with this idea, nor any thing from 
 our meditations on which we could have derived it. Conse- 
 quently it belongs, not to the class of our factitious, but to the 
 class of our innate ideas. 
 
 But if my idea of Grod be an innate idea, it must have been, 
 potentially at least, and as yet an undeveloped germ, a part 
 of my very original existence, and coeval with it. My exist- 
 ence and my idea of Grod must, therefore, both have sprung 
 from the same fontal source. What, then, is that source ? 
 
 First. My existence and my coeval idea of Grod did not orig- 
 inate with myself. If I really had the power and the will to 
 call myself into being, which is of all powers the most emi 
 nent, I must also have had the inferior power and the will to 
 clothe myself with all the perfections embraced in my innate 
 idea of Grod. But I am invested with no approach to any one 
 of those perfections. 
 
 Secondly. My existence and my coeval idea of Grod did not 
 originate with my progenitors ; for, if they really called me 
 into being, they must also have called into existence my innate 
 idea of Grod; that is, they must have infused into me a type 
 of perfection infinitely transcending any prototype residing in 
 themselves. They must have produced an effect with which the 
 producing cause was not in the slightest degree commensurate. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 531 
 
 Thirdly. My existence and my coeval idea of (rod did not 
 originate in the concurrence of a plurality of causes ; for, on 
 that supposition, plurality, which is imperfection, called into 
 being my idea of the Divine Unity, which is perfection. 
 
 It follows that the origin of my existence and of my idea of 
 God must be a cause distinct from myself and from my pro- 
 genitors must be a cause possessing the attribute of unity 
 and must be a cause invested with all other qualities of self- 
 existence, infinity, omniscience, and the like, which that idea 
 embraces. But such qualities can exist only as the forms of 
 some substance. That substance must be a living, conscious, 
 personal Being ; and to that .Being we assign the name of Deity. 
 
 See, then, the naked reason setting her foot upon a second 
 rock ; a resting-place, not contracted and narrow like the first, 
 but sufficiently broad and stable to sustain the superincumbent 
 weight of all divine and of all human knowledge. Man's con- 
 sciousness of his own thoughts has demonstrated his own ex- 
 istence. Man's consciousness of his own innate idea of Grod 
 has demonstrated the existence of a Deity, in whom every at- 
 tribute of wisdom, power, and goodness meet in absolute per- 
 fection. 
 
 Now, of those perfections, truth is one ; for the opposite of 
 truth, that is, falsehood and error, are imperfect. If, then, he 
 who is the source of my being and of my innate ideas be true, 
 those ideas must themselves be true ; that is, there must exist 
 some objective realities of which they are the types. As (rod 
 is the cause of those ideas, so must He also be the substance 
 of them. They are the marks of the great architect indelibly 
 impressed upon his workmanship, man. 
 
 Behold, then, the third conquest attained by the pure and 
 naked reason. In the innate ideas of the human mind she has 
 acquired a mirror which represents to her, with infallible ac- 
 curacy, many of the otherwise inscrutable secrets of the mate- 
 rial and immaterial universe. 
 
 Advancing from this basis, Des Cartes next proceeds to in- 
 quire into the relations between the Creator and his creation, 
 between the body and the soul, between mind and matter. He 
 teaches, if I mistake not (and I am deeply conscious of my lia- 
 bility to mistake), that between things spiritual and things 
 material there is really nothing in common ; that between the 
 
532 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 immortality of the one and the decays and dissolution of tLo 
 other there is really no contradiction ; that as created things 
 remove farther and farther from their source, they become 
 more and more multiplied, diverse, and dissimilar ; hut that 
 the Divine Unity is the common basis of them all ; that sci- 
 ence is hut the path by which we return to that unity ; that 
 it is a continually progressive generalization the constant dis- 
 covery of new harmonies, and reconcilement of seeming dif- 
 ferences, until at length the whole universe shall be revealed 
 as under the rule of some few laws and those laws as depend- 
 ent on (rod and Grod himself as the common centre of all, as 
 one in every form and species of unity, the single fountain of 
 universal life. 
 
 To determine how that divine causation acts and what it is, 
 and how far that which we call cause and effect has any anal- 
 ogy with the creative power and its results, Des Cartes moves 
 onward into a complete system of psychology, founded on and 
 illustrated by other systems, physiological and physical. I do 
 not presume 'o follow his awful guidance, but, descending to 
 a level more befitting both my capacity and my office, I would 
 attempt briefly to consider, "What was the influence, in France, 
 of the Cartesian philosophy, of which such were the first or 
 elementary principles ? 
 
 Two systems of thought, the most singularly contrasted with 
 each other, presented themselves to Des Cartes as he looked 
 back on the generations immediately preceding his own. The 
 first was the Scholastic philosophy, which, enthralled both by 
 premises and by conclusions which it was forbidden to all men 
 to controvert, and by a logic from which it was forbidden to 
 any to escape, performed within these impassable limits feats 
 of mental agility almost as miraculous as they were useless. 
 From this despotism of human authority, some of the great 
 thinkers of Italy, of England, and of France had revolted into 
 a skepticism which denied or depreciated the power of man to 
 attain to truth at all, either by the use of his reason or by the 
 aid of revelation. The Reformers themselves had contributed, 
 however undesignedly, to foster this prevailing habit of mind, 
 by subverting many of the established opinions, without being 
 able to agree with each other as to the belief to be substituted 
 for them. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 533 
 
 But the noble intellect, and yet more noble spirit of Des 
 Cartes, rejected alike this bondage of human authority and the 
 lawless anarchy by which it had been succeeded. Loving truth 
 with his whole soul, he sought her by the most rugged and un- 
 trodden paths. He accepted, indeed, the doubts of Montaigne 
 and Charron, of Grassendi and of Hobbes. But, in the judg- 
 ment of his most eminent disciples, the unbelief, which with 
 them was final, with him was provisional. To them it was a 
 resting-place, to him a point of departure. He became a vol- 
 untary unbeliever only that he might attain to a settled faith ; 
 and divested himself of every preconceived thought, that so he 
 might erect that superstructure of his more mature judgment 
 on the single basis which appeared to him unassailable by any 
 just or even plausible objection. When addressing you on the 
 subject of the " provisional doubts" of Abelard, I offered my 
 opinion on the substantial worth and accuracy of such eulo- 
 gies as these ; and I now add, that the skepticism of Des Cartes, 
 however upright, did not conduct him to the truth he sought. 
 The system which he thus built up by the intense and solitary 
 labors of more than twenty years, has long since been num- 
 bered among the things that were, and are not. It was not 
 given to him to be the intellectual legislator of succeeding ages. 
 But he achieved the yet higher glory of transmitting to all the 
 generations which have followed his own, the indelible impress 
 of his freedom of thought, of his reverence for truth, and of 
 his fervent zeal for the propagation of it. 
 
 The earliest of the triumphs of Des Cartes are, however, 
 rather amusing than serious, and are curiously characteristic 
 of French society. The austere sage, or, rather, his books and 
 his doctrines, became for a time eminently fashionable in Paris. 
 Thus we find Madame de Sevigne persuading herself that the 
 nieces of so great a man must excel all other ladies in a cer- 
 tain dance, which, in those days, all ladies were performing. 
 Her inimitable letters bear frequent testimony to the popular 
 use of Cartesian phraseology, as when she writes to her daugh- 
 ter, " J'aimerois fort a vous parler sur certains chapitres ; mais 
 ce plaisir n'est pas a portee d'etre espere. En attendant, je 
 pense, done je suis ; je pense k vous avec tendresse, done je 
 vous aime ; je pense a vous uniquement de cette maniere, done 
 je vous aime uniquement." The fables of La Fontaine also 
 
534 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 illustrate the prevailing admiration, or, it might rather be said, 
 the submissive worship, of the great teacher, whom he declares 
 the Pagans would have adored as a god, and to whom (he adds) 
 even we may assign a place midway between those beings who 
 are merely human and those who are wholly spiritual. Fene- 
 lon reproduced the principles of Des Cartes with all the em- 
 bellishments of his own graceful imagination ; and Bossuet 
 himself, in his treatise, " De la Connaissance de Dieu et de 
 Soi-meme," is supposed to be nothing more than the inter- 
 preter of some of the more considerable tenets of the Cartesian 
 philosophy. , 
 
 To explain the decrees of a power so capricious and arbitrary 
 as fashion, is a task which may be undertaken by none but 
 those who have been initiated into her higher mysteries. It 
 may, however, be conjectured, that the patrons of that kind 
 of celebrity found a peculiar zest in bestowing it on one who 
 stood so far aloof from their own glittering circle. Probably, 
 also, they discovered in his style a charm which the most en- 
 thusiastic might feel, however little they might be able to 
 analyze it ; for the language of Des Cartes resembles nothing 
 more than the atmosphere, by the intervention of which we 
 see, though it is itself invisible. It is the nearest possible ap- 
 proach to that inarticulate speech in which disembodied spirits 
 may be supposed to interchange their thoughts. It has no 
 technical terms no appeals to the memory no coloring of 
 imagination or of wit no trope, or epigram, or antithesis 
 no rhetoric and no passion. And yet it wants neither warmth 
 nor elegance. The warmth is perceptible in his evident and 
 devout solicitude to attain to truth and to impart it. He 
 writes, not to exhibit his own powers, but to benefit his read- 
 ers. In the words (I believe) of Pascal, " As you study the 
 author, you perceive the man." The elegance consists in the 
 felicity and the ease with which each successive word, and 
 sentence, and paragraph, and discussion falls into its proper 
 place, and exactly fulfills its appropriate office. It is a lan- 
 guage which may be compared to a perfect system of musical 
 chords, which, being touched by some absolute master of the 
 science of harmony, yields a strain at once the most complex 
 in reality and the most simple in appearance. La Place him- 
 self never writes under the restraint of a more severe logic. 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 535 
 
 La Fontaine never tells a fable with a more perspicuous sim- 
 plicity. " Les Precieuses Ridicules" of Moliere, therefore, read 
 and extolled Des Cartes in the sincere belief that they under- 
 stood him. It was the most natural, though the most com- 
 plete of all mistakes. If our own Butler could have borrowed 
 nis pen, the superficial many would have been as much fasci- 
 nated by the Analogy as they were by the " Discours de la 
 Methode," and (with all reverence be it added) the penetra- 
 ting few would have better understood, as they would have 
 still more profoundly revered, that imperishable monument of 
 piety and of wisdom. 
 
 But to gratify the taste, -and to win the applause of the 
 courtly or literary circles of the age of Louis XIV., was the 
 least of the effects of the labors of Des Cartes. He is the 
 founder in France of that habit of mind, which to this hour 
 characterizes her more eminent philosophers, and which they 
 hold up to the admiration of mankind under the distinguished 
 term of Spiritualism. On the soundness of these Neo-Platonic 
 doctrines I do not presume to hazard an opinion. But it is 
 risking little to say that he did good service to his country who, 
 by the undying authority of his name, has rescued it from the 
 sensualism of Hobbes. To Des Cartes, more than to any other 
 man, it is owing that Physiology has never been allowed by 
 the great philosophical teachers of France, or by their disciples, 
 to usurp the province of Psychology ; that the soul is not be- 
 lieved by them to acquire and to digest her aliment just as the 
 body gathers and assimilates its food ; that they do not sup- 
 pose the will, and all the other powers of the interior man, to 
 be but so many parts of a thinking mechanism, obeying the 
 immutable laws of mental dynamics, and destined at last to 
 an inert inactivity ; that they discern in the relations of man 
 to his Creator the still perceptible traces of the Divine image, 
 in which our race was formed, and which, in the depths of its 
 fall and degradation, it still retains ; and that they perceive, 
 even in the economy and structure of the material universe, a 
 wisdom which contemplates and provides for something more 
 than merely material advantages. 
 
 Des Cartes is also the founder, among his fellow-country- 
 men, of " Rationalism," if that word be used in its inoffensive 
 and better sense. Shortly before his birth, the rebound of the 
 
536 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 human mind from the fetters which had so long repressed its 
 elasticity had been signalized by the appearance, in every part 
 of Europe, of spirits struggling for freedom, and aspiring, as 
 it has been beautifully said, to inhabit the palace of their own 
 thoughts the edita, doctrinci sapientum, templa serena. But 
 as yet these were but the aspirations of the nobler few. The 
 less noble many were still bowing beneath their ancient servi- 
 tude. It was in the boyhood of Des Cartes that Bruno was 
 burned at Rome, and Yanini tortured at Toulouse. It was in 
 the ripe manhood of Des Cartes that the reluctant Galileo was 
 compelled to admit the revolution of the sun round the earth. 
 It was soon after Des Cartes had quitted the world that Male- 
 branche was still bemoaning the despotism which demanded 
 of all men the sacrifice of their reason and their conscience to 
 the Peripatetic faith. Yet in Malebranche, Des Cartes found 
 his most eminent disciple, and in Leibnitz his most illustrious 
 follower. To this hour the Cartesian spirit is dominant in 
 Germany, and the " Cotigo, ergo sum," is the real basis of the 
 hazardous speculations of her greatest philosophers. 
 
 For that spirit yet lives, though the forms to which it once 
 gave life are forever gone. It lives in those mental habits, so 
 familiar to our own times, that we have almost forgotten that 
 they are new, and have ceased to look back to their origin 
 among us. Such is the habitual assertion of the right to dis- 
 criminate between truth and falsehood, in opposition to any and 
 to every human authority. Such is also the habit of bringing 
 all such questions to the test of the universal, not of individ- 
 ual reason. Such, again, is the rejection, in our speculative 
 inquiries, of the treacherous aid of a philosophical terminolo- 
 gy, and the rejection of the yet more dangerous support of 
 great names, of ancient traditions, and of established maxims. 
 And such, above all the rest, is the habit of regarding the search 
 for truth, and the propagation of truth, as the high duties to 
 which the intellectual rulers of mankind are bound, when nec- 
 essary, to sacrifice, not their ease merely, but fame itself, and 
 every other recompense which the world could offer. Francis 
 Bacon was not more the founder of such rationalism as this in 
 England, than Rene des Cartes was the founder of it in France. 
 
 Nor was he content to vindicate the rights of reason. He 
 labored, also, to determine and enforce her obligations. In 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 537 
 
 Des Cartes, the characteristic logic of the French understand- 
 ing attained its perfection, as, in his writings, it found its mod- 
 el. A teacher of dialectics might draw from every page of the 
 " Discours de la Methode" admirable examples of the right use 
 of that science. So admirable, indeed, were they, that, while 
 Arnauld and Nicole followed their guidance in the " Grram- 
 maire generale Raisonnee" and in the " Logique" of Port Roy- 
 al, the dramatists, and wits, and poets, as they labored in the 
 adjacent chateau of Versailles to amuse their royal patron, ren- 
 dered an involuntary homage to their literary sovereign. They 
 imitated the severe sequence of his argumentation even when 
 it was their immediate object to provoke a smile, and they 
 aimed at his transcendental truths while giving utterance to 
 the anguish or the raptures of the heart. 
 
 The French critics, pledged as they are to discover the ab- 
 solute perfection of dramatic genius in Corneille, Racine, and 
 Moliere, the consummation of wit and taste in Boileau, and 
 the last refinement of graceful playfulness in La Fontaine, 
 maintain that the secret of the unrivaled beauty of them all 
 consists in the sagacity with which they grasp universal truths, 
 and in the precision with which they express them, or, in oth- 
 er words, in the Cartesian spirit by which they are animated. 
 I know not how to concur in this eulogy. I can perceive, in- 
 deed, in the poetry of the age of Louis XIV., this boasted pow- 
 er of reasoning ; but I think that I also perceive that it is at- 
 tained at the expense of the higher power of thinking. "We 
 have learned, from our own poets and dramatists, to regard a 
 yet more exalted office than this as their appropriate ministry. 
 We require them to invent and to imagine to detect the mys- 
 teries of the heart to kindle and to control the affections, and 
 to render the beautiful and the sublime, the pathetic and the 
 ludicrous, suggestive of truth sometimes familiar and some- 
 times recondite. The Cartesian philosophy and the logical 
 exactness of their French rivals is like a cold subsoil, stunt- 
 ing and starving the vegetation of the well-cultured surface. 
 Thus their heroines not seldom pause to deliver a subtle anal- 
 ysis of the passions by which we are to suppose them devoured. 
 Thus, also, the most brilliant of their comic personages give 
 utterance to long epigrammatic lectures, in the tone (not, I 
 tear, of all tones the most captivati ag) which best befits an ac- 
 
538 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 ademical preelection. The French dramatis persona is not an 
 individual agent, behaving and talking as his own peculiar na- 
 ture prompts him. He is but one of the various aspects of the 
 dramatic author himself one of the many vehicles for his emo- 
 tions, for his wisdom, or for his wit. When we read Henry 
 IV., we think only of Falstaff; when we read Andromache, 
 we think only of Racine. Hence it is that neither in the fa- 
 miliar conversation of the French people, nor in their popular 
 literature, do we often meet with the reference (so incessant 
 among ourselves) to the fictitious characters of the national 
 stage, as though they were so many veritable men and wom- 
 en, the intimate acquaintance of us all. For not only the 
 kings and sages, but the lackeys and chambermaids of the 
 classical French theatre are all graduates of the Cartesian 
 academy reasoners from whom, indeed, you learn no falla- 
 cies, but associates from whom you catch no inspiration. Our 
 own national and invincible predilections will constrain us all 
 to look with infinitely greater pleasure upon the forest glade, 
 over which the oak freely tosses his giant arms into the air, 
 than upon all the gardens ever laid out by Le Notre, and on 
 all the rectilineal avenues with which he has adorned them. 
 
 But Des Cartes had yet other pupils than these, whose gen- 
 ius shed a glory around the age, though not around the court, 
 of Louis XIY. In his correspondence is to be seen a letter 
 from M. Marsenne, dated November, 1639, referring to a youth 
 of sixteen years of age who had just finished a treatise on the 
 conic sections, and who promised to rival the most illustrious 
 mathematicians. The intelligence seems scarcely to have at- 
 tracted the notice of the great philosopher, who, however, aft 
 er an interval of eight years, met this precocious genius, and 
 conversed with him on the existence of a vacuum, on the weight 
 of the atmosphere, and on the reality of that subtle matter 
 which was then imagined to fill the illimitable regions of space. 
 At the time of this interview, Blaise Pascal, for that was the 
 young man's name, was laboring under an access of the mal- 
 ady which accompanied him from the cradle to the grave, and 
 Des Cartes (an amateur physician) was among the number 
 of those who in vain suggested remedies for his relief. Fee- 
 ble as was the bodily frame of Pascal, the few years which he 
 passed in intercourse with the world were vehemently agitated 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 539 
 
 by some of the most intense of tLe worldly passions. The 
 years which intervened between his retirement to Port Royal 
 des Champs and his death were devoted to a preparation for 
 that great change a preparation which consisted in the de- 
 vout communing of his soul with God, and in preparing, for 
 the benefit of mankind, that great work, of which the scat- 
 tered fragments, under the name of Pascal's Thoughts, are in 
 the hearts of many and in the hands of all. 
 
 And yet not more than seven years have elapsed since the 
 world was first placed in possession of a genuine collection of 
 them. The earliest edition had been rendered at once imper- 
 fect by the omissions, and redundant by the additions, to which 
 the author's manuscripts had been subjected by the jealous pi- 
 ety of his surviving associates at Port Royal. The existence 
 of some such errors was generally known, but the extent of 
 them was unsuspected, until M. Cousin surprised the world by 
 the publication of many of the suppressed passages, in which 
 Pascal appeared to avow a Pyrrhonism still more complete than 
 that which he had himself condemned in Montaigne. To ver > 
 ify or to correct this discovery, M. Faugere entered upon a dil- 
 igent examination of every document throwing any light on it, 
 which could be found in the national or in the private archives 
 of France. The result of this labor of love was the appearance 
 of a new edition of the " Pensees," to which it seems scarcely 
 possible that any thing material should be added by any future 
 inquirer. A careful collection and collocation of the scattered 
 leaves of the original manuscripts has enabled M. Faugere to 
 show that the passages which had attracted M. Cousin's notice 
 were, in reality, fragments of which the sense had been entire- 
 y changed by their accidental separation from their context or 
 from each other. In what manner this has been proved what 
 new views M. Faugere has been able to disclose of Pascal's 
 character and doctrines, and what that character and what 
 those doctrines really were, may be best learned from one of 
 that series of Essays which, having been first given to the 
 world anonymously, have recently been collected and pub- 
 lished as his own by Mr. Rogers, one of the very few writers 
 of our age and country who could, without presumption, have 
 undertaken to fathom the learning and to appreciate the gen- 
 ius of Blaise Pascal, It is a presumption of which I shall not 
 
540 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 myself be guilty. It will be my humbler office to inquire, 
 What is the place occupied by that great man in the literary 
 history of his native land ? 
 
 Pascal, then, was a Cartesian. Like Des Cartes, he began 
 with doubt, in order that he might end in certainty. Like 
 nim, he renounced all allegiance to merely human authorities, 
 however exalted and however venerable. In the spirit of his 
 master, he received what was passing in the microcosm of his 
 own mind as being, at least to himself, the primary and indis- 
 pensable witness of truth. As a true disciple of that severe 
 school, he not only revered his own reason as the supreme 
 earthly judge of every question so brought under his cogni- 
 zance, but conducted all such investigations by the aid of the 
 same geometrical logic by which Des Cartes himself had been 
 guided. And, to complete the resemblance between these two 
 great masters of the art and power of investigation, each of 
 them abandoned his privilege of free inquiry so soon as he en- 
 tered within the sacred precincts of Faith, where he received, 
 or professed to receive, the authentic intimations of the Divine 
 will in the spirit of a little child. 
 
 But here the similitude ended and the divergence began 
 Des Cartes impersonated the "pure reason" sojourning among 
 men, to occupy herself, not with the business of their lives, but 
 with the mysteries of their nature. Pascal impersonated hu- 
 man sympathy, yearning over the world from which he had 
 withdrawn, and still responding to all the sorrows by which it 
 was agitated. Lofty as was the range of his thoughts, they 
 were never averted from that great human family to which he 
 belonged. Every afflicted member of it had in him a fellow- 
 sufferer. Driven into solitude by the anguish of disappointed 
 hopes and blighted affections, he carried thither also the bur- 
 den of a body oppressed by almost ceaseless pain or lassitude. 
 And there, living continually, as Richard Baxter says of him- 
 self, on the confines of the church-yard, Pascal learned, like 
 that holy man, to regard physical science but as at best a man- 
 ly sport, and metaphysical science as nothing more than a cap- 
 tivating amusement. To learn that even these studies were 
 also vanity, was, however, the most exquisitely painful of all 
 the lessons he had as yet been taught. It delivered him over 
 to the crushing burden of an existence, cheered by no pursuit, 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 541 
 
 and animated by no interest. Most solemn and pathetic are 
 the words with which he celebrated his deliverance from that 
 fearful void. They were inscribed on a sort of amulet, which, 
 from that time forward to the last hour of his life, he never 
 ceased to carry secretly on his person. " Pere juste (he there 
 exclaims), le monde te ii'a point connu, mais je t'a connu. 
 Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie. Je m'en suis separe ! Renon- 
 ciation totale et douce." He had thus found at last the relief 
 of his own sorrows, but it was in renouncing his attachments 
 to the world that he might devote his mighty powers to the 
 consolation of others. 
 
 Such was the spirit in whigh Pascal entered on the composi- 
 tion of his immortal u Pensees." Of those reflections, man 
 was the subject ; and even, in the absence of any positive test- 
 imony, the internal evidence might satisfy any reader of them 
 that the three men whom he most profoundly studied were Mi- 
 chel Montaigne, Rene des Cartes, and Blaise Pascal. Who but 
 the great essayist is the original of his vivid portrait of one 
 made up of vanity and self-contradiction so light and frivo- 
 lous as to be amused with the veriest trifles, even while he is 
 the victim of misery, weakness, and insignificance at once so 
 little and so great possessed with an insatiable desire for hap- 
 piness beyond his reach, and thirsting for truth to which he is 
 unable to attain? Who but the great philosopher was the 
 prototype of the exalted being he depicts, as evidently formed 
 for infinity as immense when contrasted with nothingness 
 as the great prodigy of nature as gifted with powers to know 
 and to desire what is good as great, because he is able to 
 know his own wretchedness as nobler than the whole mate- 
 rial universe, even if it were all united together to overwhelm 
 him, because it would be unconscious of its victory, and he 
 conscious of his own destruction ? And who but Pascal himself 
 was that union of two the composite man the chimera the 
 chaos the inconsistent and incomprehensible monster, whom 
 his own energetic hand has so powerfully sketched ? 
 
 It was from his introspection of that composite man that 
 Pascal, like Des Cartes, derived some elementary truths tc 
 serve as the basis of a philosophy yet more divine than his. 
 On the basis of his own consciousness he planted the lowest 
 steps of the ladder on which, like that of the Hebrew patriarch, 
 
542 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANC JS. 
 
 an ascent might, as he hoped, be at last made to the very gates 
 of heaven. From those innate and unassailable ideas he de- 
 signed to evolve a series of consequences on which the mighty 
 edifice of revealed truth might securely rest. He proposed to 
 demonstrate the evangelical system by the Cartesian method. 
 He undertook to establish the religion of prophecy and of mir- 
 acle by the most severe logical induction. He summoned rea- 
 son to lead the way to those elevated regions of thought, in 
 which she must resign her charge to the guidance of faith and 
 adoration. From a review of the relations and analogies be- 
 tween the nature of man and the revelation of Grod, was to be 
 wrought out a chain of internal evidences, linking indissolu- 
 bly together those primary verities which our consciousness 
 attests, and those ultimate verities which Christianity dis- 
 closes. 
 
 In these later times the Church has sustained no greater dis- 
 appointment than in that premature death which intercepted 
 the completion of Pascal's undertaking. The fragments of it 
 lie scattered before us, and no meaner hand than his may pre- 
 sume to reconstruct and finish them. Yet, even in their un- 
 finished state, they constitute the most effectual, perhaps, of 
 all the succors by which uninspired man has relieved the hu- 
 man mind from the heavy burden of religious skepticism. 
 
 And yet it is but too evident that the great teacher himself 
 fainted occasionally beneath that burden throughout the whole 
 of his mortal existence. M. Cousin's discoveries have, indeed, 
 been superseded by the yet more recent discoveries of M. Fau- 
 gere. But enough remains to show that Pascal paid the usual 
 penalties of genius, and that not even he could ascend heights 
 of such surpassing elevation, without perceiving that mists and 
 obscurity hung over some parts of the boundless prospects 
 which his mental vision commanded. And hence not, perhaps, 
 the least attractive charm of his profound meditations. "What 
 more pathetic than the sadness with which he gazes on the 
 impassable limits of his inquiries, and on the seeming contra- 
 dictions to which they have conducted him ? "What more sub- 
 lime than the resolute integrity with which he scrutinizes and 
 rejects the proffered aid of sophisms to enlarge and reconcile 
 his views ? "What more touching than the meekness with 
 which his fatigued and anxious spirit finds, in the assurances 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 543 
 
 of faith, the repose which he has sought in vain from the most 
 intense and persevering efforts of reason ? 
 
 Much, however, of the painful unrest which preyed upon the 
 mind of the author of the "Pensees" may, I believe, be ascribed 
 to the necessity under which he lay of embracing the whole 
 of the tenets of that branch of the Universal Church to which 
 he belonged. The superincumbent mass of her doctrines was 
 continually tending to displace the foundations of his belief, 
 deep and solid as they were. Even the intellect of Pascal was 
 oppressed in the attempt to connect his innate ideas those 
 elementary evidences of truth which he drew from his own 
 self-consciousness with such dogmas as those of human merit 
 of the worship of saints of ecclesiastical infallibility and 
 of the transubstantiation of the elements. Yet, until that con- 
 nection had been so firmly established, his heart might not find, 
 in the communi ->n of papal Rome, the tranquillity and the sol- 
 ace of which it stood in need ; and he never sought it in any 
 other Christian fellowship than theirs. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, he found relief from skeptical thoughts 
 by diverting his mind to topics of a less overwhelming interest. 
 Some years before his retirement, the Jesuits had accused him 
 of a disingenuous plagiarism from the Italians, on the subject 
 of the weight of the atmosphere ; and it is said that his father 
 repelled the imputation by the prophetical menace that a day 
 would come when the youth whom they had injured would 
 inflict on themselves an eternal shame and penitence. The 
 utterance of this prediction is, however, doubtful; but we know 
 from the authority of his sister, Madame Perrier, that he un- 
 dertook the Provincial Letters at the request of Arnauld, who 
 had not himself succeeded in successfully refuting the condem- 
 nation which, at the instance of the Jesuits, had been launched 
 against him by the Sorbonne. And keen, indeed, were the 
 shafts of the champion of Port Royal, and irremediable their 
 wounds. Although, at the present day, few perhaps, if any, 
 feel an interest in the controversy on its own account ; yet I 
 can not but avow my own opinion that, in that controversy, 
 much less than justice is rendered by Pascal to his antagonists. 
 Father Daniel, one of the most learned of them, has written 
 an answer which no one, I think, can read without conceiving 
 some distrust of the accuracy of the great censor, both as a 
 
544 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 logician and as a narrator of matters of fact. But both Daniel 
 and Pascal leave unnoticed what I apprehend to be the true 
 answer to a large part of the argument, or rather of the invec- 
 tive, of the Provincial Letters. It is, that whoever will under- 
 take to prescribe a system of morals in which every principle 
 of virtue shall be brought to the test of extreme cases, and 
 shall be accommodated to them, will ere long find himself in a 
 region of hypothesis, in which darkness must be often put for 
 light, and light for darkness. But thus to control and guide 
 the conscience by peremptory rules, embracing every conceiv- 
 able problem of human conduct, was not peculiar to the Jesu- 
 its. Such casuistry was part of the religious system of the 
 Jansenists also ; and, indeed, of every other section of the 
 Church of Rome. It formed the code to be administered in 
 the judgment seat of the confessional. Pascal and Daniel 
 might each have silenced the other by the remark, or by the 
 acknowledgment, that their common spiritual mother was re- 
 ally responsible for the extravagances of Escobar and Sanchez, 
 because she required all her children to live under the law of 
 virtue considered as an abstract science, rather than under the 
 law of virtue considered as a sentiment spontaneously arising 
 in the regenerate heart. 
 
 But the reader of the Provincial Letters can hardly pause to 
 form any such cold censure. It seems to him impossible that 
 a weapon of such exquisite edge and temper should be wielded 
 by any other arm than that of truth herself. He can not be- 
 lieve that a fiction so simple, and yet so admirably adapted to 
 its purpose, as the imaginary dialogue of the first ten letters, 
 should be really affording concealment to any error. He re- 
 jects as incredible the supposition that any darkness (conscious 
 or unconscious) should really be overclouding a mind which 
 can infuse a light so pellucid into that metaphysical chaos, 
 and can animate with so much light and warmth the dry bones 
 of so obscure a controversy. And while Pascal exercises this 
 kind of spell over the understanding of his readers, he holds 
 their imagination also in equal bondage. His first ten letters 
 are a kind of comedy, glowing with all the illusions, the irony, 
 the gayety, and the wit of the French theatre in the age of 
 Louis XIV. Then, however, the scene is shifted. The well- 
 meaning but bewildered interpreter of the Jesuitical casuists 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 545 
 
 and his Socratic interrogator are Dismissed from the stage, and 
 the Port Royalist appears in his own person to pronounce an 
 indignant invective on the extravagant and atrocious opinions 
 into which his too candid interlocutor has been "beguiled. It 
 is an invective as withering as ever proceeded from the French 
 n ulpit, when ringing with the vehement eloquence of Bossuet, 
 or the inexorable logic of Bourdaloue. 
 
 I have said that I aim at nothing more than to ascertain 
 the place properly belonging to Pascal in the literary history 
 of his native land. It is a position unlike that of any of his 
 illustrious competitors. With each of them literature was the 
 great business and object of life. "With Pascal it may be said 
 to have been rather at one time a recreation, at another a self- 
 sacrifice a recreation or a self-sacrifice of an intellectual giant- 
 He played with physical and mathematical science, and aban- 
 doned it as a pastime unworthy the heir of an immortal exist- 
 ence. He played with theological controversy, and turned 
 aside from it also as a pursuit below the dignity of his sacred 
 vocation. He did not play, indeed, with the task of demon- 
 strating the truths of Christianity, but he undertook it in a 
 spirit of compassionate sympathy for his brethren of mankind, 
 with which no desire for their applause, nor any other secular 
 motive, was allowed to mingle. Into these relaxations, and 
 into these tasks, the whole soul of the author was unreservedly 
 thrown ; and in each of them in turn he exhibits some new 
 aspect of that sublime and comprehensive spirit. Except from 
 these genuine and undesigned self-disclosures, it would have 
 been scarcely credible that in the same mind could have met 
 in perfect harmony the reasoning powers of a great mathema- 
 tician and the imagination of a great poet ; the genial warm- 
 heartedness of a philanthropist and the malicious wit of a 
 comedian ; the condensed energy of an orator and the profound 
 and conscientious deliberations of a philosopher ; or that the 
 canvas on which he wrought out these prodigies of genius 
 should be ever glowing with the well-ordered contrasts, the 
 graceful variety, and the rich coloring of a painter of human 
 life and manners. 
 
 Pascal, however, in common with all his illustrious contem- 
 poraries, was deficient in one of the moral sciences. I refer 
 to that science which investigates the principles of all social 
 
 M M 
 
546 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 institutions, the causes and t tendencies of historical events, 
 and the rights and duties of man as a member of the common- 
 wealth. While every other field of knowledge was cultivated 
 in France, Political Philosophy alone was neglected. In other 
 lands, "by the aid of such studies, the mental had triumphed 
 over the physical power ; but there mind, though victorious in 
 every other enterprise, was powerless to secure to society the 
 blessings of a wise, just, and impartial government. What 
 were the real causes of this ill success ? or, in other words, to 
 revert to the problem with a view to which I have engaged in 
 this slight and hasty retrospect of French literature, What was 
 its effect on the constitution of the civil government of France ? 
 The answer to that question must at least touch on the polit- 
 ical influence of the School of the Pyrrhonists, or the success- 
 ors of Abelard of the School of the Ideologists, or the success- 
 ors of Bernard and of the School of the Brgoists, or the suc- 
 cessors of Calvin. The means by which the kings of France 
 first compelled the great authors of their country to abandon 
 their high office of explaining and improving the polity of the 
 state, and then reduced them to the degraded rank of syco- 
 phants or idolators of the royal power, are the fit subject of a 
 distinct consideration. 
 
 First, then, the Pyrrhonic School, or succession of the men 
 of letters of France, may be deduced from Abelard as its pa- 
 triarch, through Rabelais, Montaigne, Des Cartes, and Paschal, 
 and many intervening but more obscure writers, till it reaches 
 Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and the other contributors to the 
 Encyclopedie of the eighteenth century. It was the common 
 design of them all, though that design was not avowed by 
 them all with equal frankness, to embark on the voyage for 
 the discovery of truth from " provisional doubt" as their com- 
 mon point of departure ; that is, from a total absence of all 
 positive opinions whatever. I stated on a former occasion why 
 I believe every such attempt to proceed on a misconception of 
 the fundamental laws of our moral nature, and of the immu- 
 table condition of human life. I am well convinced, despite 
 the examples of Abelard, of Des Cartes, and of Pascal, that 
 he who, rebelling against those laws, and impatient of that 
 condition, shall really commence his search for truth in a state 
 of provisional doubt about all things, will end in a state of in- 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN PRANCE. 547 
 
 curable ^oubt upon every question. Whoever forces his mine 
 into the habit of collecting from every quarter, and of present- 
 ing vividly to his imagination, all the difficulties to which ev 
 ery doctrine, religious, moral, or political, is more or less ob- 
 noxious, and who then makes such difficulties the subjects of 
 his protracted study, is inevitably, though unconsciously, dis- 
 qualifying himself for the clear discernment, or for the cordial 
 acceptance of any doctrines whatever. Progressively abandon- 
 ing his faith in every thing else, he at length abandons all faith 
 in himself, and acquiesces in the melancholy hypothesis that 
 the primaeval cause of his existence (whatever that unknown 
 cause may be) called him in.to being (if indeed his existence 
 be real) with this eager craving for knowledge, that it might 
 conduct him, not to light, but to darkness ; not to the discov- 
 ery of the order and symmetry of all things, but to a view of 
 all things warring with each other in wild and chaotic confu- 
 sion. Commencing with universal doubt, he will end with 
 universal skepticism. 
 
 By skepticism, as I at present employ that word, I do not 
 mean the suspension of the judgment on each successive sub- 
 ject of inquiry, nor that freedom of mind which, in the result 
 of any such inquiry, can lay aside the most cherished precon- 
 ceptions, and embrace Truth, even if she at length presents 
 herself in a form the most unexpected and unwelcome. With- 
 out such skepticism as this, the search for truth is but a mock- 
 ery ; and the inquirer, however much he may vaunt his free- 
 dom, is in fact a bondsman. The skepticism which I impute 
 to so many of the great French writers is a very different state 
 of mind from this. They were opinionless, and were content 
 to be so. They were destitute of settled convictions, and ac- 
 quiesced in the want of them. Even so far as they could at- 
 tain to any definite creed, they held by it faintly and irreso- 
 lutely. They had no faith which they were ready to attest by 
 any considerable sacrifice ; none to which they clung as an in- 
 destructible part of their portion in this life, or of their inherit- 
 ance beyond the grave. 
 
 If, as I am constrained to infer, Abelard, and Rabelais, and 
 Montaigne, and Bayle, and so many others of their illustrious 
 lineage in France, were in this sense of the word skeptics, it 
 seems to me to follow inevitably that a large part of their read- 
 
548 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 
 
 ers were skeptics also ; for they became illustrious precisely 
 because they were the faithful interpreters of the thought-? and 
 feelings which had already been born, or were struggling into 
 life in the minds of their contemporaries. Their popular ac- 
 ceptance and their fame were earned by that fidelity. They 
 would have inculcated Pyrrhonism in vain, and would have 
 been unrewarded by the laurel in any land of which the pre- 
 vailing tendencies were not already Pyrrhonic. They gave to 
 those tendencies a strength and a decision which would have 
 been unattainable without their aid ; but, though they foster- 
 ed, they did not create them. 
 
 That skepticism has long been among the natural charac- 
 teristics of Frenchmen, I infer, not merely from the general 
 tone of so much of their literature, but also from that peculi- 
 arity of it which French critics make their boast. It bears, 
 as they very truly say, constant witness to the national pas- 
 sion for abstract ideas. That passion, indeed, animates, not 
 their books only, but their discourses in the senate, in the pul- 
 pit, and at the bar. It takes possession of their clubs, and even 
 of their private society. No aspirant after wit or wisdom in 
 France can make good his pretensions, unless he knows how 
 to scale the transcendental peaks of philosophy. To this spe- 
 cies of the sublime they are ever ready to sacrifice even the 
 beautiful. The fine mental sense of Greece (where the love 
 of beauty was a national and universal instinct) would have 
 rejected, with unutterable scorn, those supersensuous embel- 
 lishments with which Frenchmen, especially in our own times, 
 rejoice to adorn their poetry, their history, and their rhet- 
 oric ; for, in truth, such ornaments are as cheap and vulgar 
 as they are unbecoming. Any man of common intelligence 
 may be easily trained to any legerdemain of the understanding 
 to the making of abstractions, for example, as easily as to 
 the making of jokes or the making of verses. The production 
 of apophthegms is a hard task to him, and to him only, who 
 allows himself to utter no words without both a definite mean- 
 ing and a profound conviction of the truth of what he says. 
 The throes and labors of a long life preceded the birth of each 
 of the sayings for which as many of the sages of Greece have 
 been immortalized. But the writer of the newspaper which 
 lies on your breakfast table at Paris is never without his pearls 
 
POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 549 
 
 of superlative wisdom to scatter over his account of yester- 
 day's review or opera. 
 
 Whence, then, is this national habit of quitting the solid 
 earth for the hazy clouds ? It is nothing else than the love of 
 that " provisional doubt" in which these aeronauts find their 
 pleasure and their glory. By the aid of these metaphysica . 
 juggleries of words, they sublimate, darken, and dissolve all 
 doctrines, even without the express and formal contradiction 
 of any. They live in a region of half meanings or of no mean- 
 ing in a state of contented, though perhaps unconscious skep- 
 ticism. Wedded to no political opinions, but dallying with 
 all, they pass, in a few brief years, through all the phases in 
 which political society has ever exhibited itself among men, 
 though never lacking " pure ideas" with which to polish pe- 
 riods and to darken counsel about each. 
 
 The France of the last sixty years has indeed been in a state 
 of chronic and unnatural distortion. But her intellectual hab- 
 its were not, and could not have been, essentially different 
 when the hill and gardens of Ste. Gfenevieve were thronged 
 with the disciples of Abelard, or when the booksellers' shops 
 were besieged by purchasers of the Grargantua, or when the 
 ladies of Versailles were writing Cartesian letters. The en- 
 thusiastic popularity of their skeptical teachers has', from age 
 to age, been at once the effect and the cause of that state of 
 the national mind, of which we may read the results in every 
 page of their national history. That history every where de- 
 picts a people gallant, gay, ingenious, versatile, and ardent, be- 
 yond all rivalry and all example. But it also sets before us a 
 race more destitute than any other of profound and immutable 
 convictions, and, therefore, less capable than any other of a 
 steady progress in the great practical science of constitutional 
 government a people who are at one time the sport of any 
 demagogue who can veil his selfish ambition under the cant 
 of "pure ideas," and at another time, the victims of any des- 
 pot who may be strong enough to trample both the Ideologists 
 and their verbal science under his feet. To have induced or 
 cherished this mental temperament is, I believe, the well- 
 founded reproach of the " Pyrrhonic succession" in France. 
 
 The lessons of those who succeeded to, and represented in 
 later times than his own, the mystic Bernard, however oppo- 
 
550 POWER Of THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 site to these in their character, were not very dissimilar in their 
 results. I pause at the entrance into a chapter of ecclesias- 
 tical history, upon which I am, for many reasons, at once re- 
 luctant and incompetent to enter. It belongs not to me, hut 
 to others among us, to explain what were the religious and 
 philosophical tenets of the Gallican Church, as represented by 
 the Sorbonne, and by the schools of the various religious or- 
 ders. I believe, however, that many of the most powerful 
 members of those bodies, from the days of Bernard to those of 
 Q,uesnel, adopted each of the two cardinal articles of the pe- 
 culiar creed of the Abbot of Clairvaux : the first, the spiritual 
 discernment, by the regenerate soul, of the mystic characters 
 engraven on it by the very hand of the Creator, in attestation 
 of the whole system of Roman Catholic doctrine ; the second, 
 that, to the pure in heart, all Divine truth is attainable by 
 means of that beatific vision, to which, even in this life, they 
 are admitted or, in other words, his " Philosophy of Love." 
 To draw up an exact series of the French divines who, by their 
 writings, inculcated on the people of France opinions substan- 
 tially identical with these, would demand a kind and a degree 
 of knowledge to which I have no pretension. But that such 
 opinions are at this moment maintained in that country by the 
 Hagiologis'ts, who are laboring there so zealously for the ad- 
 vancement of the interests of the See of Rome, is a fact fa- 
 miliar to all who are conversant with their books ; and from 
 those books may also be gathered many curious intimations 
 of the descent of those mysterious dogmas from one generation 
 to another. It may, however, be a sufficient proof of their 
 vitality to observe, that it was in order to repress such specu- 
 lations that the court of Rome pronounced her censure upon 
 Fenelon, and agitated the whole of France by the Bull Uni- 
 genitus. 
 
 All the argumentative shafts of the Pyrrhonists might have 
 been discharged in vain against such a spiritual coat of mail 
 as this. All the syllogisms which Aristotle ever investigated 
 and constructed would have been unable to disturb any one of 
 the dreams of Madame Gruyon. The Stagyrite himself would 
 have been utterly baffled by an antagonist who had so com- 
 pletely shaken off all the fetters of logic. But Rabelais was 
 the most effectual of all auxiliaries to those who had vainly. 
 
POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 551 
 
 assailed these great outworks of Papal Rome with their im- 
 potent dialectics. His hearty laugh triumphed over antago- 
 nists who were altogether beyond the reach of argument. But 
 no alliance could be more disastrous even to those who invoked 
 it. He was the intellectual progenitor of Voltaire. He was 
 the first of that long line of mockers and gibers who hold a po- 
 sition so prominent and so unfortunate in the literary history 
 of France. In no other land has such perfection been ever at- 
 tained in the art of drawing merriment from the most serious 
 subjects which can engage the thoughts of man. Now there 
 is no mental habit so unfriendly to the growth of firm convic- 
 tions, and to stability of purpose, among those who addict 
 themselves to it. In his own appropriate province Momus is 
 well enough ; but when he wanders from it into the regions 
 sacred to our highest interests, temporal and eternal, he brings 
 with him a moral malaria. 
 
 As Mysticism and Quietism were impenetrable weapons of 
 defense against all argument, so they were very formidable 
 weapons of assault against all imputed heresies. I pointed 
 out, in a former lecture, the intimacy of the relation which 
 they bore to the persecutions of the court of Rome. They as- 
 sured the persecutor of his own absolute infallibility. They 
 taught him that dissent from his opinions was nothing less 
 than fatal. They appeared to him to convict the heretic, not 
 of a mere error of judgment, but of an obdurate depravity of 
 will. They supplied all the premises of which the stake was 
 the actual, if not, indeed, ,the legitimate consequence. Many 
 have been the enemies of the peace of mankind, but none so 
 ruthless as the Ideologists. Many are the thoughts which have 
 steeled the heart of man to mercy, but none so effectually as 
 a " pure idea" in full possession of it. The rapacity of De 
 Montfort might have been satiated with the plunder and con- 
 quest of the Albigenses. The gloomy purpose of the souls of 
 Innocent III. and his successors demanded their extermination. 
 Catharine of Medici and the house of Cruise might have been 
 satisfied to reign over heretical subjects, if they could have 
 been terrified into silence and submission. Philip II. and 
 Gregory XIII. were haunted by a dark spirit, which required 
 that the whole realm of France should be watered with the 
 blood of the Huguenots. Richelieu aimed at nothing more 
 
552 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 than to crush the political confederacy of La Rochelle. The 
 confessors of Louis XIY. could be appeased by nothing less 
 than the Dragonnades. 
 
 The Mystic and Q,uietist literature of France was pre-emi- 
 nently devout both in its tone and in its design. But it prop- 
 agated those views to which may be ascribed the massacre of 
 the Albigenses and of the Huguenots. It contributed more 
 powerfully than any other teaching to annihilate, in the minds 
 of men, that modest self-distrust by which the uplifted arm 
 may be arrested before it falls in vengeance on those who dis- 
 sent from our opinions. It fostered what I have before called 
 the pride of belief the pride of him who, believing that his 
 own soul is a mirror reflecting the eternal verities of the Di- 
 vine intellect, considers it impious to doubt his own infallibil- 
 ity. The stories of the Albigensian crusade and of the wars 
 of religion are, indeed, so revolting, that the reader of them is 
 reconciled to his own nature only by the remembrance that 
 crimes so unparalleled had their basis rather in the illusions 
 of the human heart than in its malignity. Those crimes, how 
 ever, have not been without their penalties. The royal ex 
 terminators of the heretics were elevated by their destruction 
 to an absolute and despotic power over every class and variety 
 of their subjects. Those literary teachers, whose mysticism 
 scattered the two prolific seeds of those persecutions, were 
 therefore, in effect, the most fatal of all enemies to the growth 
 of constitutional liberty in France. 
 
 Nor is it possible to exempt the great author of the Institu- 
 tion Chretienne, and the " Ergoists," who acknowledged in 
 him their intellectual progenitor, from their share of the re- 
 sponsibility for the failure of sound principles of government 
 among the French people. His book furnished the premises 
 of which his Presbyterian scheme of Church government in 
 France was the practical consequence. As we formerly saw, 
 it was a polity founded on principles as purely democratic as 
 \vere proclaimed in the States-General either by Marcel or by 
 Mirabeau. Calvin was one of the " grands organisateurs" of 
 France ; and, in common with almost the whole of that class 
 of French statesmen, he placed himself much more under the 
 guidance of logic than of those other habits or powers of the 
 human mind to which less ambitious statesmen render not in* 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 553 
 
 deed an exclusive, but a willing homage. He xeasoned with 
 inexorable precision, and as he reasoned so he acted. To 
 compare things utterly dissimilar in every other respect, his 
 Institution Chretienne, and the Ecclesiastical Economy to 
 which it gave "birth, tallied with the revolutionary declaration 
 of the " rights of man," and the constitutional act which fol- 
 lowed it. In either case the logic was invulnerable, and in 
 each the scheme was impracticable. In either case the design 
 was to advance the cause of freedom, and in each the result 
 was to render that cause utterly hopeless. 
 
 In his study at Greneva, Calvin seems to have forgotten the 
 real condition of the people,, and of the government of his na- 
 tive land. Perhaps he believed that his disciples would be 
 strong enough to obtain the mastery of that government. If 
 so, it was an entire and a fatal mistake. He established an 
 ecclesiastical democracy in a land in which political freedom 
 had not so much as a nominal existence, and in which the vast 
 majority were the willing subjects of a spiritual despotism. 
 No man could reason more closely, and no man could divine 
 the future more unskillfully. No visioij of such a monarch as 
 Richelieu presented itself to his foresight. He did not foresee 
 that, by asserting the independence of the Presbyterian Church, 
 he was raising up against it a mortal enemy in the first great 
 statesman who might be strong enough to assert the supremacy 
 of the crown over all the other institutions of France. He fell 
 into the error so habitual to almost all French Reformers, of 
 sacrificing the practical to the theoretical, and of squandering 
 all which might have been secured, in the vain hope of at once 
 grasping every thing which could be desired. I therefore place 
 him and his followers among those whose writings contributed 
 to the growth of absolute power in France, because he, and 
 they in obedience to his lessons, presented to the French kings, 
 and especially to Richelieu, the greatest of them all, an antag- 
 onist which at once provoked and justified their hostility ; be- 
 cause he and they enlisted the honest national sentiments of 
 their fellow-countrymen against a system pregnant with the 
 seeds of national disunion ; because he and they inculcated 
 religious freedom in a strain so lofty and uncompromising as 
 to render it barren of political freedom, its natural and legiti- 
 mate offspring. 
 
554 POWER OP THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 It remains for me to indicate (most briefly, of course) the 
 means "by which the kinga of France compelled the great au- 
 thors of their country to abandon their high and appropriate 
 office of explaining and improving the polity of the state. 
 
 During one hundred and forty years the unjust ambition of 
 England had inflicted on that country all the calamities of 
 foreign and of civil war. That crime was .expiated by our 
 forefathers in the long and sanguinary contest between the 
 houses of York and Lancaster. But scarcely had the French 
 people been rescued from the scourge of foreign invasion, be- 
 fore they in turn inflicted it on their unoffending Italian neigh- 
 bors. In their lawless thirst for extended dominion, Charles 
 VIII. and his two immediate successors delivered up the whole 
 of that peninsula to misery and bloodshed. This, again, was 
 a wanton and an audacious invocation of that retributive Prov- 
 idence which rules over the nations of the earth. 
 
 At the revival of learning, an Italian patriot might well have 
 indulged the hope of the growth, in his native land, of the sci- 
 ence of government, with all the practical blessings which are 
 the natural fruit of tl\e general diffusion of such knowledge. 
 He might have dwelt on the admirable genius of the people, 
 on their unrivaled academical institutions, on their exclusive 
 possession of many of the treasures of ancient learning, and on 
 the division of the country into several states at once inde- 
 pendent and emulous of each other. He might, indeed, have 
 anticipated a formidable hostility to such pursuits from the va- 
 rious feudal sovereigns of these states, and a yet more dan- 
 gerous obstacle jn the sacerdotal despotism of Rome. But he 
 could hardly have foreseen that a series of new invasions of 
 the Grauls would again crush the rising prospects of Italian 
 independence. They appeared, however, to the south of the 
 Alps, sometimes as the allies, and sometimes as the avowed 
 enemies of the Pope, the Italian princes, the Spaniards, and 
 the Germans, but always agreeing with them in interdicting 
 those studies which might have taught the prostrate Italian 
 people how their oppressors might be successfully opposed. 
 Crushed beneath the combination of those irresistible forces, 
 the more profound thinkers of Italy extracted out of their own 
 national degradation a new and ill-omened political science. 
 Maohiavelli taught how evil might be called good, and good 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 555 
 
 evil ; while Guicciardini, Davila, and Paolo Sarpi assumed ir 
 their histories that the rulers of mankind were really guided 
 by these Florentine maxims. We are all familiar with Mr 
 Macaulay's profound and beautiful analysis of the political 
 morality of that age and country, and with his explanation of 
 the methods by which the homage justly due to integrity and 
 truth was there transferred to successful fraud and well-timed 
 treachery. From this demon worship, however, the nobler 
 spirits of Italy turned aside, some, like Galileo and Cassini, to 
 cultivate physical science ; some, like Baronius and Muratori, 
 to ir" merse themselves in antiquarian researches ; while many 
 more, following the indestructible bent and genius of their na- 
 tion, soared away to the regions of creative art, where the fol- 
 lies and the crimes, and perhaps also the duties, of -the lower 
 world were forgotten. In that fairy land they combined the 
 wild imagination of the North with the riant fancies of the 
 East; and there Tasso and Ariosto took refuge from the world 
 of realities in a world of chimeras, where the Paladins of Char- 
 lemagne and the story-tellers of Haroun al Raschid meet to- 
 gether, and Christian affections are forced into a strange alli- 
 ance with the doctrines of Mohammed, and with the magical 
 arts of the fire-worshipers over whom he had triumphed. 
 
 But when the French had been driven to the northward of 
 the Alps, the punishment which they had provoked overtook 
 them. The calamities with which they were visited bore an 
 ominous and awful resemblance to those which they had them- 
 selves inflicted on the Italian commonwealths. As France had 
 carried the sword, the famine, and the pestilence from one end 
 of the peninsula to the other, so from the Somme to the Pyre- 
 nees no French province escaped the desolating march of the 
 religious wars. As France had torn from Italy some of her 
 finest territories, so was she compelled to cede to her own for- 
 eign enemies her ancient suzerainte over those wealthy regions 
 which now constitute the Belgio kingdom. As she had been 
 allied with the G-ermans and the Spaniards in the devastation 
 of the Transalpine States, so she had to bewail the ravages of 
 her own by German and Spanish invaders. As her kings had 
 sought the aid of the Medici in subverting the rights of the 
 neighboring principalities and republics, so an alliance with a 
 daughter of that house eventually subjugated France, during 
 
556 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE, 
 
 three successive reigns, to a woman born to be her evil genius 
 and her shame. And as the French invaders of Italy, com- 
 bining with the Pope, the Imperial and the Spanish crowns, 
 had diverted her men of genius from studies conducing to an 
 enlightened polity and to good government, so Catharine and 
 her sons, in alliance with the Papal court, the League, and 
 Philip II. , banished from France the culture and propagation 
 of a knowledge so unwelcome to her infatuated rulers. 
 
 Before the Italian wars, such knowledge had not been alto- 
 gether neglected there. Joinville, as we have seen, had frank- 
 ly and impartially exhibited the interior, and Froissart the ex- 
 terior, aspect of the courts by which, in their times, the world 
 was governed ; and De Comines had even been, not only the 
 free interpreter, but the enlightened judge, of the policy of the 
 sovereigns whom he served. But no similar revelations or 
 judgments are to be found in the great French authors who 
 succeeded them. The contending hosts in the wars of relig- 
 ion were all, indeed, assisted by squadrons of light-armed lit- 
 erary partisans, by whom libels, pamphlets, and pasquinades 
 were discharged in as thick a flight as the homicidal missiles 
 of the men-at-arms. But I know of no book written by any 
 Frenchman in that age, for the instruction of future ages (ex- 
 cept the works of Calvin and of his coadjutors, Farel and The- 
 odore Beza), in which the intellectual rulers of the world, as- 
 serting their imprescriptible authority over the secular rulers 
 of it, have summoned them to the bar of their literary tribu- 
 nal. Calvin, Farel, and Beza, indeed, exercised that danger- 
 ous privilege ; but it was as exiles from their native land, 
 Rabelais concealed the infrequent and furtive use of it under 
 the mask and riot of a buffoon. The occasional encroachments 
 of Montaigne beyond the limits permitted to men of letters 
 were sheltered from punishment, and perhaps from notice, by 
 his careless and unimpassioned optimism, by his seeming in- 
 difference about any opinions, and by his sportive dalliance 
 with all. Des Cartes escaped the censorship of the govern- 
 ment by occupying himself in researches in which the most 
 jealous autocrat could hardly see any hazard to his own au- 
 thority ; and Pascal enjoyed a precarious safety by confining 
 himself to the laws of the material universe, and to theological 
 investigations or controversy. Yet even Pascal would have par- 
 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 557 
 
 taken of the penalties of his great coadjutor Arnauld if the 
 grave had not closed over him before the publication of his 
 Pens^ees, and if the appearance of the Provincial Letters had 
 not been hailed by the acclamations of a body of which even 
 Louis XIV. stood in habitual awe the wits and epigramma- 
 tists of Paris. 
 
 But it was not enough for the kings of France to silence all 
 political speculations, unless they also reduced the great au- 
 thors of their country to the degraded rank of sycophants, or 
 idolaters of the royal power. 
 
 Richelieu (himself no inconsiderable author) brought the 
 men of letters of France into bondage to the court by creating 
 a sort of literary aristocracy, composed of the members of the 
 French Academy, the honors of which were to be won by the 
 favor of the royal patron. Louis XIV. subjected them to a still 
 more complete dependence. It was a conquest for which na- 
 ture and fortune had combined to qualify him. He was born, 
 if not with great, yet with showy and plausible abilities, with 
 a princely spirit, a majestic presence, a mellifluous voice, a 
 figure resplendent with grace and beauty, an exquisite sense 
 of all the proprieties of life, with captivating manners, and an 
 elocution adapting itself to all the emergencies of his high sta- 
 tion, and alike felicitous in them all. He reigned in an age 
 when centuries of civil war and of aristocratic ambition had 
 driven the whole people of France to the throne, as their only 
 refuge against their protracted and intolerable sufferings ; and 
 before a throne occupied by so magnificent an impersonation 
 of royalty they appeared, not merely as supplicants, but almost 
 as worshipers. Nor was this the impulse of those only who 
 were mean in station or in intellect. In the reign of Louis, 
 king worship was part of the religion of the men of rank, and 
 of genius also. The imaginations of many of them were in- 
 flamed by his personal grandeur and by his splendid achieve- 
 ments. The hearts of some were touched by his affability and 
 his kindness. "Without presuming to criticise his measures, 
 they admired in him the living reality of their ideal of a mon- 
 arch, and delineated him in all their writings as the great cen- 
 tral object, around and in subjection to which were grouped 
 all the other figures with which their invention or their mem- 
 ory could supply them. Fenelon alone, in his character of 
 
558 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 Mentor to the Duke of Burgundy, ventured to address some 
 counsels on the duty and science of government, nominally to 
 the Telemachus, but really to the Idomeneus, of the court of 
 Versailles ; and Fenelon's exile to Cambray may be ascribed 
 as much to his freedom of speech as to his quietism of soul. 
 The impatience with which, on the one hand, the Grand Mo- 
 narque regarded the interference of his literary courtiers with 
 his affairs of state, and, on the other hand, their submissive 
 acquiescence in his rebukes, can hardly, indeed, be exaggera- 
 ted. "Witness the fact so strange, and yet so certain, that Ra- 
 cine actually sickened and died on being censured by his royal 
 idol for his arrogance in hazarding a suggestion for the pre- 
 vention and cure of pauperism. 
 
 But the constellation of genius, wit, and learning, in the 
 midst of which Louis shone thus pre-eminently, was too brill- 
 iant to be obscured by any clouds of royal disfavor ; nor would 
 any man have shrunken with greater abhorrence than himself 
 from any attempt to extinguish or to eclipse their splendor. 
 He wisely felt, and frankly acknowledged, that their glory was 
 essential to his own ; and he invited to a seat at his table Mo- 
 liere the roturier, to whom the lowest of his nobles would have 
 appointed a place among his menial servants. As Francis, 
 and Charles, and Leo, and Julius, and Lorenzo had assigned 
 science, and poetry, and painting, and architecture, and sculp- 
 ture, as their appropriate provinces, to those great master spir- 
 its of Italy to whom they forbade the culture of political phi- 
 losophy, so Louis, when he interdicted to the gigantic intellects 
 of his times and country all intervention in the affairs of the 
 commonwealth, summoned them to the conquest of all the 
 other realms of thought in which they might acquire renown, 
 either for him, for France, or for themselves. The theatres, 
 the academies, the pulpits, and the monasteries of his king- 
 dom rivaled each other in their zealous obedience to that royal 
 command, and obeyed it with a success from which no com- 
 petent and equitable judge can withhold his highest admira- 
 tion. At this day, when all the illusions of the name of Louis 
 are exhausted, and in this country, where his Augustan age 
 has seldom been regarded with much enthusiasm, who can 
 seriously address himself to the perusal of his great tragedians, 
 Corneille and Racine or of his great comedians, Moliere and 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 559 
 
 Regnard or of his great poets, Boileau and La Fontaine or 
 of his great wits, La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere or of 
 his great philosophers, Des Cartes and Pascal or of his great 
 divines, Bossuet and Arnauld or of his great scholars, Mabil- 
 lon and Montfaucon or of his great preachers, Bourdaloue 
 and Massilion, and not confess that no other monarch was 
 ever surrounded by an assemblage of men of genius so admi- 
 rable for the extent, the variety, and the perfection of their 
 powers. 
 
 And yet the fact that such an assemblage were clustered 
 into a group, of which so great a king was the centre, implies 
 that there must have been spme characteristic quality uniting 
 them all to each other and to him, and distinguishing them all 
 from the nobles of every other literary commonwealth which 
 has existed among men. "What, then, was that quality, and 
 what its influence upon them ? 
 
 Louis lived with his courtiers, not as a despot among his 
 slaves, but as the most accomplished of gentlemen among his 
 associates. This social equality was, however, always guarded 
 from abuse by the most punctilious observance, on their side, 
 of the reverence due to his pre-eminent rank. In that enchant- 
 ed circle men appeared at least to obey, not from a hard neces- 
 sity, but from a willing heart. The bondage in which they 
 really lived was ennobled by that conventional code of honor 
 which dictated and enforced it. They prostrated themselves 
 before their fellow-man with' no sense of self-abasement, and 
 the chivalrous homage with which they gratified him was con- 
 sidered as imparting dignity to themselves. y.-Hii , 
 
 Louis acknowledged and repaid this tribute of courtesy by 
 a condescension still more refined, and by attentions yet more 
 delicate than their own. The harshness of power was so in- 
 geniously veiled, every shade of approbation was so nicely 
 marked, and every gradation of favor so finely discriminated, 
 that the tact of good society that acquired sense, which re- 
 veals to us the impression we make on those with whom we 
 associate became the indispensable condition of existence at 
 Versailles and Marly. The inmates of those palaces lived un- 
 der a law peculiar to themselves ; a law most effective for its 
 purposes, though the recompense it awarded to those who 
 pleased their common master was but fyis smile, and though 
 
560 POWER OF THE PEN IN FRANCE. 
 
 the penalty it imposed on those who displeased him was but 
 his frown. 
 
 The men of letters, to whom a place was assigned in the 
 court of Louis, were nearly all plebeians, but were rescued by 
 the king from the social degradations to which their rank 
 might otherwise have exposed them. The graces and the ele- 
 gance which they witnessed in his circle were not only adopt- 
 ed in their own personal address and manners, but were trans- 
 ferred into their writings. To please, and to rise by pleasing, 
 became the great ends of literary, as they were of fashionable 
 existence. Men of genius sought to please in the republic of 
 letters, as they had learned to please among the aristocratic 
 companions of their princes. They ascended to literary power 
 by the arts which, in that age, conducted the nobles of the 
 land to power in the state. They aimed at creating a profound 
 interest by their writings, without ever provoking a painful 
 excitement. Their books were redolent of the same graceful 
 ease by which they had themselves been charmed in the inter- 
 course of the privileged classes. They exhibited, as authors, 
 the same gayety of spirit which they had seen diffusing, through 
 that elevated circle, the transient sense of equality, so indis- 
 pensable to all true social enjoyment. Having learned, in 
 the brilliant companies which thronged the royal salons, how 
 mighty is the force of ridicule, they assumed, in their literary 
 character, all the weapons, offensive and defensive, by which 
 the assaults of that great aristocratic power may be either 
 pointed or repelled. Diligent students of the conventional code 
 of mamiers, they became familiar with all the signals beneath 
 which it commands the polished few to rally, and with all the 
 penalties which it denounces against the unpolished many, 
 who are heedless or unconscious of that rallying cry. Minds 
 born to grapple with the loftiest contemplations were thus too 
 often engaged with the most trivial. They were but too apt 
 to study the superficial aspect of society, to the disregard of 
 its inward state and of its outward tendencies. They investi- 
 gated the specific man more than the generic man, the French 
 character more than the human character, the empty vanities 
 of the world rather than its true dignities, the fleeting follies 
 of mankind more than their inherent weaknesses or corruptions. 
 Moliere himself, great as he was, condescended to become little 
 
POWER OF THE PEN IN TRANCE. 561 
 
 else than the lord justiciary, under Louis XIV., of the high 
 court of Ridicule. 
 
 But while many of the nobler pursuits of literature were 
 thus abandoned, the learned courtiers of Louis found, in their 
 mental and social allegiance to him, the fullest occasion for 
 exercising and perfecting those qualities which, at the com- 
 mencement of my last lecture, I enumerated as eminently char- 
 acteristic of the spirit and intellect of the people of France. 
 Their social disposition and genial nature rendered it easy and 
 delightful to them to reflect in their books, the gayety, the 
 grace, and the cordiality of the high-born associates with whom 
 they mingled. Their logical acumen detected at a glance, and 
 expelled remorselessly from their writings, whatever would 
 have appeared to that fastidious audience either vulgar, or 
 exaggerated, or tedious, or obscure. They used the most ab- 
 struse deductions of reason, as Cleopatra used her pearls, to 
 add an occasional zest to a royal banquet. Their national elo- 
 quence shone forth with unwearied lustre, though even in the 
 pulpit they never wholly intermitted the homage so habitu- 
 ally rendered to their princely idol. But, above all, the un- 
 measured obedience of the French people to whatever was es- 
 teemed as a legitimate power among them, was manifested by 
 the authors of their Augustan age by the most indiscrimina- 
 ting loyalty. Because Louis was superstitious and intolerant, 
 not a voice was raised among them in defense of spiritual or 
 of mental freedom. Because he was an absolute king, they 
 breathed not a word on behalf of their national franchises. Be- 
 cause he was himself the state, they passed by the affairs of the 
 commonwealth as though the discussion of them would have 
 been a case of leze mafeste against him. Because success in 
 war was his favorite boast, they incessantly labored in erecting 
 trophies to his military renown. Because he was amorous, they 
 sang of love in strains sometimes impassioned, sometimes arti- 
 ficial, but always in harmony with the sentiments which ru- 
 mor taught them to ascribe to their king. And because he 
 was the admitted model of universal excellence, the greatest 
 minds which France has ever produced drew habitually and 
 servilely from that model in many of their greatest works. 
 
 Grenius such as theirs could not, however, but triumph over 
 such obstacles as these. Even under the spells and the bond- 
 
 N N 
 
562 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 age of the court of Louis, she made manifest her inherent and 
 Indomitable energies. Yet the marks of those shackles are in- 
 delibly impressed upon her works. It is for this reason, chiefly, 
 that beyond the limits of France itself their power is so feebly 
 felt and so coldly acknowledged. Considered as a mere mat- 
 ter of taste, this is, indeed, of little or of no importance. But it 
 is of the deepest moment to mankind that, in the age and 
 country of Louis XIV., literature was faithless to her highest 
 calling ; that her great authors abandoned the free investiga- 
 tion of truth religious, and of truth political ; that the men of 
 the seventeenth century abdicated that high office to the men 
 of the succeeding age ; and that Racine, Boileau, Moliere, Bos- 
 suet, and Arnauld, abandoned the highest of all the realms of 
 merely human inquiry to the fatal ambition of Voltaire, Rous- 
 seau, Montesquieu, and Beaumarchais. Seizing on that de- 
 serted province, those great writers assailed the ancient bul- 
 warks of our faith in that Divine power in whom we have our 
 being, and in those human powers to which God himself has 
 commanded us to be subject. They found those fortresses in 
 France unprotected .by any recent defenses, and dilapidated by 
 long neglect ; and a century has now nearly run its course 
 since the literature of the age of Louis XV. won a disastrous 
 triumph, which might have been averted if the literature of 
 the age of his predecessor had exchanged the debasing service 
 of an idolized man for that service which we are taught to re- 
 gard, and which we rejoice to accept, as our perfect freedom. 
 
 LECTURE XX. 
 
 ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY HENRY IV. AND BY 
 RICHELIEU. 
 
 I HAVE thus far been engaged in the attempt to explain why 
 neither those causes which subverted the French Feudal Oli- 
 garchy, nor those which seemed to promise the establishment 
 of Constitutional G-overnment in that country, were effectual 
 to arrest the growth of the Absolute Monarchy of France. J 
 now proceed to inquire, What was the real character of that 
 monarchy at the period of its greatest elevation ; that is, dur- 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 563 
 
 ing the reigns of the first three princes of the house of Bour- 
 bon ? If the time which the laws of the University place at 
 my disposal had been sufficient for the purpose, I should have 
 endeavored to resolve that question by reviewing the progress 
 of the Bourbon Dynasty under each, in order, of its five great 
 administrators, Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and Louis 
 XIV. in person. But the pressure of time compels me, for the 
 present, to contract that design, and to bridge over, as it were, 
 the interval between the wars of religion and the wars of the 
 Fronde by a rapid survey of the successive stages of the policy 
 of the rulers of France during that period. 
 
 It has been said of Henry. IV., with equal truth and force, 
 that he was L'Hopital in arms. The principles which had 
 been asserted by the wisdom and the eloquence of the great 
 chancellor became triumphant by the foresight and the con- 
 quests of the great king. In an age of wild disorder and over- 
 whelming calamity, he was raised up to restore his kingdom 
 to affluence and to peace. He appeared to rescue his Protest- 
 ant subjects from the tyranny which had so long denied to 
 them the freedom of conscience. He came to give a firm ba- 
 sis to the national policy, and to open to his people at large a 
 new direction and a wider scope for the martial energies by 
 which they had hitherto been at once so highly and so ineffect- 
 ually distinguished. For these high offices he was qualified 
 by great talents and by many virtues. With a capacity large 
 enough to embrace all the social, military, and political inter- 
 ests of his dominions, he combined that practical good sense 
 and flexibility of address, without which there is no safe de- 
 scent from the higher regions of thought to the real business 
 of life. The intuitive promptitude and the enduring stability 
 of his resolutions attested at once his large experience in affairs, 
 and his wide survey both of the resources at his command, and 
 of the contingencies to which he was exposed. He possessed 
 that kind of mental instinct which advances by the shortest path 
 to what is at once useful and possible, and which turns aside, 
 with unhesitating decision, from any illusive and impracti- 
 cable scheme. Never was a great innovator more character- 
 ized by practical wisdom, and never did such wisdom assume 
 a more attractive aspect. His manners exhibited all the graces 
 of his native land in their most captivating form. Delighted 
 
564 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 with his bonhommie, his gayety, and his frankness, his sub- 
 jects not only forgave his vices, but even found in them a 
 fascination the more. They smiled at the scandalous amours 
 of their gallant monarch as a not unbecoming tribute paid by 
 human greatness to human infirmity. If they looked with 
 awe on the desperate valor of his enterprises, on the inflexible 
 rigor of his discipline, or on the soaring ambition of his polit- 
 ical designs, they were reconciled to the stern character of the 
 prince by the ever-flowing and genuine sensibilities of the man. 
 If his lofty sense of his personal and ancestral dignity some- 
 times gave an austere aspect to his intercourse with his peo- 
 ple, that pride of birth did but enhance the charm of his quick 
 sympathy with the feelings and interests of the meanest of 
 them. And, above all the rest, every Frenchman loved and ad- 
 mired, in Henry, the lover and admirer of France, and became 
 patriotically blind to the faults of his renegade and debauched, 
 but still patriot king. 
 
 And even now, when the spell is broken, and we may look 
 back on the life of Henry IY. with judicial impartiality, and 
 reprobate the apologies which would have elevated his crimes 
 into virtues, we can not conceal from ourselves the fact that 
 he conferred on his people benefits which well entitled him to 
 their lasting gratitude. 
 
 For, first, Henry of Navarre was the founder of religious 
 toleration in France. Until the Edict of Nantes there had 
 been many truces, but no real peace, between the adherents 
 of Rome and the followers of Calvin. To compel all the frag- 
 ments of the Christian Church to coalesce into one body, each 
 member of which should hold the same opinions, and worship 
 , under the same forms, had been the inflexible policy of all his 
 predecessors. To acquiesce in their separation, and yet to 
 maintain each section in the nearest possible approach to an 
 equality both of civil and religious privileges, was the no less 
 inflexible design of Henry. His charter could not, indeed, re- 
 store unity to the Church, but it established, on what seemed 
 a secure basis, the unity of the state. The two religions were 
 thenceforward placed under ecclesiastical laws widely differing 
 from each other, but under a civil law common to therr both. 
 
 The second great praise of the first of the Bourbon line is that 
 of having rescued France from the abyss of bankruptcy and 
 
HENRY VI. AND RICHELIEU. 56 
 
 financial ruin in which it had been involved by the improvi- 
 dence of the house of Valois. For the completion of that great 
 work the larger share of honor is, indeed, due to Sully ; and I 
 will not pause to repeat what I have already had occasion to 
 offer on the subject of his fiscal administration. But from his 
 own Economies Royales we sufficiently learn that, unaided by 
 the magnanimity, the self-denial, and the affection of the king, 
 not even the zeal, the courage, and the sagacity of the great 
 minister would have accomplished that Herculean labor. 
 
 The third title of Henry to the place which he has ever held 
 among the benefactors of France has at all times been ac- 
 knowledged by Frenchmen with more enthusiasm than any 
 other of his services. He was the first of her kings who had 
 at once the discernment to perceive how high a station be- 
 longed to her in the European commonwealth, and the energy 
 to devise the methods by which that rank might be effectually 
 vindicated. The project of a great Christian republic at the 
 head of which the eldest son of the Church was to take his 
 stand, was, it is true, but an amusement for the imaginations 
 of Henry and of Sully. Yet, like other dreams it had a ba- 
 sis in waking realities. Richelieu, Louis XIV., and Napo- 
 leon were but, each in his turn, the practical interpreters of 
 the vision with which the readers of the Economies Royales 
 are familiar. It contemplated the substitution of the French 
 for the Austrian preponderance in Europe. It anticipated the 
 great principle of that equilibrium of national forces which, 
 half a century later, formed the basis of the Treaty of West- 
 phalia. It was one of those prolific ideas which, when con- 
 ceived by genius, matured by experience, and planted in a 
 kindly soil, can never cease to affect the condition and pros- 
 pects of mankind, but will, from age to age, yield abundant, 
 though, perhaps, sometimes deadly fruits. The knife of the 
 assassin arrested the execution of it by Henry himself; but, to 
 this moment, the descendants of those over whom he ruled cling 
 with undiminished passion to the hope which he first excited 
 the hope that, by the propagation of their language and opin- 
 ions, by the skill of their diplomatists, and by the terror of 
 their arms, France may at length acquire an authority or an 
 influence like that of Imperial Rome over every land in which, 
 in his age. Papal Rome had established her spir tual dominion. 
 
566 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 It is not, however, on these grounds alone that the reign of 
 Henry IY. occupies a memorable position in the constitutional 
 history of his country. It was a period of great consumma- 
 tions and of great beginnings. Like some inland sea, which 
 is at once the receptacle of many converging, and the source of 
 as many diverging streams, it was interposed between two 
 eras strikingly contrasted with each other. It marked the close 
 of the mediaeval sovereignty and the commencement of the 
 modern monarchy : the first a dominion of undefined rights, of 
 unsettled habits, and of a fluctuating policy ; the second a gov- 
 ernment absolute in fact and in right, severely consistent in 
 its arbitrary principles, but elaborately adapted to the various 
 exigencies of a civilized commonwealth. The hitherto unor- 
 ganized elements of the state were now, for the first time, re- 
 duced into a political unity. The invidious distinctions of 
 earlier times now began to give place to social equality ; and 
 the slow, though steadfast progress of that unity and of that 
 equality may be considered as the subject of the whole of the 
 subsequent history of France. In the triumph of these twa 
 principles consists the peculiar distinction and the chief boast 
 of the French polity, whether monarchical or republican, of our 
 times ; and, therefore, the age of Henry IY., when considered 
 as the origin of these great national characteristics, demands, 
 and will repay, the most diligent attention. 
 
 For, first, the student of that reign will discover that it was 
 the period when all legislative, executive, and administrative 
 powers were first accurately distributed among the various 
 ministers of the crown, and carefully concentrated in the crown 
 itself. Secondly ; he will learn that it was then that the nobles, 
 ceasing to be the rivals, became the courtiers of their sover- 
 eign, and exchanged much of their ancient power and dignity 
 for an accession of splendor and of wealth. Thirdly ; from the 
 same epoch may be dated the appearance and the recognition 
 of the noblesse of the robe ; that is, of roturiers, who, being en- 
 nobled by the hereditary tenure of judicial offices, attracted to 
 themselves much of the aristocratic importance which had, 
 till then, been enjoyed exclusively by the territorial nobility. 
 Fourthly ; about the same period may be discerned the first 
 development of that moral and intellectual influence of men of 
 letters, in the presence of which the influence of illustrious 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 567 
 
 birth and of traditionary honors gradually waned and lost its 
 hold on the reverence of mankind. Fifthly ; then, also, were 
 seen to arise a class of moneyed men, who, by fortunes ac- 
 quired in commerce, eclipsed the magnificence of the great 
 lords who had inherited their estates through many genera- 
 tions. And, finally, in the reign of Henry IV. also, the differ- 
 ent classes of society were fused together in a manner till then 
 unknown, partly in consequence of the participation of all 
 ranks in the profound excitement and devotional fervor of the 
 religious wars, and partly in consequence of the protracted and 
 intimate association with each other, which had prevailed be- 
 tween the three orders of the. States-General at Blois, at Or- 
 leans, and at Paris, and between the constituent bodies who 
 had been so often convened for the election of the deputies to 
 those States in all the different bailliages of the kingdom. 
 
 But while these various causes were concentrating the pow- 
 ers of the government, and approximating the different classes 
 of Frenchmen to one common level, social equality was not to 
 establish her dominion in France except at the expense of bit- 
 ter animosities and sanguinary contests. The aristocratic and 
 plebeian rivalries, which had been suppressed during the wars 
 of religion, had not been then extinguished. Those meaner 
 passions were striking new and vigorous roots, even then, when 
 the external indications of them had, for the moment, disap- 
 peared. While brought into an unwonted intimacy by the joint 
 prosecution of their common objects, political or religious, the 
 Nobles and the Commons were each taking the measure of the 
 strength and the pretensions of the other. The privileged or- 
 ders were then taught some humiliating lessons of the real in- 
 feriority of their own powers ; and, at the same time, the Tiers 
 Etat became aware of their own comparative weight and im- 
 portance in the state. The conservative possessors of rank 
 were exasperated by the fear of new encroachments. The ag- 
 gressive aspirants after distinction were animated by the hopes 
 of new conquests ; and when the great confederacy of the 
 League was dissolved, there had become distinctly perceptible 
 the omens of another national controversy, in which each of 
 the Three Estates of the realm were to contend for the main- 
 tenance, or the subversion, of those privileges, which had hith- 
 erto detached them so widely from each other. For that con- 
 
568 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDElt 
 
 flict nothing was wanting but a convenient occasion and an 
 appropriate theatre. 
 
 Such an occasion and such a theatre were supplied in Octo- 
 ber, 1614, when, in obedience to the summons of Louis XIII., 
 the States-General of France were assembled at Paris. Al- 
 though, according to the strict law, Louis had at that time at- 
 tained his majority, he was really a boy in his fourteenth year, 
 in tutelage to his mother, Marie de Medici. She was the fee- 
 ble head of a licentious and disaffected court. To purchase 
 the support of the great lords of the realm, she had squander- 
 ed a large part of the treasure which had been amassed by 
 the providence of Sully. But the sacrifice was ineffectual. 
 Conde, D'Epernon, and the other chiefs of the old religious 
 factions, were in arms at the head of their followers. The Prot- 
 estants were on the eve of a new religious war. The Papal 
 court and the Jesuits were propagating ultramontane doctrines, 
 to which the recent assassinations of Henry III. and Henry IV. 
 had given a fearful significance. The people at large, espe- 
 cially in the south, were victims of the most abject poverty and 
 distress ; and the popular writers of the age were agitating crit- 
 ical and dangerous questions, as, for example, why the inter- 
 ests of a great nation should all be staked on the life of a sin- 
 gle man ? and why the welfare of millions should depend on 
 the wisdom of that one man's domestic counselors ? 
 
 Alarmed by the gathering tempest, the queen-mother at one 
 time sought, in alliances with the house of Austria, a protec- 
 tion against the people she had been called to govern ; and, at 
 another time, she summoned their representatives to meet at 
 Paris, to assist her with their counsels. 
 
 Florimond de Rapine is the great contemporary historian of 
 the proceedings of the assembly which met in obedience to 
 this royal citation. The general effect of his narrative is to 
 show that, in this last convention of the representatives of the 
 States- General under the old monarchy, the three orders of 
 which they were composed broke out into an open and irrecon- 
 cilable hostility. Concurring, indeed, in that ancient consti- 
 tutional jealousy of the crown by which their predecessors had 
 been animated, they agreed iri deprecating the dissolution of 
 the States before their complaints for the redress of grievances 
 should have actually ripened into royal enactments ; and they 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 569 
 
 were, therefore, unanimous in resolving to commerce their la- 
 bors, by preferring to the king a joint petition, demanding re- 
 dress of some few of the more prominent of the evils under 
 which their constituents were laboring. By this method it- 
 was assumed that they would deprive the court of any plausi- 
 ble pretext for evading the required concessions, by postponing 
 their answer until after the close of the session. 
 
 But, though unanimous in concerting this plan of operations, 
 they could not agree in carrying it into effect. The Clergy 
 proposed that, in the select list of grievances, the foremost place 
 should be assigned to the wrong done to the Church by the 
 long neglect of the crown to receive the decrees of the Council 
 of Trent as binding on all persons within the realm of France. 
 To that proposal the Nobles gave a slow and reluctant adhe- 
 sion ; the Tiers Etat, a peremptory and contemptuous refusal. 
 They denied the necessity for any such request to the crown ; 
 inquired why the Clergy did not themselves inculcate reverence 
 for the Tridentine Decrees by their own voluntary obedience 
 to them ; why, for example, such of them as had two or more 
 benefices did not conform to the laws of the synod by resign- 
 ing them in favor of other pastors who had none. 
 
 After setting aside the scheme of the Clergy by this and 
 similar sarcasms, the Tiers Etat proceeded to exhibit their own 
 project. They advised that the joint preliminary petition of 
 the three orders should embrace four grievances. These were, 
 first, the undue magnitude of the pension list ; secondly, the 
 excessive pressure of the,tailles ; thirdly, the venality of pub- 
 lic offices ; and, fourthly, the annual tax, called the Paulette, 
 which was paid to the crown as the price of the hereditary 
 tenure of them. In the two last suggestions the Clergy and 
 the Noblesse willingly acquiesced, because the advantage de- 
 rived from the traffic in public employments, and from the 
 heritable title to them, was enjoyed exclusively by the rotu- 
 riers. But they refused to solicit either a reduction of the 
 tailles, from which they were themselves exempt, or a decrease 
 of the pensions of which their own orders were the sole re- 
 cipients. 
 
 Unable, as the Three Estates thus were, to concur in the 
 demands to be made for the relief of their constituents, they 
 were still more decidedly at variance as to the demands to be 
 
570 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 made for the security of the king himself. Alarmed by the 
 recent excommunications and murders of their two last sov- 
 ereigns, and animated by the habitual propensity of French- 
 men to a verbal defiance of the Papal court, the Tiers Etat re- 
 solved to place at the head of their cahier a request that it 
 might be enacted as a fundamental and inviolable law of the 
 kingdom, " that no power on earth, whether spiritual or tem- 
 poral, hath any right either to deprive the realm of France of 
 the sacred persons of her kings, or for any cause or any ground 
 whatever to dispense or absolve their subjects from the fealty 
 or obedience due to them ;" and they desired to add the re- 
 quest that the contrary opinion might be declared " to be im- 
 pious and detestable, opposed to truth and to the constitution 
 of the state of France, which is immediately dependent on (rod 
 alone." Against this suggestion the Clergy entered a vehe- 
 ment protest. They declared it to be nothing less than an at- 
 tempt to establish the English oath of abjuration. They an- 
 nounced their readiness to suffer martyrdom rather than par- 
 ticipate in such an outrage on the spiritual authority of the 
 Pope. The kings of the earth, they said, were bound to lick 
 the dust from the feet of the Church, submitting themselves 
 to her authority in the person of the sovereign pontiff. They 
 maintained that such an enactment would encroach on the 
 lawful authority of the spiritual power, to which alone it be- 
 longed to determine how far the Pope was entitled to depose 
 kings, and to absolve their subjects from their oaths of allegi- 
 ance; and, adopting the celebrated Jesuitical doctrine of prob- 
 ability, they declared that, in the absence of such a decision, 
 the affirmative and the negative of that question were equally 
 probable, and might alike be holden and acted upon with good 
 conscience. 
 
 Such was the violence of the contention, that the Clergy had 
 threatened to retire from the States- General, and to place the 
 kingdom under an interdict ; when, to terminate the dispute, 
 the court evoked the article in debate ; that is, they assumed 
 to the king himself the exclusive consideration of it, and di- 
 rected that the passage of the cahier referring to it should be 
 expunged. 
 
 The speeches to which these and similar controversies be- 
 tween the three orders gave occasion, afford a yet clearer illus- 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 571 
 
 tration of the antipathies by which the different classes of so- 
 ciety were at this time alienated from each other. Montaigne, 
 one of the orators of the Tiers Etat (who has been strangely 
 confounded, by more than one eminent French writer, with his 
 illustrious namesake), denounced the baseness of the noble pen- 
 sioners of his age with a vehemence into which all the wrongs 
 which were ever done on the face of the earth could never have 
 betrayed the philosophical essayist. "Is he who serves his 
 king in hope of a pension (demanded the speaker) a good and 
 faithful subject ? Alas for the unworthy Frenchmen, French 
 in nothing but the name, who serve your king as mercenaries ! 
 If your hearts were touched .with the true spirit of obedience, 
 you would serve him not for money, but because he reigns over 
 you by the law of France, and by the law of nature, and by 
 the law of Grod." 
 
 Savaron, another commoner, seems to have excelled in that 
 rhetorical artifice by which the deepest wounds are inflicted 
 in eulogistic phrases, and the deadliest sting is disguised be- 
 neath the most affectionate language. In the form of sarcas- 
 tic apologies, he poured out a series of bitter reproaches upon 
 the Noblesse. After depicting the stupidity which had induced 
 them to abandon the judicial office to men of humble birth, he 
 affects to account for it as a respectable prejudice. After show- 
 ing that they had abstained from purchasing public offices be- 
 cause they were incapable of discharging public duties, ho 
 sneeringly applauds the rectitude and generosity of their for- 
 bearance. And when he condemned the conduct of the No- 
 bles to his own order, he at the same time respectfully ac- 
 knowledged that the Nobles were their elder brethren ; antic- 
 ipating, perhaps, but doubtless rejoicing in, the preposterous 
 violence of their answer, that they would not allow themselves 
 to be addressed as brethren by the sons of cobblers and soap- 
 boilers, who were as much their inferiors as the valet is below 
 his master. 
 
 We find Robert Miron, a third of these champions of the 
 Commons, thus apostrophizing the king with all the energy of 
 a tribune of the people. " That man's heart," he said, "must 
 be surrounded by triple brass, and fenced with a rampart of 
 adamant, who can think of the miseries of your subjects with- 
 out tears and lamentations.. For the support of your kingdom 
 
572 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 they toil incessantly, regardless of their health and of theii 
 lives. They have their sweat and their wretchedness for their 
 pains. Whatever else they gain is consumed by the tailles, 
 the gabelles, the aides, and the other subventions of your maj- 
 esty. Yet, even when thus stripped of every thing, they are 
 still required to provide for certain persons, who, abusing your 
 sacred name, harass them by commissions, by inquests, and 
 by other oppressive inventions. It is nothing less than a mir- 
 acle that they are able to answer so many demands. On the 
 labor of their hands depends the maintenance of your majes- 
 ty, of the ecclesiastics, of the noblesse, and of the commons. 
 What without their exertions would be the value of the tithes 
 and great possessions of the Church, of the splendid estates 
 and fiefs of the nobility, or of our own houses, rents, and in- 
 heritances ? With their bones scarcely skinned over, your 
 wretched people present themselves before you, beaten down 
 and helpless, with the aspect rather of death itself than of liv- 
 ing men, imploring your succor in the name of Him who has 
 appointed you to reign over them ; who made you a man, that 
 you might be merciful to other men ; and who made you the 
 father of your subjects, that you might be compassionate to 
 these your helpless children. If your majesty shall not take 
 measures for that end, I fear lest despair should teach the suf- 
 ferers that a soldier is, after all, nothing more than a peasant 
 bearing arms ; and lest, when the vine-dresser shall have taken 
 up his arquebus, he should cease to become an anvil only that 
 he may become a hammer." 
 
 In the midst of these sarcasms and invectives was raised an- 
 other and a far more impressive voice. It was that of Armand 
 Duplessis de Richelieu, then in his thirtieth year, the descend- 
 ant of an ancient family in Poitou, who, after having been 
 trained to arms, had been appointed, at an early age, to the 
 bishopric of Lu^on. He was distinguished among the mem- 
 bers of his own order in the States- General as one of the ablest 
 and most effective of their speakers. As if to justify that 
 praise, he has preserved in his Memoirs the oration which he 
 delivered at the final meeting of the States in the royal pres- 
 ence. It shows how much he was in advance of his age as to 
 the real objects and right use of rhetoric. With the exception 
 of a few occasional sacrifices to the pedantic taste of the times, 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 573 
 
 it is throughout clear, vigorous, and to the purpose. It depicts, 
 in precise and comprehensive terms, the grievances of the peo- 
 ple, but especially of the clergy of France, and dwells with an 
 amusing but prophetic emphasis on the benefits which the king- 
 dom would derive from the admission of the more enlightened 
 prelates into the royal counsels. 
 
 On the 23d of February, 1625, after four months of eloquent 
 disputations and assiduous labors, the Clergy, the Nobles, and 
 the Tiers Etat presented to the king their cahiers of grievances. 
 On the following day the Tiers Etat returned to their usual 
 place of meeting, in the hope that some communication would 
 then be made to them of the measures to be taken in pursuance 
 of their demands. But, in that short interval, the place had 
 been the subject of a metamorphosis at which some appear to 
 have wept, though assuredly but few Frenchmen could have 
 refused also to smile at so whimsical a contrast. The presi- 
 dent's throne, the secretaries' chairs, the members' benches, 
 and the speakers' tribune, had all given place to painted orches- 
 tras, gilded side-boards, embroidered stools, and silken cush- 
 ions ; in short, to the preparations for a ball to be given by the ' 
 sister of Louis to the cavaliers of his court. The impression 
 produced by this disappointment on Florimond Rapine and his 
 associates is amusingly described by himself. " We began," 
 he says, " to see, as in a mirror, all our errors, and regretted 
 the cowardice and weakness of our past proceedings. Day by 
 day we paced the pavement of the cloister of the Augustines 
 to learn what was to happen. Every body was asking news 
 from the court ; nobody had any thing certain to tell. One 
 man depicted the public calamities ; the next criticised the 
 language of the chancellor and his partisans ; the third smote 
 on his breast, bemoaning his unprofitable journey ; while an- 
 other was counting up the minutes which must elapse before 
 he might quit his hateful residence at Paris, and forget the ex- 
 piring liberties of his country in the quiet of his home and the 
 caresses of his family. All were agreed in devising means for 
 obtaining our dismissal from a city in which we were now wan- 
 dering idly up and down, with nothing to do either for the pub- 
 lic or in our private affairs." Among the deputies, some, how- 
 ever, appear to have been of a sterner mood. One of them in- 
 dignantly exclaimed, "Are we not the very same men who 
 
574 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 yesterday entered the royal presence chamber to complete the 
 most important transaction which could happen in France ? 
 Or can a single night have so totally changed our rank, oui 
 station, and our authority?" " Are we not the same men to 
 day that we were yesterday ?" exclaimed the Abbe Sieyes, one 
 hundred and seventy-four years later, in the Tennis Court of 
 Versailles. The phrase which, in the reign of Louis XIII., 
 had served only to turn a period, was sufficient, in the reign 
 of his successor, to expedite a revolution. 
 
 We must not, however, judge lightly of the real importance 
 of this convention of the States-General of France in the sev- 
 enteenth century. Their petitions were productive, though at 
 the distance of fifteen years, of some beneficial enactments ; 
 and the principles which they asserted were the salient, though 
 the long dormant springs of those great changes which event- 
 ually gave a new character to all the political institutions of 
 the kingdom. Thus the adjustment which the Tiers Etat pro- 
 posed to establish of the great controversy of the League, be- 
 came the basis, and was almost the text, of the declaration 
 framed by Bossuet, and adopted by almost all the bishops of 
 the Grallican Church in the year 1682. And thus, also, they 
 anticipated four at least of the great political doctrines of 
 France in the age in which we live : the doctrines, that is, 
 of the equality of all men in the eye of the law ; of the sub- 
 ordination of all judicial tribunals to one supreme and super- 
 intending judicature ; of the uniformity of the rates of export 
 and import duties in every district of the state ; and of the 
 right of all men freely to engage in every branch of commerce, 
 Concurring in these demands, the Clergy separated their cause 
 from that of the other two orders by the extravagance of their 
 ecclesiastical pretensions ; while the Noblesse constituted them- 
 selves the apologists for all those abuses which were crushed 
 at the first rude shock of the Revolution of 1789. Had the 
 Three Estates been unanimous, they might have averted that 
 catastrophe ; for their united power would have been sufficient 
 to have given a new tendency and character to the whole of 
 the subsequent history of France. But, by their dissensions, 
 they afforded the court of Louis XIII. a specious, if not, in- 
 deed, a reasonable escape from all the reforms which the Tiers 
 Etat had so earnestly demanded. The time was perhaps un- 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 575 
 
 tipe for such, innovations, and it was presumptuously concluded 
 that it would never ripen. So at least judged the queen-moth- 
 er and her advisers. But it was with a much farther-sighted 
 prescience that Richelieu had contemplated the scene in which 
 ne had borne so conspicuous a part. He had observed how 
 great was the rising power cf the Commons, how enlightened 
 their policy, how formidable their moral influence, and, at the 
 same time, how ill regulated their passions ; he had studied the 
 means of rendering those passions subservient to his schemes 
 of absolute dominion ; nor was the period remote in which he 
 was to reduce to practice the result of those profound medita- 
 tions. That period, however, had not as yet come. 
 
 When deprived of the guidance of the States -General, the 
 mass of society turned for leaders to the Parliament of Paris. 
 It was one of the favorite maxims of that company that they 
 were les Et&ts Generaux au petit pied ; that is, that they 
 were the depositaries of their powers when the States them- 
 selves were not in session. Though it was impossible to dis- 
 cover any law, it was easy enough to find authoritative suf- 
 frages in support of this doctrine ; for the Parliament had a 
 strong hold on the confidence and affections of society. Al- 
 though many of the members of it were nobles, the counselors 
 or judicial members were invariably commoners, though, in- 
 deed, commoners of the highest consideration. Their learning, 
 their integrity, and their public spirit merited, and were re- 
 warded by, universal esteem. A large proportion of them had 
 the advantage of great wealth, and the habitual demeanor of 
 them all was that of men justly confident in their own position 
 and authority. In them the people admired and revered the 
 fearless antagonists of the nobles, of the favorites, and of the 
 court. They passed for the guardians of the liberties of the 
 G-allican Church, and for defenders of national as opposed to 
 foreign interests. Moreover, they formed a compact and united 
 phalanx. They were, or seemed to be, the one stable bulwark 
 in the state, beneath which the weak might hope to find shel- 
 ter from oppression, and under the shelter of which the public 
 liberties could be securely nourished. 
 
 And yet, as often as the Parliament advanced beyond the 
 limits of their appropriate judicial functions, they were in real- 
 ity feeble, if not impotent. In thoir conflicts with tho crown 
 
576 THE ABSOLTTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 and its officers they had 110 effective constitutional weapon 
 They could, indeed, refuse to register a royal edict. They 
 could pronounce eloquent remonstrances. They could retire, 
 with the most imposing dignity, into prison or to exile. But 
 then their quiver was exhausted. Their political story is thus 
 the record of enterprises commenced with all imaginable pomp, 
 and ended with all imaginable meanness ; of prodigies of moral 
 courage dwindling away into pitiful intrigues ; of patriotic de- 
 signs terminating in civil wars ; and of loyal enterprises result- 
 ing in traitorous alliances with the foreign enemies of their 
 kings. 
 
 Since the dissolution of the States-General of 1614, a month 
 had not passed before the Parliament had embarked in one of 
 these desperate undertakings. They had convened all the no- 
 bles and public officers who were members, though not coun- 
 selors, of their body, to deliberate on certain proposals to be 
 made for the service of the king, for the good of the state, and 
 for the solace of the people. The arret was a manifest usurpa- 
 tion, and was promptly and indignantly annulled by an order 
 of the king in council. They met to remonstrate against this 
 mandate, and were again commanded to desist. They then 
 actually prepared, and, in imitation of the States- General, they 
 delivered to Louis a cahier of public grievances, and were an- 
 swered by a peremptory interdict against their farther inter- 
 ference in any affairs of state. The perplexed magistrates, at 
 the end of their resources, now betook themselves to the debate 
 of points of law and to the investigation of theories of govern- 
 ment. To cut the knot by which the lawyers had been baffled, 
 their noble and military colleagues drew their swords. In de- 
 fense, as they pretended, of their company, the Prince of Conde, 
 and the Dukes of Bouillon, Mayenne, and Longueville, plunged 
 their country into a civil war a war as ignominious in its 
 close as it had been unjustifiable in its commencement. 
 
 Seduced by a donation from the court of 6,000,000 livres, 
 those aristocratic commanders abandoned the field almost as 
 soon as they had entered it, leaving to the counselors of the 
 Parliament the responsibility, the ridicule, and the reproach 
 of this extravagant rebellion. 
 
 It was no light responsibility ; for, in the wanton levity of 
 their hearts, the Parliamentarians had once more kindled the 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 577 
 
 flames, not of civil war only, but of a new war of religion. 
 Conde, indeed, was a bigoted Catholic ; but such was still the 
 attachment of the Huguenots for the name he bore, that many 
 of them joined the standard which, as his manifesto assured 
 them, he had raised to prevent the revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes, and to rescue themselves from massacre. His perfid- 
 ious and mercenary abandonment of their cause left them the 
 helpless victims of the vengeance which they had but too justly 
 provoked. A new persecution fell with terrible weight on the 
 Protestant inhabitants of Beam, and those outrages yielded in 
 their turn the ordinary and natural results of a vindictive re- 
 action. The deputies of the Calvinistic churches, at a synod 
 or diet holden at La Rochelle, resolved to divide the whole 
 kingdom into eight circles, over each of which a Protestant 
 commander was to preside, though all of those commanders 
 were to be placed under the orders of the Due de Bouillon, as 
 the military head of the whole confederacy. By these chiefs, 
 armies were to be raised, officers appointed, and taxes levied ; 
 but the power of making peace was specially reserved by the 
 assembly to themselves. 
 
 The pretext for this traitorous conspiracy (for it was nothing 
 less) was suppMed by those provisions of the Edict of Nantes 
 which seemed to recognize in the Protestants the right of de- 
 fending their privileges with arms, and of deliberating in gen- 
 eral assemblies on all the interests of their churches. Such a 
 construction of the edict was, however, sufficiently refuted by 
 the absurdity of the consequences it involved. Henry IV. could 
 not have designed, as assuredly he was not entitled, to au- 
 thorize the establishment, within the realm of France, of an 
 independent religious and military republic, protected by as- 
 semblies, troops, revenues, and foreign alliances of its own. 
 No government could rationally admit, or safely disregard, a 
 pretension at once so extravagant and so formidable. How 
 formidable may be inferred from the fact that, although the 
 Dukes of Rohan and Soubise were the only two of the eight 
 elected commanders who accepted that perilous charge, and 
 although Saintonge, Guienne, Q,uercy, and Languedoc were 
 the only provinces of France in which the confederates of La 
 Rochelle found any support, yet, even with their resources 
 thus unexpectedly reduced, they continued, during sixteen 
 
 Go 
 
578 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 months, to maintain hostilities on equal terms with the roya' 
 armies, and at length obtained a pacification on conditions so 
 favorable as to show that they had effectually balanced and 
 held in check the power of their sovereign. 
 
 It was immediately after this period that Richelieu first ob- 
 tained admission to the Council of State. He might seem to 
 have been born to supply the deficiencies of the king, and to 
 impart to his dormant virtues the life and energy of which 
 they stood in need. For Louis was a man of large and just 
 capacity. His ideas of the duties of his station were princely 
 and magnanimous. He lived in profound submission to the 
 law of his conscience, in the fear of God, and in veneration for 
 all men in whom he saw, or thought he saw, any image, how- 
 ever faint, of the Divine beneficence and power. But he was 
 of a feeble, indolent, and melancholy spirit. He was habitu- 
 ally rapt in reveries, sometimes splendid, though more often 
 gloomy ; but he was always incapable of prompt or decisive 
 action. Though a king, he never was, and never could have 
 been, a free man. It was among the necessities of his exist- 
 ence to live under the government of a master. After select- 
 ing and rejecting many such, he at length submitted himself 
 to the dominion of Richelieu, and thenceforward endured that 
 bondage to the last. He endured it, certainly, neither from 
 attachment nor from fear, but because, as often as he struggled 
 to regain his liberty, his efforts were baffled by his admiration 
 of the genius of his great minister, and by his persuasion that 
 no other man could so effectually promote the welfare of his 
 state and people. 
 
 Richelieu, on the other hand, was one of the rulers of man- 
 kind in virtue of an inherent and indefeasible birthright. His 
 title to command rested on that sublime force of will and de- 
 cision of character by which, in an age of great men, he was 
 raised above them all. It is a gift which supposes and requires 
 ; n him on whom it is conferred convictions too firm to be 
 shaken by the discovery of any unperceived or unheeded truths. 
 It is, therefore, a gift which, when bestowed on the governors 
 of nations, also presupposes in them the patience to investigate, 
 the capacity to comprehend, and the genius to combine, all 
 those views of the national interest, under the guidance of 
 which their inflexible policy is to be conducted to its destine^ 
 
HENRY IV, AND RICHELIEU, 579 
 
 consummation ; for the stoutest hearted of men, if acting in 
 ignorance, or under the impulse of haste or of error, must often 
 pause, often hesitate, and not seldom recede. K/ichelieu was 
 exposed to no such danger. He moved onward to his prede- 
 termined ends with that unfaltering step which attests, not 
 merely a stern immutability of purpose, but a comprehensive 
 survey of the path to be trodden, and a profound acquaintance 
 with all its difficulties and all its resources. It was a path 
 from which he could be turned aside neither by his bad nor 
 by his good genius ; neither by fear, lassitude, interest, or 
 pleasure ; nor by justice, pity, humanity, or conscience. 
 
 The idolatrous homage of *mere mental power, without ref- 
 erence to the motives by which it is governed, or to the ends 
 to which it is addressed that blind hero-worship, which would 
 place "Wallenstein and Grustavus Adolphus on the same level, 
 and extol with equal warmth the triumphs of Cromwell and 
 of Washington, though it be a modern fashion, has certainly 
 not the charm of novelty. On the contrary, it might, in the 
 language of the Puritans, be described as one of the " old fol- 
 lies of the old Adam ;" and to the influence of that folly the 
 reputation of Richelieu is not a little indebted. 
 
 In his estimate, the absolute dominion of the French crown 
 and the grandeur of France were convertible terms. They 
 seemed to him but as two different aspects of the great con- 
 summation to which every hour of his political life was devoted. 
 In approaching that ultimate goal, there were to be surmount- 
 ed many obstacles which he distinctly perceived, and of which 
 he has given a very clear summary in his Testament Politique. 
 "When it pleased your majesty," he says, "to give me not 
 only a place in your council, but a great share in the conduct 
 of your affairs, the Huguenots divided the state with you. 
 The great lords were acting, not as your subjects, but as in- 
 dependent chieftains. The governors of your provinces were 
 conducting themselves like so many sovereign princes. For- 
 eign affairs and alliances were disregarded. The interest of 
 the public was postponed to that of private men. In a word, 
 your authority was, at that time, so torn to shreds, and so un- 
 like what it ought to be, that, in the confusion, it was impos- 
 sible to recognize the genuine traces of your royal power." 
 
 Before his death, Richelieu had triumphed over all these 
 
580 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 enemies, and had elevated the house of Bourbon upon their 
 ruins. He is, I believe, the only human being who ever con- 
 ceived and executed, in the spirit of philosophy, the design of 
 erecting a political despotism; not, indeed, a despotism like 
 that of Constantinople or Teheran, but a power which, being 
 restrained by religion, by learning, and by public spirit, was 
 to be exempted from all other restraints ; a dynasty which, 
 like a kind of subordinate providence, was to spread wide its 
 arms for the guidance and shelter of the subject multitude, it- 
 self the while inhabiting a region too lofty to be ever darkened 
 by the mists of human weakness or of human corruption. 
 
 To devise schemes worthy of the academies of Laputa, and 
 to pursue them with all the relentless perseverance of Cortes 
 or of Clive, has been characteristic of many of the statesmen 
 of France, both in remote and in recent times. Richelieu was 
 but a more successful Mirabeau. He was not so much a min- 
 ister as a dictator. He was rather the depositary than the 
 agent of the royal power. A king in all things but the name, 
 he reigned with that exemption from hereditary and domestic 
 influences which has so often imparted to the Papal monarchs 
 a kind of preterhuman energy > and has as often taught the 
 world to deprecate the celibacy of the throne. 
 
 Richelieu was the heir of the designs of Henry IV., and the 
 ancestor of those of Louis XIY. But they courted, and were 
 sustained by, the applause and the attachment of their sub- 
 jects. He passed his life in one unintermitted struggle with 
 each, in turn, of the powerful bodies over whom he ruled. By 
 a long series of well-directed blows, he crushed forever the po- 
 litical and military strength of the Huguenots. By his strong 
 hand, the sovereign courts were confined to their judicial du- 
 ties, and their claims to participate in the government of the 
 state were scattered to the winds. Trampling under foot all 
 rules of judicial procedure and the clearest principles of justice, 
 he brought to the scaffold one after another of the proudest 
 nobles of France, by sentences dictated by himself, to extra- 
 ordinary judges of his own selection ; thus teaching the doc- 
 trine of social equality by lessons too impressive to be misinter- 
 preted or forgotten by any later generation. Both the priv- 
 ileges, in exchange for which the greater fiefs had surrendered 
 their independence, and the franchises, for the conquest of which 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 581 
 
 the cities, in earlier times, had successfully contended, were 
 alike swept away by this remorseless innovator. He exiled 
 the mother, oppressed the wife, degraded the brother, banished 
 the confessor, and put to death the kinsmen and favorites of 
 the king, and compelled the king himself to be the instrument 
 of these domestic severities. Though surrounded by enemies 
 and by rivals, his power ended only with his life. Though 
 beset by assassins, he died in the ordinary course of nature 
 Though he had waded to dominion through slaughter, cruelty, 
 and wrong, he passed to his great account amid the applause 
 of the people, with the benedictions of the Church ; and, as 
 far as any human eye could perceive, in hope, in tranquillity 
 and in peace. 
 
 What, then, is the reason why so tumultuous a career reached 
 at length so serene a close ? The reason is, that, amid all his 
 conflicts, Richelieu wisely and successfully maintained three 
 powerful alliances. He cultivated the attachment of men of 
 letters, the favor of the commons, and the sympathy of all 
 French idolaters of the national glory. 
 
 He was a man of extensive, if not of profound learning, a 
 theologian of some account, and an aspirant for fame as a 
 dramatist, a wit, a poet, and a historian. But if his claims 
 to admiration as a writer were disputable, none contended his 
 title to applause as a patron of literature and of art. The 
 founder of a despotism in the world of politics, he aspired also 
 to be the founder of a commonwealth in the world of letters. 
 While crushing the national liberties, he founded the French 
 Academy as the sacred shrine of intellectual freedom and in- 
 dependence. Acknowledging no equal in the state, he forbade 
 the acknowledgment, in that literary republic, of any superi- 
 ority save that of genius. While refusing to bare his head to 
 any earthly potentate, he would permit no eminent author to 
 stand bareheaded in his presence. By these cheap and not dis- 
 honest arts, he gained an inestimable advantage. The honors he 
 conferred on the men of learning of his age they largely repaid, 
 by placing under his control the main-springs of public opinion. 
 
 To conciliate the commons of France, Richelieu even osten- 
 tatiously divested himself of every prejudice hostile to his pop- 
 ularity. A prince of the Church of Rome, he cherished the 
 independence of the Grallican Church and clergy. The con- 
 
582 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 queror of the Calvinists, he yet respected the rights of con- 
 science. Of noble birth and ancestry, his demeanor was stil} 
 that of a tribune of the people. But it was not by demeanor 
 alone that he labored to win their regard. He affected the 
 more solid praise of large and salutary reformations. 
 
 At the distance of fifteen years from the close of the States- 
 General of 1614, he had matured the plans by which he pro- 
 posed not only to give effect to the cahier of the Tiers Etat, but 
 even to advance far beyond the limits within which they had 
 circumscribed their requests. To have accomplished his de- 
 signs by the unaided powers of the crown would have been to 
 deprive of much of its grace the boon he intended to confer. 
 To have sought the concurrence of the States-General in a 
 new assembly would have been to counteract his great pur- 
 pose of elevating the crown above all popular control. He 
 avoided the dilemma by the convention of an assembly of No- 
 tables selected by himself. It comprised fifty-five members, 
 among whom no duke, nor peer, nor provincial governor had a 
 place. The majority were commoners, but commoners of high 
 distinction, drawn from the various sovereign courts of the 
 realm. In the States-General, the initiative of all cahiers, or 
 requests for the redress of grievances, belonged to the three 
 orders. In the assembly of Notables, Bichelieu claimed it for 
 himself. In his indications of the general objects with a view 
 to which new laws were requisite, he more than anticipated 
 the hopes of the people. Little is it to be wondered that their 
 enthusiasm was fired by projects of which the following are 
 an example : 
 
 The king was to be requested to remit all taxes affecting 
 those of his subjects who were either engaged in productive 
 labor, or suffering under urgent want ; to throw open promo- 
 tion in the army to every class of society ; to maintain an ex- 
 act balance between the receipt and the expenditure of the 
 treasury ; to increase the navy for the protection of commerce ; 
 to establish new commercial companies ; to form new canals ; 
 to rescue the husbandmen from the rapacity of the troops by 
 a stricter discipline and a punctual payment of their wages ; 
 and to dismantle every fortress and castle which was not act- 
 ually required for the defense of the realm. 
 
 A more captivating programme of reforms has not been pro- 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 583 
 
 duced in our own days before the National Assembly of Paris 
 or the commercial hall of Manchester. It was welcomed with 
 delight, and then transferred to commissioners charged with 
 the duty of translating these abstract doctrines into circum- 
 stantial edicts. But, in the case of the last of his proposals, 
 Richelieu saw fit to dispense with any such formality. He 
 summoned the people at once to execute the sentence passed 
 against the fortresses and castles of their lords. Never was a 
 royal injunction more zealously obeyed. In every province 
 and city of France, myriads of plebeian hands were joyfully 
 raised to demolish the strong-holds which they had so long 
 dreaded and so cordially abhorred. The work of destruction 
 was done with order and with calmness. Not one stone was 
 left upon another which could again serve to shelter the op- 
 pressions of the lords. Not one stone was cast down which 
 might serve as a monument of the ancient faith or institutions 
 of their country. 
 
 The completion of this labor of love was promptly rewarded 
 by the promulgation of the royal edict designed to give effect 
 to the cahiers of the Notables. It comprised four hundred and 
 sixty-one articles, ranging over every branch of the internal 
 polity of the realm : civil law and penal law ecclesiastical 
 affairs and education justice and finance commerce and ca- 
 nals the army and the navy. But the art of codification may 
 flourish without any advancement being made in the still 
 greater art of legislation. The code of Richelieu, like many 
 other French codes before his time and since, was the Pro- 
 methean statue without the Promethean fire. It wanted noth- 
 ing except a living principle. Its great author had also been 
 the author of an irresistible despotism. The elder of his off- 
 spring devoured the younger. Having created a power supe- 
 rior to all law, it mattered little or nothing what laws he after- 
 ward called into existence. 
 
 Thirdly. The strength of Richelieu consisted in his alliance 
 with the idolaters of the national glory. By wars, successful 
 if not brilliant, by negotiations judiciously conducted, by many 
 treacheries, and by a policy philanthropic in pretense, but pro- 
 foundly selfish in reality, he transferred to the house of Bour- 
 bon the ancient influence of the house of Austria. The once 
 formidable armies of Spain were finally crushed at Rocroi, at 
 
584 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 Nordlingen, and at Lens, and the Peace of "Westphalia estab- 
 lished among the powers of Europe a balance, of which the ad- 
 justment and the superintendence thenceforward "belonged tc 
 France. It is true, indeed, that five years had passed from the 
 death of Richelieu before those victories were won, and that 
 peace was made. Yet, as they were the immediate fruits of 
 his policy, and the direct results of the impulse giver-i by him, 
 they Were not unjustly regarded as triumphs won under his 
 auspices, and as trophies to his fame. 
 
 With what enthusiasm the Frenchmen of his own age re- 
 garded the great author of their national aggrandizement may, 
 perhaps, be best inferred from the following passage, which oc- 
 curs in a prefatory discourse, which, so lately as the year 1850, 
 was prefixed, by so considerable a person as M. Augustia 
 Thierry, to one of those volumes of the national records, for 
 the publication of which the world is indebted to M. Guizot : 
 a discourse to which I gladly acknowledge my own obligations 
 for a more profound and comprehensive survey than I have 
 elsewhere seen of those passages of the history of France to 
 which our attention has been directed on the present occasion. 
 " The exterior policy of Richelieu," observes M. Thierry, "has 
 the singular merit that, after the lapse of two centuries, it is 
 still as living and as national as at the day of its birth. Since 
 the fall of the Roman empire that policy has never ceased, if I 
 may use such an expression, to form a part of the national con- 
 science. It is the policy which the nation has demanded with 
 importunity, and with menaces, of each of the two dynasties 
 which it has so lately crushed. It is the policy which the na- 
 tion demands now, when restored to her full liberty of action. 
 It consists in the maintenance of independent nationalities, in 
 the enfranchisement of oppressed nationalities, and in respect 
 for the bonds resulting from the community of language and 
 of race. When speaking on the question of the right of France 
 to an aggrandizement which would give her a definite frontier 
 a question often proposed during three centuries, and still 
 pending, Henry IV. said, I desire that all who speak Spanish 
 should belong to Spain, and all who speak German to Ger- 
 many, but that all who speak French should be mine.' On the 
 same subject Richelieu said, 'The object of my administration 
 has been to re-establish the natural limits of Gaul, to identify 
 
HENRY IV. AND RICHELIEU. 585 
 
 Gaul and France, and to render the limits of the new Gaul 
 coincident with those of the old.' From these principles, com- 
 bined together, and moderating each other, will result, in the 
 ripeness of the time, the ultimate limitation of the soil of 
 France of that soil to which we have a title legitimate, and 
 perpetual a title resting on the double foundation of history 
 and of nature." 
 
 The hopes thus frankly, and perhaps incautiously, avowed a 
 few months ago by one of the greatest of the living historians 
 of France, though originally excited by Richelieu, first received 
 a definite form and a tangible substance in the reign of Louis 
 XIV. The prejudices of M. Thierry and of his fellow-coun- 
 trymen may dispose them greatly to overrate the real grandeur 
 of that era. Our own prejudices are not less prone to under- 
 value it. In unadorned truth, however, it is the most splendid, 
 if not the only splendid, period of the ancient French mon- 
 archy. It gave birth to more remarkable events and to more 
 illustrious personages than any other. It was then that the 
 territory of France received its principal enlargement. It was 
 then that the administration of her government was first re- 
 duced to any well-ascertained system, or conducted on any 
 self-consistent principles. It was the age of her greatest me- 
 chanical and manufacturing inventions. The codes of French 
 jurisprudence were then first reduced into method, and France 
 then possessed her greatest generals and her most illustrious 
 writers. 
 
 But there is a dark reverse to this brilliant picture. It was 
 in the reign of Louis XIV., also, that France was afflicted by 
 calamities fearfully contrasted with her recent glories in arms, 
 in arts, and in literature. After eloquence, and poetry, and 
 sculpture, and painting had exhausted their powers in celebra- 
 ting the triumphs and the felicities of Le Grand Monarque, 
 history had to describe the evening of that bright day overcast 
 by famines, by persecutions, by bankruptcy, by defeats, by 
 invasions, and by the domestic sorrows which shed so deep a 
 gloom over the later years of the once idolized king. But that 
 passage of the annals of France is especially important, be- 
 cause it affords the most complete exhibition which we pos- 
 sess of the real character of her absolute monarchy. To that 
 subject I therefore propose to devote my next three lectures, 
 
586 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 considering the reign of Louis, first, in his minority, that is. 
 during the wars of the Fronde and the administration of Maz- 
 arin ; secondly, in his early manhood, that is, during the ad- 
 ministration of Colbert and Louvois ; and, thirdly, in his de- 
 clining years, that is, during the conduct of the government 
 by Louis himself in person. That division will bring under 
 review each in turn of the most momentous constitutional 
 questions of that eventful period. 
 
 LECTURE XXI. 
 
 ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 
 
 SOON after the surrender of Bordeaux to the arms of Maza- 
 rin, three of his defeated antagonists accompanied him, in his 
 carriage, to a short distance from the city. As they rolled 
 along, the cardinal gayly exclaimed, "Who would have thought, 
 a week ago, that by this time of day we four should be sitting 
 together so much at our ease ?" " Tout arrive en France," 
 was the characteristic answer of La Rochefoucauld, one of his 
 fellow- travelers. There is no better example, even in his own 
 maxims, of the art of compressing much truth into a narrow 
 compass, than is afforded by this epitome of the civil wars in 
 which he was then engaged ; for never, before or since, did so 
 many marvelous personages crowd into the space of four years 
 so many marvelous doings, to be afterward recorded by such 
 a series of marvelous writers. The Fronde is a protracted 
 drama, where, in defiance of all French theatrical laws, trag- 
 edy, comedy, and buffoonery struggle for the pre-eminence, 
 but where, nevertheless, a French critic might be pleased tc 
 recognize some approach to two of the three indispensable 
 unities of his national stage- those," namely, of action and of 
 place. 
 
 On the 14th of May, 1643, Louis XIII. closed his melan- 
 choly life, and transmitted his crown to the fourteenth Louis, 
 then a child in his fifth year. In the first week of the new 
 reign, the armies of France under Conde won the splendid vie- 
 tory of Rocroi, With what rapture it was hailed by the peo- 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 587 
 
 pie at large, may perhaps be inferred from the exulting elo- 
 quence in which, at the distance of fifty years, Bossuet revived, 
 in one of his funeral orations, the impressions which that great 
 triumph had produced upon his own boyish mind, when a 
 student at the University of Paris. All was festivity and joy. 
 The ruthless dominion of the austere Richelieu had given place 
 to the indulgent rule of the affable Mazarin. The queen-moth- 
 er had thrown open to the Parisian world those princely halls 
 which her gloomy husband had devoted to monastic austerities. 
 Prisoners discharged from captivity, exiles returning from for- 
 eign lands, thronged her brilliant court, to participate in the 
 hilarities of the new era, and. to solicit compensation for their 
 former sufferings. Such was the universal good humor, that, 
 according to a courtly hyperbole of those joyous days, the whole 
 French language was reduced to the five little words " la Reine 
 est si bonne." 
 
 Less obsequious observers, however, could perceive, beneath 
 this flowery surface, the widely-scattered seeds of approaching 
 disaster. During the administration of Richelieu, many had 
 really suffered in the cause of Anne of Austria ; and many 
 more now ascribed to their zeal in her service the enmity which 
 they had either endured or apprehended from the remorseless- 
 cardinal. To reject the demands of such ancient partisans 
 would be to insure their vindictive resentment. To accede to 
 those demands would be to provoke the hostility of all the other 
 candidates for honors or advancement. It was an inextricable 
 dilemma. A few weeks were sufficient to crowd the chambers 
 of the Louvre with dissatisfied courtiers, bemoaning the dis- 
 appointment of their long-cherished hopes, celebrating their 
 past merits, and denouncing the heartless ingratitude of princes. 
 Their complaints and pretensions amused the laughter-loving 
 people of Paris, and won for them the sobriquet of " Les Im- 
 portants" To themselves, however, such merriment seemed 
 utterly misplaced. So keen, indeed, was their anger, that the 
 leader of their cabal, the Duo de Beaufort, meditated mortal 
 vengeance ; and, as a punishment for the intended assassina- 
 tion of Mazarin, was sent to brood over his wrongs as a pris- 
 oner of state in the dismal towers of Vinoennes. 
 
 To these embarrassments succeeded financial difficulties. 
 The war was conducted with alternate success and failure, but 
 
588 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 with an unintermitted waste of the public revenue ; and white 
 Guebriant, Turenne, and Conde were maintaining the military 
 renown of France, D' Emery, the superintendent of finance, 
 was struggling with the far severer difficulty of raising her 
 ways and means to the level of her expenditure. The internal 
 history of the first five years of the regency is thenceforward 
 a record of the contest between the court and the Parliament 
 of Paris ; between the court, promulgating edicts to replenish 
 the exhausted treasury, and the Parliament, remonstrating in 
 angry addresses against the acceptance of them. In some of 
 those remonstrances, Omer Talon, the advocate general, ad- 
 dressed the queen-mother in terms from which the orators of 
 the National Convention might have borrowed proofs and il- 
 lustrations of their favorite doctrines of the rights of man. But 
 Anne of Austria listened to such eloquence in a spirit most 
 unlike that of her descendant, Louis XVI. She seems to have 
 regarded M. Talon in the light of a tragic actor, reciting a 
 declamation from Corneille, and warmly extolled the rhetorical 
 embellishments with which he had adorned it. Nor does the 
 speaker himself appear to have foreseen the approach of any 
 more genuine tragedy ; for, just before his delivery of the last 
 of those patriotic speeches, he recorded, in his still extant jour- 
 nal, his opinion that a great and universal calm had at length 
 been firmly established throughout the kingdom. To under- 
 stand how, and by whom, that calm was broken, it is neces- 
 sary to recur, however briefly, to the constitution of the sov- 
 ereign courts, which at that period had their seat in the Palais 
 de Justice of Paris. 
 
 In ancient France, as I had formerly occasion to explain, 
 the title of sovereign was given to every court of justice, from 
 the judgments of which there could be no appeal to any other 
 tribunal. Four such courts were in practice, if not of right, 
 always stationary in the capital. Of these the Parliament was 
 the most considerable. It was a single company, divided into 
 five distinct chambers, called the Great Chamber the Cham- 
 ber "des Enqueues" the Chamber "de la Tournelle" the 
 Chamber "des Requetes" and the Chamber "de PEdit." 
 
 First. The Great Chamber was composed of a high officer, 
 called the first president ; of nine presidents a mortier (so called 
 from their mortar-shaped velvet caps, which were the badge 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. (589 
 
 of sovereign justice) ; and of thirty-seven counselors, of whom 
 twelve were clergymen and twenty-five laymen. These were 
 the stipendiary members of the Great Chamber. But seats in 
 it belonged to honorary members also. These were the princes 
 of the blood the dukes and peers of France the chancellor 
 or keeper of the great seal the counselors of state the arch- 
 bishop of Paris and the bailli of Clugny : to whom were add- 
 ed four masters of requests. To the Great Chamber belonged 
 what was called " la haute direction" of the whole Parliament, 
 the cognizance of all charges of high treason, and jurisdiction 
 in all cases affecting any peer of France, or any great officer of 
 the crown, or the University of Paris, or the hospitals of that city. 
 
 Secondly. The Chamber "des Enquetes" was a court of 
 appeal from all subordinate civil tribunals, and from all the 
 courts of Police correctionelle. The counselors of this cham- 
 ber were very numerous, and were usually young men, and 
 among them were invariably found the most active political 
 agitators of the Parliament. 
 
 Thirdly. The Chamber " de la Tournelle" was the court 
 for adjudicating on all criminal cases brought before the Par- 
 liament by way of appeal. 
 
 Fourthly. The Chamber "des Requetes" had, for their pe- 
 culiar province, the decision of all cases specially reserved to 
 the Parliament by the writ of committimus, which I formerly 
 mentioned. 
 
 Fifthly. The Chamber " de PEdit" was so called, because 
 it was constituted, under the edict of pacification with the 
 Protestants, to decide the causes in which they were chiefly 
 concerned. 
 
 Although each of these five component chambers of the Par- 
 liament had thus separate functions, yet, when any royal edict 
 was to be registered, or when any other political question was 
 to be discussed, all the members of each met together as one 
 united body. The exclusive right to convene any such gen- 
 eral meetings was claimed by the Great Chamber, but that 
 claim was disputed by the others, and especially by the Cham- 
 ber " des Enquetes," who asserted an equal right to summon 
 any such conventions. 
 
 The three other sovereign courts of Paris were the Chamber 
 " des Comptes," the Cour des Aides, and the Grand Conseil. 
 
590 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 The Chamber "des Comptes" was originally composed of 
 officers of the crown, selected from the Royal Council. It 
 afterward received a separate organization not unlike that of 
 our own Court of Exchequer ; and, as we formerly saw, be- 
 came at once an office for auditing the public accounts of the 
 kingdom, and a court of justice for the decision of cases affect- 
 ing the public revenue. 
 
 A large part of the judicial functions of the Chamber " des 
 Comptes" was, however, afterward transferred to the Cour des 
 Aides. That court was also composed of officers or counsel- 
 ors of the crown. The judicial powers of the Chamber " des 
 Comptes" and of the Cour des Aides, though not altogether, 
 were yet, to some degree, concurrent ; but the Cour des Aides 
 did not at all participate in the administrative powers of the 
 Chamber " des Comptes" as auditors of the public revenue. 
 
 Finally. The Grand Conseil was a body exercising many 
 high political functions, but also constituting a court of justice. 
 It had cognizance of those cases from which other courts were 
 specially excluded. Such, for example, were cases which, by 
 the evocation of the king, or by some peculiar privilege of the 
 suitors, were exempt from the authority of the ordinary tribu- 
 nals. The Grand Conseil had also, like the modern Cour de 
 Cassation, the power to annul the judgments of other courts, 
 when such judgments were self-contradictory, or when they 
 encroached oh the legislative or other prerogatives of the crown. 
 
 The counselors or stipendiary judges of each of these four 
 sovereign courts held their offices for life. But, in virtue of 
 the law called the Paulette, to which I adverted on a former 
 occasion, they also held them as an inheritance transmissible 
 to their descendants. The Paulette, as I then stated, was a 
 royal ordinance, which imposed an annual* tax on the stipend 
 of every judge. It was usually passed for a term of nine years 
 only. If the judge died during that term, his heir was enti- 
 tled to succeed to the vacant office. But if the death of the 
 judge happened when the Paulette was not in force, his heir 
 had no such right. Consequently, the renewal of the tax was 
 always welcome to the stipendiary counselors of the sovereign 
 courts ; and, by refusing or delaying to renew it, the king 
 could always exercise a powerful influence over them. 
 
 In April, 1647, the Paulette had expired, and the queen- 
 
THE MINORITY OP LOUIS XIV. 591 
 
 mother proposed the revival of it. But, to relieve the neces- 
 sities of the treasury, she also proposed to increase the annual 
 per centage which it imposed on the stipends of the counselors 
 of the Chamber " des Comptes," of the Cour des Aides, and of 
 the Grrand Conseil. To concert measures of resistance to the 
 contemplated innovation, those counselors held a meeting in 
 the Great Hall of St. Louis ; and at their request the Parlia- 
 ment, though not personally and directly interested in the 
 change, joined their assembly. It was a union too formidable 
 to be needlessly encountered by the royal power ; and, to es- 
 cape such a conflict, the queen informed them that such was 
 the profound attachment of the king, her son, for the judges 
 of his four sovereign courts, that he would not only withdraw 
 his proposal for an increase in the rate of the annual tax on 
 their stipends, but would even graciously relieve them from 
 that burden altogether. 
 
 There is a time and a place for all things, and, among the 
 rest, for irony, but never in the speeches of kings. Exaspera- 
 ted by the threatened loss of the heritable tenure of their offices, 
 and still more offended by the sarcastic terms in which that 
 menace was conveyed, the judges assembled in the hall of St. 
 Louis with increased zeal, and harangued there with yet more 
 indignant eloquence. Four different times the queen inter- 
 dicted their meetings, and four different times they answered 
 her by renewed resolutions for the continuance of them. She 
 threatened severe punishments, and they replied by remon- 
 strances. A direct collision of authority had thus occurred, 
 and it behooved either party to look well to their steps. 
 
 Of that necessity Anne of Austria was at length profoundly 
 sensible. She had all the firmness of her race, but she regard- 
 ed with reasonable alarm the results of such a controversy, 
 and attempted to propitiate, by conciliatory language, the for- 
 midable power to which her menaces had been addressed in 
 vain. But the associated magistrates derived new boldness 
 from the lowered tone and apparent fears of the government. 
 Soaring at once above the humble topic on which they had 
 hitherto been engaged into the region of general politics, they 
 passed at a step from the question of the Paulette to a review 
 of all the public grievances under which their fellow-subjects 
 were laboring. After having wrought during four successive 
 
592 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 days in this inexhaustible mine of eloquence, they at length, 
 on the 30th of June, 1648, commenced the adoption of a series 
 of resolutions, which, by the 24th of July, had amounted in 
 number to twenty-seven, and which may be said to have laid 
 the basis of a constitutional revolution. Among other things, 
 they demanded that the offices of intendants in the various 
 provinces should be abolished; that a fourth of the tailles 
 should be revoked ; that a chamber of justice should be estab- 
 lished for the trial of the officers of finance for their malversa- 
 tions ; that various guarantees should be established for secur- 
 ing the privileges and jurisdictions of the sovereign courts ; 
 that no subject of the king should be detained in prison during 
 more than twenty-four hours, without being interrogated and 
 transferred to his natural judges ; that all imposts levied un- 
 der ordinances not registered in Parliament should be discon- 
 tinued on pain of death ; and that the gross amount of all im- 
 posts should be paid immediately into the treasury, without 
 any deduction on account of advances made to the king. 
 
 Important as these resolutions were in themselves, they were 
 still more important as the assertion, by the associated magis- 
 trates, of the right to originate laws affecting all the general 
 interests of the commonwealth. In fact, a new power in the 
 state had suddenly sprung into existence. It possessed a strong, 
 and, at that time, an exclusive hold on the popular favor. The 
 authority it assumed was defined by no ascertained rules, and 
 was limited by no established precedents or maxims. There 
 were, therefore, no assignable bounds to their possible usurpa- 
 tions. But that was an age in which the minds of men, in 
 every part of Europe, had been rudely awakened to the extent 
 to which the unconstitutional encroachments of popular bod- 
 ies might be carried. Charles I. was at that time a prisoner 
 in the hands of the English Parliament. Louis XIV. was a 
 boy, unripe for an encounter with any similar antagonists. 
 His court was distracted by hostile factions, and a ceaseless 
 war was daily exhausting the resources of his government. 
 The queen-mother, therefore, resolved to spare no concessions 
 by which the disaffected magistracy might be conciliated. 
 D' Emery was sacrificed to their displeasure ; the renewal of 
 the Paulette on its ancient terms was offered to them ; some 
 of the grievances of which they complained were immediately 
 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 593 
 
 redressed ; and the young king appeared before them in person, 
 to promise his assent to their other demands. In return, he 
 stipulated only for the cessation of their combined meetings, 
 and for their desisting from the farther promulgation of arrets, 
 to which they ascribed the force and authority of law. 
 
 But the authors of this hasty revolution were no longeu 
 masters of the spirits whom they had summoned to their aid 
 They had to choose between a hazardous advance and a still 
 more hazardous retreat. With increasing audacity, therefore, 
 they persevered in defying the royal power, and in requiring 
 from all Frenchmen implicit submission to their own. Ad- 
 vancing from one step to another, they adopted, on the 28th 
 of August, 1648, an arret in direct conflict with a recent proc- 
 lamation of the king, and ordered the prosecution of three per- 
 sons for the offense of presuming to lend him money. At that 
 moment their debates were interrupted by shouts and discharges 
 of cannon, announcing the great victory of Conde at Lens. 
 During the four following days, religious festivals and public 
 rejoicings suspended their sittings. But in those four days, 
 the court had arranged their measures for a coup d'etat. As 
 the Parliament retired from Notre Dame, where they had at- 
 tended at a solemn thanksgiving for the triumph of the arms 
 of France, they observed that the soldiery still stood to the 
 posts which, in honor of that ceremonial, had been assigned to 
 them in different quarters of the city. Under the protection 
 of that force, one of the presidents of the Chamber " des En- 
 quetes," and De Broussel, the chief of the parliamentary agi- 
 tators, were arrested and consigned to different prisons, while 
 three of their colleagues were exiled to remote distances from 
 the capital. 
 
 At the tidings of this violence, the Parisian populace were 
 seized with a characteristic paroxysm of fury. As by some 
 magical impulse, they at once fell into ranks, as if they had 
 been so many bands of a well-organized army. They elected 
 commanders, threw up barricades, and stationed garrisons at 
 every vulnerable point of attack or defense. In less than three 
 hours, Paris had become an intrenched camp. In the centre 
 was the Palais de Justice, the strong-hold of the Parliament ; 
 and at the extremity, the Palais Royal, the fortress of the 
 queen. No effectual resistance to the enraged but well-dis- 
 
 P P 
 
594 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 ciplined multitude was, however, possible. They dictated their 
 own terms. The exiles were recalled, and the prisoners re- 
 leased. Peals of bells from every steeple, acclamations from 
 every mouth, repeated salvos from twenty thousand muskets, 
 greeted their return ; and then, at the bidding of the Parlia- 
 ment, the people laid aside their weapons, threw down the 
 barricades, re-opened their shops, and resumed the common 
 business of life as quietly as if nothing had occurred to inter- 
 rupt the tranquil course of their ordinary existence. 
 
 It was, however, a short-lived triumph. The queen, her 
 son, and Mazarin effected their escape to St. Germain's ; and 
 there, by the mediation of Conde, and of Graston, duke of Or- 
 leans, the uncle of the king, a peace was negotiated. The 
 treaty of St. G-ermain's was regarded by the court with shame, 
 and by the Parliament with exultation. But when, according 
 to the terms of it, the royal family had resumed their residence 
 at Paris, the four sovereign courts entered upon new and angry 
 debates on the final acceptance of that arrangement. Each of 
 them fastened on some different provisions of the treaty, and 
 each demanded numerous and irreconcilable amendments of 
 them. But they had now to deal with a new and a much 
 more formidable antagonist. Conde was a great soldier, but 
 an unskillful and impatient peace-maker. By his advice and 
 aid, the queen-mother and the king once more retired to St. 
 G-ermain's, and commanded the immediate adjournment of the 
 Parliament from Paris to Montargis. To their remonstrances 
 against that order they could obtain no answer, except that if 
 their obedience to it should be any longer deferred, an army 
 of twenty-five thousand men would immediately lay siege to 
 the city. 
 
 War was thus declared ; but never did war assume a less 
 imposing aspect. At the Hotel de Ville, the head-quarters of 
 the parliamentary forces, a joyous troop of plumed and silken 
 nobles, and a still gayer array of high-born ladies, were per- 
 mitted to usurp, not only the defense of Paris, but the conduct 
 of public affairs. The fascinated multitude welcomed these 
 aristocratic allies with loud applauses, and even the long-robed 
 magistrates themselves were compelled to confess and to bow 
 to their supremacy. Those grandees had, however, plunged 
 into rebellion on no principle at all, and from no assignable 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV 595 
 
 motives. Some had been seduced into it by mere idleness 
 some by conceit others by offended self-love and not a few 
 by the allurement of wanton paramours ; and while Conde was 
 drawing his veteran troops round the walls, the gallant lords 
 and ladies within them were caballing, intriguing, dancing, 
 and reveling with an equal contempt of their own reputation, of 
 the common safety, and of those high political interests which 
 had drawn their plebeian associates into this hazardous contest 
 with their king. 
 
 The catastrophe was worthy of such beginnings. "With an 
 andissembled contempt both for his learned and for his fash- 
 ionable adversaries, the conqueror of Rocroi scarcely conde- 
 scended to put forth his military skill or resources against 
 them/ Nor was it necessary ; for, at the first keen blast of 
 real war, the belligerent propensities both of the Palais de Jus- 
 tice and of the Hotel de Ville drooped and faded away. An 
 onslaught by Conde on one of their outposts at Charenton was 
 followed, within a month, first by an offer to treat for peace, 
 and then by the actual acceptance of the treaty of Ruel. It 
 was, however, neither a dastardly nor an unwise concession 
 Gallant as were the spirits of many of the insurgent magis- 
 trates, their position was one from which the bravest and the 
 wisest might have rejoiced to retire. The post which brought 
 the tidings of the attack on Charenton brought also the intel- 
 ligence of the execution of Charles I. ; and the melancholy is- 
 sue of the revolt of the Parliament in England sounded as a 
 dismal omen in the ears of the Parliament of Paris. Besieged 
 as they then were by the greatest warrior of the age, they had 
 been superseded in the defense of the city, at the bidding of 
 the fickle multitude, by a troop of holiday courtiers. Enter- 
 taining no ultimate views but such as the most loyal French- 
 man might cherish and avow, they were shocked to learn that 
 their lordly associates were far advanced in a treaty for intro- 
 ducing into the land as their allies the generals and the troops 
 of the King of Spain, who was at that time engaged in an open 
 war with their lawful sovereign ; and, to complete their dis- 
 tress, they were nearly at the same moment informed that the 
 queen-mother had just issued letters patent for the convocation 
 of the States- General, in whose presence their own usurped 
 authority must fade away, and their own persons shrink into 
 insignificance and disesteem. 
 
596 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 The treaty of Ruel was, therefore, not so much a choice ag 
 a necessity. It was, however, a great epoch. It was the close 
 of the constitutional, and the commencement of the romantic 
 history of the Fronde ; and such of the occurrences of that war 
 as lie beyond it are, therefore, not within the limits of the in- 
 quiry which I have at present proposed to myself. Yet I am 
 unwilling to pass over so curious a passage in the annals of 
 France as that which is variously called either the second 
 Fronde or the War of Princes, without at least indicating what 
 are the best sources from which authentic information respect- 
 ing it may be derived. 
 
 The whole contest, whether constitutional or military, has 
 recently been narrated by M. de St. Aulaire and by M. Bazin, 
 in works entitled to no mean rank among those in which mod- 
 ern historians have emulated the skill and surpassed the wis- 
 dom of the great historical artists of antiquity. Of such com- 
 pendious and philosophical abridgments of the records of past 
 ages, many have earned high admiration, and are justly enti- 
 tled to it. The great authors of that class have given the most 
 exquisite examples of the power of selecting, grouping, and 
 harmonizing events. They have drawn many graphic por- 
 traitures of human character ; and they have supplied us with 
 many luminous statements and profound solutions of the so- 
 cial and political problems of former times, and with many an 
 analysis of remote occurrences, around which, as a nucleus, 
 the student may accumulate whatever additional knowledge 
 his own researches may bring to the more complete illustra- 
 tion of them. Some of you may perhaps, however, remember 
 how, in one of his graceful flights over the surface of things, 
 Charles Lamb had the courage to place all such histories in 
 his Index Expurgatorius of "books impossible to be read;'' 
 and although the papal decrees of that most elegant of triflers 
 may not command our absolute submission, yet the more any 
 man descends below the surface over which he fluttered, the 
 more, I think, will he so far agree with him as to place such 
 books among those with which it is " impossible to be satis- 
 fied ;" for, indisputable as may be the duty, and great as may 
 be the pleasure, of studying Gruicciardini and Davila, Voltaire 
 and Sismondi, Hume and Gibbon, who ever yet closed them 
 without some distaste for such learned epitomes, and for the 
 
THE MINORITY OP LOUIS XIV. 597 
 
 l Makers of them ? In the dusty fields of ancient chronicles; 
 imd even in the flower-beds of some historical romances, may 
 be gathered a more vivid, and perhaps a more just, conception 
 of the ages which have passed away, than can be gleaned from 
 any of those scientific and eloquent narratives. The student 
 of the elaborate histories of the Fronde will therefore, in my 
 judgment, do well to cultivate the acquaintance of the great 
 memoir writers among the Frondeurs. Such, however, is their 
 number, that I can at present pause to notice a few only of the 
 most considerable. 
 
 Foremost in importance, in variety, and in genius, and there- 
 fore foremost in fame, are the Memoirs of John Francis Paul 
 de Grondi, Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal de Retz. It might 
 pass for a species of impiety to say of so eminent an ecclesi- 
 astic that he was a debauchee, a liar, and a knave, if the car- 
 dinal himself had not taken the utmost pains to demonstrate 
 that such were the habits, and such even the boast, of his life. 
 He laid suicidal hands on his own character with an obliquity 
 of moral vision unrivaled, perhaps, except by Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau ; and yet, in a letter of Rousseau himself, may be 
 read the following estimate of the merits of his fellow-suicide. 
 " I have," he says, "read the Memoirs of De Retz from end 
 to end. It is a Salmagundy of all things good and bad. The 
 first volume abounds with touches of great beauty, and with 
 many weighty reflections apropos to trifles. The other vol- 
 umes are little better than so much verbiage apropos to things 
 of great importance. But what amazes me is to see a man of 
 rank and of mature age a priest, an archbishop, and a car- 
 dinal exhibiting himself as a duelist, as living in concubin- 
 age, and, worst of all, as a deliberate hypocrite, secluding him- 
 self in a religious retirement that he may appear as an honest 
 man in the eyes of the world, and as a rogue in the sight of 
 his Maker." 
 
 Hard words these, but scarcely more hard than true ! Nor 
 is the explanation of this strange moral phenomenon either 
 doubtful or recondite. Excepting only his severe and eloquent 
 censor, De Retz was the most eminent and zealous of all the 
 high-priests who have at different times devoted themselves tc 
 the worship of vanity. At her shrine he was prompt to im- 
 molate every thing his friends, his country, his religion ; and 
 
598 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 jven his reputation for decorum, integrity, and truth. To sa- 
 tiate his thirst for applause on any terms, he became the great 
 teacher and example, to his own and to future ages, of sedi- 
 tion reduced into a science. "With all the sententious gravity 
 of a philosopher, he instructs us how the people may be de- 
 ceived and how they may be agitated; how advantage may 
 be taken of the infirmities of the rulers of mankind ; and how 
 even their virtues may be made the instruments of their de- 
 struction. Le Grendre, the Terrorist, said well of the. cardi- 
 nal's Memoirs that they were a breviary of revolution. He 
 was not, however, wholly exempt from ambition in its more 
 vulgar forms. The first great object of his life was to be gazed 
 at and talked about. The second was to obtain the red hat 
 of a cardinal ; and he did obtain it by a series of treacheries 
 and falsehoods which would have been more fitly rewarded by 
 a seat in the galleys than by a seat in the Roman conclave. 
 And yet, strange and contradictory as it may at first sound, 
 De Hetz is a writer from whom much valuable and even trust- 
 worthy information is to be obtained. Although no credit be 
 due to one word he says with a view of magnifying his own 
 importance, and although he suppresses all facts hostile to his 
 claims to be the projector of every cabal, the chief agent in 
 every intrigue, and the most daring adventurer in every en- 
 terprise, yet his self-portraiture, and his delineations of the 
 great actors who trod the stage with him, bear the most vivid 
 impress of truth in substance, however much exaggerated or 
 discolored in the details. So graphic and self-consistent are 
 his innumerable portraits, and so carefully are they wrought 
 out in all their minutest features, that the most exalted genius 
 could never have produced them if they had not been close 
 copies of living originals. With all his faults, he places his 
 reader in the very centre of that strange society, and throws 
 a clear light on the character of every member of it, and on 
 the nature of all the transactions in which they were engaged. 
 The book is, besides, one of the best, as it is one of the earli- 
 est, examples of the force, the freedom, and the finesse of the 
 French language. It has all the ease and vivacity of a sus- 
 tained conversation, or rather of a story told by the most ani- 
 mated of conversers to a group of admiring associates. Never, 
 indeed, was genius more perverted ; but, even in its perver- 
 sion, it is genius still 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 599 
 
 Inferior in interest only to those of De Retz, La Rochefou- 
 cauld also has left to the world his memoirs of the wars of the 
 Fronde, in which he largely participated. After a youth of 
 strange and audacious adventures, he engaged in that contro- 
 versy, partly, as it would seem, from the mere love of hazard, 
 and partly from a guilty attachment to the Duchesse de Longue- 
 ville. In her service he sported with his fortune, his reputa- 
 tion, and his life, and devoted his great literary powers to the 
 single object of making Mazarin ridiculous. But, at the ma- 
 ture age of forty-two, he at length retired from these turbu- 
 lent scenes to become the centre of the fashionable and the lit- 
 erary society of Paris ; and, at the same time, to meditate and 
 to write. He accordingly produced the two books on which 
 his reputation has ever since depended, his Memoirs and his 
 Maxims. Of his Memoirs, Bayle has said that " he could not 
 believe any lover of antiquity to be so prejudiced as to deny 
 their superiority to those of Caesar." His Maxims may be 
 considered as the philosophical retrospect of the experience 
 acquired in the calenture of his youth, and, therefore, as the 
 most impressive of all illustrations of the guilt, the baseness, 
 and the folly of the Fronde. " There is," says Voltaire, " in 
 the whole book, nothing but this solitary thought that self- 
 love is the single motive of all our actions ; but that one 
 thought," he adds, "is presented to us under such a variety 
 of aspects as never to lose its interest." The Maxims of La 
 Rochefoucauld are in fact nothing else than the immature and 
 dispersed germs of that philosophy of selfishness which ripened 
 into the " Fable of the Bees" under the fostering care of Mande- 
 ville, and which were then crushed forever by the giant arm 
 of Joseph Butler. 
 
 In beautiful contrast with the Memoirs of De Retz and of 
 La Rochefoucauld are those of Madame de Motteville. She 
 was one of the ladies of the household of Anne of Austria, and 
 in that position enjoyed a broader survey of the surface of af- 
 fairs during the civil wars than any other of the writers who 
 have undertaken to describe them. Her curiosity was as act 
 ive as her opportunities were ample ; and though she wrote 
 as a partisan of the royal cause, she was at least as impartial 
 as any other of the chroniclers of those times. But she excels 
 them all in warmth of heart and singleness of purpose, and in 
 
fiOO THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 her abundance and variety of interesting anecdotes. She loved 
 and admired her royal mistress cordially. She had no appar- 
 ent wish to suppress or to exaggerate the truth ; and she is, 
 above all things, free from the selfishness which De Retz avowed 
 as the guide of his life, and LI a Rochefoucauld as the principle 
 of his philosophy. Madame de Motteville was a true woman ; 
 a woman so profoundly interested in the happiness, the troubles, 
 and the reputation of her friends, as never to waste a thought 
 upon her own ; and to that generous self-forgetfulness she is 
 really indebted for an authority to which the narrow-souled 
 genius of her great rivals has never been able to elevate either 
 of them. 
 
 Yet she was not the most eminent of the women who rose 
 to distinction among the contemporary writers of Memoirs of 
 the Fronde. The Duchesse de Montpensier surpass-ed Madame 
 de Motteville as much in the marvels of her life as she fell 
 below her in the disinterestedness of her spirit. At the close 
 of the siege of Bordeaux she became the popular heroine of the 
 day. At the head of a troop of courtly damsels she fairly broke 
 down one of the gates of Orleans ; and, like another Joan of 
 Arc, marched in triumph into the beleaguered city. Enter- 
 ing the Bastile while the cannon of Turenne were thundering 
 upon its walls, she turned the guns of the fortress against that 
 great captain, and, after repulsing him to St. Denys, rescued 
 the shattered remains of the forces of Conde. And then, brav- 
 ing a Parisian mob in the height of its savage fury, she pene- 
 trated to the Hotel de Yille, and, at the imminent hazard of 
 her own life, saved the magistrates, the ecclesiastics, and the 
 citizens there from the assassins by whom they were surround- 
 ed. And yet, if you read the Memoirs of this Penthesilea, you 
 will find that, during the wars of the Fronde, and for many a 
 year before and after, the real question depending in the wide 
 realm of France was not whether the Parliament or the queen- 
 mother, whether Conde or Turenne, whether the French or the 
 Spanish arms should prevail, but how a husband should be 
 found worthy of the hand of Mademoiselle la Duchesse de 
 Montpensier !-~a question to which an ungrateful generation 
 was never able to return any satisfactory answer. 
 
 It was, indeed, an age in which both the heroes and the he- 
 loines of French history exhibited themselves to the wonder- 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 601 
 
 ing world in characters of the most fantastic extravagance. 
 There were, for example, to be seen the First President and 
 Chancellor Matthieu Mole, who, after long years of humble 
 subserviency to the despotic Richelieu, was now rising to the 
 most sublime heights of moral courage and of patriotic self- 
 devotion ; and Graston, duke of Orleans, thrust by his rank into 
 the foremost place of responsibility and honor, but invariably 
 becoming sick and taking to his bed at the near approach of 
 danger at once the only great speaker and the only real cow- 
 ard of the house of Bourbon ; and Turenne, all grave, decorous, 
 and dutiful as he was, engaging in a traitorous league with 
 Spain against his king for love of the unhappy Duchesse de 
 Longueville ; and the great Conde, the Napoleon of his age ; 
 year after year leading Spanish armies against his country and 
 his sovereign, from no one conceivable motive except the mere 
 wantonness of vindictive pride, and a puerile passion for mis- 
 chievous activity ; and the Duke de Beaufort, the illegitimate 
 grandson of Henry IV., but better known as Le Roi des Halles, 
 at one time playing at tennis in the midst of thousands of en- 
 thusiastic Poissardes, at another rejecting, from admirers of 
 the same class, a proffered pension of 60,000 livres ; now up- 
 setting a public supper-table, at which a crowd of royal parti- 
 sans were making merry, and then killing his own brother-in- 
 law in a preposterous duel ; but, under his continually shift- 
 ing forms of extravagance, remaining still the cherished, or, 
 rather, the idolized d'emagogue of the proletaires of Paris ; and 
 Broussel, who, at the age of seventy-two, for the first time at- 
 tracted to himself, and never afterward lost, a large share in 
 the same mob- worship ; and the Duchesse de Longueville, im- 
 pelled by vanity and ennui into rebellion to her king, treason 
 to her country, and infidelity to her husband, until at length 
 a penitential retirement at Port Royal rescued her from the in- 
 toxicating grandeurs, and cares, and pleasures of the world ; 
 and the queen-mother, with all the majestic composure and 
 inflexibility of her race, triumphing in the protracted struggle 
 with the enemies of her viceregal throne, though not equally 
 victorious over the frailties of her own heart, and the irasci- 
 bility of her own temper ; and Mazarin, twice banished, and 
 twice returning from banishment to France, and there alien, 
 and tortuous, and irresolute, and rapacious as he was, retain- 
 
602 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING* 
 
 ing to his latest breath an absolute dominion over the high- 
 spirited people who, during four successive years, had exhaust- 
 ed against him all the quivers of ridicule, invective, and popu- 
 lar indignation ; and in that strange scene was also conspicu- 
 ous the young Louis XIV., contemplating, with premature 
 thoughtfulness, the events and the personages amid which he 
 was growing up to manhood, and from that contemplation im- 
 bibing an unmitigable hatred of the institutions, and distrust 
 of the cause, for the advancement of which his kingdom had 
 been so long abandoned to misrule and violence. 
 
 Yet, if the wars of the Fronde had terminated with the 
 treaty of Ruel, Louis XIV. might perhaps have drawn from 
 them some deeper and more salutary lessons than these. It 
 was till that era a contest from the character and the conduct 
 of which much practical wisdom might have been gathered. 
 
 The Fronde commenced in the spirit of reaction against the 
 absolute dictatorship of Richelieu. But that spirit was at first 
 timid, hesitating, and narrow. Omer Talon, who, as we have 
 seen, had persuaded himself, at the end of the fifth year of the 
 regency, that a great and universal calm had at length been 
 established, had the integrity to acknowledge that the judicial 
 company of which he was so great an ornament were provoked 
 into the disturbance of that calm by no more elevated motive 
 than the desire to perpetuate their own offices in their own 
 families. If Anne of Austria had not proposed to abolish the 
 Paulette, 'the Parliament would not have roused the people of 
 Paris and of France to a rebellion against her. It is, however, 
 a very curious and instructive fact, that the other contempo- 
 rary historians of the Fronde (De Retz among the number) 
 carefully concealed this important truth. It lay unheeded in 
 the uninviting pages of Talon, and unnoticed by subsequent 
 writers, until very recent students, by referring to the original 
 journals of the Parliament, brought to light this dishonest mis- 
 quotation of them. 
 
 "When, however, though from motives thus mercenary, the 
 signal of opposition to the government had been given by the 
 combination against it of the four sovereign courts of Paris, a 
 great though incongruous multitude nocked to the standard of 
 revolt. Among them the foremost and the loudest were, of 
 course, those who were enduring palpable wrongs, and smart- 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 603 
 
 ing beneath real and weighty grievances. These were the 
 Roturiers, who were overwhelmed by the intolerable burdens 
 which the protracted war with the house of Austria and the 
 prodigality of the court had laid upon them. Then followed 
 the Noblesse, resenting the overthrow of their ancient predom- 
 inance; and the citizens of the more considerable towns of 
 France, lamenting the subversion of their municipal privileges ; 
 and to them were added a multitude of the Tiers Etat, who 
 regretted the loss of the franchises which they and their fathers 
 had enjoyed in the States- General and in the election of depu- 
 ties to serve in that assembly. Not a few also swelled the 
 clamor with imaginations heated by the example so lately given 
 in England of a successful resistance to the royal authority. 
 Classical students again were there with bewitching pictures, 
 then first made universally known, of the Athenian and Roman 
 liberties. And there were not wanting statesmen of large 
 views, who, partaking in the progress of thought by which 
 that age was distinguished, had learned, and were desirous to 
 teach, that national freedom can never pass out of a name into 
 a reality until it shall have been guaranteed, not by positive 
 laws merely, but by the unassailable bulwarks of free popular 
 institutions. On every side was therefore heard the cry of 
 long-suppressed opinions, of newly-awakened passions, of sec- 
 ular interests, and of religious convictions. On every side was 
 also invoked the sympathy and the support of the power which 
 had so suddenly, but so resolutely, ventured to confront the 
 throne, and to challenge its absolute supremacy. 
 
 The combined courts were thus hurried onward by an ir- 
 resistible external influence into a revolt aiming at nothing 
 less than the creation of a new system, and of new principles 
 of government. Nor may we condemn with much severity 
 this attempted usurpation. Richelieu and Mazarin had long 
 governed France with an utter oblivion of the interests of the 
 great body of the French people. The policy common to them 
 both was nothing more than the depression of the house of 
 Austria, in order that the house of Bourbon might be elevated 
 to a power which should be at once supreme abroad and absol- 
 ute at home. I will not venture to deny that an enlightened 
 and far-sighted patriotism might at that time have pursued 
 these objects with all the energy of the first cardinal, and all 
 
604 VHE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 the subtlety of the other. But to pursue them, as they did, not 
 as a means, but as an end ; not as the means of rendering 
 France prosperous, but as an end in which the rulers of France 
 were to find the grandeur and the glory of their race, was as 
 narrow and as unworthy a consummation as was ever pro- 
 posed to themselves by men of genius in the government of a 
 mighty nation. The antagonists of such a system may well 
 expect pardon for some violations of law and even of justice 
 in their efforts for the subversion of it. 
 
 Nor was the revolt of the associated magistrates conducted 
 in a feeble or temporizing spirit. Their arret, or twenty-seven 
 articles of the 30th of June, 1648, amounted to nothing less 
 than the imposition on the crown of a new charter of govern- 
 ment. Their traditional right of remonstrance against royal 
 enactments was alleged by them merely as a shadow and a 
 pretext. The substantial attempt and purpose was to wrest 
 altogether from the king the powers of legislation, of arbitra- 
 ry taxation, and of arbitrary imprisonments. " Henceforth," 
 so ran the arret, "there shall be imposed no taxes except in 
 virtue of edicts and declarations well and duly verified by the 
 sovereign courts with full liberty of suffrage. No subject of 
 the king," it is added, " of whatever quality or condition, may 
 be kept in prison for more than twenty-four hours without be- 
 ing interrogated according to the ordinances, and transferred 
 to his natural judge." And to secure to themselves the per- 
 manent and undivided power of watching over the execution 
 of these resolves, the same arret claimed for the sovereign 
 courts a veto on the creation of any new offices which might 
 supersede or emulate their own. 
 
 Nor were these the pretensions of wordy and irresolute agi- 
 tators only. To carry them into effect, the magistrates em- 
 ployed, if they did not promote, the insurrection and the barri- 
 cades of Paris. They levied troops, appointed generals, raised 
 funds for the conduct of the war, closed the gates of Paris 
 against the king, and negotiated a federative union with all 
 the cities and Parliaments of France ; nor did they at last lay 
 down their arms until both at St. Germain's and at Ruel they 
 had obtained from the king treaties which were at least sup- 
 posed to affirm the entire substance of their insurrectionary 
 demands. And yet, in fact, not one effective step was mada 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 605 
 
 n the wars of the Fronde toward the conquest of constitu- 
 tional freedom ; hut, on the contrary, that struggle had the 
 effect of delivering over the kingdom to a power more absolute 
 and irresponsible than had ever before exercised the supreme 
 authority in France. It remains to inquire, What were the 
 causes, and what the explanation, of this disappointment ? 
 
 First, then, the claims of the associated magistrates were, 
 in strictness of law, a mere usurpation. The four sovereign 
 courts of Paris were so many judicial tribunals, but through- 
 out these proceedings they were acting in direct and unequiv- 
 ocal defiance of the law which it was their appropriate duty to 
 enforce. Even if the right, of insurrection could be allowed 
 to possess all the sanctity ascribed to it in a later age, it may 
 be supposed that neither Danton, nor Marat himself, would 
 have held the exercise of it sacred except when undertaken 
 by the sovereign people. Those eminent doctors of the science 
 of revolution would probably have repudiated, as unjustifiable, 
 a rebellion planned and conducted by a convention of long- 
 robed counselors and presidents a mortier. This incongruity 
 between the appropriate office and the actual employment of 
 the Parisian magistracy threw a constant discredit on their en- 
 terprises, and embarrassed all their revolutionary movements. 
 
 Secondly. Not only were the characters of judge and dem- 
 agogue inherently incompatible, but the counselors of the Par- 
 liament labored under many accidental and personal disqual- 
 ifications for the conduct of the popular cause. In that as in 
 every other era of French history, the great questions and real 
 difficulties of the government were financial. Richelieu and 
 Mazarin had crushed the whole rural population beneath intol- 
 erable imposts. The tailles, the corvees, and the gabelle had re- 
 duced them to the last extremities of want and misery. " Ten 
 years have now elapsed," said Talon, in one of his speeches ;to 
 Louis XIV., "since the country was absolutely ruined, since 
 the peasants were reduced to sleep on the straw, and all their 
 goods seized in satisfaction of the demands of the treasury. To 
 maintain the luxury of Paris, millions of unoffending people are 
 compelled to live on bread made of bran and oats. They have 
 no protection excepting their utter wretchedness. Their souls 
 alone are left to them, and that only because they can not be put 
 up to auction." Never was indignation more eloquent or more 
 
606 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURINtt 
 
 just. Yet the very magistrates, in whose name Talon thus 
 spoke, were at that very moment contending, with still greater 
 zeal, and with all the characteristic ingenuity of their profess- 
 ion, against the single equitable tax which the court had ever 
 proposed to establish. It was the octroi, or duty on provisions 
 brought into Paris and the other great cities ; and unmeasured 
 were the invectives with which, in the very midst of the gen- 
 eral ruin, the magistrates denounced the injustice of taxing any 
 articles consumed by themselves and their wealthy fellow- 
 citizens. No men could be more ignorant of the great, though 
 melancholy science of taxation ; none more heedless of main- 
 taining even the semblance of disinterestedness; and none, 
 therefore, could be less qualified for the critical office of trib- 
 unes of the people. 
 
 Thirdly. Though great municipal lawyers, the associated 
 magistrates had no proficiency even in the elements of consti- 
 tutional law. On the 24th of October, 1648, the crown had 
 assented to what may be called their habeas corpus law. On 
 the _8th of January, 1650, that is, less than fifteen months 
 afterward, that law was flagrantly violated in the persons of 
 the Dukes of Conde, Conti, and Longueville. But when the 
 mother of Conde invoked the recent enactment in favor of her 
 son, the Parliament refused to interfere, alleging that, as no 
 member of the royal house was amenable to their authority, 
 so neither could any such person be entitled to their protec- 
 tion. They might have alleged, with much greater truth, that 
 the illegal imprisonment of the princes had been secretly sanc- 
 tioned by themselves. A body thus ignorant or heedless of the 
 elementary truth, that the infringement of the rights of any 
 one member of society, however low or however high, is an in- 
 jury to all the rest, were but ill prepared to assume the char- 
 acter of constitutional vindicators of the national liberties. 
 
 Fourthly. It is seldom given to individual men to emanci- 
 pate their minds from bondage to the prejudices of their pro- 
 fession. To professional assemblages that freedom of mind is 
 always unknown and unattainable. Whether they deliberated 
 on the affairs of the commonwealth, or projected political meas- 
 ures, or made war, or entered into treaties, the counselors of 
 the Parliament still wrapped themselves up in their long robes, 
 their legal fictions, and their judicial subtleties. Never were 
 
THE MINORITY OF LOUIS XIV. 607 
 
 a party in the state so destitute of the power of taking the 
 straight path toward their end, or of using simple words to ex- 
 press their real meaning. For example, the twenty-seven ar- 
 ticles of their confederation of the 30th of June, 1648 ; the 
 treaty of St. Grermain of September in the same year ; and the 
 treaty of Euel of March, 1649, form the three pivots of their 
 whole policy. And yet it may well be doubted whether those 
 great constitutional acts, when read and collated together, 
 would at this day convey to any man, uninformed of the history 
 of those times, any definite meaning whatever. Thus the great 
 principle that no prisoner should be confined during twenty- 
 four hours without being interrogated and transferred to his 
 natural judges, though plainly enough stated in the articles of 
 June, 1648, is laid down in the treaty of St. Grermain in words 
 selected by the Parliament themselves, which words are as fol- 
 lows : " No subject of the king shall hereafter be prosecuted 
 as a criminal, except according to the forms prescribed by the 
 laws and ordinances of the kingdom ; and the ordinance of 
 King Louis XI., of October, 1467, shall be observed according 
 to its form and tenor." The lawyers who put together these 
 words might see in them a perfect assent to their correspond- 
 ing article of June, 1648, and a perfect security for the liberty 
 of the subject ; for they were so many hierophants who could 
 not abide a plain-spoken oracle. They preferred a riddle, of 
 which the key was in their own keeping, to any words which 
 had the inconvenience of being universally intelligible. But 
 never yet was a free constitution erected on legal enigmas, or 
 built up by the labors of schoolmen. They who would govern 
 the world must condescend to make use of the world's lan- 
 guage. The articles of June, 1648, were plain enough, but 
 they were invalid except in so far as they were ratified by the 
 treaties. Now the treaty of St. Grermain said nothing dis- 
 tinctly, and the treaty of Ruel said absolutely nothing at all 
 respecting the great constitutional questions which those arti- 
 cles had been designed to regulate. 
 
 Fifthly. If the pretensions of the Parliament had been real- 
 ly successful, the effect must have been to supersede the au- 
 thority of the States- Greneral, and to break up the kingdom of 
 France into a system of confederated states or governments, as 
 numerous as the sovereign courts or Parliaments of the realm. 
 
608 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY DURING 
 
 All good Frenchmen deprecated such a result ; and the ob- 
 vious tendency of the measures of the associated magistrates 
 to produce it, greatly impaired their influence with that great 
 but tranquil majority, who will always prefer the permanent 
 welfare of their country to the triumph of the agitators of the 
 passing day. 
 
 Sixthly. There was also in France, at that time, a multi- 
 tude of persons who contemplated with alarm the seeming pro- 
 pensity of the French Parliament to imitate the revolutionary 
 example of the Parliament of England. The monarchy of a 
 thousand years was still dear and venerable to most of those 
 who had grown up beneath its shelter, and the supposed ene- 
 mies of it were regarded by them with alarm and jealousy. 
 
 Seventhly. To men accustomed to reflect, the success of 
 the Parliament held out the unwelcome prospect of the intro- 
 duction of a polity never before heard of in the world, and 
 hardly to be reconciled with the maxims which had been re- 
 ceived among men as fundamental on the subject of civil gov- 
 ernment. It would have been a fusion of all legislative, ad- 
 ministrative, and judicial powers ; a combination of them all, 
 in the hands of men trained to the study and practice of the 
 law, and forming a kind of hereditary caste, neither selected 
 by the people, nor chosen from among the ancient aristocracy, 
 nor appointed by the crown. An oligarchy in any form was 
 sufficiently formidable to Frenchmen ; but, from an oligarchy 
 of lawyers, they could anticipate nothing which any class of 
 society could regard either with respect, or confidence, or at- 
 tachment. , .,$ 
 
 Eighthly. The failure of the associated magistracy to ac- 
 complish the purposes of their union is also to be ascribed to 
 the coincidence of the religious with the political division of 
 parties. The Jansenists were Parliamentarians, and the Jes- 
 uits Royalists. As in England, the Independents and the 
 Episcopalians selected their positions in the state according to 
 their relations to the Church, so in France, the innovators in 
 the ecclesiastical society were also promoters of changes in the 
 commonwealth. And hence it happened that all the more 
 zealous adherents of sacerdotal power were, in either country, 
 the devoted supporters of the monarchical authority. It was 
 in no small degree by their aid that Louis XIY. finally tri- 
 
THE MONARCHY OF LOUIS XIV. 609 
 
 over both the first and the second Frondeurs, and to 
 these uarly recollections must be ascribed no small part of the 
 animosity with which, at a later period, he regarded and per- 
 secuted the family of Arnauld, and the whole body of their 
 proselytes at Port Royal. 
 
 Ninthly. But of all the causes which contributed to neu- 
 tralize and defeat the efforts of the Fronde to reform the French 
 government, none was so effectual as the alliance into which 
 the Frondeurs were forced with their aristocratic associates, 
 and especially with the family of Conde. That association 
 rapidly destroyed whatever was popular, and generous, and 
 patriotic in the movement of $ie Reformers. It rendered the 
 cause and the interests of the people at large subservient to the 
 selfish objects of the Noblesse. They were the too faithful 
 successors and representatives of the old feudal seigneurs. In 
 their hands, the contest wholly changed its character and its 
 purposes. It degenerated from a high principle into a paltry 
 fashion. It was rendered ludicrous by the follies of the court- 
 ly ladies, who assumed so conspicuous a share in the direction 
 of it, and hateful by the traitorous alliance into which the 
 Frondeurs were drawn with the foreign enemies and invaders 
 of the kingdom. 
 
 And, finally, while France was desolated by this civil wai, 
 and was witnessing the decline of the influence of the authors 
 of it, the young king was growing up to manhood, adorned 
 with every kingly grace, and attracting universal admiration 
 by his real, and still more by his supposed talents and capaci- 
 ty for government. So rapid and complete was the growth of 
 his personal authority, that, before he had completed his twen- 
 tieth year, the astonished and now subdued Parliament saw 
 him appear in his riding-dress among them, to command the 
 acceptance of his edicts, in language and in a tone which Com- 
 moclius would not have hazarded with his abject senators. 
 The Fronde had been a reaction against the dictatorship of 
 Richelieu. The reign of Louis XIV. was a still more com- 
 plete and protracted reaction against the ill-conceived and ill- 
 conducted efforts of the Fronde, to substitute a free for an ab- 
 solute government in France. 
 
 Q,Q 
 
610 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 LECTURE XXII. 
 
 ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY COLBERT AND LOUVOI& 
 
 THE administration of Cardinal Mazarin, so far as it has a 
 conspicuous place in the history of the civil government of 
 France, begins and closes with the wars of the Fronde. His 
 name, once so &acred to obloquy that a Mazarinade and a sa- 
 tirical libel had become convertible terms in the French lan- 
 guage, has, since his death, and especially of late years, ac- 
 quired a perpetually-increasing lustre ; for in that enthusiastic 
 land there is no offense which will not be pardoned, no applause 
 which will not be given, to any one whose fortune it has been 
 to augment the sum of what is there considered as the nation- 
 al glory. And although Mazarin long protracted an unneces- 
 sary war though he plunged the state into an abyss of finan- 
 cial difficulties though in the midst of the public distress he 
 accumulated a fortune which would be inadequately repre- 
 sented at the present day by sixteen millions of pounds ster- 
 ling though his government was signalized by no one meas- 
 ure of legislative or administrative wisdom though he was 
 insincere and timid, and (to the utmost of his faint daring) an 
 oppressor, yet we can not deny him the praise of having adopt- 
 ed both the foreign and domestic policy of Richelieu in the true 
 spirit of that unscrupulous dictator. In the wars of the Fronde 
 he played the patrician and the plebeian orders against each 
 other to the common depression of them both ; and by the treaty 
 of the Pyrenees he accomplished that matrimonial alliance, 
 which laid the basis of the long subjection of the monarchy 
 of Spain to the crown of France. At length, on the 9th of 
 March, 1661, he died, leaving in the hands of the youthful 
 Louis XIV. a power more absolute than had ever been enjoyed 
 by any of the successors of Charlemagne, with the not unrea- 
 sonable prospect of transmitting to his own successors a do- 
 minion embracing many of the fairer provinces of the Charlo- 
 vingian empire. Early on the morning of the following day 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 
 
 611 
 
 the king, having assembled his council, addressed them in the 
 following words : " I have called you together to say, that 
 though hitherto I have been well satisfied that my government 
 should be conducted by the late cardinal, I intend hencefor- 
 ward to govern in my own person. You will assist me with 
 your advice whenever I shall demand it." From that hour to 
 his last, Louis XIV. appeared to the world at large, and even 
 to himself, to be the supreme, if not the sole, administrator of 
 the affairs of his kingdom. 
 
 He had many royal qualities a noble presence manners 
 full of grace and dignity an elocution at once majestic and 
 seductive unwearied assiduity in business a luminous un- 
 derstanding an instinctive taste for whatever is magnificent 
 in thought or action, and a genuine zeal for the welfare of his 
 people. But for the high office of molding and conducting the 
 policy of the greatest of the nations of the civilized world, he 
 wanted three indispensable gifts : an education so liberal as to 
 have revealed to him the real interests and resources of his 
 kingdom ; the faculty by which a true statesman, in the si- 
 lence of all established precedents, originates measures adapt- 
 ed to the innovations, whether progressive or immediate, of his 
 times ; and that dominion over passion and appetite which is 
 the one essential condition of all true mental independence. 
 Without such knowledge, such invention, and such self-con- 
 trol, Louis could not really think, and, therefore, could not re- 
 ally act, for himself. 
 
 It was consequently inevitable that the office of thinking 
 and of acting for him should be devolved on some minister ; 
 and Jean Baptiste Colbert was, ere long, called to the dis- 
 charge of that arduous duty. Colbert was the son of a mer- 
 chant of Rheims, and had held the place of intendant in the 
 household of Mazarin. In that employment he had earned the 
 reputation of great skill and diligence in managing the colos- 
 sal fortune of his master, and in detecting the frauds by which 
 the officers of the royal revenue had enriched themselves at the 
 public expense. His own integrity was universally acknowl- 
 edged, but the respect commanded by his talents and his vir- 
 tue was not a willing nor an affectionate tribute. No man, 
 indeed, could be more unpopular, for no man was more severe, 
 morose, and repulsive, even toward those whom he most de- 
 
612 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 sired to conciliate. Hostile as such an origin, such pursuits, 
 and such a demeanor might be to his success with others, it 
 would have been impossible for him to have combined together 
 a greater number of powerful recommendations than these to 
 the favor of the young king. Supported by no family connec- 
 tions or personal attachments, and inured to an obscure and 
 useful drudgery, Colbert seemed of all men the best qualified 
 to render to Louis those humble but effective services, which, 
 while they would relieve himself from the toils incompatible 
 with his kingly state and with his youthful enjoyments, would 
 still leave to him the glory of governing, or of seeming to gov- 
 ern, his vast hereditary possessions. At first, therefore, Col- 
 bert was privately consulted by his sovereign on some urgent 
 fiscal questions ; then employed in prosecuting Fouquet, the 
 superintendent of finance, whose peculations he had brought 
 to light ; then admitted to a seat in the royal council ; then 
 intrusted with the subordinate function of intendant of finance ; 
 then appointed to superintend the works and buildings of the 
 king ; then elevated to the post of controller general ; and finally 
 promoted to the office of secretary of state for the marine and 
 the colonies. During each successive step of his upward prog- 
 ress, the harsh and inflexible minister made many enemies and 
 few friends. Yet he was seldom or never betrayed into the 
 fault of an arrogant self-importance. It was, on the contrary, 
 his habit to depreciate his own power and influence a habit 
 in which he was not improbably sincere, as he certainly was 
 discreet. He habitually spoke and wrote of himself as a mere 
 subaltern, and as unable either to decide on any measure, or 
 to confer any place or advantage except by the express com- 
 mand of his royal master. Charmed with a servant so upright, 
 painstaking, and unobtrusive, and so destitute of political or 
 domestic alliances, the king could not, or would not, perceive 
 that this lowly dependent was in reality becoming his indis- 
 pensable ruler. Read the instructions of Louis to the Dau- 
 phin, and you will conclude that every material act of his 
 government was dictated by himself and executed by Colbert. 
 Read the authentic documents of that age, and you will be 
 convinced that every measure which Louis dictated to Colbert 
 had first been suggested by Colbert to Louis. The power of 
 the magnificent Richelieu was, in effect, revived in the unos- 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 
 
 tentatious Colbert, with the difference that, while Louis XIII. 
 had retreated into obscurity, and had been consigned to his 
 confessor and to his oratory, that way might be made for the 
 haughty cardinal, Louis XIV., both in the cabinet, in the field, 
 on the throne, and in every princely pageant, assumed the im- 
 posing majesty of an autocratic sovereign, in whose presence 
 all inferior dignitaries appeared but as so many dependent 
 satellites. The theatrical exhibition was altogether changed ; 
 but the plot and characters of the drama were scarcely altered. 
 
 Dropping, then, the fiction which ascribes the authorship of 
 all royal acts to the monarch in whose name they are done, I 
 shall consider the reign of Louis XIV., from 1661 to 1672, as 
 really constituting the administration of Jean Baptiste Colbert. 
 
 A Protectionist in England and a Colbertiste in France are 
 the same. Yet, in the war against free trade, our neighbors 
 have inscribed on their banners a nom de guerre of much 
 greater force and precision than our own. Their Colbert is 
 the very Newton or Linnaeus of the science of commercial re- 
 striction. The civil government of their country, as adminis- 
 tered by him, was a series of crucial experiments on the sound- 
 ness of the doctrines which that science inculcates. They were 
 tried on the shipping and navigation of France on her corn 
 trade on the export of coin on her foreign commerce and 
 on her domestic manufactures. Asserting the broad principle 
 that a people laboring under fiscal burdens of unrivaled mag- 
 nitude could prosper only by such laws, protecting and prohib- 
 itory, as would secure to national products a preference in the 
 home market over the similar products of foreign countries, 
 the great economist of that age brought all his large experi- 
 ence, all his preternatural diligence, and all his unlimited pow- 
 er, to animate and sustain the industry of France by protective 
 legislation. What were the nature and what the results of 
 his experiments? 
 
 First, then, with regard to the shipping and navigation of 
 France. As early as the thirteenth century, the people of Hol- 
 land and Zealand, an amphibious, hardy, and frugal race, had 
 engrossed the cod and herring fisheries, and were able to build 
 and to navigate vessels on terms with which no other nation 
 could successfully compete. They became the maritime car- 
 ries jo f Europe. They triumphed over the commercial jealousy 
 
614 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 of England, and the restrictive laws of Edward IV. They tri- 
 umphed still more completely over the tyranny and persecution 
 of Spain, and, while struggling for existence against the vic- 
 torious arms of Alva and of Alexander Farnese, they rapidly 
 extended their commerce over the eastern and western pos- 
 sessions of Philip II. ? unt>l at length the treaty of Westphalia 
 guaranteed to them Java and the Moluccas, with all their fac- 
 tories in Ceylon and the continent of India, and the exclusive 
 enjoyment of the spice trade. Such was at that time their 
 prosperity, that, about two years "before the death of Mazarin, 
 they possessed between 15,000 and 16,000 sea-going vessels, 
 while France could number at the most from 500 to 600. 
 
 To destroy this humiliating superiority, a series of edicts 
 were promulgated by Fouquet, the then superintendent of 
 finance, imposing a duty of fifty sous per ton on every foreign 
 ship entering or quitting any French port. During several 
 successive years the Dutch embassador at Paris exhausted all 
 the resources of diplomatic skill and eloquence in a series of 
 importunate remonstrances against this impost. He might as 
 well have expostulated with the tides against their assaults on 
 the dikes of his native land. Colbert remained inexorable ; 
 and, with no substantial change, the discriminating tonnage 
 duty continued in force till long after the end of his adminis- 
 tration. 
 
 These fiscal hostilities with the Dutch were nearly coinci- 
 dent in point of time with our own Navigation Act, and were 
 far less stringent. Now Adam Smith has applauded the policy 
 of our forefathers in thus effecting the transfer to this country 
 of much of the maritime power of Holland, and has taught 
 that, in order to promote the higher interests of our national 
 strength and safety, the pecuniary sacrifice involved in the 
 compulsory employment of our own more costly shipping was 
 wisely incurred. If, in deference to the authority or to the 
 reasoning of Adam Smith, we may conclude Cromwell to have 
 been right, with what consistency can we also conclude that 
 Colbert was wrong ? 
 
 The two opinions, however apparently in conflict with each 
 other, may, perhaps, be reconciled by observing first, that the 
 mere pecuniary sacrifice made by England was soon and effect- 
 ually repaid by the growth of an English commercial navy, far 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 615 
 
 surpassing that of our Dutch, rivals ; whereas in France, the 
 Dutch, after the restrictive law against their shipping, still re- 
 tained the greater part of the French carrying trade, so that 
 the French tonnage duty produced little or no other direct re- 
 sult than that of enhancing the freight of all sea-borne goods. 
 Secondly ; the inestimable advantage of national safety, which 
 appeared to Adam Smith to apologize for the unthriftiness of 
 our own law, was not in question in France, and, therefore, 
 did not afford a corresponding defense for the mercantile dis- 
 advantages to which the French people were subjected by their 
 attempted disuse of the best and cheapest maritime convey- 
 ances. And, thirdly, to England, in the time of the Common- 
 wealth, the friendship or the enmity of Holland seemed to 
 promise or to menace but little, whereas to France the amica- 
 ble relations which she had maintained with the United Prov- 
 inces for the last preceding eighty years were of inappreciable 
 value. Yet those relations were suspended by the French ton- 
 nage law, and not long after gave place altogether to the wars 
 which, during half a century, consigned both France and Hol- 
 land to a succession of overwhelming sufferings. In a word, 
 by the abandonment of the great mercantile principle, that the 
 cheapest service is the best, Cromwell reaped great gain and 
 little loss, Colbert reaped great loss and little gain. 
 
 Secondly. The trade in corn was subjected by Colbert to 
 experiments of yet more serious importance. 
 
 Until the reign of Charles V., France had ever enjoyed a 
 perfect freedom of exporting corn to all other countries. After 
 that period, the right was occasionally suspended by royal or- 
 dinances. But Francis I. and Henry IV., and even Louis XIV., 
 under the administration of Mazarin, had fully and emphatic- 
 ally re-established it. In the year 1661, however, France was 
 afflicted with a scarcity which might almost be described as a 
 famine, and, after waging an ineffectual war against it by the 
 usual methods of forbidding accumulations of grain in private 
 hands, and fixing a maximum price of corn, Colbert retained 
 in his mind an indelible impression of the horrors of that fatal 
 season. To prevent their recurrence, he obtained, toward the 
 close of every future harvest, official returns of its probable 
 productiveness. If the crops had been plentiful, he authorized 
 the free exportation of corn for a year, or for a few months, or 
 
616 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 weeks, as lie judged best. If the supply did not seem to him 
 abundantly adequate to the wants of the people, he imposed a 
 temporary export duty of greater or less amount. If he saw 
 cause to anticipate a deficiency, he forbade the exportation al- 
 together. 
 
 No man, therefore, could safely engage in the growth of corn 
 in France for sale in any other country ; for, however high the 
 prices in the foreign markets might eventually be, as compared 
 with the prices in the French markets, it depended entirely on 
 the future decision of Colbert whether the owners of it should 
 or should not have the power of availing themselves of that 
 advantage. The results of course were, first, that the export 
 of grain from France ceased altogether ; secondly, that all the 
 inferior soils were thrown out of cultivation, the superior soils 
 alone being brought under tillage ; and, thirdly, that there was 
 a constant risk, and not seldom an actual production, of scar- 
 city, and even of famine. Except in extreme exigencies of 
 that kind, corn could never be sold at any considerable profit 
 to the agriculturist. He was, therefore, condemned to habit- 
 ual poverty, and his inability to purchase manufactured goods 
 deprived the producers of them of their most important cus- 
 tomers. Such, at least, are the consequences which our own 
 economical theories would ascribe to such an interference of 
 the government with the natural course of the corn trade. 
 How far are we able, from any direct evidence, to verify or to 
 disprove those anticipations ? 
 
 They might be verified from the many still extant reports 
 addressed to Colbert by the intendants of the various provinces 
 of France, and especially by the intendants of Gascony, Poi- 
 tou, and Dauphine. But we have a memoir, transmitted by 
 the minister himself to the king in the year 1681, in which the 
 great author of this system thus sums up the result of it: 
 " The most important fact of all," he says, "and that which 
 demands the greatest reflection, is the excessive misery of the 
 people. It is announced in all the letters which reach us from 
 the provinces, whoever may be the writers of them, whether 
 intendants, receivers general, or even bishops." Seventeen 
 years later, Marshal Yauban, whose public spirit was not in- 
 ferior to his military science, drew up his celebrated account 
 of the state of France, in which he declared that a tenth part 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 617 
 
 of the whole population were reduced to pauperism ; that five 
 other tenth parts of it were so poor as to be unable to contrib- 
 ute any thing to the relief of the destitute ; that three other 
 tenth parts were grievously straitened in their circumstances, 
 and oppressed by debt ; and that, in the only remaining tenth 
 part, there were not ten thousand families in perfectly easy 
 circumstances. That Colbert sincerely desired, and ardently 
 pursued, the welfare of the kingdom which he governed, no 
 one has ever questioned. But it may well be doubted whether 
 any degree of apathy or negligence was ever so fatal in its re- 
 sults as was his ceaseless solicitude to interfere in every thing, 
 and to manage every thing. Happy would it have been for 
 France if her indefatigable minister had learned, like an emi- 
 nent statesman of later times, to divide his official business 
 into three equal parts, of which the first was not worth the 
 doing, the second did itself, and the third was quite enough 
 for any man to attempt. 
 
 Thirdly. Regarding the trade in gold and silver money 
 Colbert, adopting the opinions of his age, proclaimed and acted 
 on the maxim that the wealth of a nation is to be measured, 
 at any given moment, by the quantity of such coin which it 
 may happen to possess. It is, I think, no less a person than 
 Voltaire who extols his wisdom in thus preferring the accu- 
 mulation of imperishable bullion to the exchange of it for ar- 
 ticles which must, sooner or later, wear out. The less scien- 
 tific merchants of his day represented to Colbert that the rigor 
 with which he prevented or punished the exportation of the 
 precious metals was rendering them of less value in France 
 than in other countries ; and added that, if the transit of them 
 were unfettered, gold would always be attracted to Franco 
 from every part of the world in which it bore a lower value. 
 The universal manager of all the affairs of the whole realm 
 had the honesty to record his inability to understand the mean- 
 ing of this remonstrance ; and then, assuming that it had no 
 meaning, he persisted in devoting the whole influence of the 
 government to the hopeful project of causing French produce 
 to be exchanged in all other parts of the world for gold and 
 silver in preference to every other return. Fortunately, the 
 common sense of the merchants was too active for the Lapu- 
 tan science of the statesman, Had it been otherwise, Franco 
 
618 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 would have acquired a vast mass of gojd and silver, as useless 
 in her coffers as in its native mines, at the expense of bringing 
 to a close all her commercial intercourse with the other nations 
 of the world, to whom she would have sold every thing, but of 
 whom she would have bought nothing. 
 
 Fourthly. To promote that commercial intercourse was, 
 however, the great object of the policy of Colbert. Why, he 
 inquired, should not France participate in the treasures which 
 England and Holland are gathering as each tide floats into 
 their ports vessels from every quarter of the navigable globe ? 
 The answer was at hand. The trade of France languished 
 because it was not adequately encouraged by the French gov- 
 ernment. True, indeed, royal charters had been given to three 
 successive companies trading to the East. But contenting 
 himself by conferring on them a corporate character, the king 
 had omitted to supply them with corporate funds. Let that 
 omission be remedied ; let a new French East India Company 
 be instituted, with all the aids and all the protection which 
 the crown can bestow, and Havre and Bordeaux shall soon 
 eclipse the mercantile splendor of Rotterdam and Bristol. So 
 reasoned or so predicted Colbert ; and, at his suggestion, Louis 
 XIV. granted to the new association all that royalty can grant : 
 the power of making conquests dominion over them when 
 made exclusive privileges of every known extent and variety 
 bounties on all their exports and imports a code of laws 
 an ecclesiastical establishment and even the right of tolera- 
 ting any heathens, heretics, and infidels, with whom it might 
 be convenient for them to enter into commercial relations. 
 The royal heralds contributed an escutcheon crowded with 
 palm and olive trees, and .encircled by the legend Florebo quo- 
 cunque ferar. Artkts of another class circulated such delinea- 
 tions of Madagascar (the seat of the projected government) as 
 might best tempt a Picard or Languedocian to exchange his 
 cold or his arid home for that earthly paradise. Of the re- 
 quired capital of fifteen millions, Louis himself subscribed 
 three. All aspirants for court favor were encouraged, if not 
 required, to imitate the example. Public defaulters were al- 
 lowed to liquidate their debts to the treasury by taking shares. 
 Even in the great chamber of the Parliament the chancellor 
 appeared as a suitor to the judges for assistance to this great 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 619 
 
 national undertaking ; and those learned persons had to make 
 their reluctant choice between a hazardous speculation and 
 the displeasure of Versailles. 
 
 Never was a commercial speculation so dandled into life by 
 nurses of such high degree, and never were such cares more 
 ineffectual. Before ten years had elapsed the company had 
 become irretrievably bankrupt, and the king assumed the pos- 
 session and control of their establishments on the hard condi- 
 tion of paying off their debts. 
 
 Nor was this the only attempt made by Colbert to emulate 
 the achievements of the Dutch and English merchants. In 
 North and Central America ; in the West Indies and Africa, 
 and in the Levant, he assigned to three mercantile corpora- 
 tions as many distinct fields in which they were to make the 
 fleurs de lys the emblem of successful trade and of maritime 
 greatness. Nothing was withholden from any of them which 
 the crown could give neither privileges, nor monopolies, nor 
 bounties, nor exemptions, nor sovereign powers. Yet the au- 
 thor of these schemes lived long enough to witness the failure 
 of them all, and long enough (as it would seem) to discover 
 that royal patronage was a motive-power utterly unable to 
 compete with the energy of individual enterprise. 
 
 Still it remained for Colbert to try whether the trade of 
 France might not thrive on the depression, and at the expense, 
 ^f the trade of all the neighboring states ; and that experiment 
 was commenced in the year 1667, by the enactment of such 
 import duties as would virtually prevent the importation of 
 the cloths and other wrought goods of England and of the 
 United Provinces. The new tariff was to deprive the Dutch \\ 
 of a market indispensable to some of the chief branches of 
 their domestic industry ; but (so, at least, reasoned the great 
 patron of commerce) it would transfer to the capitalists and 
 workmen of France all the profits and all the wages which 
 their neighbors had been accustomed to earn in the markets 
 of that country. He fell into the common mistake of not look- 
 ing at the subject in that point of view from which it would 
 be regarded by his antagonists. By imposing a high discrim- 
 inating duty on French wines in favor of the wines of Ger- 
 many, Holland had in her hands the means of an effective re- 
 taliation ; and, after four years had been consumed in unprof- 
 
620 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDZ1R 
 
 itable diplomatic remonstrances, those reprisals were at length 
 made hy the States-General in the winter of 1670. For thus 
 imitating his own example, and for thus presuming to act on 
 his own principles, Louis, at the suggestion, or at least with 
 the full concurrence, of Colbert, punished the United Provinces 
 by an invasion at the head of 130,000 men, under the imme- 
 diate command of Conde and Turenne, of Luxembourg and 
 Vauban. By terror and by corruption the gates of all the 
 cities of Holland were at once thrown open at his approach, 
 and the passage of the Rhine was defended against him just 
 so far as was necessary to give some deceptive color to the 
 preposterous eulogies which, on the ground of that operation, 
 exalted the courtly Louis to the level of the mighty Julius. 
 Deputies suing for peace arrived from the terrified States at the 
 camp of the invader. Their proposals were rejected with arro- 
 gance and insult ; and the victorious king was not ashamed to 
 require that the rulers of the Seven Provinces should annually 
 transmit to him a medal surrounded by a legend, in which was 
 to be made the acknowledgment that the Dutch people held 
 their liberties of him and at his pleasure. The insult sunk 
 deeply into their hearts. In a phrensy of popular madness, 
 they massacred John and Cornelius de Witt as faithless to their 
 native land, and as partisans of their hated enemy. The gov- 
 ernment passed into the hands of William, prince of Orange, 
 who, after a war of six years, at length concluded with Louis, 
 in August, 1678, the treaty of Nimeguen. By that treaty 
 France abandoned the original ground of the quarrel. Her 
 tariff of 1667 was revoked, and either country conceded to the 
 other a full liberty of trade, unimpeded by the grant of any 
 privileges or bounties in which the citizens of both should not 
 equally participate. From this iniquitous contest, therefore, 
 Colbert and his master acquired no real commercial advantage, 
 nor any just military fame. It laid the basis of a costly and 
 humiliating warfare of forty years' continuance ; but, on the 
 other hand, it served as an apology for striking some ostenta- 
 tious medals, for erecting some arrogant statues, and for ele- 
 vating a splendid triumphal arch at the northern gates of Paris. 
 Fifthly. To his other cares for the mercantile greatness of 
 France, Colbert added an extreme solicitude to guide, or rath- 
 er to force, the labor of her artisans into the most profitable 
 channels. 
 
 
COLBERT Alt'D LOUVOIS. 621 
 
 In the tenth and three following centuries, commercial fra- 
 ternities had been formed in most of the great cities of thai 
 kingdom (as of the rest of Europe) for the defense of the handi- 
 craftsmen against their feudal lords. "When those Guilds had 
 effectually repelled oppression from themselves, they began to 
 practice it on others. They were the Communists of that gen- 
 eration, and their history might teach a useful lesson to the 
 Socialists of our own. Their tyranny was directed against all 
 the private artisans who would not, or who could not, join their 
 societies. In Charles Y. and in Charles VI., those artisans 
 sought and found defenders against the persecutions of the in- 
 corporated brotherhoods. But when Louis XI. invoked the aid 
 of those companies in his Struggle against the seigneurs, he 
 was in his turn compelled to support them in their contest with 
 the independent workmen. Thenceforward their oppressions 
 knew no limit. No man could lawfully carry on his trade un- 
 less he became a freeman of one of their incorporations. No 
 man could obtain that freedom except by the payment of ad- 
 mission fees of a great but arbitrary amount. And, before any 
 one could be allowed so to qualify himself, he was required to 
 produce to the guild a specimen of his skill, which they should 
 acknowledge to be a chef d'veuvre. To many a candidate it 
 was also a matter of extreme difficulty to ascertain what was 
 the guild into which his particular art or craft would author- 
 ize him to enter; for those companies were exceedingly nu- 
 merous, and were engaged in ceaseless and acrimonious dis- 
 putes with each other as to the precise limits of their respect- 
 ive functions. To determine those knotty questions, the tav- 
 ern-keepers went to law with the bakers, and the fruiterers 
 with the grocers ; and a protracted contest before the courts 
 was necessary to determine the precise point at which the ap- 
 propriate office of the shoemaker gave place to that of the cob- 
 bler. It is with an admiration not unmixed with awe that 
 we celebrate the venerable length of years which our own suits 
 in Chancery occasionally attain, but they must be numbered 
 among ephemeral litigations when brought into contrast with 
 the antediluvian longevity of some of the judicial controversies 
 between the commercial brotherhoods of France. Thus the 
 tailors commenced in 1530 an action against the old-clothes- 
 men, which expired in the year 1776, in the 246th year of its 
 
622 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 age, though, not till it had given birth (says M. Clement) to be- 
 tween 20,000 and 30,000 preliminary decrees. And thus, also, 
 in the year 1509, the poulterers commenced a suit against the 
 rotisseurs, to determine whether, within their privilege of sell- 
 ing rotis, the defendants were entitled to sell roasted game and 
 poultry. The Palais de Justice decided, in 1628, that is, in 
 the 120th year of the discussion, that no rotisseur might sup- 
 ply the meat required at any marriage or other festival, unless 
 it were celebrated under his own roof ; but that within those 
 domestic precincts he might sell to any customer " trois plats 
 de viande bouillie, et trois de fricassee ;" a judgment which, 
 though it left the main point unsettled, would have done hon- 
 or to the Court of Barataria, under the presidency of that illus- 
 trious judge who has rendered its decisions forever memorable. 
 
 From the time of Louis XI. to that of Louis XIV., the gen- 
 eral tendency of the legislation of the kings of France had been 
 to relax the fetters by which the monopoly of the incorporated 
 guilds thus impeded the industry of all other French manufac- 
 turers. The only material exception occurred in the reign of 
 Henry IV., who, in deference to the advice of the notables, as- 
 sembled at Rouen in 1597, reversed the policy of his imme- 
 diate predecessors, and restored the companies to their former 
 power. But, in that assembly, the interests and the votes of 
 a large number of rich merchants and master workmen pre- 
 vailed over their colleagues. In the States-General of 1614, 
 on the contrary, where the public opinion of the whole king- 
 dom was freely expressed, these restrictions were condemned 
 as an intolerable grievance. 
 
 In Colbert, however, they found a patron of unrivaled au- 
 thority and zeal. He observed that the relaxation of them 
 which had been practically established had produced the effect 
 of bringing into the market many manufactured articles which 
 fell far below the highest attainable standard of excellence. 
 But Colbert's object was to render the cloths, and tapestry, and 
 glass, and silk of France more than equal, in value and in price, 
 to those of England, Flanders, and Italy. To accomplish this 
 design, he promulgated no less than forty-four edicts or royal 
 regulations to determine how those articles should be fabri- 
 cated. The general character of this singular code may be 
 inferred from the following specimens : 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 623 
 
 Fkst. In August, 1666, an edict appeared, reciting that 
 the serge-makers of Aumale had, during some years, had "an 
 entire liberty of determining, according to their own caprice," 
 the length and breadth of their cloths, and that, on account 
 of the consequent faults in those articles, the sale of them had 
 greatly diminished. To remedy this evil, it was enacted that 
 the serge-makers of the place should be formed into a trading 
 company, enjoying the usual privileges for controlling all work- 
 men in that business. 
 
 Secondly. Twelve months later, Colbert promulgated an- 
 other edict, reciting that the goods produced by the workers 
 in gold, in silver, in silk, in wool, in thread, in dyeing and in 
 bleaching, were not of the requisite quality ; and, therefore, 
 laying down rules for the guidance of them all, in each of their 
 various operations. These rules, in a single case, that of the 
 dyers, comprised no less than 317 distinct articles. 
 
 Thirdly. There was a corporation of united barbers, wig- 
 makers, and bathing-house keepers. For their better conduct, 
 Colbert directed that the basins hung out at their shop-win- 
 dows should always be white, to distinguish them from the 
 surgeons' basins, which were always to be yellow. The bar- 
 bier peruquiers, and they alone, might sell hair, excepting 
 (added the provident law-giver) any case in which any person 
 may bring his own hair for sale to any wig-maker's shop. 
 
 Fourthly. By another enactment, it was forbidden to any 
 master workman to keep more than a single apprentice. 
 
 Fifthly. In many trades, as, for example, in the trade of bon- 
 neterie, every aspirant was to serve for five years as an appren- 
 tice, and then five years more as a journeyman ; after which 
 he was to produce his chef d'oeuvre. Thus, in those days, no 
 one in France might sell a " bonnet," which, under correction, 
 I take to be the French for any female head-dress, who had not 
 studied the art during ten years, and who had not then given 
 proof of perfection in it ; a perfection which (if reliance may 
 be placed on circumstances not entirely unknown to some of us) 
 would seem to be regarded by the best possible judges of tho 
 question as not often attained, and as not easily attainable. 
 
 But, sixthly ; from these obligations, the sons and daughters 
 of master workmen were to a very great extent exempted. 
 
 Every one anticipates the results of these puerilities. They 
 
624 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 tended to confine the manufactures of France to a few privi- 
 leged families. They gave rise to useless prosecutions, and tc 
 many oppressive and unprofitable punishments. They tended 
 to confine the manufacturing business to a few privileged fam- 
 ilies, and to reduce the number of competitors to the lowest 
 possible amount. They excited from every quarter resentments 
 and remonstrances, which again provoked still more vexatious 
 edicts. One of these, of the 24th of December, 1670, ordained 
 that any manufactured goods which should not be in exact 
 conformity to the royal ordinances should be exhibited on a 
 gibbet nine feet high, bearing the maker's name ; and that, 
 after twenty-four hours, they should be cut, torn, burned, or 
 confiscated. For the second offense, the manufacturer was also 
 to receive a public admonition in a full meeting of his guild ; 
 but for the third offense he was to be put into the stocks for 
 two. hours, with the fragments of his confiscated property 
 hanging about him ; an edict, says Forbonnais, which one 
 might suppose to have been written in Japan. M. Clement, 
 with greater equity, adds that, before affiliating such a law 
 on the Japanese, one ought to ascertain what kind of opinion 
 they would have of it. 
 
 After trying in vain the efficacy of penalties, Colbert resort- 
 ed to the use of bounties. He gave 1200 livres to every dyer 
 who conformed to his rules. He gave money to every work- 
 man who, being himself in the service of such a master, should 
 marry a female fellow-servant. He gave them a premium on 
 the birth of their first child. He gave to every apprentice en- 
 tering the trade on his own account both money and tools. 
 And, in favor of some workmen whom he peculiarly cherished, 
 he even gave a great reduction of their tailles. 
 
 But the storm and the sunshine were alike ineffectual to 
 ripen the fruits of the French Protectionist husbandry. The 
 trades cherished by Colbert died with him. His policy was, 
 however, more long-lived. The authority of his name main- 
 tained till the eve of the Revolution, and even yet supports in 
 France, a commercial system which all her real statesmen rep- 
 robate, but in which many sections of the people find their ac- 
 count. 
 
 To what causes, it may be asked, is that authority to be re- 
 ferred, since the measures of Colbert, which I have mtnerto 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 625 
 
 noticed, were calculated neither to secure the approbation of 
 the wiser few, nor the favor of the unreflecting many ? The 
 answer to that inquiry is neither difficult nor doubtful. No 
 man had ever studied more profoundly, or, perhaps, no man 
 ever judged by a surer instinct, the character of his fellow- 
 countrymen. If some of the measures which he pursued were 
 ill-judged, the common motive of them all was to promote the 
 welfare of the great body of the people of France. That object 
 ever lay nearest to his heart. No statesman was ever actuated 
 by a public spirit more genuine, or by a patriotism more ar- 
 dent, even when the most ill directed ; and though Colbert has 
 won this praise tardily from generations later than his own, 
 yet it is a praise which, when once firmly won by any ruler 
 of that enthusiastic people, secures to him for all future times 
 the rank and worship of a demigod among them. The love of 
 country of this great minister exhibited itself, I think, chiefly, 
 first, in his unrelenting hostility to all abuses and to the au- 
 thors of them ; secondly, in the splendor and utility of his pub- 
 lic works ; thirdly, in his creation of a belligerent marine far 
 more powerful than France had ever before seen or contem- 
 plated ; fourthly, in his labors for the improvement of the laws 
 and judicial system of the kingdom ; and, finally, on the pat- 
 ronage which he bestowed on literature, and, therefore,, on the 
 literary dispensers of reputation. My limits of time will not 
 allow me to touch on these topics except with great brevity, 
 but I may not altogether pass them over. 
 
 First, then, on his accession to power in 1661, Colbert de- 
 clared war to the knife against the whole brood of peculators, 
 defaulters, and public accountants, by instituting an extraor 
 dinary commission, or court of justice, to compel them to dis- 
 gorge their ill-gotten gains ; and though some parts of his sub- 
 sequent proceedings for that purpose may not bear the test 
 of a very severe morality, some excuse for his rigor may be 
 found, partly in the habits of the times, and partly in the enor- 
 mous extravagance of the frauds with which he had undertaken 
 to contend. 
 
 The authors, or suspected authors of them, were required 
 to produce and verify statements of all the property which 
 they had acquired by inheritance or otherwise during the last 
 preceding twenty-six years, and all the cures and vicars of 
 
 RR 
 
626 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 Paris were directed to call upon the faithful in their respective 
 congregations, to denounce all offenses against the treasury of 
 which they might be aware, on pain of excommunication in 
 case of disobedience. The results of the proceedings of this 
 tribunal were, first, to effect the restitution to the crown of one 
 hundred and ten millions of livres ; secondly, to set aside the 
 conveyances of many territorial and other royal rights which 
 had been alienated on no adequate consideration ; and, thirdly, 
 to reduce, by eight millions, the annual charge for the public 
 debt. So long as this tempest raged against the financiers alone, 
 the citizens of Paris watched the progress of it with exultation ; 
 but the reduction of the dividends payable at the Hotel de Yille 
 spread alarm, and, for a moment seemed to threaten a revolt 
 among all the wealthy inhabitants of that once rebellious city. 
 With the suppression of the Fronde, however, they had ceased 
 to be formidable. Their discontent expressed itself only in 
 impotent murmurs, and in those dismal looks which suggested 
 to Boileau his picture of a " visage plus pale qu'un rentier, 
 a 1'aspeet d'un arret qui retranche un quartier." 
 
 To these retributory measures Colbert added others for pre- 
 venting the recurrence of similar abuses. He deprived all fiscal 
 offices of their heritable character. He took from every pub- 
 lic accountant securities for the faithful performance of the 
 duties of his office. He exacted of every such officer an ha- 
 bitual residence at his post. He reduced the per centage on 
 all collections of the public revenue. He subjected the estate 
 of every debtor to the crown to a tacit mortgage for the amount 
 of his debt, which was payable in preference to every other 
 demand. He rendered it necessary that all taxes let to farm 
 should so be disposed of by public auction, and not otherwise. 
 He established a complete system of keeping and rendering ac- 
 counts of the receipt and application of the public money ; and 
 he devised effective forms and rules for preventing the devia- 
 tion of any such money from the particular service to which 
 it was properly applicable. Such labors are easily enumerated, 
 and may not collectively assume in the enumeration a very 
 brilliant appearance. But they were such as few other men 
 would have had the diligence, the skill, and the hardihood at 
 once to devise and to enforce. 
 
 From the accountants and peculators, Colbert turned to make 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 627 
 
 war on the dishonest creditors of the state. In the depths of 
 his financial distresses, Mazarin had diverted to the use of 
 the crown the octrois and other dues exigible in the various 
 cities of France, and applicable there to various purposes of 
 local necessity or convenience. To indemnify the citizens for 
 the consequent prejudice to their municipal interests, the car- 
 dinal, as we formerly saw, administered the singular relief of 
 authorizing them to exact from themselves as much more 
 money for recruiting the civic treasuries as he had taken away 
 for the behoof of the national treasury. To escape the burden 
 of this double taxation, the communes every where borrowed 
 funds for their indispensable Jocal expenditure. Such funds 
 were, however, unavoidably taken upon an equivocal security, 
 and, therefore, at a high rate of interest ; and, in consequence 
 of these improvident loans, Colbert found nearly the whole of 
 France threatened with a kind of municipal bankruptcy. After 
 ascertaining, by a rigid inquest, what was the amount of debt 
 really due, and to what extent the contracts made with the 
 embarrassed citizens had been fraudulent or usurious, and after 
 establishing a registry in each city of the pecuniary obligations 
 to which each was justly liable, he restored to them all half 
 of the funds which Mazarin had seized, leaving to them the 
 collection and management of the whole of the octrois and other 
 dues which they were thenceforward to divide with the crown. 
 Applying themselves with new zeal to the improvement of an 
 income in which they were so largely to participate, the com- 
 munes ere long paid off their debts, and gave a new illustra- 
 tion of tho old proverbial truth, that " a half is sometimes 
 greater than the whole." 
 
 From the corporation creditors, this sleepless reformer next 
 turned to the Noblesse. To escape their contribution to the 
 tailles and other ordinary taxes, a vast throng of persons had 
 either acquired or laid claim to the privileges of nobility. Some 
 had bought this honor ; some had earned it by the discharge 
 of public offices ; and many were indebted for it to their own 
 impudence, or to the favor, not hardly propitiated, of the her- 
 alds and genealogists, who were but too well disposed to cer- 
 tify the gentle lineage of all whom they knew to be provided 
 with well-lined purses. The poorer roturiers were thus con- 
 demned to see one after another of their wealthier brethren 
 
628 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 withdrawing their shoulders from the pressure of the burden 
 which weighed so heavily, because so exclusively, on their owjj 
 class or caste of society. Indignant at their sufferings, and 
 full of burning zeal for the interests of the treasury, Colbert 
 attacked this noble phalanx with characteristic decision. With 
 one blow he revoked all titles to nobility which had been ac- 
 quired within the last preceding thirty years. With another 
 he recovered against the usurpers of noble rank penalties for 
 that offense amounting collectively to two millions of livres. In 
 every part of France multitudes of parvenus were driven back 
 to the ranks which they had deserted, and were compelled to re- 
 sume their shares of the load which they had shaken off. In 
 Provence alone, the number who thus shed their false plumage 
 was 1257, all men of mark in their respective vicinities. It 
 is not difficult to imagine how profound was the satisfaction 
 with which all classes of society hailed this signal act of penal 
 justice how the ancient Nobles rejoiced to be delivered from 
 their undignified associates how the meaner ranks were glad- 
 dened at the defeat of an arrogant pretension and how the 
 tax-payers welcomed back into their lines the fugitives who 
 had left them to suffer alone. The only mourners were they 
 to whom the public faith was dear ; for to them it appeared 
 nothing less than a robbery to receive money for patents of no- 
 bility, and then to revoke the grants on no alleged ground except 
 that the money paid had been inadequate to the advantage ob- 
 tained. But among the praises of Colbert's administration and 
 of the age of Louis XIV., a strict integrity in public affairs 
 held no place. 
 
 In the custom-houses of France the great minister found his 
 next antagonists. On his accession to power, export duties 
 were payable, not only on the removal of merchandise beyond 
 the limits of the kingdom, but even when they were removed 
 from one province to another. Nor were the rates of those du- 
 ties the same in any two provinces. Although the absurdity 
 and the mischiefs of this system baffle description, they may 
 be illustrated by the example of what were called the Customs 
 of Valence. At that place a duty of from three to five per 
 cent, ad valorem was payable, first, on all goods brought into 
 Lyons from Languedoc, from Provence, from the Levant, or 
 from Spain; and, secondly, upon all goods brought from tho 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 629 
 
 eastern provinces of France into Languedoc, Provence, or Pied- 
 mont. To secure the payment of these duties, all articles sub- 
 ject to them were to be brought to Valence, however great 
 might be the deviation from the shorter and more convenient 
 route ; and a vast cordon of revenue officers was accordingly 
 drawn, as a kind of net, round no less than nine of the princi- 
 pal provinces of the kingdom. To abolish this and all other 
 local tariffs, and to substitute for them one general scale of 
 customs duties applicable only to the external trade of France, 
 that so the intercourse between the different parts of the realm 
 might be entirely free, was a scheme to which Colbert devoted 
 all the energies of his mind, and all the delegated authority 
 and influence of the crown. He was, however, opposed by the 
 multitudes who had a vested or a prospective interest in these 
 strange abuses. He was opposed also by that still greater and 
 more irrational multitude which found in the commercial iso- 
 lation of their respective provinces food with which to nourish 
 their provincial prejudices. And in many parts of the king- 
 dom those prejudices found supporters, and Colbert antagonists, 
 in the old provincial states which still maintained their languid 
 and decaying existence. Before such adversaries he at last re- 
 coiled. Some of the provinces resisted the proposed tariff al- 
 together, and, so far as commerce was concerned, they were 
 allowed to remain and to be described as provinces on the foot- 
 ing of foreign countries. Other provinces demanded and ob- 
 tained the maintenance of all their old and distinctive laws of 
 customs, and they were thenceforward known as the foreign 
 provinces. But about half of France acquiesced in the new 
 and uniform tariff, and that part of the realm acquired the 
 fiscal designation of the " five great farms." With this incom- 
 plete success Colbert was obliged to be content. He had plant- 
 ed the vigorous shoots of a great future improvement. Yet so 
 slow was their growth, that (strange as it now sounds to us) 
 the French Revolution still found the Douane de Valence and 
 the " five great farms" in full vigor, and swept them away 
 among the throng of obsolete anomalies. 
 
 But, secondly, the ambition of Colbert was of too noble a 
 character to be satisfied with increasing the public revenue by 
 the punishment or prevention of abuses, or by the establish- 
 ment of new tariffs. He aimed to explore and open new sources 
 
630 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 of national wealth, and with that view became not merely the 
 patron, "but even the author, of some of the noblest of the pub- 
 lic works of France, and especially of the great scheme, so oft- 
 en meditated by others, of uniting the Mediterranean and the 
 Atlantic. To Pierre Paul de Riquet is, indeed, due the praise 
 of all the science which devised, and of all the energy which 
 actually accomplished, the Canal of Languedoc. Without pre- 
 suming to explain the mechanical contrivances by which he 
 subdued the obstacles which nature seemed to have opposed 
 to that undertaking, I believe I am safe in asserting that, when 
 due allowance is made for the inexperience of his age, Riquet 
 exhibited in that great work an extent of genius and a variety 
 of resources which entitle him to a high place among the great- 
 est engineers of modern times. The appropriate praise of Col- 
 bert is, that he appreciated the capacity, admired the energy, 
 and sustained the courage of his great agent in this scheme ; 
 that he continued to hope while others desponded, and was 
 unmoved by all the expostulations and ridicule by which the 
 prophets of evil, and the speakers of evil, of those days would 
 have arrested the enterprise ; and that, in the midst of all 
 other demands on the public treasury, he advanced from that 
 source one half of the indispensable outlay. Corneille has 
 celebrated the junction of the two seas in some noble verses, 
 whose only fault is that they say far too much of Louis XIV., 
 and nothing at all of Riquet or of Colbert. Yauban, after trav- 
 ersing the whole length of the canal, and admiring the labors 
 of a genius so kindred to his own, pronounced a eulogy more 
 generous than that of the great dramatist : " The work (he 
 said) is absolutely perfect, with one exception I have looked 
 in vain for a statue of Riquet." 
 
 Thirdly. It was, however, neither as a financier nor as an 
 economist that Colbert chiefly acquired the high place which 
 he retains in the admiration of all Frenchmen. His higher, 
 or, at least, his more effective claim to their gratitude is, that 
 by him France was first elevated into the foremost rank of 
 maritime powers, so far, at least, as that rank depends on the 
 possession of a belligerent navy. In 1661, the date of his ac- 
 cession to power, she possessed 30 ships of war,- of which 3 
 were of the first class, 8 of the second, and 7 of the third, the 
 rest being small craft only. At the peace of Nimeguen in 1678, 
 
CCLBERT AND LOUVOtS. 631 
 
 the royal navy comprised 120 ships of war, of which 12 were 
 of the first class, 26 of the second, and 40 bf the third. Five 
 years later, the number had arisen to n3 less than 273 vessels 
 of all classes, of which 139 were either ships of war or frigates. 
 To man this vast navy, Colbert established a law, not unlike 
 the maritime conscription law of France at the present day ; 
 and such was its success, that in the year 1670, the number 
 of seamen registered under it amounted to 30,000 ; and, after 
 the lapse of thirteen years (that is, in 1683), to 77,852. Neither 
 honors nor emoluments were spared to animate the courage of 
 the force thus rapidly called into existence ; and, in his official 
 intercourse with his naval commanders, Colbert relaxed his 
 habitual austerity, and cheerfully indulged them in the rough- 
 ness of manners and petulance of temper for which their em- 
 ployment afforded at once the temptation and the apology. 
 
 His zeal for this branch of the public service showed itself 
 in other and yet more laborious cares. He employed lawyers 
 of great eminence to compile a code of laws for the government 
 of the French navy ; and the Ordonnance sur la Marine, which 
 he at length promulgated, rapidly acquired that universal ad- 
 miration which has ever since followed it. The praise of this 
 great work must, of course, be divided between Colbert and 
 the subordinate agents whom he employed in the execution of 
 it ; and, for the same reason, I hesitate to subscribe to the 
 eulogies which he has so largely received as the author of the 
 other codes of law which were promulgated during his admin- 
 istration. On his accession to power, some of the provinces of 
 France were governed by ancient customs or traditions. Some 
 of them lived under the droit ecrit, or ancient laws of Rome. 
 In some, the provincial jurisprudence was the result of a fusion 
 of the corpus juris civilis and of customs borrowed from many 
 different localities ; and in all, the rule for the observance of 
 the people in their transactions with each other, and for the 
 guidance of the judges in their decisions, was, to a great ex- 
 tent, doubtful and indeterminate. To reduce this chaos into 
 order, Colbert employed Lamoignon, and others of the greatest 
 jurists of his times ; and in the years 1667, 1669, 1670, and 
 1673, appeared four codes, the result of their labors, and, as 
 it is said, of Colbert's superintendence and revision of them. 
 They were known as the Ordonnance pour la Reformation de 
 
(532 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 la Justice Civile as the Reglement general pour les Eaux et 
 Forets as the Ordonnance Criminelle and as the Ordonnance 
 de Commerce. During one hundred and thirty years, and un- 
 til superseded by the Code Napoleon, they formed the basis of 
 the law of France, both civil and penal. But as the name of 
 Justinian was superscribed to the work of Tribonian and his 
 fellow-laborers, and as the name of Napoleon has been given 
 to the compilation of Cambaceres and his colleagues, so has 
 the name of Louis XIY. been attached to that of Colbert, of 
 Lamoignon, and his associates ; for in civil, as in military life, 
 the laurel is habitually assigned to the leader under whose 
 auspices the victory has been won, rather than to the subor- 
 dinates by whose toil, and ability, and self-sacrifice it may 
 have been really gained ; and, in this distribution of fame, 
 there is sometimes more substantial equity, and always more 
 public convenience, than might be supposed by those who 
 never, either as leaders or as subordinates, wielded either sword 
 or pen in such a controversy. 
 
 Finally. No man ever understood, better than Colbert, the 
 importance of the suffrages of those by whom the pen is so 
 wielded as an instrument of dominion over mankind. To 
 many of them he granted pensions ; and in the list of his pen- 
 sioners, amid many heroes of the French Dunciad, occur the 
 names of Pierre Corneille, with his description as " le premier 
 poete dramatique du monde ;" of Moliere, " excellent poete 
 comique ;" of the Sieur Racine, " poete Fran^ais ;" and of Le 
 Sieur Mezerai, " historiographe." The favor of many foreign 
 writers was wooed in the same persuasive manner ; but among 
 them I see no Englishman, nor any name more eminent than 
 those of Huygens and Isaac Vossius. To take other securities 
 for the permanency of his own reputation, Colbert established 
 the Academies of Sciences, of Painting, and of Inscriptions. 
 The last of these was so called, because its peculiar office was 
 that of devising inscriptions in honor of the great King of 
 France, and in celebration of his triumphs, military and civil. 
 As far as Louis himself is concerned, however, no great grati- 
 tude was due to this company of eulogists ; for, among many 
 other extravagances, he was indebted to them for his famous 
 device of the sun rising over the world, with the legend, " Nee 
 pluribus impar ;" a boast, perhaps, as ambiguous in its mean- 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 
 
 633 
 
 ing as it was arrogant in its appearance and offensive in its 
 effect. The interpretation of it by Louis himself, in his in- 
 structions to the Dauphin, is, I suppose, the right one. It is 
 that, adequate as he had proved himself to be to the conduct 
 of so many great affairs, he would not have been inadequate 
 to the government of many other of the kingdoms of the earth, 
 if they, like France, had been brought, or should be brought, 
 within the radiance of his solar beams. If such be, indeed, 
 the sense which the authors of this metallurgic hyperbole in- 
 tended it to convey, it was as unjust as it was extravagant ; 
 for, beyond all dispute, the boasted sufficiency to such and so 
 many great undertakings belonged, not to Louis himself, but 
 to his great minister, Colbert In some of these he had greatly 
 erred. But in all of them, by turns, he had exhibited a range 
 of knowledge, an energy of application, a contempt for diffi- 
 culty and for danger, and a zeal for the glory, the greatness, 
 and the welfare of his country, which entitles him to an emi- 
 nent place among the most illustrious statesmen who have im- 
 pressed an indelible trace of their lives and labors on the his- 
 tory of mankind. 
 
 To Colbert, however, no such honor was rendered, either by 
 the king whom he had so well served, or by the people for 
 whom he had so diligently labored. Louis had long been over- 
 awed by the genius of his great minister. The forms of sub- 
 mission and deference had, indeed, been as studiously main- 
 tained by the subordinate as they had been rigidly exacted by 
 the superior. The austere and frugal controller general had 
 even indicted eulogies on the Grand Monarque, and had pro- 
 jected costly monumental works in honor of his conquests. 
 The homage was coldly received, while the substantial power, 
 which it was intended to conceal, was suspiciously resented 
 With the peace of Nimeguen, Louis had regained his insatia- 
 ble passion for buildings and other selfish expenditure ; and as 
 Versailles, Trianon, Marly, the gigantic aqueduct of Mainte- 
 non, and the edifices of the Place Yendome, one after another 
 drained the resources which Colbert had accumulated, his 
 scruples and remonstrances became a continual rebuke and a 
 serious obstacle to the extravagance of his master. With his 
 pride wounded and his temper irritated, the king at length in- 
 flicted on the aged statesman some of those indignities which, 
 
634 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 when coming from him, withered the very souls of those who 
 worshiped at that idolatrous court. Already worn out by la- 
 bor and disease, the heart-broken old man sickened and died ; 
 and when the last letter he was ever to receive from Louis 
 reached him, he refused to read it, exclaiming in the bitterness 
 of his soul, in words like those of Wolsey, " If I had but served 
 my Grod as faithfully as I have served this man, I should long 
 since have worked out my salvation. But now what awaits 
 me ! 
 
 Nor were the people of France more grateful than their sov- 
 ereign to their aged servant. His death was hailed at Paris 
 by a perfect storm of satirical epigrams, and to rescue his body 
 from the anticipated outrages of the Parisians, it was conveyed 
 by night from his hotel to the place of interment under a strong 
 military escort. 
 
 The catastrophe is not without its moral. If, among those 
 whom I address, there be any who are proposing to devote all 
 the powers of their souls and bodies to the service of the state, 
 but who may not hope either to command her armies in the 
 field or to lead her parties in the senate, let them not shrink 
 from that most severe and thankless service, but let them learn 
 betimes to look to the approbation of Grod and of their own 
 consciences as their only reward. If they should bring all the 
 energies and all the virtues of Colbert to their appointed offices, 
 they will assuredly find a Louis XIV. to appropriate to himself 
 the glory of their labors, and an ignorant multitude to exact 
 from them the expiation of his incapacity, and faults, and 
 blunders. 
 
 At the death of Colbert it became necessary to reconstitute 
 the administration of which he had been the real, though the 
 unavowed head, and especially to replace him in the office of 
 controller general by a successor who would at once have skill 
 to replenish the treasury, and meekness to acquiesce in the im- 
 provident exhaustion of it. But it was above all things essen- 
 tial that the choice should appear to Louis to be his own un- 
 prompted and spontaneous act. It deserves to be told how he 
 was beguiled into that belief. 
 
 "What think you," said he to the Chancellor le Tellier, "of 
 Le Pelletier as my new minister of finance ?" " Sire," an- 
 swered the sagacious lawyer, "that is a subject on which. I 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 635 
 
 have no claim to your confidence. He is the son of my guard- 
 ian, and I have, therefore, always regarded him as my own 
 child." u No matter," replied the king, " tell me what is your 
 opinion of him." " My opinion then is, sire, that he is up- 
 right, honorable, and industrious ; but he is unfit to be a min- 
 ister 6f finance ; he is not severe enough." "What," rejoin- 
 ed Louis, " do you suppose I wish that any of my servants 
 should be severe to my subjects. Since he is faithful and dil- 
 igent, I appoint him to be my controller general." 
 
 The king believed the decision to be his own, and was will- 
 fully blind to the motives which had induced the chancellor so 
 skillfully to draw him into it. The choice of Le Pelletier vir- 
 tually placed the whole government in the hands of Le Tellier 
 himself, and of his son Louvois, the minister secretary of state 
 for war ; for they, when supported by the new controller gen- 
 eral, formed not merely a numerical, but a most effective ma- 
 jority of the new administration. Their colleagues, Seignelay 
 and Colbert de Croissy, were neither of them gifted with the 
 talents by which nations are governed, and absolute monarchs 
 held in an unconscious bondage. Louvois possessed both of 
 these talents in an eminent degree. 
 
 He had not completed his fourteenth year when he received 
 from Louis a grant of the reversion of the office of secretary of 
 state for war, to take effect on the death of his father Le Tel- 
 lier ; and it was the boast of the king that he had himself, by 
 his own example and instructions, formed the young minister 
 for the duties of his place. If so, he might well be proud of 
 his success, for ifc is the universal consent of all the most com- 
 petent judges that Louvois was a perfect model of an admin- 
 istrator of the department of war. His method, his compre- 
 hensiveness, his foresight, his force of will, and his almost pre- 
 ternatural activity, molded the belligerent force under his 
 orders into an instrument so flexible for all the purposes of 
 aggressive warfare, and so terrible to those against whom it 
 was directed, that Louis was far more indebted to his minis- 
 ter than even to his generals for the military triumphs which 
 embellished his reign, and for the conquests by which his 
 dominions were extended. So eminent, indeed, were his mer- 
 its, and so universally acknowledged, even in his own lifetime, 
 that, even in the jealous court of Versailles, they were cele- 
 
636 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDEK 
 
 brated in the highest terms by the most devout of the wor- 
 shipers of the great king. Thus Madame de Sevigne, in a let- 
 ter written on the 5th of August, 1676, says of the siege of 
 Aire, " M. Louvois carries off all the honors. His authority is 
 absolute, and he commands the armies to advance and retreat 
 at his pleasure." His pretensions were not, however, undis- 
 puted. Turenne, in his great campaign of 1674-5, had the 
 courage to act in direct and systematic disobedience of his or- 
 ders, and Luxembourg could not live at peace with him. In- 
 deed, if Madame de Sevigne be right, Louvois was the Haman 
 of Racine's Esther, and either Turenne or Luxembourg the 
 Mardochee. 
 
 "Well had it been for the fair fame of Turenne if he had as 
 inflexibly refused to do homage to this Haman when he re- 
 ceived his commands to lay waste the Palatinate. It is a far 
 darker stain on the memory of that great captain than even 
 his traitorous adhesion to the foreign enemies of his country 
 during the wars of the Fronde. But the return of Louvois to 
 the same atrocious system of making war in 1689, in defiance 
 of the indignant protestations of the whole civilized world, is 
 a stain far deeper still, not only on himself, but on his mas- 
 ter, and even on his nation. For such guilt no administrative 
 genius can make any atonement, nor any success afford the 
 slightest apology. It is one of those crimes, the recollection 
 of which must ever, in the judgment of all impartial men, de- 
 press Louis and his minister from the level of the chiefs of the 
 civilized world to a rank far below that of the most ferocious 
 and pitiless of the rude barbarians by whom the Roman em- 
 pire was devastated. But it forms no unmeet preparation for 
 the one great measure of domestic policy which illustrated the 
 years during which Louvois was the real, though the unac- 
 knowledged head of the civil government of France. 
 
 Religion, as inculcated on Louis XIY. by his confessors, is 
 said by M. de Sismondi to have been reducible to two precepts, 
 " Desist from adultery ; exterminate heresy." If the king fell 
 short in the first of those duties, he wrought works of super- 
 erogation in the second. Yet he did not commence his holy 
 war with the sword. 
 
 One third of all the profits of all the vacant benefices of 
 France was set apart by Louis as the capital of a sort of Bank 
 
COLBERT AND LOUV01S. 637 
 
 of Conversion, at the head of which he placed Pelisson, him- 
 self a convert from the faith of Geneva. Under Pelisson were 
 employed subordinate officers in all the cities and provinces of 
 France in which Protestantism most abounded. Their duty 
 was to purchase adhesions to the Church of Rome. For this 
 traffic there was a regular scale of prices, ranging from five to 
 one hundred livres, according to the estimated value of each 
 man's apostasy an enormous price, indeed, if regard be had 
 to the value of the commodity bought and sold ; for, at half 
 the money, the rogues and vagabonds of France might, as it 
 should seem, have broken this royal Bank of Faith in a month, 
 and kept the Catholic benefices indefinitely vacant. Yet ga- 
 zette after gazette published lists of many hundreds of Pelis- 
 son's miraculous conversions ; and if the union of folly, fraud, 
 and impudence, in the highest possible degree, be any depart- 
 ure from the established laws of nature, the term was not ill 
 bestowed. Such was the religion of him, dissent from whom 
 was about to be followed by the most disgusting, if not the most 
 terrible of all the persecutions with which the Christian world 
 has been visited ! 
 
 Pelisson's converts, as he himself says of them, desired to be 
 moistened liberally by the rich dews which it was his genial 
 office to distill. Many of them, therefore, devised the obvious 
 scheme of a relapse, a reconversion, and a new sale of their 
 souls to the royal purchaser. He answered them, however, 
 not by more livres, but by an edict of the year 1679, which 
 condemned all relapsed persons to banishment for life, and con- 
 fiscation of all their property. The blow, as we shall here- 
 after see, reached much farther than to the knaves at whom 
 it was aimed. 
 
 It was in the preceding year that the peace of Nimeguen 
 brought the greatness of Louis to its apogee. Supreme over 
 his own subjects and over all the powers of Europe, it remain- 
 ed for him to accomplish the strange law or destiny of his race, 
 by submitting his mind to a thraldom from which he should 
 never again be either able or willing to emancipate himself. 
 The chains so indissoluble, because they were at once so soft 
 and so well concealed, were grasped by the too famous Ma- 
 dame de Maintenon. 
 
 During the first sixteen years of her life she had adhered to 
 
638 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 the religious creed or society of her great-grandfather, Agrippa 
 d'Aubigne, one of the most eminent of the champions and his- 
 torians of the Huguenots. Even after her elevation, Louis (as 
 we learn from her own letters) would occasionally upbraid her 
 with too fond a remembrance of the heresy of her youth ; but 
 ambition, which (as she also informs us) was the master-spirit 
 of her life, rendered her triumphant over all such domestic as- 
 sociations and early remembrances. She even exaggerated, in 
 her own person, the bigotry of her royal patron, and became the 
 willing accomplice of Fere la Chaise in provoking him to en- 
 gage in the great crusade of the seventeenth century. 
 
 In that servile court, obedience to the presiding demigod was 
 not merely a law, but a passion. To win his smile by making 
 proselytes became the daily labor of all the sycophants who 
 thronged it. At each levee, dukes, and peers, and bishops, 
 and generals laid before him their lists of new converts. No 
 post reached Versailles without intelligence of some Protestant 
 church having been demolished, or of the dispersion of some 
 Protestant assembly. If, with such grateful tidings, there also 
 came the news of riots, outrages, and conflagrations, of which 
 the heretics had been the victims, the sovereign, jealous as he 
 was of his power, regarded with seeming indifference, and with 
 at least supposed favor, such violations of the laws of which he 
 was the guardian. 
 
 For the law was, even yet, on the side of the Dissenters. 
 The Edict of Nantes still remained on the statute-book of 
 France. During fourscore years and upward, 2,000,000 of 
 Frenchmen had regarded it as the charter of their civil and 
 religious liberties ; and of the rest, many respected it as the 
 corner-stone of the peace and union of the kingdom. The 
 great founder of the Bourbon dynasty had consecrated it as the 
 very ark of the Constitution, purchased with the toils, the sac- 
 rifices, and the bloodshed of his glorious life. It was the one 
 royal ordinance to which the people of the realm had learned 
 to look with enthusiasm, as an immortal trophy of the valor 
 and wisdom of their ancestors. Even the triumphant Louis, 
 therefore, paused before laying his hand upon such a monu- 
 ment. He could not at once subvert it, but he could, by new 
 legislation, render it ineffectual. 
 
 In the succeeding century the statute-book of our own coun- 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 639 
 
 try also was to be disgraced by a penal code against the Ro- 
 man Catholics. It was, indeed, prompted by the too well- 
 founded fears of our ancestors for the Protestant succession and 
 for the civil liberties of England. It was, I admit, to a con- 
 siderable extent, a menace only; as to the last, it remained 
 dormant in many of its worst enactments. But, whatever 
 may be the worth of these or of any similar apologies, that 
 penal code was a great crime, and has been righteously and 
 signally punished. When, however, the adherents of the 
 Church of Rome denounce that or any other form of religious 
 persecution as unexampled, one is constrained to ask whether 
 there be really any limits to human credulity in the accept- 
 ance of fiction, or of human incredulity in the rejection of 
 truth ? There are, we know, those who regard the story of 
 Julius Csesar as a myth. Some allow no existence to Moham- 
 med, except as the ideal hero of an Arabian tale. Dr. Whate- 
 ly, as we are all aware, has gone far to annihilate the faith of 
 mankind in the life and adventures of Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 But what are these historical discoveries in comparison with 
 that which requires us to disbelieve the surpassing pre-emi- 
 nence of the Church of Rome, in every country and in every 
 age, in the mysteries of tormenting heretics in mind, body, and 
 estate ! We must be more mythical than Strauss, more skep- 
 tical than Whately, if we do not recognize in her the great 
 original, of whom all other persecutors have ever been but 
 timid, feeble, and most imperfect imitators. Thus, for ex- 
 ample, the penal code which grew up amid the agonies and 
 alarms of our revolution of 1688, was nothing else than a faint 
 copy of the edicts which, in the profound tranquillity of the 
 peace of Mmeguen, were promulgated by Louis XIV., with 
 the aid. and by the advice, of some of the greatest statesmen, 
 lawyers, and divines whom the Catholic Church of France 
 could boast, at the very climax of the literary and ecclesias- 
 tical glory of that kingdom. 
 
 It provided that no Protestant might hold any public office, 
 political or municipal, or engage in any liberal profession. 
 No Protestant woman might discharge the office of midwife. 
 No mixed marriages might be contracted. By one provision, 
 all Protestants were forbidden to employ Catholic valets, lest 
 the valet should be seduced into heresy. By another they were 
 
640 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 forbidden to employ Protestant valets, because such perscns 
 could not be trusted in such a service. No Protestant could 
 be the tutor or guardian of a child, however nearly related to 
 him. All bastards, of whatever age, must be brought up or 
 instructed in the Catholic faith. Any child of the age of sev- 
 en years might abjure the Protestant religion, and the parent 
 opposing any such abjuration was to incur the most severe 
 penalties. Converts to the Church of Rome were to enjoy an 
 immunity during three years from all the demands of their 
 creditors, and during two years from all tallies and quarter- 
 ings of troops ; while the treasury was to be indemnified for 
 the loss by doubling those charges upon the contumacious. 
 All the property of all Protestant churches beyond the permit- 
 ted limits, and such of their property within those limits as 
 was devoted to the maintenance of their poor, was transferred 
 to the Catholic hospitals. No legacy could be bequeathed for 
 the benefit of any consistory. All physicians were required to 
 report the state of their Protestant patients to the magistrates, 
 that domiciliary visits might be made, to obtain, if possible, 
 their abjuration. No sick Protestant might be relieved or at- 
 tended in any private houses, but, if they had not houses of 
 their own, were to be conveyed to hospitals under the care of 
 Catholic physicians and divines. And, finally, if any new con- 
 vert should be admitted into any Protestant congregation, the 
 pastor was to be punished by banishment and confiscation of 
 his goods, the people by the final dispersion of their assembly. 
 
 I will not undertake to say that our own Parliament may 
 not afterward have invented some improvements even on this 
 iniquitous series of enactments. They were but too apt pu- 
 pils in the wicked acts of their Catholic models. But from the 
 very lips of those who gave them the example, the reproach 
 of having followed it is as preposterous as, unhappily, it is just. 
 Bacchanals are not the most appropriate censors of drunken- 
 ness, nor do rebukes for impurity come with the happiest ef- 
 fect from the priesthood of Aphrodite. 
 
 But Louis and his counselors, lay and ecclesiastical, were 
 soon to advance far beyond the reach of any Protestant imita- 
 tion. The most powerful of those counselors, after the death 
 of Colbert, were, as we have seen, the Chancellor le Tellier 
 and the Marquis de Louvois, his son ; to whom rrust be added 
 
COLBEKT AND LOUVOIS. 64l 
 
 Madame le Maintenon and Pere la Chaise. Le Tellier was, 
 at this time, far advanced in life, and cherished, as he was 
 himself accustomed to say, but one last wish. It was, that 
 he might live long enough to affix the great seal of France to 
 a royal ordinance for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. 
 Louvois contemplated the compulsory union of all Frenchmen 
 in the same forms of worship, and in the avowal, at least, of 
 the same faith, in the light in which he contemplated every 
 other subject. "Whenever the impending war with the Prot- 
 estant powers should be actually declared, such a union would, 
 as he believed, at once deprive them of a formidable alliance 
 within the kingdom, and increase the force and number of the 
 arms by which they might be'either resisted or assailed abroad. 
 To govern the heart of Louis, and therefore to adopt all the 
 maxims by which his confessor governed his conscience, were 
 the very laws of the existence of Madame de Maintenon. Those 
 maxims, as inculcated by La Chaise, might be summed up in 
 the doctrine, that to promote the dominion of the Church of 
 Rome is the one end for which existence has been given to 
 kings, to ministers, to favorites, and to confessors, and to every 
 one within the reach of their authority. 
 
 The conduct of all affairs relating to the Protestants fell, at 
 that time, within the department of Chateauneuf de la Vrilli- 
 ere, one of the four secretaries of state, a man of feeble char- 
 acter, who readily acquiesced in the usurpation by Louvois of 
 some of the most important functions of his office. In April, 
 1684, the king, on Louvois's advice, promulgated one of those 
 ordinances to which I have already referred. It was the law 
 exempting all converts from the duty of quartering the king's 
 troops during the two years next immediately after their con- 
 version. The effect of this enactment was to transfer from 
 La Yrilliere to Louvois as minister, or secretary of state, for 
 war, the entire management of all the relations between the 
 crown and the heretics of France ; for, as the troops withdrawn 
 from the houses of the converts were to be domiciled in those 
 of the contumacious, Louvois, and the officers acting under 
 him, became at once the universal and absolute judges of such 
 contumacy, and the punishers of it without appeal. He intro- 
 duced into the French language a new word, and added to the 
 miseries of the persecuted a new torment. Diocletian might 
 
 Ss 
 
642 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 have envied the ingenuity by which the most Christian king 
 invented the Dragonnades for the punishment of erring Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 " Louvois," says Madame de Caylus, "finding the kingdom 
 at peace, and fearing that his colleagues in office would eclipse 
 his own importance, was determined, at whatever cost, to em- 
 ploy the sword in a transaction which ought to have been con- 
 ducted by charity and gentleness alone." In 1685, a French 
 army had hastily been drawn together, by an unfounded alarm, 
 to the Spanish frontier, and were then marched into the south- 
 ern provinces of France as missionaries of the faith of Rome. 
 We have still the instructions of Louvois to the Marquis de 
 BouffleTs, their commandant, to quarter them on the Protest- 
 ants, and to retain them at each house where they might be so 
 lodged until the inhabitants of it should be converted, and then 
 to transfer them for the same purpose to another. " The king," 
 wrote Louvois shortly afterward to another of his officers, " de- 
 sires that they who will not adopt his religion should suffer the 
 most extreme rigors, and that such of them as may have the 
 stupid ambition of being the last to yield, should be urged to 
 the last extremities." 
 
 What, then, were the methods by which these new mission- 
 aries labored to enlarge the borders of their Church ? He who 
 would possess such knowledge must purchase it at a heavy 
 price. He must read Elie Benoit, and the other Huguenot 
 martyrologists of those times, and learn from them what are 
 the woes, and what the degradations, into which fanaticism can 
 plunge the inhabitants of this fair world. Or he may consult 
 the yet surviving witnesses of the last European war, who still 
 whisper things, the publicity of which mankind would not en- 
 dure, about the habits of a brutal soldiery, when let loose to 
 satiate their evil passions among a conquered and helpless pop- 
 ulation. To the Protestant subjects of Louis XIY. that mys- 
 tery of iniquity was revealed by those whom he sent among 
 them in the holiest of all names, and, avowedly at least, for 
 the most sacred of all purposes. A single passage from Benoit 
 may suggest some of the disclosures which it does not actually 
 make. 
 
 " The dragoons," he says, " fixed crosses to their musquet- 
 oons, so as the more readily to compel their hosts to kiss them ; 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 643 
 
 and if the kiss was not given, they drove the crosses against 
 their stomachs or their faces. They had as little mercy for the 
 children as for the adult, beating them with those crosses, or 
 with the flat sides of their swords, so violently as not seldom 
 to maim them. The wretches subjected the women also to 
 their barbarities ; they whipped them ; they disfigured them ; 
 they dragged them by the hair through the mud or along the 
 stones. Sometimes they would seize the laborers on the high- 
 ways, or when following their carts, and drive them to -the 
 Catholic churches, pricking them like oxen with their own 
 goads to quicken their pace thither." 
 
 If the missionaries themselves may be believed, never was 
 any Christian mission so successful. In one of his reports to 
 his father the chancellor, Louvois informed him that in a few 
 weeks 20,000 conversions had been effected in the Greneralite 
 of Montauban, and 60,000 in that of Bordeaux, where such 
 (he said) was the rapidity of the process, that, though so lately 
 as the last month there had been 150,000 Protestants dwelling 
 in that district, there would soon not be as many as 10,000. 
 The Due de Noailles, commanding the army on the southeast, 
 wrote to Louvois as follows: " The day after my arrival at 
 Nismes, the most considerable persons of the place made their 
 abjuration. The ardor for change then cooled a little ; but, in 
 consequence of my having quartered some troops upon some 
 of the most obstinate, affairs are once more in a good train." 
 .?"!* . . " I hope that, before the end of the month, not a sin- 
 gle Huguenot will be left in the Cevennes." ' .,rr'.r. " The 
 number of these religionists in this province is about 240,000. 
 I find that I have demanded more time than enough in asking 
 you to allow me to the 25th of next month for the conversion 
 of them all. I now think that the whole business will be fin- 
 ished before the end of this month." 
 
 Nor were these unmixed falsehoods. There was no small 
 infusion of truth in the most exaggerated of the reports of 
 Louvois and his officers. The spirit of martyrdom slumbered 
 at that moment among the Protestants, or was tried by a test 
 too sore for our frail humanity. It can, indeed, never be known 
 whether even Polycarp or Ignatius would have borne up against 
 the Dragonnades as firmly as they submitted themselves to the 
 lions Worried, disgusted, and exasperated beyond endurance, 
 
644 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 by a plague more loathsome than any which visited Pharaoh, 
 multitudes of the Huguenots subscribed their names, or their 
 marks, to lists laid before them by their tormentors, that they 
 might so gain time and opportunity for flight from their native 
 land. But for such emigra nts the new code had set some of 
 its most subtle springes. If any one who had subscribed the 
 roll of the converted was found attempting an escape from 
 France, he was punished with the galleys as an emigrating 
 Protestant. If he stayed at home adhering to his religion, he 
 was punished with the same severity as a relapsed Catholic. 
 To have hedged up his opponents in this inextricable dilemma 
 is the ground on which Pere la Chaise has been extolled by 
 one of his eulogists as a bright model of legislative wisdom. 
 
 Whether such praise was due to him or not, there can be 
 no doubt that both he and his royal penitent received with 
 delight the accounts of the success of their Propaganda. It 
 seemed to them, to Le Tellier, to Louvois, and to Madame de 
 Maintenon, to have levelled all the difficulties which had hith- 
 erto forbidden the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. If, they 
 asked, there was really but one religion in France de facto, 
 why should there any longei be more than one de jure ? The 
 sagacity of Madame de Maintenon, aided by her old Huguenot 
 habits and remembrances, was indeed proof against these illu- 
 sions. She well knew that the faith of her ancestors was in-> 
 domitable, even by the Dragonnades of her husband ; but with 
 her cold and characteristic shrewdness she remarked, " The 
 parents may be hypocrites, but the children will grow up to 
 be good Catholics." 
 
 Yet, while the fatal decision was still in suspense, the Prot- 
 estants omitted no practicable effort for their own deliverance. 
 Many and pathetic were their appeals to the whole Christian 
 commonwealth, and of these none were more eloquent than 
 that of their great pastor Jurieu. But the custom-house offi- 
 cers of France were able to prevent the introduction there of a 
 remonstrance which all the doctors of France would have been 
 unable to answer. To Louis himself his persecuted subjects 
 addressed pictures of their distress, and petitions for relief, to 
 which no human heart, unless rendered callous by bigotry, 
 could have been insensible. But borrowing, as it is said, the 
 language of Francis L, he told their deputies that, to restore 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 645 
 
 unity of religion to his people, he would willingly employ one 
 of his hands to chop off the other. Despair then dictated bold- 
 er courses ; and the Protestants of Languedoc, of the Ceven- 
 nes, of Vivarais, and of Dauphine met to worship publicly in 
 defiance of the law, that they might refute, by their numbers, 
 the statements of their persecutors as to the multitude of the 
 pretended abjurations. They came together, not with swords, 
 but with Bibles in their hands ; and, by the order of Louvois, 
 hundreds of them were slaughtered either by his soldiers or by 
 the public executioners. 
 
 At length, on the 18th of October, 1685, one of the darkest 
 days in the dark annals of France, Louis XIV. signed the or- 
 dinance which revoked the Edict of Nantes. Those words 
 might seem to imply that he merely abrogated that great char- 
 ter of his illustrious ancestor. But the terms of his ordinance 
 went much farther than this, and merit peculiar attention. 
 
 " Observing (so runs the preamble), with the gratitude which 
 we so justly owe to Grod, that our cares have produced their 
 desired result, since the better and the larger part of those who 
 professed the religion calling itself Reformed have embraced 
 the Catholic faith, for which reason the farther execution of 
 the Edict of Nantes is useless," therefore the royal legislator 
 proceeded to enact, in substance, as follows : The public cele- 
 bration of the Protestant worship was no longer to be permit- 
 ted in any part of his kingdom. All Protestant pastors were 
 to quit France within fifteen days, and were to incur the pun- 
 ishment of the galleys for life if they should again officiate in 
 that capacity. But any pastor who should conform to the 
 Catholic Church was to receive a pension exceeding by one 
 third his actual stipend, with a reversion of half of that pen- 
 sion to his widow, and was to be at liberty to practice as an 
 advocate, should such be his wish, without the usual academ- 
 ical studies. Every parent was required to send his children 
 to the Catholic churches, and was forbidden to educate them 
 as Protestants. All emigrants were to return to France within 
 four months, or were to be subjected to the confiscation of all 
 their property. The galleys for life in the case of men, and 
 imprisonment for life in the case of women, were to be the 
 penalties of an attempt to emigrate. To this catalogue of de- 
 nunciations was added what, in appearance at least, was a 
 
646 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 just and humane indulgence. " The members of this relig- 
 ion," said the ordinance, " may continue to inhabit the cities 
 and other parts of our realm until it shall please Gfod to en- 
 lighten them, without being molested on account of their re- 
 ligion, so long as they do not engage in the public exercise 
 of it." 
 
 It was with a kind of melancholy fitness that this persecut- 
 ing edict was thus prefaced with a false apology, and closed 
 by a faithless promise. It was false that the better and larger 
 part of the Protestants had embraced the Catholic faith ; it was 
 a mere illusion and a snare to promise that the rights of con- 
 science should be respected so long as the Huguenots did not 
 worship publicly. 
 
 The resentment with which the heart rises against the royal 
 author of so much guilt and misery is, however, almost si- 
 lenced by the remembrance of the character of the court, and 
 the spirit of the times in which he lived. Hymned and dei- 
 fied, even in his crimes and follies, by such a chorus as that 
 which daily greeted him with the incense of their flattery, how 
 should a poor mortal man escape the intoxication, or think of 
 himself as less than the Grod they made him ? for they were no 
 vulgar lips or pens which extolled his revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes as among the greatest achievements of his life. 
 
 It may have been little that such was the strain of the la- 
 dies of his court; that Madame de Maintenon declared that 
 the act "would cover him with glory before Grod and men;" 
 and Madame de Sevigne, that " there never had been, nor could 
 be, any other ordinance so magnificent, or any act of any other 
 king so glorious as this." It was, perhaps, something more 
 that the aged Le Tellier sang the Nunc dimittis of Simeon as, 
 on the 18th of October, he attached the great seal of France 
 to the ordinance, and actually died twelve days afterward. 
 But Louis had higher suffrages than these. His admirable 
 grandson, the Duo de Bourgogne, anticipated "the astonish- 
 ment with which all Europe would regard the extinction by a 
 single edict of a heresy with which six preceding kings had 
 contended in vain." The great Arnauld, while describing the 
 measure as "a little too violent," declared that "he did not 
 think it unjust.'' The still greater Bossuet, and the eloquent 
 Flechier, called on their congregations to lift up their voices 
 
COLBE&T AND LOUVOIS. 647 
 
 in loud thanksgiving for this blessing to the Church. And the 
 Galiican Church herself, as represented by her synod of May, 
 1685, that is, while the Dragonnades were yet in progress, had 
 the intrepidity to assure the king that, " without violence and 
 without arms," he had induced all reasonable people to aban- 
 don heresy, and had " reclaimed the wanderers who, perhaps, 
 would never have returned to the bosom of the Church except 
 by the road strewn with flowers which he had opened for 
 them." The offense, therefore, was not that of Louis alone, 
 nor did he alone sustain the punishment. 
 
 The edict of revocation was executed with inflexible rigor. 
 The pastors, and among them the celebrated Claude, were 
 driven into immediate exile. Vast crowds of fugitives, with 
 more or less success, attempted to follow. Some bribed the 
 guard stationed along the frontier. Some forced for themselves 
 a passage with the sword. Delicate and aged women, says 
 Benoit, might be seen crawling many weary leagues in the 
 hope of escaping at once from their persecutors and from their 
 country. Some of the younger, he adds (not, perhaps, with- 
 out the involuntary smile which will occasionally light up the 
 French countenance in its deepest gloom), disguised them- 
 selves by spoiling their complexions, by producing artificial 
 wrinkles, and by pretending to be dumb. Few ships quitted 
 the coast without carrying away fugitives stowed and hidden 
 amid the cargo. Many put to sea in open boats. The high- 
 ways were thronged with Protestants yoked by chains to the 
 most desperate criminals. Grentlemen who had, till then, lived 
 in affluence and in honor, crowded the galleys of Marseilles, 
 and women of every rank and condition of life filled, as pris- 
 oners, the convents and the jails of France. The Reign of 
 Terror, which was to deform the close of the succeeding cen- 
 tury, was not more formidable or more extensive. 
 
 After the lapse of thirty eventful years from the revocation 
 of the Edict of Nantes, Louis was an infirm and an aged man. 
 He had survived his children and grandchildren; He had 
 been humbled by the victories of Eugene and Marlborough. 
 He was overwhelmed with debt. He was hated by the people 
 who had so long idolized him, and was compelled to listen to 
 the indignant invectives which the whole civilized world poured 
 forth against his blind and inhuman persecutions. Yet in 
 
648 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY UNDER 
 
 March, 1715, and within five months of his death, he published 
 another ordinance, declaring that every man who had continued 
 to reside in France after the ordinance of 1685 had given con- 
 clusive proof that he was a Catholic, beqause, if not a Cath- 
 olic, he would not have been permitted to dwell there. It was 
 therefore enacted that every one who had avowed his purpose 
 to persist in the Protestant religion should be regarded as a re- 
 lapsed heretic, and punished accordingly. To quit France as a 
 Protestant had been declared, by the law of 1685, a crime pun- 
 ishable by the galleys for life. Not to have quitted France 
 was declared, by the law of 1715, conclusive proof of a volun- 
 tary continuance there as a Catholic. The code of persecution 
 was again erected on flagrant absurdity and falsehood the 
 most fitting and convenient foundation for all such codes. And 
 then the long career of him in whose name and by whose sanc- 
 tion it had been promulgated reached its close. He died, de- 
 claring to the Cardinals Rohan and Bissy, and to his confessor, 
 the Jesuit Le Tellier, that, being himself altogether ignorant 
 of ecclesiastical questions, he had acted under their guidance 
 and as their agent in all that he had done against either the 
 Jansenists or the Protestant heretics, and on those, his spiritual 
 advisers, he devolved the responsibility to the Supreme Judge. 
 
 We may well believe, as we most devoutly hope, that the 
 decrees of that dread tribunal are often more lenient, as they 
 are always more just, than the sentences which erring man 
 pronounces on his fellows. And yet, however deeply conscious 
 of our liability to such error, we may not, on that account, 
 shrink from the unwelcome duty of echoing the indignant re- 
 proaches which have been cast on the name of Louis the Per- 
 secutor by every generation which has been born into the world 
 since his departure from it. Even though the posthumous in- 
 famy of such oppressors may be insufficient entirely to prevent 
 the renewal of such oppressions, it is not altogether ineffectual ; 
 and History would abdicate one of her highest privileges and 
 most sacred duties if, in a faint distrust of her own influence*, 
 she hesitated, calmly indeed and gravely, yet decisively and 
 unambiguously, to denounce the guilt and to brand the mem- 
 ories of such offenders against the religion of Christ and the 
 welfare of mankind. 
 
 I have already taken occasion to avow my belief that it is 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 64C 
 
 not only permitted to us to trace the march of a retributive 
 Providence in tne history of mankind, but that reverently and 
 humbly to interpret the laws by which the Divine government 
 of the world is conducted is the highest of the ends with a 
 view to which any wise man engages in a review of that his- 
 tory. To myself it seems impossible that any such man should 
 well consider the events which followed these persecutions with- 
 out regarding them as among the most signal examples of the 
 retributive justice of (rod. Even they who dislike and avoid, 
 as unphilosophical, the religious phraseology of such an avow- 
 al, are not seldom driven to the use of more circuitous, but 
 not, I think, more profound terms, to give expression to the 
 same general meaning. 
 
 The extent of the depopulation to which France was sub- 
 jected by the Edict of October, 1685, has been estimated by 
 many different writers of great authority in terms varying 
 with their respective sympathies, political or religious. The 
 Due de Bourgogne, anxious to vindicate his grandfather, ap- 
 pears to have concluded that the emigrants did not exceed 
 68,000. Yoltaire calculates them as amounting, in the first 
 three years, to 50,000 families. Marshal Vauban represented 
 to Louvois that, in five years, 100,000 Frenchmen had fled 
 the country ; and that 9000 of the best seamen, with 12,000 
 soldiers and 600 officers, had joined the enemies of France. 
 M. de Sismondi considers the loss to have exceeded 300,000 
 men ; and M. Capefigue, the latest writer on the subject, hos- 
 tile to the name and cause of the Protestants, reports, as the 
 result of his searches into the still extant provincial records, 
 that at least 225,000 of their number quitted the kingdom. 
 But all these writers are agreed that the fugitives were among 
 the bravest, the most intelligent, and the most industrious 
 members of society, and that they carried with them into hos- 
 tile countries the mechanical arts by which they had, till then, 
 enriched their own, and by which they far more than repaid 
 the hospitality which every where welcomed them. 
 
 Of the numbers who perished in ineffectual attempts to es- 
 cape, in conflicts with the troops of Louvois, on the scaffold, 
 in the prisons, and on the galleys, the conjectural estimates 
 are still more various and uncertain. But no one disputes tha< 
 the loss was enormous, or that the universal alarm and anxio- 
 
650 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY* UNDER 
 
 ty which were protracted during so many years induced other 
 and scarcely less lamentable evils. 
 
 The cry of distress from the sufferers was answered from 
 every part of Europe by a cry of pity and of indignation. It 
 gave to the confederacy against Louis both the energy of the 
 vindictive passions, and the support which, in drawing the 
 sword, men derive from the belief that it is wielded in a sacred 
 cause against the common enemy of mankind. 
 
 By this egregious error, as well as crime, of Louis and his 
 counselors, William, the head of that confederacy, was enabled 
 to wrest from the King of France, and to vindicate as his own, 
 the position which Henry IV., and Richelieu, and Mazarin, and 
 even Louis himself, had assumed as protector and guide of the 
 Protestant powers. This hereditary weapon of his house was 
 thenceforward turned with fatal efficacy against it. The vic- 
 tories of Eugene and Marlborough, the humiliations of Grer- 
 truydenberg, and the concessions of Utrecht, were all among 
 the direct results of the Dragonnades, and of the revocation of 
 the Edict of Nantes. 
 
 But they were not the only or the most fatal results. The 
 age in which Louis lived was far too enlightened for the sub- 
 missive endurance of such enormities. They gave birth to new 
 and dangerous ideas. They suggested questions never to be 
 discussed with safety in any land in which the fictions of gov- 
 ernment are at the same time falsehoods. They provoked even 
 the devout Fenelon to inquire into the grounds on which the 
 will of a single man was to be the arbiter of the happiness and 
 of the creeds of millions. They contributed largely to dissolve 
 the illusions of French loyalty to the absolute King of France. 
 Great as was the descent from the " Telemaque" to the " So- 
 cial Contract," that descent had now become inevitable. The 
 grave protests of the Archbishop of Cambray against so glaring 
 an infringement of the laws of the Grospel and of the feelings 
 of humanity ripened at last into the protest of Rousseau against 
 the fundamental principles of all human society. Among the 
 countless causes which were to combine to overthrow the Dy- 
 nasty of the Bourbons, and to conduct the descendants of Lou- 
 is to the scaffold and to exile, few were more active than the 
 blind and bigoted zeal with which, at the bidding of priests, 
 and women, and evil counselors, and especially of Le Telliei 
 
COLBERT AND LOUVOIS. 651 
 
 and Louvois, he sentenced so large a proportion of his unof- 
 fending subjects to unmerited sufferings of the same general 
 nature. 
 
 That in the all- wise and equitable judgment of Him whose 
 judgments are alone of any real importance to the highest or 
 to the meanest of us, the offense of Louis may have been mit- 
 igated by many considerations, of which Omniscience alone 
 can take cognizance, I willingly and gladly believe. He was 
 a man of many noble purposes and of many generous impulses ; 
 and he labored under disadvantages and temptations by which 
 no other man was ever so powerfully assailed. But to us he 
 is known only as the depositary of one of the highest trusts 
 which was ever committed by God to any of his creatures ; 
 and, as his elevation was eminent, and his abuse of it conspic- 
 uous, so, according to a general law of our existence, was the 
 magnitude of his offense proclaimed by the magnitude of the 
 punishment which it drew upon himself and on those whose 
 felicity or sorrows were inseparable from his. 
 
 If any teacher of what is called " the positive" shall reject 
 this teaching as puerile or as superstitious, let him at least 
 substitute some other explanation of phenomena which no 
 skepticism can dispute, and of sequences which no incredulity 
 can deny. In the mean while we will cling to our long-cher- 
 ished belief that the bonds are still unbroken and indissoluble, 
 which, as our Bibles assure us, connected together, in the days 
 of old, the oppression of the just and the judicial chastisement 
 of the oppressor. 
 
652 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OP 
 
 LECTURE XXIII. 
 
 ON THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY AS ADMINISTERED BY LOUIS XIV. IN PERSON. 
 
 ON the death of Mazarin, Louis XIY. had announced that 
 he would "be his own chief minister. On the death of Louvois 
 in 1691, that boast was, for the first time, completely verified. 
 Better had it been for France if he had continued to the last 
 in a real, though in a disguised pupilage. He was admirably 
 qualified to sustain the character of a king, and no less emi- 
 nently unfit to discharge the more arduous office of an admin- 
 istrator. 
 
 Of all the external advantages which best become a mon- 
 arch, both nature and fortune were bountiful, if not rather 
 prodigal, to Louis. It was well said, that if the word " maj- 
 esty" had never been in use before, it must have been invent- 
 ed to characterize him. His person was stately and of exqui- 
 site proportions. The consciousness of supreme authority, 
 tempered by a generous respect toward even the meanest of his 
 associates, gave to his countenance a noble expression, to which 
 each of his finely-sculptured features contributed its share. 
 In all his gestures the sense of high dignity was animated and 
 controlled by a graciousness which captivated every one who 
 approached him, and by an elegance which seemed instinctive 
 in his nature. His courtesy to all men, and still more to all 
 women, was that of a preux chevalier. His familiar conver- 
 sation was grave but engaging, replete with curious anecdotes, 
 and abounding in reflections well weighed if not profound, and 
 unborrowed if not original. His more sustained elocution flow- 
 ed with facility and copiousness ; and if no man exacted so 
 large a tribute of applause, none possessed in greater perfec- 
 tion the talent of bestowing praise which went straight to the 
 heart, and settled there. 
 
 I doubt whether any human being ever enjoyed, in greater 
 perfection, the blessing of nerves toned to habitual energy, and 
 exempt from all morbid sensitiveness. Heat, cold, pain ; fa- 
 
LOUIS xiv. 653 
 
 tigue, and hunger, seemed to have no power over him. Not 
 only his delicate courtiers, buf his hardy veterans, admired the 
 stoicism of their invulnerable king ; and his mental composure 
 was on a level with his bodily hardihood. No provocation 
 could excite him to unseemly anger, and no calamity could 
 depress him to unmanly dejection. If he was often the victim, 
 he was never the slave of appetite or passion. Though con- 
 stantly exposed to the allurements of the most exquisite flat- 
 tery and of the most fascinating caresses, he never yielded 
 himself to the guidance of any favorite, male or female, but 
 adhered, with immutable constancy and calmness, to the min- 
 isters whom he had either trained or chosen. 
 
 This unshaken equilibrium of mind and firmness of bodily 
 constitution enabled Louis to maintain a continuity of mental 
 labor, an exact method in business, and a consistency of pur- 
 pose, which imparted a certain dramatic unity of action to the 
 whole of his long career. Under all vicissitudes of good and 
 evil fortune, he lived for the single purpose of enlarging and 
 consolidating the powers of his crown. 
 
 Louis was a self- worshiper ; but to maintain that worship 
 he carefully cherished in his bosom, and practiced jn his pri- 
 vate relations, the virtues which he most highly respected, 
 such as truth, honor, courtesy, courage, and fidelity to his 
 promises except, indeed, the promise which he made on his 
 espousals. It was his evil fortune to be the object of a yet 
 more intoxicating worship from the illustrious authors by 
 whom he was surrounded, but it was also his wisdom to make 
 a skillful use even of that disadvantage. He appreciated, ex- 
 tolled, and not seldom rewarded their genius, and earned in 
 exaggerated, but yet immortal praises, a recompense such as 
 a thousand-fold the same expenditure of money or of labor in 
 any other direction could not have purchased for him. Yet, 
 if it be indeed true, as some modern French writers maintain, 
 that the great dramatists of his age at once represented and 
 apologized for the disorderly passions of the enamored king in 
 the mimic heroes whom they sent to head the stage before him, 
 well indeed had it been both for him and for them if they had 
 substituted their keenest shafts of satire for the most seductive 
 and eloquent of those dishonest eulogies. 
 
 I do not think that either the writings of Louis, or the his- 
 
654 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OP 
 
 tories or memoires of his reign, justify any high estimate of 
 his intellectual powers. He had indeed, in perfection, some 
 of the talents of a mere man of business. He could sustain 
 the weight of any number of details, however intricate or te- 
 dious ; and, within a range of ideas neither very comprehensive 
 nor very profound, was perspicacious, accurate, and persever- 
 ing. But there is no proof, nor, indeed, any considerable sug- 
 gestion, that he was skillful in the practical science of govern- 
 ment, or well instructed in any of the moral sciences which 
 are tributary to it. 
 
 His memory is, however, enshrined in Voltaire's " Siecle de 
 Louis Quatorze." The king and his great eulogist seem to 
 have been born for the express purpose of bearing to each other 
 the relation of hero and historian, so complete and so harmoni- 
 ous was the correspondence between the dramatic majesty of 
 the Grand Monarque of Versailles and the dramatic imagina- 
 tion of the philosopher of Ferney. Nature had lavished on the 
 imperator of France all the gifts, and Fortune all the felicities, 
 which the dictator of the republic of letters could best appre- 
 ciate and portray. The dominion cf either potentate has now, 
 indeed, passed away, but the book to which this alliance be- 
 tween them gave birth must ever remain an inimitable monu- 
 ment of the greatness both of the idol and the idolater. Nor, 
 indeed, is any one likely to hazard such an imitation. "We 
 have as little prospect of seeing a new Siecle de Louis Q,ua- 
 torze as a new tragedy on the story of Zaire. It is a trophy 
 to the fame of Louis which no meaner hand can either embel- 
 lish or subvert. But, while it protects his memory against all 
 injurious assaults, it may, for that very reason, impart free- 
 dom to the attempt to estimate rightly, even though it be un- 
 favorably, his real character as the personal administrator of 
 the government of France. 
 
 It is, indeed, an attempt which has been made so often, and 
 by authors of so much eminence, that, unless by sacrificing 
 truth to novelty, I believe it to be impossible to offer any thing 
 on the subject which would not be, in substance, a repetition 
 of what has been said, and well said, before. The pencil and 
 the chisel did not multiply representations of the bodily form 
 and features of Louis during his life-time more frequently than 
 the pen has delineated his character since his death. The his- 
 
LOUIS xiv. 65s 
 
 tories and the memoirs of his reign may be said to emulate the 
 number and the gigantic proportions of those royal edifices by 
 which it was illustrated ; and all that remains to any one who 
 would now pronounce a just judgment on the conduct of the 
 great king himself, is to follow the best of the innumerable 
 guides who present themselves to his notice. I therefore have 
 selected M. Lemontey as my chief authority, believing as I do 
 that his essay " Sur 1'Etablissement Monarchique de Louis 
 XIV." is at once the most complete and the most compendious 
 of the various summaries which have been published of the 
 facts to which I shall have occasion to refer as the basis of 
 the conclusions which are to follow. 
 
 Louis himself, indeed, has been drawn by his own hand 
 more distinctly, if less powerfully, than by M. Lemontey, or 
 than by Voltaire himself. Though an illiterate man, he was 
 a diligent writer, and his collected works fill six octavo vol- 
 umes. In the first and second of them will be found his Me- 
 moires Historiques, addressed to the Dauphin, and containing 
 a series of instructions for his guidance whenever he should 
 be called to wear the crown of France. The following extracts 
 from them will explain what was his estimate of his own kingly 
 duties and prerogatives. Yet it should be observed that these 
 isolated passages are detached from a context which is gener- 
 ally honorable both to the character and the understanding 
 of their royal author ; and that his naked theory of despotism 
 is really propounded in his memoirs, not idly or ostentatiously, 
 but in order to enforce upon his destined successor those sacred 
 duties which he judged to be inseparable from the possession 
 of absolute authority. 
 
 "It is," writes the royal interpreter of the science of gov- 
 ernment, " the will of Heaven, who has given kings to man, 
 that they should be revered as his vicegerents, he having re- 
 served to himself alone the right to scrutinize their conduct." 
 "It is the will of God that every subject should yield to his 
 sovereign an implicit obedience." " The worst calamity which 
 can befall any one of our rank is to be reduced to that sub- 
 jection in which the monarch is obliged to receive the law 
 from his people." " It is the essential vice of the English mon- 
 archy that the king can make no extraordinary levies of men 
 or money without the consent of the Parliament, nor convene 
 
656 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 the Parliament without impairing his own authority." " All 
 property within our realm belongs to us in virtue of the same 
 title. The funds actually deposited in our treasury, the funds 
 in the hand of revenue officers, and the funds which we allow 
 our people to employ in their various occupations, are all equal- 
 ly subject to our control." " Be assured that kings are ab- 
 solute lords, who may fully and freely dispose of all the proper- 
 ty in the possession either of churchmen or of laymen, though 
 they are bound always to employ it as faithful stewards." 
 " Since the lives of his .subjects belong to the prince, he is 
 obliged to be solicitous for the preservation of them." " The 
 first basis of all other reforms was the rendering my own will 
 properly absolute." Such, in his more contemplative moods, 
 was his view of his own kingly powers. Jn his colloquial mo- 
 ments the same doctrines were more pithily compressed into 
 his celebrated aphorism, " L'Etat c'est moi." 
 
 It was at the date of the treaty of Mmeguen, of August, 
 1678, that this autocratic theory had received the most com- 
 plete practical development ; for, at that time, the dominion of 
 Louis was elevated to its greatest height, and was resting upon 
 its most secure foundation. "What, then, were those elements 
 of power in reliance on which he so confidently maintained 
 those doctrines in his own person, and so unambiguously in- 
 culcated them on the heir-apparent of his crown ? 
 
 First. His lofty conception of his own regal state was sus- 
 tained by the command of a regular army, such as the Eu- 
 ropean world had never before seen since the days of Charle- 
 magne, or perhaps of the Antonines. The veterans who had 
 grown up during his minority in the lawless wars of the 
 Fronde had been silently, but rapidly disbanded, and their 
 ranks had been filled by boys, trained up from their youth in 
 a strict and salutary discipline. Boileau, after attending a re- 
 view of that young army, said with equal truth and humor, 
 " Elle sera fort bonne quand elle sera majeure ;" and so it 
 happened. They were carefully instructed in all the maneu- 
 vers and military arts which Gustavus Adolphus had intro- 
 duced into modern warfare. They were the first French troops 
 who were clothed, armed, and accoutered uniformly and ac- 
 cording to fixed regulations. They were recruited by royal 
 officers, and not, as formerly, by the governors of the different 
 
 
LOUIS xiv. 657 
 
 provinces. By the king himself, and no longer by those gov- 
 ernors, all commissions were granted, and all promotions made 
 among them. The ordnance, the engineers, the commissariat, 
 and all the other military departments now, for the first time, 
 received a regular organization. The offices of constable, high 
 admiral, lieutenant general of France, and all the other high 
 dignities which conferred on the holders of them a great and 
 indefinite authority, both over the troops and in the civil gov- 
 ernment, were suppressed ; and the soldier's ambition was 
 limited to warlike distinctions, and, as the most elevated of 
 them all, to the rank of Marechal de France. It was in this 
 service that Conde, Turenne, and Luxembourg had risen to 
 the highest glory. Vauban had created the science of fortifi- 
 cation. Louvois had administered, with unrivaled energy, the 
 financial concerns and the internal economy of the forces whom 
 those great generals had conducted in the field. Honors free- 
 ly and judiciously bestowed stimulated the ardor of those who 
 were able to bear arms ; and the Hotel des Invalides, the most 
 superb of all the edifices of the capital of France, was con- 
 structed for the solace of the veterans. And thus, in the course 
 of a few years, was called into existence the most formidable 
 of European armies. It was trained to exact obedience, gov- 
 erned with perfect order, and paid with punctilious regularity. 
 It exulted in its own achievements, and gloried in the reputa- 
 tion of its chiefs. But, above all, it was enthusiastically de- 
 voted to the king. At their head he had frequently, in the 
 sieges of fortified towns, claimed for himself the post of honor 
 and of danger, and had not seldom accompanied and command- 
 ed them in the camp. In his name every trophy was won. 
 By him every substantial recompense was awarded; and by 
 him, also, the honors of war were conferred with a majesty, a 
 cordiality, and a grace which immeasurably enhanced their 
 value. 
 
 By these methods, or by such as these, Louis had acquired 
 that great first instrument of all arbitrary power, a soldiery 
 who had ceased to be citizens, who regarded the military serv- 
 ice as the only path to wealth and eminence, and who sought 
 renown by cultivating the favor, not of their fellow-subjects, 
 but of their sovereign alone. The legionaires of the King of 
 France were at the same time his praetorians, and io that irre- 
 
 TT 
 
658 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 sistible armament the people of France had been "brought into 
 a willing, or, rather, an ostentatious subjection. 
 
 For it was not embodied for the encounter with foreign ene- 
 mies alone. It was the effective instrument of the royal will 
 in every branch of the civil government. Soldiers were ever 
 at hand to enforce the payment of public taxes. Soldiers were 
 ever ready to compel obedience to the orders of the executive 
 authority. Soldiers, as we lately saw, were employed even as 
 missionaries, to inculcate obedience to the spiritual dominion 
 of Rome, by executing those dragonnades which brought into 
 every Protestant dwelling every scourge which bigotry, licen- 
 tiousness, and rapacity could inflict upon the wretched inhab- 
 itants. 
 
 Secondly. The civil government of France, under Louis 
 XIV., acquired a concentration and an energy like that of some 
 vast encampment. Eventually it became no empty boast that 
 he would be himself his own chief minister. After the death 
 of Colbert and of Louvois, the other functionaries of the state 
 were not merely his inferiors or his servants, but were, in the 
 proper sense of the word, his subordinates also. France was 
 subject to his single will. The States-General were extinct. 
 The Provincial States, as we shall hereafter see, had ceased to 
 meet. The Parliaments were silent and submissive. Taxes 
 were imposed by royal edicts, in whatever form and to what- 
 ever amount seemed fit to the great autocrat, and were levied, 
 without opposition, from his subjects. Throughout the prov- 
 inces, the ancient administrators of the local government had 
 given place to the intendants, who, originally appointed by 
 Richelieu, had become the immediate delegates, in every part 
 of the kingdom, of the vast prerogatives of the crown. 
 
 The existing centralization of power in France, so foreign to 
 our own habits of thought and action, is as ancient as the days 
 of Louis XIY. ; and his introduction of it is still applauded by 
 some even of those who, in the present times, have the most 
 eloquently arraigned his despotism. They draw an impressive 
 and a just comparison between the regularity, the method, and 
 the efficiency of his system of internal rule, and the violence, 
 the frauds, and the extravagance of the earlier system for which 
 tt was substituted ; and if his people were really reduced by 
 any inevitable necessity to the choice between the disorders 
 
LOUIS xiv, 659 
 
 of a dispersed and incoherent administration on the one hand, 
 and the tyranny of a centralized government on the other, it 
 must, indeed, be admitted that he chose for them the lighter 
 evil of the two. But of the real existence of any such neces- 
 sity I am not aware that any proof has been or could be given. 
 
 Thirdly. To secure to that central power its characteristic 
 decision and promptitude, Louis became the founder of the 
 police which has ever since exercised so great an influence in 
 France. The chief objects of that institution were indeed the 
 prevention of crime and the maintenance of the public peace, 
 but it was also designed to secure the royal authority against 
 all secret conspiracies and intrigues ; and with that view it was 
 supported by a systematic espionage, and became a vast net, 
 of which the minister of police held the strings, and which 
 inclosed almost every member of society within its invisible 
 meshes. D'Argenson was the Fouche of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Fourthly. The absolute powers of Louis XI Y. were sus- 
 tained by the ecclesiastical not less than by the other orders 
 of his subjects. In virtue of the Concordat of August, 1516, 
 between Francis I. and Leo X., the King of France had become 
 the patron of all episcopal sees, of all royal abbeys, and of many 
 parochial benefices. By the skillful use of that patronage 
 Louis was enabled to attach to his service and person every 
 considerable family in his kingdom. Sometimes he bestowed 
 the cure of souls upon laymen, in commendam. Sometimes 
 lie charged the revenues of particular churches with pensions 
 for the support of his favorites. The abbeys became the ap- 
 panages of noble lords or of noble ladies. The mitres were al- 
 most invariably bestowed on men of high birth but of mean 
 fortunes. The temporalities of the Church were thus employed 
 for the corruption of the world. The single mitigation of the 
 evil was, that the sacerdotal aristocracy was composed of men 
 whose hereditary rank secured for them a liberal education, 
 elegant manners, and at least decorous lives. If, in the reign 
 of Louis XIV., the mitre in the Grallican Church adorned the 
 brows of no candidates for canonization, it was very rarely dis- 
 graced by the scandalous habits or open immoralities of those 
 who wore it. Nor were the French bishops much, or often, in- 
 volved in the cabals of worldly ambition. After the death of 
 
660 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 Mazarin, Louis intrusted no churchman with any considerable 
 authority in the state ; and though he confided the education 
 of the Dauphin to Bossuet and to Fenelon, he did not invite- 
 and would not have permitted, even these illustrious men to 
 exert their genius and eloquence beyond the appropriate sphere 
 of their sacred functions. 
 
 Fifthly. The nobility of France also were constrained to 
 minister to the elevation of their sovereign by a virtual abdi- 
 cation of their own. The ancienf feudal chiefs had, indeed, 
 long since disappeared, but the later Noblesse, of which Charles 
 V. and Louis XI. were the founders, had, even from its origin, 
 been subject to great indignities. Louis XL ennobled not only 
 the municipal officers of the great cities, but his own menial 
 servant. Charles VIII., to the consternation of his age, granted 
 the same honor to a bastard. Charles IX. sold patents of no- 
 bility by twenties and thirties at a time. Henry III. created 
 1000 new nobles in the single year 1576 ; and at last a mul- 
 titude of persons assumed the same rank by a mere lawless 
 usurpation. Louis XIV. was the first to declare against the 
 Noblesse and their privileges that war which was at last to be 
 triumphant in the Revolution. He instituted a severe inquiry 
 into the validity of their pretensions to that rank, and perse- 
 vered in pursuing it without regard to the bitter humiliations 
 to which it subjected so many of the claimants of hereditary 
 titles. He selected all the principal ministers of his crown from 
 plebeian families ; and, to induce the poor nobility to seek their 
 maintenance by commercial pursuits, he published an edict, 
 declaring that such occupations should derogate nothing from 
 their rank and station in society. The exhortation and the in- 
 dulgence were alike indignantly rejected, and the words Che- 
 valier d'Industrie, then first introduced into the French tongue, 
 are said to be the record of the preference which many of those 
 high-born persons gave to a descent into the high road with 
 visors and pistols, over a descent into the counting-house with 
 pens and rulers. Their number was enormous, amounting, it 
 is computed, to not less than 30,000 families. To deliver him- 
 self from that hungry and rapacious swarm became one of the 
 most serious embarrassments of the king. After largely in- 
 creasing the establishment of officers in the army for their re- 
 lief, he at length embodied whole corps, composed exclusivelv 
 
LOUIS xiv. 661 
 
 i,<f these indigent gentlemen. The result was, to place him- 
 self at the head of the most costly, irascible, intrepid, and in- 
 telligent force in Europe. But it was a school in which the 
 proudest learned the great lesson of obedience ; for even when 
 not under arms, the most ancient and illustrious duke was com- 
 pelled to yield precedence to the youngest Marechal de France 
 
 While the necessitous aristocracy were thus tamed in the 
 camp or destroyed in the field of battle, the more affluent were 
 attracted to the court by other motives. Thither came the ru- 
 ral lords from Auvergne, or Brittany, or Provence ; for, to with- 
 hold that homage was to provoke the royal displeasure and the 
 ridicule of society. Thither came also the noble aspirants 
 after honors, preferment, pleasure, or fashion ; for of these the 
 court was the seat and centre. There they sacrificed their 
 independence, and squandered their resources in dress, and 
 equipages, and gallantry, and gaming ; and there they repaired 
 those losses by the acceptance of royal gratuities, bestowed on 
 them in every form the best calculated to mortify the pride 
 of rank and to wound all honest feelings of self-respect. And 
 there also Louis, the most accomplished of gentlemen, habitu- 
 ally exacted and received from the noblest of his realm adula- 
 tions and menial services better becoming the palace of Ispa- 
 han than the chateau of Versailles. The individual nobles 
 who, in the reign of Louis XIII., had aspired to a competition 
 with the royal authority, had been crushed by the iron hand 
 of Richelieu. Their order itself was degraded by the four- 
 teenth Louis into a band of mercenary soldiers or of servile 
 courtiers. 
 
 Sixthly. The magistracy also was rendered tributary to his 
 absolute power. The Parliaments had, to no inconsiderable 
 extent, succeeded to the authority of the States- General, and 
 under the shelter of legal forms exercised at least a suspensive 
 veto on all royal ordinances, and especially on all fiscal edicts. 
 Destitute as they were of all material force, they had long 
 possessed a moral power, to which the power of the sword ren- 
 dered a reluctant and almost unconscious obeisance ; and the 
 brightest page of French history is that which records the cour- 
 age, the disinterestedness, and the learning of that company 
 of pedantic lawyers. But from his boyhood Louis had been 
 taught to regard them with antipathy and contempt. He was 
 
662 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 but seventeen years old when, entering that venerable assem- 
 bly booted and spurred, and (it is usually added) insolently 
 brandishing his riding whip, he dissolved their meeting, for- 
 bade them ever again to prefer any remonstrance to him, and 
 commanded them to confine themselves strictly within the 
 limits of their judicial office ; nor, during the remainder of his 
 long reign, did he once condescend to solicit or to accept their 
 advice. Excluded from their political functions, they found 
 in the assiduous discharge of their duties as judges a shelter 
 from indignities and danger ; and, ceasing to be the antago- 
 nists of the king, they became the instruments of his absolute 
 dominion. Before their tribunal he could humble the proud- 
 est grandees of France. By their concurrence he could impart 
 a seeming legality to his taxation ; and by their agency he 
 was able to carry into execution all the severe and formidable 
 provisions of his penal code of 1670. A more convenient bul- 
 wark could, indeed, hardly have been interposed between an 
 arbitrary throne and the discontents of the people ; for, exist- 
 ing as they did, not by popular representation, but by the ap- 
 pointment of the crown, the public indignation could always 
 be readily directed against them, while they were altogether 
 dependent on the sovereign for support against it. 
 
 Seventhly. The Tiers Etat, or Commons of France, were 
 at this time in a state of abject insignificance and political im- 
 potency. They bore nearly the whole burden of direct taxa- 
 tion, they performed the corvees, or personal services on the 
 public roads, and they lived under all the pressure of the feu- 
 dal tenures, and of the yet subsisting seignorial jurisdictions. 
 The incorporated towns alone retained the ancient forms of 
 civic liberty and the semblance of their ancestral franchises. 
 But these forms and semblances had survived the once living 
 realities. Louis, as we formerly saw, claimed and exercised 
 the right of superseding the elected municipal officers, to make 
 way for officers of his own appointment, and those appoint- 
 ments he disposed of at a kind of public auction. In this 
 manner he put up to sale, in 1681, all the employments at the 
 Hotel de Yille at Paris ; and eleven years later he displaced, 
 in favor of his own nominees, the elected mayors and judicial 
 assessors of every other city in France except Lyons. To en- 
 hance the price of the more considerable of these civic offices, 
 
LOUIS xiv 663 
 
 he sometimes sold with them hereditary patents of nobility, 
 and sometimes he consented to leave a commune in possession 
 of its electoral franchises in consideration of the payment of a 
 sum of money sufficient to indemnify him against what he 
 lost by that forbearance. The extent of this abuse will be 
 best illustrated by a single example. It is that of the city of 
 Rennes, where, in the course of fourteen years, the king cre- 
 ated and sold nineteen royal offices in the militia of the city, 
 all the seats in the civic tribunals, five employments in the 
 local police, with two in the fiscal and one in the legal de- 
 partments ; nor must it be omitted that, in the list of this 
 royal merchandise, the king.was not ashamed to include the 
 office of house-porter to the Hotel de Yille. If Louis the Fat 
 and Louis the Saint are really entitled to the glory of having 
 founded municipal liberty in France, Louis the Great is much 
 more clearly entitled to the reproach of having destroyed it. 
 
 Eighthly. In a preceding lecture I adverted to the absolute 
 dependence into which Louis had reduced the men of letters 
 of France. It was a conquest even yet more essential than 
 any of the rest to the maintenance of his personal supremacy. 
 It gave him the greatest of all powers the power of directing 
 and controlling public opinion. It gave him, as the instru- 
 ments of that power, an assemblage of writers who, even if in- 
 ferior in genius to the philosophers, poets, and dramatists who 
 have conferred immortal renown on the ages of Lorenzo and 
 of Elizabeth, were still decidedly their superiors in the gift of 
 forming and captivating the taste of their fellow-countrymen 
 in their own and all succeeding generations. When Boileau 
 was as profuse in panegyric on Louis as in satire on all other 
 men when Moliere, who laughed at every body else, worshiped 
 him when Racine's devotion to his Creator was reconciled 
 with the idolatry of his king when La Rochefoucauld, in his 
 " indictment against human nature," could find place for en- 
 comiums on that one bright exception when the eloquence 
 of Bossuet could stoop from its loftiest flights to celebrate the 
 virtues of his royal patron when both the learning of the 
 Benedictines and the piety of the Port Royalists rendered a de- 
 vout homage to the great monarch and when the casuistry 
 of the Jesuits apologized for his offenses, how could it be but 
 that every meaner voice should join in the loud chorus of ad- 
 
664 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OP 
 
 ulation, which, during more than half a century, never ceased 
 to extol the courage, the wisdom, the genius, and the triumphs 
 of the universal idol ? And how could it ho but that he who 
 inhaled the fumes of such sacrifices, offered to him by such a 
 priesthood, should yield his better reason to that intoxicating 
 influence, and believe himself to be that miracle of nature 
 which they delineated ? I doubt the truth, for I can not as- 
 certain the authority of the story, that William III. indig- 
 nantly repelled the plaudits of a theatre by the question^ " Do 
 the idiots mistake me for the king of France ?" But, even if 
 untrue, it is no inapt illustration of the then prevailing opin- 
 ion of the extent and of the value of the flatteries which Louis 
 was accustomed to receive and to welcome from his subjects. 
 
 The two foundations of the absolute throne of Louis XIV. 
 were, therefore, terror and admiration : the terror of a power 
 which had subjugated the army, the Church, the magistracy, 
 the noblesse, and the municipalities ; the admiration of a power 
 to which literature and art, arms and fortune, rendered their 
 richest and their uninterrupted tribute. King- worship had 
 never before taken so entire a possession of any Christian state. 
 Never had the luxurious pomp of an Oriental court been so in- 
 timately and so long associated with the energies, the refined 
 tastes, and the intellectual culture of a European sovereignty. 
 During fifty successive years, Louis continued to be the great- 
 est actor on the noblest stage, and in the presence of the most 
 enthusiastic audience of the world. At how boundless an ex- 
 pense of toil and treasure that representation was conducted 
 how it was continued even in the midst of famine and all oth- 
 er national calamities and how the gorgeous drama of Ver- 
 sailles was relieved by the yet more animating spectacle of 
 military triumphs, or darkened by gloom of military reverses, 
 is known to all who have read even the most familiar accounts 
 of the Siecle de Louis Q,uatorze. 
 
 To substitute, however, for that general impression a more 
 definite view of the principal results of this absolute dominion, 
 it may be convenient to advert, however briefly, to the finan- 
 cial consequences of the wars into which Louis plunged ; to 
 the character of his diplomatic relations with all other powers ; 
 io the fiscal calamities induced by his waste of the national re- 
 sources in maintaining the pomp and luxuries of his court ; t<? 
 
LOUIS xiv. 665 
 
 the effect of that lavish expenditure on the morals and man- 
 ners of his age ; to the iniquitous persecutions into which the 
 possession of unrestrained power hurried him ; and to the man- 
 ner in which the abuse of that power contributed to the event- 
 ual subversion of his dynasty. 
 
 First, then, the wars of Louis with the other powers of Eu- 
 rope were commenced on four different occasions between the 
 death of Mazarin and the Peace of Utrecht, and on each of 
 those occasions, the French historians themselves being the 
 judges, were unprovoked and unjustifiable. As he thought on 
 that subject, so he wrote. " Self-aggrandizement," he informs 
 his grandson, " is at once the noblest and the most agreeable 
 occupation of kings." But he affected rather the glory of a 
 conqueror than the reputation of a general. He invariably 
 declined a battle in the field with his enemies, apparently be- 
 cause he would not run the risk of compromising his majes- 
 ty by the indignities of a possible defeat. He as invariably 
 availed himself of every opportunity of undertaking in person 
 the siege of the strongest cities, because in such enterprises 
 the genius of Vauban and of his other engineers assured him 
 of a rich harvest of renown. But, ere long, he wisely aban- 
 doned to his officers the conduct of his armies. His keen sense 
 of ridicule taught him that a king of France could not, in im-^ 
 itation of a Persian sophy, carry with him to the wars his 
 courtiers, and courtesans, and mimes, and cooks, and side- 
 boards, and stage scenery, without provoking from the wits 
 and jesters missiles to which even his artillery could make no 
 effectual answer. He therefore withdrew from the camp the 
 luxuries of his court, but not without drawing to his court 
 much of the licentiousness of the camp. A great, though not 
 an intolerable evil ; but the evil of his habitually maintaining 
 those vast encampments was such as could be endured neither 
 by his neighbors nor by his people. It is with hesitation, be- 
 cause it is with a full knowledge how great are the fallacies 
 to which statistics so often give shelter, that I transcribe the 
 common estimate of the number and the cost of his great arm- 
 aments. It represents the standing army of Louis as having 
 amounted to 400,000 men under arms, or, as I rather under- 
 stand the statement on the muster-rolls, and it assures us that, 
 for the support of the ten campaigns of the war of 1688, the 
 
666 THE ABSOLUTEMONARCHY OF 
 
 French treasury disbursed between forty and forty-one mill- 
 ions of pounds sterling, and between eighty-one and eighty- 
 two millions of the same money on account of the twelve cam > 
 paigns of the war of 1701. Prodigal as such a waste of treas 
 ure may seem, well had it been for mankind if that waste had 
 been the most calamitous result of those campaigns ; but, to 
 the disgrace of our common Christianity and of our common 
 nature, History has a far darker tale to tell of the utter ruin 
 and desolation, by the armies of Louis, of the defenseless cit- 
 ies of Spires, "Worms, and Oppenheim, of all the territories of 
 Treves and Baden, and of all the towns, villages, and hamlets 
 of the Palatinate, and of the unarmed inhabitants of those once 
 smiling regions crimes which, as they were wantonly perpe- 
 trated in cold blood, and by one Christian and civilized people 
 upon another, threw into the shade the worst ravages of Attila 
 or Grenseric, and almost challenged a comparison with the 
 atrocities of the day of St. Bartholomew. 
 
 Nor was the character of his diplomatic relations with other 
 powers more defensible. In his pursuit of that "noblest and 
 most agreeable occupation of kings self-aggrandizement," 
 Louis not only violated all the laws of nations and of human- 
 ity in his warfare with his enemies, but was deliberately, and 
 on principle, regardless of the obligations of good faith toward 
 his allies. " In dispensing with the exact observance of treat- 
 ies (such is the language of his instructions to the Dauphin), 
 we do not," he says, "violate them; for the language of such 
 instruments is never to be understood literally. We must em- 
 ploy, in our treaties, a conventional phraseology, just as we use 
 complimentary expressions in society. They are indispensa- 
 ble to our intercourse with one another, but they always mean 
 much less than they say." " The more unusual, circumspect, 
 and reiterated were the clauses by which the Spaniards ex- 
 cluded me from assisting Portugal, the more evident it is that 
 the Spaniards did not believe that I should really withhold 
 such assistance." 
 
 Machiavelli never taught a more dissolute doctrine, nor Es* 
 co bar a more convenient sophistry ; nor did Moliere ever as- 
 cribe to his Mascarilles a greater proficiency in imposture, than 
 Louis XIV, thus openly avows and attributes to himself. Nor 
 did he write thus to amuse himself with a barren theory or a 
 
LOUIS xiv. 667 
 
 pleasant exaggeration. He actually rendered to Portugal the 
 aid which he had just engaged to withhold from her. He es- 
 tablished a title to the states of Lorraine, and to the cities of 
 Colmar, Strasbourg, and Casal, by artifices at which Gril Bias 
 de Santillane would have been scandalized. He despoiled the 
 Duchesse de Montpensier of her vast inheritance by a strata- 
 gem better befitting the bachelor of Salamanca than a great 
 king. At the moment he was bribing Charles II. to betray 
 his people, he was also exciting the remnant of the Cromwel- 
 lians to revolt against Charles. 
 
 But neither the deceits nor the injustice of Louis irritated 
 mankind so profoundly as his insolence. His statue, at the 
 feet of which all nations were exhibited crouching and in 
 chains, represented to the admiring Parisians the haughty 
 spirit of their sovereign not less distinctly than his noble per- 
 son. He avenged the slightest shadow of an imaginable wrong 
 by the most galling insults. From such indignities Genoa was 
 not rescued by her weakness, nor Holland by the advantages, 
 political and commercial, of her alliance, nor Home by the relig- 
 ious veneration rendered to her pontiffs. And therefore, when 
 Philip II. and Louis XIV. had both, at length, been humbled 
 before the same Bataviaii marshes, the nations of Europe ex- 
 ulted more in the overthrow of the arrogance which had made 
 war with the United Provinces, to punish the discourtesy of a 
 medalist and a gazetteer, than in the defeat of the bigotry which 
 had decimated the Dutch people to establish the Inquisition. 
 
 If the immutable laws of (rod had not decreed that such 
 wars, however successful,' should be followed by a fearful re- 
 bound of misery against the aggressors, this earth would not 
 be habitable. The French nation never recovered the waste 
 of strength and treasure in the campaigns of their once idol- 
 ized monarch, until his dynasty and his institutions had been 
 subverted in the same common ruin. To this day they have 
 never effectually recovered the wounds inflicted on their na- 
 tional self-esteem by the humiliations of the war of the Span- 
 ish succession. And yet neither the loss nor the shame incur- 
 red by those disastrous conflicts were so deeply injurious to the 
 subjects of Louis, as the fiscal calamities induced by his waste 
 of the resources of his people in maintaining the pomp and 
 luxuries of his court, 
 
668 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OV 
 
 Among the many conjectural estimates of the sums squan 
 dered "by him on fetes, gardens, palaces, gratuities, unmerited 
 pensions, and other prodigalities, it is difficult to make any 
 confident preference. But the highest of them will scarcely 
 seem incredible to the readers of Danjeau and St. Simon, or to 
 those who contemplate the sumptuous edifices which still em- 
 bellish Paris, and Marly, and Versailles, and least of all to 
 those who bear in mind the economical illusions under which 
 he acted. 
 
 Those illusions taught him that his extravagance was not 
 only not injurious, but positively beneficial to his subjects. 
 When Madame de Maintenon solicited him to relieve the men- 
 dicants who thronged his palace gates, he made what M. Say 
 calls " that precious and terrible answer, which taught how to 
 ruin a nation upon principle." "A large expenditure," he 
 said, " is the alms-giving of kings," and he gave such alms 
 until France had nearly been reduced to one vast receptacle 
 for paupers. 
 
 His fiscal measures, after the death of Colbert, attest the 
 utmost extremity of distress. The invention of stamp-duties, 
 and the creation and sale of an oppressive monopoly of tobac- 
 co, were comparatively unimportant. Far more burdensome 
 was the duty on all alienations of land, with the auxiliary 
 enactment that no lease should be made to continue in force 
 for more than nine years from its date, that so the alienation 
 tax might be exigible at the end of every such term. Yet 
 more vexatious still were his taxes on marriages and baptisms, 
 and on all the other great transactions of life, which provoked 
 the abandonment of all religious ordinances in those provinces 
 in which they did not provoke partial insurrections. But of 
 all the imposts of the bewildered monarch, the most offensive 
 and intolerable was the royal tithe. In the midst of his mili- 
 tary pursuits, Marshal Vauban had devised a plan for substi- 
 tuting a tax of ten per cent, on the annual income of all im- 
 movable property for a multitude of more vexatious and less 
 profitable duties. Under the shelter of the name of that great 
 man, Louis promulgated an edict for giving effect to this proj- 
 ect ; but with the difference, that whereas the Marshal of 
 France had contemplated a royal tithe in exchange for other 
 burdens, the King of France imposed it in addition to them. 
 
LOUIS xiv. 669 
 
 Nor was this all. The money borrowed on the credit of those 
 revenues created a national debt, which, when due allowance 
 is made for the value of money in that age, appears stupendous 
 even now, with all our lamentable familiarity with such sub- 
 jects. I reject, indeed, as a mere extravagance, though I know 
 not how to reduce to the level of truth, the statement that it 
 amounted to no less than d200,000,000 sterling. But the ac- 
 ceptance of such an exaggeration by writers not habitually 
 credulous or inaccurate is itself some proof that the real amount 
 of the burden transmitted by Louis to his descendants was such 
 as was best expressed by hyperbole, in the absence of any ex- 
 act means of knowledge. 
 
 The more prominent results of this extravagance were per- 
 ceptible to the contemporary memorialists of the court and 
 times of Louis XI Y. Smuggling became a trade in which none 
 were ashamed, and few were afraid to engage. "Whole bodies 
 of cavalry deserted their ranks to take their share in it. 'On 
 the northern and eastern frontiers, the half- famished garrisons 
 were in revolt. At the beginning, as at the close of the eight- 
 eenth century, the place d'armes in front of the chateau of 
 Versailles was thronged with hordes of destitute people clam- 
 orous for relief. At length Louis the Magnificent himself was 
 driven by want to Paris, humbly to sue, in person, for loans at 
 an extortionate usury from Samuel Bernard, and the other 
 money-lenders of his capital. 
 
 But to those who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, 
 there were perceptible still more impressive proofs than these 
 of the calamities in which the prodigality of a king may in- 
 volve his people. Wanton wars and heartless luxuries had 
 corrupted the moral sense of that voluptuous court. The the- 
 atre of Paris, at this day, would not tolerate the tone in which, 
 at that time, the great Moliere mocked at conjugal fidelity in 
 comedies written for the theatre of Versailles. The great mon- 
 arch himself violated that duty openly and ostentatiously. He 
 raised to the line of succession to his crown the sons borne to 
 him by the wives of other men while his ow:\ wife was still 
 living. That gaming flourished there to the most extravagant 
 excess, we know from the strange avowals of the courtly Dan- 
 H jeau ; but, unaided by the caustic St. Simon, who would have 
 conjectured that in those splendid halls a fraudulent gamester 
 
670 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 could be regarded in the light of an ingenious, pleasant com- 
 panion ? He tells us of a duke who frequented the royal cir- 
 cle, and who, he says, " was better liked by the king, and had 
 more influence in society than any body. He was," proceeds 
 our author, " magnificent in every thing and a great gambler, 
 and did not pique himself in fair dealing in his play ; but many 
 other great lords did the same, and only laughed at it." The 
 ladies also, as we learn from the same authority, imitated the 
 example. But the female conscience had, it seems, a peculiar 
 tenderness on the subject of cheating at cards. No lady could 
 think of retaining such unrighteous gains. No sooner had she 
 touched them than she religiously gave them all away. But 
 then, it must be added, the gift was always made to some 
 other winner of her own sex. By carefully avoiding the words 
 " interchange of winnings," the fair casuists seem also to have 
 avoided all self-reproach, and to have had an easy escape with 
 their discreet and lenient confessors. In this singular society 
 were young gentlemen also, who relieved the tame formalities 
 of other conversation by admitting to their tables and familiar 
 intercourse notorious criminals, who had animating stories to 
 tell of their own desperate achievements as forgers or as high- 
 waymen. And young and old were alike engaged in that scan- 
 dalous traffic in penalties and forfeitures, which Mr. Macau- 
 lay has so vividly depicted in his portraiture of the court of 
 James II. 
 
 Among the victims of the law in France there were always 
 to be found both the innocent and the rich. To multiply their 
 number was to open a vein of wealth to many a necessitous 
 sycophant of the court. As the miner of California to some 
 newly-discovered digging, or the vulture of those regions to the 
 scent of some recent carcass, so hurried the lords, and even the 
 ladies, of Versailles in search of forgotten penalties, or uncol- 
 lected forfeitures, or obsolete offenses, for which the offenders 
 might still be subjected to fines or confiscations. Sometimes 
 the whole of any such game, when hunted down, was thrown 
 by the lavish king to the informers ; sometimes he himself par- 
 ticipated in the spoil. There were not wanting cases in which 
 even the princesses of his house were enabled, by such re- 
 sources, to repay the expenditure of the wardrobe and the 
 gaming-table. The Duke of Orleans is said to have extracted 
 
LOUIS xiv. 671 
 
 a million of livres from an officer in charge of the military 
 chest, who had been made over to him to be subjected to the 
 peine forte et dure of a judicial process. In this crusade 
 against wealthy criminals, the only persons who were abso- 
 lutely excluded from the field were the destitute kindred, who 
 were to partake of the ruin, though they had not partaken of 
 the guilt of the offenders. 
 
 It is said by M. Lemontey that it was at this period that 
 the word "honnete" exchanged its primitive for its actual 
 meaning in the French vocabulary ; that, till the latter half of 
 the reign of Louis, an " honnete homme" was the name of an 
 upright, not for an inoffensive man ; that, when a man's de- 
 scent was said to be honnete, he was complimented on the vir- 
 tuousness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity of 
 their condition ; and that, when his family were described as 
 honnete, it was an acknowledgment that they belonged to the 
 middle ranks of society, not a suggestion that they were ple- 
 beians. If the remark be accurate, it is a curious instance of 
 the connection between philology and history, and of the influ- 
 ence of the French court on the vernacular language of France. 
 
 But the most impressive record of the misgovernment of 
 Louis is to be found in those religious persecutions into which 
 he was hurried by the possession of an absolute and irrespons- 
 ible power. On the woes which he inflicted on his Protest- 
 ant subjects I have already spoken. But even the members 
 of his own religious communion had terrible penalties to pay 
 for any dissent from his opinions. At the distance of three 
 leagues from Versailles stood the splendid church and monas- 
 tery of Port Royal des Champs, where dwelt the Mere Ange- 
 lique and her saintly sisterhood, and near them Pascal, Ar- 
 nauld, Nicole, De Sacy, and their illustrious fraternity. Those 
 learned men had declared themselves unable to find in the 
 " Augustinus," a posthumous work of Cornelius Jansen, bish- 
 op of Ypres, five propositions, which the Pope had discovered 
 there, and had censured as heretical. Those holy women, be- 
 ing unable to read the Latin in which the book was written, 
 had refused to affirm, either under their hands or with their 
 lips, that those propositions might be found there by those who 
 could read it. For these offenses the king dispersed the whole 
 of the brethren of Port Royal, and exiled many of them, lev. 
 
672 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 eled the monastery to the ground, exhumed and gave to the 
 dogs the dead bodies of such of the fraternity as had been 
 buried there, and committed the survivors to an imprisonment 
 from which death alone released them. 
 
 If the picture which I have thus laid before you of the ad- 
 ministration of the government of France by Louis XIY. be in- 
 deed accurate, how, it may be asked, could it happen that no 
 voices were raised in his own times and country to anticipate 
 the reproaches of posterity ? There were assuredly not wanting 
 many men wise enough to perceive such evils, or courageous 
 enough to protest against them. Why, then, were no such re- 
 monstrances raised ? 
 
 I answer, first, by referring to the explanation which I gave 
 in a former lecture of the methods by which literature had 
 been not merely silenced on all political questions, but had 
 been brought by the court into a dependence which was the 
 more servile, because it was willingly, and even ostentatiously 
 borne. I answer, next, by denying the statement that the si- 
 lence of the great men of France on these subjects was as com- 
 plete as it is usually supposed to have been. Among such 
 men a very high place is due to Fenelon, and to his pupil, the 
 Due de Bourgogne. Now every one is agreed that the romance 
 of Telemaque was designed to point out to the heir to the 
 crown of France some of the enormous abuses of the govern- 
 ment of his grandfather. But the Telemaque is neither the 
 only nor the most impressive of the protests made on that sub- 
 ject by its eloquent author. 
 
 It is impossible to state with precision what was the date 
 of the letter from Fenelon to Louis XIY., which is to be found 
 in the eighth volume of the works of D'Alembert, although it 
 is certain that it was written after the death of Louvois in 
 1691. In her preface to Danjeau's Memoirs, Madame de Gren- 
 lis has, indeed, disputed the authenticity of that letter alto- 
 gether. She supposes it to have been forged by the skeptical 
 philosopher who first gave it to the world ; and she suggests 
 that he was prompted to commit this crime by his desire to 
 give to his own disloyal principles the apparent sanction of one 
 of the most revered of the divines of France, who was, at the 
 same time, one of the holiest of her saints, and one of the most 
 considerable of her men of letters. To myself the imputation 
 
LOUIS xiv. 673 
 
 appears altogether incredible. It was in his official character 
 of secretary to the Royal Academy that D'Alembert publish- 
 ed his Eloge on Fenelon, and the letter which is appended to 
 it. To have been detected in the fraud imputed to him would 
 have been to expose himself to infamy and ruin ; and the de- 
 tection would have been perfectly easy, as he declared his man- 
 uscript of the letter in question to be authenticated by the 
 handwriting of the Archbishop of Cambray himself. Little 
 respect is indeed due to the political or religious principles of 
 D'Alembert, but he was neither wicked enough nor foolish 
 enough to expose himself to so terrible a risk merely to gratify 
 himself by blackening the reputation of a deceased monarch. 
 Madame de Grenlis's suspicions are also, I think, repelled by 
 her own elaborate and indignant demonstration of the exact 
 harmony between the supposed letter and many passages of 
 the Telemaque. I therefore suppose it to be genuine, and 1 
 think that the following extracts from it will demonstrate that 
 one of the most profound and of the closest observers of what 
 was passing in the court and kingdom of Louis XIV., regarded 
 his administration of the government of France in a light even 
 more unfavorable than that in which I have hitherto repre- 
 sented it. 
 
 " He who takes the liberty, sire," such is the commence- 
 ment of the letter, " to address this communication to you, is 
 one for whom the interests of this world have but little value. 
 He is not prompted to write by pique, by ambition, nor by the 
 wish to intermeddle in great affairs. Though you know not 
 who he is, he loves you, 'and reveres in your person the dele- 
 gated authority of God himself." " Be not surprised 
 
 if he addresses you in terms of unusual emphasis. He does 
 eo because truth is at once free and fearless ; but to truth you 
 have not been accustomed to listen." 
 
 " Your heart is naturally just and equitable. But they 
 who had the charge of your education taught you, as your 
 only principles of government, to be suspicious, and jealous, 
 and haughty ; to keep virtue aloof, to dread all eminent merit, 
 to prefer the society of the flexible and the cringing, and to 
 cherish an exclusive regard to your own personal interests." 
 
 " During the last thirty years, your chief ministers have 
 deranged and reversed all the ancient maxims of our govern- 
 
 U u 
 
674 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OP 
 
 ment, in order to elevate your authority, or, rather, that they 
 might increase their own ; for that authority was not really 
 in your hands, but in theirs. The state and the laws are no 
 more mentioned among us. The king and the royal pleasure 
 are now all in all. Your ministers have infinitely extended 
 both your revenue and your expenditure. They have extolled 
 you to the heavens for having eclipsed the splendor of all your 
 predecessors, or, in other words, for having impoverished the 
 whole kingdom, that so you might introduce into your court 
 a luxury alike monstrous and incurable." 
 
 "You have, indeed, been jealous of your authority; too 
 much so, perhaps, in whatever relates to mere externals ; but, 
 within his own appropriate province, each of your ministers 
 has in reality been your master. Because you marked out 
 the limits of the respective functions of those who really con- 
 ducted your government, you imagined that you were yourself 
 governing. They have been severe, haughty, unjust, violent, 
 faithless. Whether in governing at home or in negotiating 
 with foreign powers, their only system has been that of men- 
 acing, crushing, and annihilating their opponents. They have 
 habituated you to flatteries so outrageous, and even so idol- 
 atrous, that your own honor required your indignant rejection 
 of them. They have rendered your name odious to the people 
 of France, and insufferable to your neighbors." 
 
 Then, after an exposure of the injustice of the wars and 
 conquests of Louis, the writer proceeds : " Enough, sire, has 
 been said to show you that, during your whole life, you have 
 been wandering from the path of justice and of truth, and, 
 therefore, from the path which the Gospel prescribes. That 
 long series of fearful calamities which have desolated the whole 
 of Europe during the last twenty years, the blood so profusely 
 shed, the multitude of the scandals which have been given, 
 the cities and the villages laid in ashes, have been the lament- 
 able results of that war of 1672, which was undertaken for 
 your glory, and for the confusion of the gazetteers and medal- 
 ists of Holland." 
 
 " Your people, whom you are bound to love as your children, 
 and who have been enthusiastically devoted to you, are dying 
 of hunger. The land is nearly thrown out of cultivation. The 
 cities and the country are depopulated. All trades are Ian- 
 
LOUIS xiv. 675 
 
 guishing, and unable to afford subsistence to the artisans. 
 All commerce is extinguished. In order to make and to de- 
 fend your vast external conquests, you have destroyed one 
 half of the internal resources of your kingdom. All France 
 is but one great hospital, desolate, and unprovided with the 
 necessaries of life. It is yourself, sire, by whom these disas- 
 ters have been created. In the ruin of France, every thing 
 has passed into your hands, and your subjects are reduced to 
 live upon your bounty." 
 
 " You do not love God. You do not even fear him, except 
 with a servile terror. It is not God you fear, but hell. Your 
 religion is made up of superstitions and of petty superficial 
 observances. Scrupulous about trifles, you are untouched by 
 the most terrible responsibilities. Your own glory, your own 
 advantage, are the real and only objects of your love. You 
 refer every thing to yourself, as though you were the very 
 God of this earth, and as though every thing else in it had 
 been called into existence only that it might serve as a sacri- 
 fice to you." 
 
 Then follow very unfavorable portraits of the Archbishop 
 of Paris ; of La Chaise, the confessor of the king ; of Madame 
 de Maintenon, and of his other confidential advisers, with a 
 denunciation of their infidelity to that great trust. " Per- 
 haps," proceeds the letter, " you may ask what they, who are 
 thus in your confidence, ought to say to you. I answer, they 
 ought to say thus : i Humble yourself under the mighty hand 
 of God, if you would not that God should humble you. Sub- 
 mit to the humiliation of making peace, and so expiate the 
 glory which you have made your idol. Listen no more to the 
 counsels of your flatterers. Restore to your enemies the con- 
 quests which you can not retain with safety or without injus- 
 tice.' Sire, he who tells you these truths is so far from being 
 an enemy to your real interests, that he would lay down his 
 life to see you such as God would have you to be ; nor does 
 he ever cease to pray for you." 
 
 Although I credit D'Alembert's assertion that he transcribed 
 this letter from a manuscript authenticated by Fenelon him- 
 self, yet there is no proof that it was ever transmitted to Louis, 
 or that he ever saw it, or heard of it. For the credit of the 
 king, I would gladly believe the story that it was conveyed 
 
676 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 to him by Beauvilliers at the instance of the writer ; for if it 
 be really the fact that he received such a communication from 
 the tutor of his grandson, and afterward promoted him to the 
 archbishopric of Cambray, we must all admit with D'Alembert 
 that, for once at least, he nobly earned the title of "the Great." 
 
 I have stated that the Due de Bourgogne was one of those 
 who felt and acknowledged the abuses of the government of 
 his grandfather. I do not, of course, mean that he ever as- 
 sumed the indecorous and undutiful office of a censor of the 
 conduct of Louis XIV. Nothing could have been more repug- 
 nant to the spirit of that admirable prince, or to the lessons 
 which he had received from Fenelon. But the Telemaque was 
 written for his instruction, and in the imaginary court of Ido 
 menee the duke unavoidably recognized the image of the court 
 of Versailles. The impression left on his mind by that, and 
 by the similar lessons of his Mentor, was profound and lasting. 
 He had a clear view of the evils under which France was labor- 
 ing. He had a distinct foresight of the coming tempest, and 
 an ardent desire to avert it. Among the papers which he left 
 behind him was one which attests how deeply these subjects 
 had engaged his thoughts. It was a complete scheme of con- 
 stitutional reformation. It contemplated the revival of the 
 States-General, and of the States of the various provinces, and 
 the periodical convention of assemblies of the people in every 
 canton of France. On the basis of these central and local in- 
 stitutions, and through their agencies, he hoped to provide at 
 once for the stability of the throne and for the good govern- 
 of the people, with their own support and concurrence. 
 
 If the Due de Bourgogne had been permitted to ascend that 
 throne, and to carry his project into execution, what would 
 have been the probable results of it ? If the. answer to that 
 question were to be given by persons imbued with the spirit 
 of our own government, it would probably express their con- 
 viction that such a reform would have given to France the 
 greatest blessings for which any nation could be indebted to 
 the sagacity and patriotism of its rulers. By such critics it 
 would be applauded as a well-devised bond for the indissoluble 
 union of the past, of the present, and of the future ; as calling 
 into healthful activity all those popular instincts and local at- 
 tachments which constitute the main-springs of the life and 
 
LOUIS xiv. 67? 
 
 health of a great nation ; as rendering tributary to the service 
 of the state those home feelings, which, of all feelings, act with 
 the most constant and irresistible energy ; as affording to the 
 various sections of the commonwealth the means of an invig- 
 orating yet amicable rivalry ; as productive of that social har- 
 mony of which the indispensable basis is to be found only in 
 diversity and in contrast ; as providing for that concentration 
 of power without which the state is impotent, and for that dif- 
 fusion of power without which the central dominion must be 
 despotic ; and, above all, as affording the means of acquiring 
 those habits of self-government which constitute the ultimate 
 perfection of any civil polity. 
 
 All such anticipations and predictions would, however, I 
 suppose, have been derided by the French philosophers of that 
 age if they partook of the philosophical opinions which most 
 find favor in France in our own. M. Alexandre Thomas, for 
 example, the author of a book published in the year 1844, 
 under the title of "Une Province sous Louis XIV.," would 
 smile at such reveries as the dreams of narrow-minded men, 
 by whom the region of pure ideas had ever been, and must ever 
 be, unvisited ; for in that book he describes the state of Bur- 
 gundy from 1661 to 1715, in order to establish the conclusions 
 that the institutions of that province, and that the French pro- 
 vincial institutions in general, in the reign of Louis XIV., were 
 so entirely and irremediably absurd, that they never could have 
 served as the foundations of any safe or salutary national ref- 
 ormation. M. Thomas is no ordinary writer. When he ad- 
 dresses himself to the arrangement of evidence and to the nar- 
 ration of facts, he combines much of our English good sense 
 with no less of the buoyant vivacity of a Frenchman. But 
 when he unveils his theories, and writes as a philosopher, his 
 style undergoes an extraordinary change. Between the glare 
 of his eloquence and the darkness of his metaphysics, my own 
 mental vision, at least, is effectually dazzled and overpowered. 
 Nevertheless, as both his facts and his theories have a direct 
 and very important bearing on any judgment we can form on 
 the administration of the government of Louis XIV., I will not 
 decline the attempt to indicate, though in as few words as pos- 
 sible, what are the discoveries, philosophical and historical, for 
 which his readers are to be prepared. 
 
678 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 I collect then, that, according to the doctrine of M. Thomas, 
 there is a certain general law which regulates the progress o 
 political society. Emerging from chaos, where its elements 
 battle with each other in wild confusion, it makes a steadfast, 
 though it may be a tardy, progress toward that perfect sym- 
 metry and order in which its ultimate perfection consists. 
 Thus the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh centuries was the 
 chaotic period of France. Oat of that abyss first arose the 
 feudal oligarchy a state of orderly disorder. Then succeeded 
 the Capetian despotism, destined to crush one after another of 
 the countless feudal privileges, whether local and personal 
 whether corporate and municipal whether legislative, admin- 
 istrative, or judicial, which, as so many conflicting wrongs, 
 were arrayed one against another in unappeasal-le hostility. 
 When the iron grasp of "royalty" had subdued and annihi- 
 lated them all, then "royalty," in the midst of the triumphs 
 she had won, presented herself to the nation, in the person of 
 Louis XIV., as the one gigantic privilege, the conqueror and 
 the survivor of all the rest. Her " mission" was now fulfilled ; 
 and when at last the indignant nation raised her voice in an- 
 ger, " royalty," confessing her own inherent weakness, bowed 
 her head and fell. Then appeared a long succession of revo- 
 lutionary systems, each of which, in turn, made some great 
 stride toward that ultimate consummation of symmetry and 
 order which form the perfection of political society. Distant 
 as that perfection may appear to some, yet France has already 
 attained, by the overthrow of all privileges, to unity, that is, 
 to the concentration of power in the supreme government ; to 
 equality, that is, the absolute uniformity of the political fran- 
 chises of all citizens ; and to liberty, that is, the sovereign do- 
 minion of the people themselves. Unity, equality, and liberty 
 are, therefore, those mighty and unrivaled powers, under the 
 guidance of which France is advancing toward that high estate 
 of national greatness and of social harmony toward which no 
 other European people have as yet light enough even to aspire. 
 
 Perhaps the high tone of M. Thomas's coloring might have 
 been subdued a little if he had postponed the publication of his 
 book from 1844 to 1848. But the new shapes which unity, 
 equality, and liberty assumed in the last of those years, would 
 have detracted nothing from the value of the facts by which 
 
LOUIS xiv. 679 
 
 he undertakes to show how desperate and irremediable was the 
 misgovernment of the French provinces during the reign of 
 Louis XIV. I shall not, of course, affect to compress the re- 
 sults of such extensive inquiries into the fragment of time 
 which remains at my disposal to-day. But neither can I en- 
 tirely pass them over, for they are of the utmost importance 
 in resolving the question whether Louis XIV. was more wise 
 in extinguishing the privileges of the provinces ?of France, or 
 the Due de Bourgogne in regarding them as the ready basis 
 on which to erect a free constitutional government. 
 
 It appears, then, from the researches of M. Thomas, that in 
 the seventeenth century the generalite of Bourgogne com- 
 prised, first, the duchy of that name, then five counties, and, 
 finally, three pays d'election. The duchy and counties were 
 under the immediate government of the Burgundian States- 
 General during their sessions ; and, in the intervals of those 
 sessions, they were under the government of officers called 
 elus. The Burgundian States- General were composed of the 
 clergy and the nobility of the duchy, and of the deputies of 
 the Tiers Etat. Each of the five counties sent thither depu- 
 ties, representing the Tiers Etat of each. But the pays d'elec- 
 tion were not so represented. They were under the immedi- 
 ate government of the crown. 
 
 The sessions of the Burgundian States-General were hold- 
 en once only in each three years, and were continued during 
 about twenty days. Thus, with the exception of about three 
 weeks in as many years, the duchy and the counties were des- 
 titute of any representative government, but lived under the 
 authority of the ems. 
 
 Each order appointed its own elu, and other officers, called 
 alcaids, who were to superintend and to control them. Each 
 county had, in the same manner, a separate assembly, which 
 appointed the elu for the county. There were also royal offi- 
 cers having the same title of elus, who were associated with 
 the nominees of the States-General and of the county assem- 
 blies. 
 
 Over all this official hierarchy presided the governor of the 
 province of Burgundy, who represented the person of the king 
 himself, and was invested with his prerogatives. In the sev- 
 enteenth century, this government had passed into the hands 
 
680 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 of the great and powerful family of Conde, who held it \\ ith 
 an authority not very remote from that with which, in earlier 
 times, the princes of the royal house had held their apanages. 
 
 This scheme of provincial administration already appears 
 sufficiently complicated ; but the want of symmetry, and what 
 may be called logical method, was still more remarkable in 
 the composition of the Burgundian States- General. Our own 
 ancient anomalies of the deserted mount of Old Sarum, or the 
 highly-ornamented park and gardens of Gratton, sending each 
 two members to the House of Commons, when the great man- 
 ufacturing cities of the north sent no members at all, were not 
 more strange than the anomalies according to which the Bur- 
 gundian States were constituted. They comprised between 
 400 and 500 members, of whom 72 only were commoners, the 
 rest being clergy or nobles, who were not elected by their re- 
 spective orders, but who held their seats proprio jure. Then, 
 again, no one was eligible as a deputy of the Tiers Etat un- 
 less he were a mayor or one of the chief echevins of a city ; 
 and of the two deputies representing the same place, one only 
 had a vote. Neither could the deputies of the Tiers Etat se- 
 lect their elus and alcaids at their pleasure. They were bound 
 to choose them from the citizens of particular cities according 
 to a rotation, of which some cities had the benefit only on each 
 alternate election, and of which other cities had so little share 
 that they might be said to be almost wholly excluded. 
 
 These anomalies (and many more which I omit) were re- 
 ducible to no assignable principle whatever, but had their 
 roots only in obsolete traditions and inveterate prejudices, and 
 the proceedings of the States-Greneral were marked by a cor- 
 responding instability of purpose and of character. During the 
 reign of Louis XIV., the hero of their history is Nicholas Bra- 
 lart. He was the member of one of those high judicial fami- 
 lies which transmitted, from one generation to another, the 
 presidency of the sovereign courts ; and Brulart therefore, at 
 the age of thirty-four, found himself first president of the Par- 
 liament of Dijon. In that capacity he acquired great renown 
 by his inflexible opposition to the commands of Mazarin. Hav- 
 ing been sent to Perpignan as a prisoner for refusing to regis- 
 ter some of the edicts of the cardinal, he was released, and 
 when the Prince de Conde again tendered to him the obnox 
 
LOUIS xiv. 681 
 
 bus edicts, "M. le Prince," was his celebrated answer, "the 
 towers of Perpignan are distinctly visible from the place where 
 we stand " In fact, Brulart was the very ideal of a French 
 magistrate, really independent in his spirit, and not without 
 a certain theatrical sublimity of demeanor and of discourse. 
 But when Mazarin died, and Louis XIV. announced himself 
 as his own chief minister, Brulart became an altered man. 
 No longer sententious and epigrammatic about the dignity of 
 his judicial character and the majesty of his office, he became 
 an eloquent vindicator of the absolute and irresponsible author- 
 ity of the young sovereign. Nor was this servility or baseness. 
 Brulart, looking on the scene Before him with the eye of a states- 
 man, as statesmen went in those days, seems to have been sin- 
 cerely convinced that the power and greatness of the state were 
 inextricably bound up with the unrestricted power and inde- 
 pendence of the king. In the name of the Burgundian States- 
 General, and as their president, he delivered a series of dis- 
 courses, the general tone of which may be fairly inferred from 
 the following extract from one of them : 
 
 " The king being the first, and the permanent spring of all 
 tranquillity and virtue in his dominions, every thing within 
 them follows his impulse, and derives its character from him. 
 Every profession is adorned by his virtues. The sciences are 
 advanced, manners are purified, and religion is at length in 
 repose ; the calm is profound, the law is obeyed, the people 
 are tranquil and happy under his government ; and all these 
 blessings are the fruit of that sublime composure of mind 
 with which he regulates all these interests, and watches over 
 them all." 
 
 Such, during the twenty prosperous years of the reign of 
 Louis, was the style of the States-General of Burgundy, and 
 of Brulart their president, in all their communications to the 
 king or to his representatives. They were content to follow 
 the chariot- wheels of the conqueror, and to swell the loud cho- 
 rus of adulation. But with the reverses of Louis XIV., the 
 language of the Burgundian States-General underwent a total 
 revolution. Eulogy gave place to bitter remonstrance, and the 
 idol of yesterday became the object of the obloquies of to-day. 
 M-. Thomas pursues, in full detail, the history of these vicissi- 
 tudes, and then pursuing the career of the communes of Bur- 
 
682 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF 
 
 gundy and of the Parliament of Dijon, convicts them all, in 
 turn, of that instability of character, caprice, and unreasona- 
 bleness, from which I suppose few such bodies would be found 
 to be exempt, if their portraits were delineated with equal fidel- 
 ity, and by as picturesque a pen. The particular inference is, 
 that petty passions and local prejudices, unsettled principles 
 and fluctuating opinions, narrow privileges and warring inter- 
 ests, disqualified the States-Greneral of Burgundy for the po- 
 sition assigned to them by the Due de Bourgogne in his med- 
 itated constitution of France. The more general inference is, 
 that as the States-Greneral of the other provinces were in no 
 essential respect superior to those of Burgundy, the duke's 
 scheme rested altogether on a foundation of sand. 
 
 To a certain extent I am not disposed to controvert or to 
 doubt this conclusion. On the contrary, I think that M. Thomas 
 has well explained why the provincial governments of France 
 were impotent to control the central authority, and were, at 
 the same time, indisposed to co-operate with it, and were not, 
 in fact, elements out of which a system of order and of good 
 government could have spontaneously arisen. 
 
 But I am aware of no proof, nor of any argument to show, 
 that the evils of these provincial constitutions were irremedi- 
 able. I do not believe that the Due de Bourgogne meditated 
 building on such foundations until they had undergone the im- 
 provements which they both admitted and required. His pol- 
 icy was at once to adhere to the ancient usages and landmarks, 
 and to improve them ; and if he had lived, he would at least 
 have attempted to meet the exigencies of " the great innova- 
 tor, Time," by reformations, to be sanctioned and established 
 by the people at large, both in the States of the various prov- 
 inces, and in the States-G-eneral of the kingdom at large. 
 
 I gather, however, from such acquaintance as I have with 
 the modern literature of France, that M. Thomas expresses the 
 general opinion of his contemporaries and fellow-countrymen 
 in commending Louis XI Y. for reducing the provincial States 
 to utter insignificance, instead of assigning a place for them in 
 any enlarged basis of his government. Louis at present enjoys 
 the praise, such as it is, of having extinguished, one after an- 
 other, all the institutions of France, which, if not so overthrown 
 by him, might, it is said, have enabled his dynasty to wage a 
 
LOUIS xiv. 683 
 
 successful war against the democratic usurpations of the eight- 
 eenth century. He is extolled as a great innovator in his own 
 despite, as having well fulfilled his high destiny of contribu- 
 ting more than any other man to the preparation of that tabu- 
 lar rasa, on which modern philosophy was to inscribe so long 
 a series of constitutions, charters, and schemes of revolution- 
 ary government. 
 
 To myself it appears a mere prejudice to deny that France 
 has derived from the subversion of her ancient monarchy sec- 
 ular advantages so vast, that even the incalculable price which 
 she has paid for them may not, perhaps, have been excessive. 
 Louis XIV. may be really entitled to the praise of having been 
 the unconscious instrument of bringing those results to pass, 
 but it is no very exalted commendation. Still less is it any 
 good title to renown, if, as I believe, the motives by which he 
 was guided were for the most part selfish, narrow, and con- 
 tracted. Yet I would gladly, if possible, concur in the enthu- 
 siasm which his name even yet excites in the land over which 
 he reigned so long. Although there be no national prejudices 
 predisposing us to such feelings, and though there be many 
 such prejudices indisposing us to them, there is yet in the im- 
 age which presents itself to us, as we read his own writings, 
 the memoirs of his friends, and the eulogies of his admirers, 
 something which it is impossible not to admire, something 
 which we must occasionally revere, and something which we 
 must now and then even love. Yet, when ceasing to think of 
 the man as he lived among his kindred and his friends, we 
 estimate the king as he governed the people subject to his 
 power, a far more unfavorable judgment on him seems to me 
 inevitable. 
 
 " L'Etat c'est moi" became at length no empty boast, but 
 the arrogant avowal of a melancholy truth. In the lips of the 
 sultan or of the sophy it would have been not only an exact, 
 but a very reasonable epitome of the constitution of his des- 
 potism. In those Oriental autocracies, the science of govern- 
 ment is reducible to the stern alternative, that the ruler must 
 either strike off the heads of those who resist his will, or for- 
 feit bis own head. But the system of the French monarchy 
 was never thus terribly simple. It was most remote from such 
 simplicity in the days of Louis XI Y, It was, on the contrary, 
 
584 THE ABSOLUTE MONARCHY OF LOUIS XIV. 
 
 a complex mechanism, of which each part was essential to the 
 activity of the rest. It was a living body, the vitality of which 
 consisted in the conservation and mutual support of all its in- 
 tegral members. To detach the crown from its alliance with 
 the States-General, with the Provincial States, with the Par- 
 liament, the Municipalities, and the Magistracy, was to aim a 
 suicidal blow at the crown itself. They were the buttresses 
 of the throne, which could not long stand erect after their over- 
 throw. They were the bulwarks of the third dynasty, which 
 was evidently foredoomed to perish as the inevitable conse- 
 quence of their fall. That ancient and venerable aristocracy 
 of privilege, which, by attracting to itself the homage of the 
 people, was enabled in its turn to render to the sovereign a yet 
 more important homage, could not be degraded by him with- 
 out inducing his own degradation. 
 
 But pride and flattery blinded the eyes of Louis to these ob- 
 vious and familiar truths. He would be the one power in the 
 state, and presumptuously imagined that such independence 
 and isolation might be at once practicable and enduring. He 
 had the presumption to invite literature and commerce to take 
 shelter beneath that solitary rule, not perceiving that he was 
 thus about to nourish the infancy of powers which, in their 
 maturity > must annihilate the protector beneath whose shadow 
 they had grown up. He had the temerity to rule, as wall as 
 to reign, in his own person, not foreseeing that the responsi- 
 bility thus incurred must one day be fatal to the reverence, 
 the admiration, and the terror which formed the real basis of 
 his authority. But, above all, he forgot that no dominion can 
 at once be hereditary and despotic ; that although he might 
 transmit to his descendants his own extreme and unlimited 
 rights, he could not transmit to them the talents or the fortune 
 necessary to render such rights effectual ; and that, according 
 to the established laws of nature, an heir and successor to his 
 crown must ere long appear, who would want the capacity to 
 sustain that burdensome inheritance, and who yet would be 
 neither willing to abandon it, nor able with safety to attempt 
 so hazardous a resignation. 
 
THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MONARCHIES, ETC. 685 
 
 LECTURE XXIV. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 
 
 "How did it happen," asks Yoltaire, "that, setting out 
 from the same point of departure, the governments of England 
 and of France arrived, at nearly the same time, at results as 
 dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Mo- 
 rocco ?" 
 
 The object of all my preceding lectures has been to answer 
 that question so far as it relates to France. To answer it 
 fully, in relation to England, would require me to make a still 
 larger demand on your time than I have already made. The 
 subject is far too extensive to be discussed accurately, or even 
 intelligibly, in any brief space, and yet it is too important to 
 be altogether passed over in silence. I propose therefore, at 
 present, merely to lay before you what I regard as the sub- 
 stance of the answer to the problem which I have stated, re- 
 serving for some future time the more complete exposition and 
 defense of what I am about to offer. I must begin, however, 
 by taking a very rapid retrospect of the ground which we have 
 already traversed. 
 
 It was long doubtful whether the empire of the "Western 
 world would belong to the Roman or to the Gallic people. If, 
 in the result of the protracted struggle between them, those 
 whom Rome called barbarians had triumphed, our poets would 
 now have been writing " Lays of Ancient Gaul," founded on 
 a basis at once more romantic and more certain than the ex- 
 isting legends of Livy ; for, while the inhabitants of the Seven 
 Hills were engaged in an obscure warfare with the petty towns 
 and villages of Central Italy, the people of Gaul were extend- 
 ing their power over the western limits both of the Asiatic 
 and of the European continents, and were leaving an indelible 
 impression of their name and language from Galatia to Gal- 
 licia and Portugal from Galway to Galloway and Galles or 
 Wales. Of all the nations over whom triumphs had been eel- 
 
686 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 ebrated at the Capitol, none had herself won so many con. 
 quests, and none gave so large an accession of strength and 
 glory to the all-conquering republic. 
 
 Graul ceased to be a nation without becoming, in sentiment 
 or in spirit, an integral member of the empire. Her civil in- 
 stitutions no longer imparted security, honor, or advantage to 
 the citizens. Her agriculture withered away under fiscal op- 
 pression. Vast tracts of country were abandoned to barren- 
 ness. Large parts of her territory were cultivated, not by 
 freemen, but by slaves. Her ancient language gave place to 
 that of her conquerors, and the melancholy triumphs of des- 
 potism were incomplete only because the Church mitigated 
 the calamities which even she was unable to avert. 
 
 Graul, therefore, fell an easy prey to her German invaders. 
 They settled in the south and in the east, to relieve rather 
 than to augment her sufferings ; but the barbarous Franks 
 dispossessed the Graulic proprietors of the north and of the 
 west of a large part of the soil, and, to a great extent, even of 
 their personal freedom. Though the long-haired Merovings 
 ruled from the Ebro to the Meuse, and over the whole of West- 
 ern Germany, it was a nominal rather than a real dominion 
 the ill-cemented alliance of a multitude of independent and 
 half-savage chiefs, who, acknowledging the titular supremacy 
 of the royal race, the supposed descendants of the gods, yield- 
 ed them no effective obedience, nor any enduring attachment. 
 The Merovingian kings discharged none of the essential attri- 
 butes of sovereignty, but afforded the shelter of their name, 
 and of their nominal power, to the growth of an aristocracy 
 which, dividing among them the land and its inhabitants, pre- 
 pared the way for the development of the feudal system. 
 
 From the centre of that aristocracy emerged a family yet 
 more distinguished by their hereditary genius than by their 
 predominant authority. The third in succession of that lin- 
 eage, Pepin le Bref, deprived the last of the Merovings of his 
 titular crown. From Pepin it passed to Charlemagne the 
 most illustrious of all the founders of empire, if such glory be 
 measured by the personal qualities of those by whom empire 
 is acquired and maintained. For Charlemagne may be said 
 to have been born prematurely, and to have belonged, by his 
 character, by his tastes, and by his aspirations, to the eigh- 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 687 
 
 teenth rather than to the eighth century. In the very depth 
 of that night of ignorance which was interposed between the 
 ancient and the modern civilization of Europe, he emulated 
 the profound policy of Augustus, and anticipated the soaring 
 ambition of Napoleon. 
 
 But when the powerful grasp of Charlemagne might no 
 longer hold together the dominions which he had won, they 
 were rapidly dissolved into their original elements. Gaul, or, 
 as she was henceforth called, France, first shook off her de- 
 pendence on the Grerman or foreign yoke, and then split into 
 as many internal divisions as there were chieftains capable of 
 exempting themselves from the control of the Carlovingian 
 kings. A new territorial aristocracy divided the lands among 
 them. Another family, destined, like that of Pepin, to be the 
 founders of a new dynasty, arose in the midst of the conse- 
 quent anarchical confusion. Robert the Strong transmitted to 
 his descendants the duchy of France, until at length, in the 
 person of Hugues Capet, they acquired the title of kings of 
 the French people. 
 
 It was at first, however, little more than a title. The feu- 
 dal oligarchs were the real sovereigns of France. They be- 
 came the founders of a polity of which, since then, the world 
 has never ceased to feel the influence. The feudal system 
 was a scheme of government which the subtle intellect of the 
 Normans first subjected to positive rules founded upon gener- 
 al principles. It was a system derived from the combination 
 of many concurrent elements, such as the patriarchal spirit of 
 the old Grerman tribes '-the territorial grants made by the 
 leaders of the Grerman invasions to their military chieftains 
 the subdivision of those grants by them among their own fol- 
 lowers the conditions of military service on which all such 
 grants were made, and the necessity which in that age con- 
 strained every one either to seek protection as a client or to 
 afford it as a patron. 
 
 It was, however, an iron despotism. A feudal peer or baron 
 of France was, within his own fief, not merely an absolute 
 monarch, but a monarch invested with powers which, in ev- 
 ery other form of government, have been regarded as incom- 
 patible with each other. He could make war or peace with 
 any other feudatory. He could make laws (with the consent 
 
688 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 of his chief vassals) for the government of his fief and of all 
 persons sojourning within its limits. He was not subject to 
 any law made without his own consent by the king or by any 
 other law-givers. He was the supreme judge in all cases aris- 
 ing within his fief, and over all the inhabitants of it. He 
 might coin and issue money in his own name and at his own 
 discretion. He was not liable to pay any tribute to the king, 
 his suzerain, excepting only such dues as were imposed by the 
 express conditions of the grant under which his feudal estate 
 was holden. He was himself the suzerain of whom all his 
 vassals held their lands. He was not only the lord of the free- 
 men, but, to a great extent, the proprietor of the serfs living 
 within his domain. 
 
 I have already referred you to the works of Dr. Robertson, 
 of Mr. Hallam, and of M. Guizot, for an explanation of this 
 singular scheme of government, whether considered as a body 
 of laws, or as a system of national policy, or as a code of moral 
 sentiments. From those great writers you will collect, that 
 no dominion less stern, and no maxims less arbitrary, could 
 have prepared mankind in the Middle Ages for the happier con- 
 dition which awaited them in more civilized, though distant 
 times. It formed the indispensable, though the terrible dis- 
 cipline of generations which had been trained up in barbarism 
 and in personal servitude. It was, therefore, destined to be a 
 state of transition, and to be itself subverted by changes some- 
 times abrupt, but more usually gradual and imperceptible. 
 The history of France under the Capetian kings may be said 
 to consist of the record of those changes. That history de- 
 scribes the successive stages of the protracted contest which 
 terminated first in the triumph of the successors of Hugues 
 Capet over the feudal confederation, and then in the subver- 
 sion of the feudal system, in all its principles and in all its de- 
 tails, by the great revolutionary movements which marked the 
 close of the eighteenth century. 
 
 It has, therefore, been my object hitherto to consider each 
 in order of the more considerable steps which led to this result, 
 till the close of the reign of Louis XIV. With that view I at- 
 tempted to explain how the enfranchisement of the communes, 
 and the consequent growth of the municipal institutions of 
 France, strengthened the royal power, and called into exist- 
 
ENGLISH "MONARCHIES COMPARED. 689 
 
 ence the Tiers Etat as a counterpoise to the authority of the 
 feudal aristocracy. I then considered how the Eastern cru- 
 sades diminished the number of the feudal serfs and vassals 
 how they increased the strength and the number of the com- 
 munes in which the feudal power had its natural and inveter- 
 ate antagonists how they tended to terminate the private 
 wars by which the seigneurs asserted and maintained their 
 authority how they contributed to restore the Roman law in 
 France, and, therefore, to subvert the customs which formed 
 the basis of the feudal dominion how they promoted a change 
 in the judicial institutions by which the seigneurs adminis- 
 tered the law how they were often fatal to the ancient rela- 
 tions of the feudatories and 'the royal suzerains to each other 
 how they tended to impair the power of the feudal chiefs by 
 changing the whole military system of Europe how they gave 
 to the kings of France a new militia in the great military and 
 religious orders, and how, by promoting commerce and liter- 
 ature, they nurtured the most deadly antagonists of the feudal 
 despotism. 
 
 I next pointed out how the Albigensian crusades, coinciding 
 with the annexation, to the crown of Normandy and Cham- 
 pagne, brought within the limits of the royal authority the 
 countries extending from the Alps to the Pyrenees, and de- 
 pressed, in the same proportion, the power of the seignorial 
 confederation. 
 
 The assumption by St. Louis of a legislative authority, at 
 first co-ordinate with, and then superior to, that of the seign- 
 eurs of the royal domain, but which was ultimately destined 
 to supersede the feudal right of legislation in all the fiefs of 
 France, was the next subject of our inquiries. 
 
 I then endeavored to show how the same monarch, by de- 
 priving his barons of the right of private war and of trial by 
 battle, laid the foundation of a new judicial system, by which 
 the power, which they had so long exorcised as judges in their 
 respective fiefs, was gradually subverted. 
 
 Such were the principal, though not the only causes to which 
 I referred the triumph of the Capetian kings over the only body 
 in the state which presented itself as a rival to their power 
 By means of that triumph they were enabled to acquire, o* to 
 assume, prerogatives so vast, as, in the result, to substitute 6 
 
 Xx 
 
690 THE GROWTH OP THE FRENCH AND 
 
 royal for a feudal despotism. Yet in France, as in England, 
 there were many influences tending to counteract and to repel 
 this usurpation. There, as here, the privileged orders, noble 
 and sacerdotal, enjoyed great wealth, and still greater author- 
 ity. The French, not less than the English, courts of justice 
 were the natural guardians of the rights and franchises of all 
 the people of the realm. The municipal corporations of that 
 kingdom, as of our own, possessed the means of defending the 
 national liberties. The representatives of the French people 
 were elected on a more popular suffrage, and on a wider basis, 
 than the representatives of the people of England ; and, like 
 them, were convened to assist their sovereigns with their ad- 
 vice and with pecuniary grants. The States- General claimed 
 the power o the purse as distinctly as the House of Commons, 
 and often maintained that power with equal firmness. The 
 Calvinists of France were in no respect inferior to our own 
 Puritans in zeal for freedom of conscience, and, as its inevi- 
 table result, for constitutional freedom; and, in their active 
 efforts to attain those blessings, they were unrivaled by their 
 co-religionists in this country. And, finally, our national self- 
 esteem will, I think, hardly persuade us that the pen was ever 
 employed among our own ancestors by writers of more per- 
 suasive eloquence, or of more enlarged and liberal minds, than 
 the great authors who wielded that mighty instrument of 
 power among our neighbors. I therefore attempted, at some 
 length, to explain why neither the privileged orders, nor the 
 judicial order, nor the municipalities, nor the States- General, 
 nor the Reformers, nor the men of letters of France, were able 
 to stem the current which bore her forward to what Voltaire 
 calls a resemblance to the government of Morocco. 
 
 My last general object has been to show, by some few illus- 
 trations, what that despotic authority really was, from the time 
 when Henry IY. first acquired the undisputed possession of his 
 throne, to the time when Louis XIV, conducted the govern- 
 ment of France in person. If absolute power could ever be 
 fitly confided to mortal man, where could nobler depositaries 
 of that high trust have been found than in the succession of 
 great men who filled up that interval in .the history of their 
 country ? What ruler of mankind was ever gifted with a spir- 
 it more genial, or with views more comprehensive, than those 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 691 
 
 of Henry IV.? or with an integrity and a patriotism more no- 
 ble than that of Sully ? or with an energy of will superior to 
 that of Richelieu ? or with subtlety more profound than that 
 of Mazarin ? or with a zeal and activity surpassing that of Col- 
 bert ? or with greater decision of character than Louvois ? or 
 with a majesty transcending that of Louis XIV. ? And yet, 
 what were the results of so much genius and intellectual pow- 
 er when intrusted with political powers so vast and unrestrict- 
 ed? The favorable result was to add to the greatness of France, 
 and to give birth to some undying traditions, pointing to her 
 still more extensive aggrandizement. The unfavorable results 
 were, to produce every possible variety of internal and of ex- 
 ternal misgovernment to promote wars more sanguinary than 
 had ever before been waged between Christian nations to pro- 
 duce a waste of treasure so vast, that the simple truth seems 
 fabulous -to excite a protracted civil war to create artificial 
 famines by absurd commercial restrictions in a country bless- 
 ed beyond all other European states with a fertile soil and a 
 genial climate to kindle persecutions which altogether eclipse, 
 in their enormity, those to which the early Christians were sub- 
 jected by the emperors of Rome to subject the territories of 
 the belligerent neighbors of France to desolations for a com- 
 parison to which we must look back to the histories of the 
 Huns and the Yandals and to corrupt the moral sense of the 
 people by the exhibition at the court of their sovereigns of a 
 profligacy of manners resembling that of an Asiatic rather than 
 that of a European monarchy. 
 
 It would be easy, but it would hardly be useful, to enlarge 
 the catalogue of the calamities in which France was involved 
 by the absolute dominion to which her rulers had been con- 
 ducted, first, by their conquest over their feudal antagonists, 
 and then by the inability of the aristocratic, the judicial, the 
 municipal, the representative, the religious, and the literary in- 
 stitutions of the kingdom to balance and to restrain their pow- 
 er. It is enough if we learn to regard such despotism with 
 irreconcilable aversion, and to study with diligence, and to re- 
 member with gratitude, the causes to which we are indebted 
 for our own hereditary exemption from it. 
 
 Such being the answer which I have already attempted to 
 return to Voltaire's question, so far as it relates to France, I 
 
692 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 pass on to inquire what were the chief causes which, during 
 the same period, conducted our own land to the possession of 
 those constitutional franchises of which, at the present hour, 
 we are still the undisputed inheritors ? It is not, I confess, 
 without reluctance that I enter on topics at all times so trite 
 and so familiar, and which, in very recent times, have been 
 discussed by Mr. Hallam, and by M. G-uizot, and more espe- 
 cially by Sir Francis Palgrave, with such a prodigality of learn- 
 ing, and in so rich and measured a flow of judicial eloquence. 
 Yet I may not forget that misgivings similar to these would 
 obstruct no small part of all our academical studies ; that all 
 elementary teaching must, to a great extent, be but the repe- 
 tition of commonplaces ; that the history of our national liber- 
 ties has for us an interest which may well be regarded as in- 
 exhaustible ; that it has aspects almost as numerous, and as 
 distinguishable from each other, as are the minds by which it 
 is contemplated ; and that even they who are most unworthy 
 to aspire to an equality or to a competition with the great au- 
 thors I have mentioned, may at least illustrate and verify their 
 conclusions, and may even venture occasionally to dispute and 
 to correct them. 
 
 While the Goths, the Burgundians, and the Franks were 
 effecting the conquest and the occupation of Gaul, the Saxons 
 were overrunning the whole of Great Britain south of the 
 Grampians. Their national name, at first confined to the in- 
 habitants of the territories between the Elbe and the Eyder, 
 progressively embraced all the tribes or peoples dwelling be- 
 tween the Weser, the Ems, and the Rhine. It was not till the 
 middle of the fifth century that they first appeared in force in 
 this island ; but, within one hundred and fifty years from that 
 time, they had founded here the eight kingdoms of Kent, Sus- 
 sex, "Wessex, Essex, East Anglia, Bernecia, Deira, and Mer- 
 cia. Gradually retreating before them, a large part of the 
 British or Celtic natives of the soil took refuge in the western 
 mountains, or, crossing the Channel, established themselves on 
 the Armorican peninsula, which has ever since borne from them 
 the name of Bretagne. 
 
 The theory that the whole of the ancient British population 
 .were driven by their conquerors either into "Wales or into Bre- 
 tagne, rests chiefly, if not exclusively, on the indisputable fact 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 693 
 
 that, not long after the Conquest, the Celtic had been entirely 
 superseded by the German language ; for, with the exception 
 of some few of the more prominent natural features of our 
 country, such as our broader rivers and loftier mountains, the 
 name of almost every object which meets the eye, from the 
 Grampians to the South Downs, from the Severn to the East- 
 ern Ocean, is derived from the Saxon tongue. Here and there 
 some local vestiges of the British, Roman, or Scandinavian 
 nomenclatures perpetuate the memory of still earlier or still 
 later vicissitudes of our national fortunes ; but our villages, 
 our towns, our hundreds, and our counties the animals which 
 depasture our fields the birds native to our climate the in- 
 digenous plants which we cultivate the products of our mines 
 our common trades and mechanical arts the utensils we 
 employ in them the members of our bodies the ordinary 
 actions of our lives, and whatever is idiomatic, pungent, and 
 forcible in our common speech, all bear their concurrent test- 
 imony to the fact that we descejnd from those with whom the 
 language of Saxony was once vernacular. With less distinct- 
 ness, indeed, yet with no real doubt, our laws and our institu- 
 tions attest the same genealogy. 
 
 I reject, however, as altogether improbable and gratuitous, 
 the hypothesis of the exile into "Wales or Brittany of the whole 
 of the native British population who escaped the sword of the 
 German conquerors. A large proportion of them were proba- 
 bly included in that great body of slaves, prsedial and domes- 
 tic, of whom we meet with such frequent mention in the an- 
 nals of those times. That in that servitude they were tardily 
 but effectually exterminated, will seem incredible to no one 
 who is aware how, even in our own days, the aboriginal races 
 in all newly-discovered territories waste away, and at length 
 disappear in the presence of their more hardy, enterprising, 
 and civilized invaders. Be this as it may, it is at least clear 
 that, during twenty-five successive centuries, the lowlands of 
 our island were chiefly peopled, and were exclusively govern- 
 ed, by members of the great Teutonic family. In France, 
 throughout the same period, there was a vast numerical pre- 
 ponderance of the Gallic or Romano-Gallic over the Teutonic 
 element of society. What was the effect of the slow and im- 
 perfect fusion of the two races in that kingdom I have attempt- 
 
694 THE GROWTH OP THE FRENCH AND 
 
 ed, in a former lecture, to explain. What was the effect of 
 the undisturbed development of the German habits of thought 
 and action in our own land, it remains for us to inquire. 
 
 I have already avowed my belief, that to each of the nations 
 of the earth belongs, by a divine decree, a jdistinctive charac- 
 ter adapted to the peculiar office assigned to each in the great 
 and comprehensive system of human affairs. Thus to France 
 was appointed, by the Supreme Ruler of mankind, the duty 
 of civilizing and humanizing the European world. To En- 
 gland it has been given to guide all other states to excellence 
 in the practical arts of life, to commercial wealth, to political 
 wisdom, and to spiritual liberty. But to Germany was dele- 
 gated the highest and the noblest trust which has been com- 
 mitted to any people since the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the 
 Romans fulfilled their respective commissions of imparting to 
 our race the blessings of religion, of learning, and of law ; for 
 in Germany we revere the prolific mother of nations, the re- 
 former of a corrupted Christianity, and the conservator of the 
 liberties and independence of the European commonwealth. 
 "Weakened as she has been in defensive, as well as in aggress- 
 ive war, by the division of her territory into so many separate 
 states, yet in that very weakness she has found her strength, 
 in the unambitious but beneficent career which, by the pre- 
 scient will of the Creator himself, she was destined to pursue. 
 The fathers of some of the most aged among us witnessed her 
 first assumption of her rank and proper station in the republic 
 of letters ; and we ourselves are witnesses how, in that com- 
 paratively new region of national prowess, she has exhibited 
 the same indestructible character which, more than a thousand 
 years ago, enabled her to lay in this island the basis of a gov- 
 ernment, of which (if our posterity be true to their trust) anoth- 
 er thousand years will scarcely witness the subversion. That 
 England has her patrimony on the seas, France on the land, 
 and Germany in the clouds, is a sarcasm at which a German 
 may. well afford to smile. For reverence in the contemplation 
 of whatever is elevated, and imagination in the embellishment 
 of whatever is beautiful, and tenderness in cherishing whatev- 
 er is lovely, and patience in the pursuit of the most recondite 
 truths, and courage in the avowal of every deliberate convic- 
 tion, and charity in tolerating every form of honest dissent 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 693 
 
 these are now, as they have ever been, the vital elements of 
 the Teutonic mind. They may, indeed, not seldom have given 
 birth to an unmeaning mysticism, to visionary hopes, and to 
 dangerous errors. Yet, from their remotest ancestry, the Grer- 
 mans have received these gifts as their best and most enduring 
 inheritance ; and, by the exercise and the influence of them, 
 they impressed upon our own ancestral constitution much of 
 that peculiar character which it retains to the present hour. 
 
 " By the word Constitution," says Lord Bolingbroke, "we 
 mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, the 
 assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs derived from 
 certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed ob- 
 jects of public good, that compose the general system by which 
 the community hath agreed to be governed." Assuming the 
 accuracy of this definition, I infer from it that we must seek 
 the Constitution of any commonwealth, and, therefore, of our 
 own, not in the organic structure of its government, but in the 
 living spirit by which it is habitually animated ; not in a rigid 
 analysis of the rights and the functions of the various orders 
 of the citizens, so much as in the primaeval tendencies, the 
 cherished habits, and the venerated maxims, by which the na- 
 tional polity has been molded and directed. I therefore pro- 
 ceed to inquire, What are those principles of our English mon- 
 archy which, having been first established by our Anglo-Saxon 
 progenitors, have, from their age to our own, retained among 
 us a perennial and an undisputed dominion ? 
 
 First, then, whether we listen to the invectives of our neigh- 
 bors, or to the taunts of some of the most eloquent, though not, 
 I think, the wisest of our fellow-countrymen, we are required 
 to condemn and to subvert those hereditary distinctions which 
 elevate some, and depress the rest, of the ranks of society 
 among us. Declining this, and all the other controversies of 
 our age, I limit myself to the statement and the proof of the 
 fact that an aristocracy of birth has ever been among the most 
 active elements of our constitutional polity. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon people were divided into the five classes 
 of kings, nobles, vavasours, ceorls, and slaves ranks transmit- 
 ted by inheritance from one generation to another, and which 
 became the salient fountains of the whole body of our nation- 
 al laws, of our most cherished rights, and of our most popular 
 privileges. 
 
696 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 First in order in this political hierarchy was what, for want 
 of a more appropriate word, may be called the Royal Caste. 
 Over each of the component kingdoms of the Heptarchy, or, 
 as it ought to be called, the Octarchy, reigned a monarch, who 
 was designated sometimes as the Kyning and sometimes as the 
 E alderman. In the belief of his subjects, he was one of the 
 descendants of Odin or "Woden, whose name, under various 
 modifications, was revered from the shores of the Polar Sea to 
 the eastern verge of the Caucasian Mountains. For that rea- 
 son, the descent of the crown was strictly limited to the royal, 
 or, rather, to the sacred line. Yet it was not invariably a lin- 
 eal descent. The collateral was not seldom preferred to the 
 direct heir the brother, for example, to the son of the last 
 Kyning. 
 
 But in the persons of Athelstane and his successors the An- 
 glo-Saxon realms were united into one confederation, though 
 not incorporated into one kingdom. Over these confederate 
 states reigned a sovereign, to whom his people gave the name 
 of Brettwalda that is, the wielder or ruler of Britain. Thus 
 Athelstane was Brettwalda of the whole of Albion. The men 
 of Kent and the men of Sussex were alike his subjects, but 
 they were not fellow-citizens. He was not only the king of 
 eight adjacent and rival states, but was also the mediator be- 
 tween them. To maintain the principle and the permanency 
 of this federal union, the powers of the Brettwalda over each 
 member of it were, therefore, greater than the powers of any 
 one of the E aldermen or Kynings in his own dominion, just 
 (to use a very modern illustration) as the Congress of the 
 United States has higher legislative functions, and as their 
 Supreme Court has higher judicial functions throughout the 
 whole republic than the Legislatures or than the tribunals of 
 the component states possess within their several jurisdictions. 
 
 Next in rank in the Anglo-Saxon commonwealth were the 
 nobles, designated either as Earls or Thanes. That dignity, 
 when combined with a certain extent and description of terri- 
 torial property, carried with it high powers, both civil and mil- 
 itary. Men of noble birth, when destitute of such property, 
 were also destitute of any political power. But they had priv- 
 ileges from which the inferior members of society were ex- 
 cluded. Thus, even the monk in his cloister, and the priest 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 697 
 
 in his cathedral (if of noble lineage), claimed and received the 
 honors due to their descent. The word Vavasours, though of 
 later origin, best designates this part of the Anglo-Saxon so- 
 ciety. 
 
 To the nobles succeeded the. Ceorls, or Commons of the realm. 
 Though liable to many burdensome obligations, resulting from 
 the relation in which they stood to their earls or lords, they 
 were regarded by others and by themselves as freemen. They 
 corresponded to the class which we now call the Yeomanry, 
 or to the Tiers Etat of France. 
 
 All freemen, who were not themselves lords, were bound to 
 live in subjection to some Ior4 5 to whom they swore fealty, and 
 whose banner they followed in war. But the vavasour might 
 choose his own lord, that is, he might attach, or, as it was 
 called, commend himself to any lord who would accept his 
 homage. The ceorl, on the other hand, was a tenant attached 
 to a particular lordship, on which he was required to live, and 
 where he was bound to render to his lord certain fixed services, 
 either personal or pecuniary. Yet the ceorl had often a usu- 
 fructuary title to some definite amount of land within the pre- 
 cincts of the lordship. From that home he could not be eject- 
 ed ; and if he possessed the means of purchasing a discharge 
 from his adscription or attachment to the soil, the lord could 
 not refuse so to enfranchise him. A ceorl, destitute of such 
 a home, was compelled to find a master who would accept him 
 as a laborer and as an inmate in his household. 
 
 These distinctions of rank among freemen were not, how- 
 ever, indelible. A merchant who had thrice crossed the sea 
 at his own expense obtained the dignity of a thane. A ceorl 
 who could acquire, in his own right, five hydes of land, as- 
 cended to the same rank. His descendants, in the third g&ner- 
 ation, if retaining the land, were considered as vavasours, that 
 is, as men of gentle blood and kindred, and as entitle! to all 
 the privileges of noble birth. 
 
 Finally. The slave, who filled the lowest station in the 
 Anglo-Saxon community, was res not persona, and as destitute 
 of all political rights and franchises as the bullocks with whom 
 he labored. Such having been the divisions of society among 
 the Anglo-Saxons, I observe, 
 
 Secondly, that in their age, as in our own, it was a princi- 
 
698 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 pie of the constitution of this kingdom, that the powera A the' 
 state should, as little as possible, be combined in a central 
 government, and should, as much as possible, be distributed 
 among the provincial or local authorities ; and that this rule 
 was especially observed regarding the administration of justice. 
 In all modern kingdoms sovereignty is territorial. In all 
 the mediaeval kingdoms it was patriarchal. We consider all 
 men as the subjects of Him who reigns over their settled place 
 of abode. Our German forefathers considered all men as sub- 
 ject to the monarch of the tribe or confederacy within which 
 they were born. After the tribe had become sedentary, they 
 still gathered round their chieftain and acknowledged his do- 
 minion. In this island his domain was called a town or town- 
 ship, a word of which the Norman term manor has since taken 
 the place. The chieftain was the proprietor of the whole of 
 that domain. He was the actual possessor only of a part of 
 it ; the rest was granted to his followers as tenants, either for 
 their lives or for other terms, or was left as open fields or com- 
 mons, of which the lord and his tenants had a kind of joint 
 occupation. 
 
 In each township the lord, with the concurrence of his ten- 
 ants, held courts of justice, then called town-motes, which ex- 
 ist among us at the present hour under the name of courts 
 leet or courts baron. The conservation of the public peace 
 was intrusted to the inhabitants of the township collectively. 
 An officer, called the town-reeve, appointed by the lord, and 
 four good and lawful men of the township, elected by the in- 
 habitants, represented it at the folk-mote, or local assembly 
 of the hundred. 
 
 The court of the hundred, or folk-mote, was composed of 
 all the lords and thanes whose townships were included within 
 that district of the town-reeve and four men already men- 
 tioned, representing every such township of the bishop of 
 the diocese and of an earl, who acted as the president of the 
 assembly. The folk-mote was at once a court of justice (penal 
 and civil) for the hundred, and a meeting for attesting and 
 perpetuating the memory of a variety of acts, of which, in 
 those days, no written record could be made. Such, for ex- 
 ample, were the sale of lands, the payment for them, the en- 
 franchisement of serfs, and the like, 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED 699 
 
 Next in the ascending scale of the local courts of the Anglo- 
 Saxons were the shire-motes, or county courts. Our English 
 counties have their origin from two sources. Some of them 
 are ancient kingdoms reduced to the rank of provinces ; others 
 are the dismemberments of such kingdoms. In either case 
 the shire was placed under the authority of an earl. In each 
 shire two shire-motes were holden annually. Sometimes those 
 bodies acted as ecclesiastical synods, under the presidency of 
 the "bishop ; sometimes as secular courts, under the presidency 
 of the earl, or of the shire- reeve, his deputy. The shire-mote 
 was the grand inquest of the county. Every hundred was 
 represented there by twelve men, and each township by the 
 town-reeve and the four men already mentioned. It was the 
 office of such attendants or representatives to present to the 
 court the grievances of their respective hundreds or townships. 
 It was the office of the court to take cognizance of all such 
 grievances -of all crimes committed within the county of 
 all complaints of the abuse of power by any subordinate offi- 
 cers and of all appeals from the judgments of the township 
 or the hundred courts. Such having been the distribution of 
 political and of judicial powers in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, 
 I observe, 
 
 Thirdly ', that in that, as in all subsequent ages, the Church 
 of England and the realm of England were co-extensive ; that 
 (in theory at least) each embraced, within its appropriate sphere, 
 all the people of England ; and that the ecclesiastical and civil 
 states were intimately allied or united to each other. So inti- 
 mate, indeed, was that 'union, that each kingdom of the Oc- 
 tarchy constituted a distinct diocese, and every such diocese 
 was considered as a single parish, of which the bishop was the 
 incumbent. By him presbyters were appointed to officiate in 
 the various districts, civic or rural ; and by him the annual 
 revenues of the see were appropriated, first, for the maintenance 
 of divine service ; then for the relief of the poor ; and, finally, 
 for the support of the clergy. The clerks and the laymen then 
 lived under the same code, civil and penal ; and, though the 
 exposition of the faith was considered as the peculiar province 
 of synods, the regulation and enforcement of ecclesiastical dis- 
 cipline belonged to the temporal Legislature and tribunals. 
 The king was the patron of all vacant lishoprics, and granted 
 
700 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 them, by royal writs or charters, without either the previous 
 concurrence of the clergy, or the subsequent sanction of the 
 pope. If the State thus encroached on the province of the 
 Church, the Church, in turn, assumed some of the functions 
 of the temporal government. The clerical order in those times 
 were in the exclusive possession of the art of writing, and, 
 therefore, of many of the higher secular offices. As ,by them 
 all royal charters were prepared and transcribed, so they were 
 the keepers or depositaries of them. To the clergy, also, it thus 
 belonged to devise and issue those royal mandates or writs, 
 which then, as now, were the foundation of all civil actions. 
 Hence arose the Chancery, or Officina Brevium ; and hence 
 also, was chiefly derived that peculiarity of the English judicia. 
 system, the jurisdiction of a judge of equity, whose province 
 it is to supply the defects and to mitigate the rigor of the or- 
 dinary administration of justice. 
 
 Fourthly. I observe that, from the era of our earliest An- 
 glo-Saxon records, England has never acknowledged any other 
 than a monarchical government. In the Anglo-Saxon king, or 
 Brettwalda, resided in theory (if not in fact) all the powers of 
 the state, and from him flowed, or were supposed to flow, all 
 offices and dignities subordinate to his own. 
 
 Thus he was in all causes the great and the ultimate judge. 
 As the supreme lord or suzerain of the realm, all his thanes 
 were amenable to his judicial authority. As commander-in- 
 chief of the military forces of the state, all offenses committed 
 sub vexilld, came within his cognizance. As sovereign of all 
 the denizens of his kingdom, he punished all offenses accom- 
 panied by violence or rapine ; remedied the defects of the law 
 which he administered ; supplied the omissions of it when it 
 was silent ; infused energy into the administration of it when 
 it was feeble ; and mitigated the severity of it when it was 
 oppressive or burdensome. As judge of appeal, he afforded re- 
 dress to any suitor who had sought it in vain in the hundred 
 or county courts. As owner of the four great roads which 
 traversed the island from east to west and from north to south, 
 he had a special care of all who traveled along them ; and 
 crimes committed on the king's highway thus came to be re. 
 garded as falling especially within the jurisdiction of the king 
 
 His presence, his vicinity, or his express grant, carried with 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 70] 
 
 it a special protection, which was called the king's peace. It 
 was a privilege which always prevailed throughout a circle of 
 which his mansion was the centre, and of which, for some 
 mystic reason, the radius measured three miles, added to three 
 furlongs, three acre breadths, nine feet, nine palms, and three 
 barley-corns. 
 
 On his coronation, and at the three great festivals of the 
 Church, the king's peace was extended throughout the whole 
 realm. All violations of it were considered as injuries to the 
 king himself, and rendered the transgressor amenable imme- 
 diately to his penal jurisdiction. 
 
 The judicial powers thus. vested in the Brettwalda were ex- 
 ercised by him in person. Thus Edgar made two judicial cir- 
 cuits in each year, and Canute appears to have observed the 
 same practice. Such royal visitations were, indeed, indispens- 
 able at a time when each of the component states, or the king- 
 dom of Britain, still retained laws and customs peculiar to it- 
 self, and was under the rule of earls or viceroys, whose abuse 
 of power could be arrested by no other means. 
 
 But the Anglo-Saxon king or Brettwalda had many other 
 than these judicial prerogatives. He was the patron of all the 
 dignities and offices of his government, appointing, and at his 
 pleasure displacing, the aldermen, earls, thanes, sheriffs, heret- 
 archs, and all other great functionaries, civil or military. 
 
 He was in possession of large revenues. His royal domains 
 were nearly equal to the domains of all his principal chieftains 
 combined together. He received customs at every sea-port, 
 and tolls in all open markets. He was entitled to money pay- 
 ments from every incorporated city or borough, in commuta- 
 tion of the services due to him from the citizens. Heriots were 
 rendered to him on the death of all of his thanes, and to him 
 were paid the forfeitures imposed on offenders in various cases 
 of conviction from crimes. 
 
 But his highest prerogative was that of legislation, which, 
 however, he exercised in concurrence with the wittenage-mote. 
 For, 
 
 Fifthly, I observe that, even in that remote age, England 
 was never destitute of assemblies, meeting under the presi- 
 dency of the King of England, for the enactment and promul- 
 gation of laws. 
 
702 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 Each of the component kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon mon- 
 archy had a separate wittenage-mote, or Council of the Wise. 
 Probably this may in each have been but another name for the 
 shire-mote, or County Court, already mentioned. But concur- 
 rently with them the Brettwalda, or King of Britain, held a 
 general wittenage-mote, or Diet of the kingdom at large. At 
 every such assembly he presented himself to his subjects in all 
 the splendor of royalty. There also appeared all the prelates 
 of the realm, the ealdermen, the earls, and the thanes, of each 
 of the states, or minor kingdoms, or shires, over which he was 
 supreme ; and all the high officers of his government, both lay 
 and clerical. In this supreme wittenage-mote laws were en- 
 acted in the name of the Brettwalda. In terms, at least, the 
 authority of them was co-extensive with the limits of his do- 
 minions. But, in fact, the acceptance of such laws, by wfiat 
 may be called the local or inferior Legislatures, was essential 
 to their validity within the precincts of each. Thus we learn 
 that the laws of Edgar were long rejected in Mercia, those oi 
 Athelstane in Kent, and those of Canute in Northumberland. 
 
 But the wittenage-mote was not merely a Legislature. They 
 constituted, also, a court of criminal jurisdiction, and especially 
 in cases in which an accusation, or, as we should now say, an 
 impeachment, was preferred against any ealderman or earl, or 
 against any thane, who was an immediate vassal of the crown. 
 
 The wittenage-mote possessed, also, much of the character 
 of a congress of independent powers, in which those whom we 
 should describe as the great vassals of the crown deliberated 
 on all questions affecting their respective states or communi- 
 ties, and entered into compacts for raising money, or for the 
 adoption of other measures required by the exigencies of the 
 whole Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. 
 
 Mr. Sharon Turner has labored to prove that the wittenage- 
 mote included members holding neither office nor dignity, but 
 who appeared there as representatives of the absent vassals or 
 citizens. He is contradicted, on what appear to me conclusive 
 grounds, by authorities more recent, and, indeed, much higher 
 than his ow r n, and especially by Dr. Lingard and by Sir Francis 
 Palgrave. It must, indeed, be confessed, that all inquiries into 
 the composition, the rights, the powers, and the modes of proce- 
 dure of this great assembly, are involved in an obscurity which 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 703 
 
 the most profound research, the ripest learning, and the keen- 
 est subtlety of our most eminent antiquarians have not been 
 able altogether to dispel. Yet no fact can be more exempt 
 from reasonable doubt than that, during nearly two centuries 
 before the Norman Conquest, a national assembly, comprising 
 such dignitaries, and habitually exercising such functions as 
 I have mentioned, formed, under the Anglo-Saxon kings, one 
 great element of our national government and Constitution. 
 
 Such were the main fundamental principles of the Anglo- 
 Saxon Constitution principles which may, with ease, be dog- 
 matically stated, but which can hardly be understood aright 
 except as they are illustrated by the laws, the arts, the man- 
 ners, and the literature of the Anglo-Saxon people. What 
 these were may be learned from Mr. Sharon Turner, of whom 
 M. Guizot says that he has diligently collected an abundance 
 of facts, but possesses few ideas. If that censure were better 
 founded than it really is, it would not, perhaps, derogate much 
 from the esteem in which that wise and amiable writer is held 
 by us, his fellow-countrymen ; for we are accustomed to think 
 that history and philosophy have each their own appropriate 
 spheres ; that each should inform and be infused into the oth- 
 er, not confounded with it ; and that a complete, luminous, 
 and accurate narrative of events may reasonably be preferred 
 by a historian to the most subtle explication of their connect- 
 ing principles. 
 
 If Mr. Sharon Turner's speculative wisdom be not very re- 
 dundant, it is at least copious enough to establish the fact that 
 Teutonic ideas and Teutonic habits were planted by the Sax- 
 ons in England, as they had been by the Groths, the Burgundi- 
 ans, and the Franks in France. But the growth of those ideas 
 and habits was more active here than there, and the develop- 
 ment of them far more complete ; for, in this island, the Grer- 
 man race, alloyed by no foreign admixture (the Danes were 
 but another branch of the great Saxon family), had, long be- 
 fore the Norman invasion, impressed upon our people a char- 
 acter at once peculiar, indigenous, and indestructible. From 
 them our fathers' fathers inherited, and have transmitted to 
 our own generation, a body of opinions, of maxims, and of 
 moral sentiments, in which may be found for their polity and 
 for our polity a common root, and origin, and lineage. That 
 
704 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 their Brettwalda and our Queen- their earls, and thanes, and 
 our nobility their shire-motes and our Circuit Courts their 
 wittenage-mote and our Parliament, were so many constituted 
 authorities, identical in all things except in the epochs in which 
 they flourished and in the names by which they were desig- 
 nated, is, indeed, only one of those pleasant dreams which 
 haunt and animate the antiquarian as he treads his dry and 
 dusty path. But that, under the widest diversities of forms, 
 there is yet much real sameness of substance between the in- 
 stitutions of England as they formerly existed in the ninth, 
 and as they actually exist in the nineteenth century, is a fact 
 susceptible of the clearest proof, and replete with the deepest 
 interest. Nor is the cause of this unbroken continuity doubt- 
 ful or obscure. Beyond all "Western nations, the Grermans pos- 
 sess that immutability of character and of habits by which the 
 Oriental races are distinguished ; but with the difference that, 
 in the East, an abject superstition and an inert passiveness 
 in Germany, a solemn imagination has ever attached the 
 living to the dead, and to those who are yet to live. Serious, 
 dutiful, and meditative, they inhabited this island a thousand 
 years ago, as they inhabit their own father-land now, in pa- 
 triarchal thoughtfulness, dwelling less in the passing hour than 
 in the generations which are yet to come, and in the genera- 
 tions which have long since passed away. I will attempt, in 
 the fewest possible words, to show how great is the conformity 
 between the living spirit of the institutions which they created, 
 and to which I have already referred, and that of the institu- 
 tions under which we actually live. 
 
 1st, then, that wide inequality between the different ranks 
 and orders of our people which distinguishes our nation at the 
 present day, has been characteristic of it since the days of Ed- 
 gar and of Athelstane. The aristocratic spirit has at all times 
 pervaded and animated the English commonwealth, but not 
 the aristocracy of birth alone. In the times of the Brett wal- 
 das, successful merit might rise to the privileges of noble de- 
 scent as freely as in those of Elizabeth or of Victoria. Polit- 
 ical power was, indeed, never dissociated from property. The 
 law which exacts from every member of the House of Com- 
 mons a certain proprietary qualification in land, is but the re- 
 publication, in a new form, of a law which was in force at the 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 705 
 
 shire-motes and at the wittenage-motes of our remote progen 
 itors ; for to them it was known by a natural sagacity, as it 
 is known to us by a wider experience, that power and proper- 
 ty, if not bound together in a strict alliance, will be arrayed 
 against each other in a deadly hostility. Yet power in the 
 state, and the advantages which such power conveys, have 
 never been confined to a single caste among us. It was the 
 policy which our Saxon ancestors have transmitted to ourselves, 
 to render such honors a prize for which all might contend, not 
 an exclusive enjoyment in which a few might luxuriate. They 
 aimed at an equality of rights, not at an equality of conditions. 
 They sought to combine all ranks of free men into one body ; 
 not by depressing the noble to the level of the ignoble, but by 
 enabling all men to acquire, by desert and industry, the bene- 
 fits denied to them by fortune and by parentage. An untu- 
 tored wisdom taught them that this is the one true and secure 
 equality the only structure of the social system by which the 
 highest social qualities can be permanently called into exercise 
 for the general good the single polity which affords an ade- 
 quate scope for. dutifulness, for energy, and for hope in those 
 who aspire to rise ; for vigilance, for self-improvement, for con- 
 descension, and for sympathy in those who have inherited from 
 their fathers a position on the high places of the earth. 
 
 2. With the exception of the years which elapsed between 
 the death of the first and the restoration of the second Charles, 
 England has, during more than a thousand years, been under 
 the rule of hereditary monarchs, who, either in fact or in the- 
 ory, have wielded all the powers and dispensed all the honors 
 of the state. The prerogatives which our present sovereign 
 exercises, through the agency of responsible advisers, are her 
 inheritance from the Brettwaldas, who, as we have seen, exer- 
 cised them in their own persons. If, at this day, fleets and 
 armies are raised and commanded in the royal name if all 
 property, dedicated to public uses, is now vested in the crown 
 if every stage of every suit or action is conducted by the 
 queen's judicial officers, in obedience to the queen's writs or 
 mandates if, by her alone, war can be made and peace re- 
 stored if all treaties with foreign powers be concluded only 
 in her name if, at her pleasure and under her great seal, all 
 patents of nobility and all grants of the higher offices of the 
 
 YY 
 
706 THE GROWTIF OF T-H E FRENCH AND 
 
 state are issued if, -by her, the Legislature is summoned, pro- 
 rogued, and dissolved and if all our laws are enacted, not by 
 the three estates of the realm, but by her majesty, with the 
 advice and consent of those estates assembled in Parliament, 
 all these rights or usages form a part of the patrimony of the 
 English crown, which has descended upon her who wears it 
 now, through each of the six' dynasties by whom successively 
 it has been worn. Such usages are, indeed, derided as so many 
 obsolete legal fictions by certain scoffers among us, who un- 
 ceremoniously, if not irreverently, consign all such fictions to 
 the limbo of imposture and of cant, or, in more fashionable 
 phrase, of shams. Tho.se monsters of the modern imagination 
 have, it must be confessed, achieved great triumphs, but per- 
 haps none so great as their entire subjugation- of the very 
 writers who have thus most loudly proclaimed war against 
 them, seeing that they are themselves, of all men, the most 
 helpless slaves of cant, if thereby be meant the habitual sub- 
 stitution of certain favorite phrases for real and definite mean- 
 ings. Wiser, though less witty men, will regard these fictions 
 of our Constitution as among its most sacred and invaluable 
 elements. They survive, not as so many vain traditions of 
 worn-out principles not as the empty shadows of departed 
 realities but as the grave, though cautious expression of liv- 
 ing truths* They are a homage rendered to hoar antiquity, 
 indeed; but rendered also to prerogatives which, though dor- 
 mant, are not extinct. They are the records of exigencies 
 which have arise*!, and of exigencies which may yet arise, 
 when, for the conservation of society at large, the prerogatives 
 of the English crown may be called into exercise in all their 
 primaeval force and in all their still inherent vitality. In the 
 mean time, the theory which recognizes and does homage to 
 'these dormant prerogatives is not, in truth (as our facetious 
 satirists imagine), .merely fictitious. All who have studied the 
 government of our land, not in books merely, or in magazines 
 and newspapers, -but from a close personal observation of it, 
 will attest, that the personal powers of the sovereign of En- 
 gland in the nineteenth century, tempered as they are by the 
 comities of our age, and modified as they are by the forms in 
 use among us, are yet powers not nominal, but real ; arduous 
 enough to exercise the highest intellect, and large enough to 
 satisfy the aspirations of the most ardent beneficence. 
 
ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 707 
 
 3. The monarchy of the ancient Brettwalda, as of our mod- 
 ern King, was a limited monarchy. From the days of Alfred 
 and of Athelstane to these days, our sovereigns have reigned 
 (every lover of our national liberties, if wise, -will acknowledge 
 that they have reigned) by divine right. There is a deep and 
 a generous philosophy, as well as a more than human wisdom, 
 in the apostolic canon, that "the powers which be are ordained 
 of God" the powers symbolized, whether by the staff of the 
 constable or by the crown of the monarch. The servile max- 
 ims for which that doctrine has been made the pretext are not 
 legitimate deductions from it. They proceed on a total mis- 
 apprehension of its real meaning. That meaning is, that all 
 human power is indissolubly connected with a correspond- 
 ing responsibility both to Grod as its author, and to man as 
 the subject of it. In this spirit it was that, long before and 
 long after the Norman Conquest, the coronation of our kings 
 was regarded, not as an empty pageant, but as an act strictly 
 essential to the assumption and use of their royal authority ; 
 for at that solemn ceremony a sacramental unction was (at 
 least) supposed to impart to the English king a sacerdotal 
 character, as the vicegerent among men of the King of kings. 
 That sacred chrism rendered him, at least in popular belief, 
 the anointed of the Lord ; but it also rendered him, hi popu- 
 lar belief, and often in his own, amenable to those inevitable 
 penalties which the Supreme Ruler of the world would inflict, 
 or would sanction, if the king should violate the oath which 
 he then took before his assembled people to govern them in 
 justice and in mercy. 
 
 4. But the limitation of the power of our kings, from the 
 earliest to the latest times, has rested on a surer sanction than 
 any oath, however solemn. To repeat what I have already 
 had occasion to say on that subject in a preceding lecture, 
 " Our land has ever lived under the dominion of law. By 
 that power the physical force of the many, the formidable in- 
 fluence of the few, and the arbitrary will of the monarch, have 
 ever been controlled with more or less of energy and of suc- 
 cess. This dominion of the law was exercised in the time of 
 our Saxon progenitors in the folk-motes, the shire-motes, and 
 the wittenage-motes ; in our own times, in our courts of jus- 
 tice, and in our high court of Parliament. During more than 
 
708 THE GROWTH OF THE FRENCH AND 
 
 a thousand years, our legal tribunals have been interposed be- 
 tween the various orders of the state, to vindicate the rights, 
 and to arrest the encroachments of them all. Throughout that 
 long course of ages, those legal sanctuaries have been at once 
 the bulwarks of order and the strong-holds of liberty in En- 
 gland ; and to them it is to be ascribed that the English Par- 
 liaments have never fallen, as the Cortes of Spain fell, or as 
 the States-Greneral of France silently disappeared." 
 
 5. Since the age when England was governed by the house 
 of Cerdic to the age in which the sceptre passed to the house 
 of Brunswick, there has never been a period in which the pow- 
 ers of the English crown have not been divided, balanced, and 
 controlled by the co-ordinate powers of the English Legisla- 
 ture. No sovereign has ever sat on the* throne of this realm 
 except in virtue of a title created by some preceding enact- 
 ment, or sanctioned by some subsequent recognition of the na- 
 tional Legislature. No such sovereign has ever established a 
 right to inscribe among our laws edicts promulgated in the 
 exercise of his own unaided prerogative. There never was a 
 time when the law-givers of our land were not armed with 
 privileges, judicial and administrative, for their safeguard in 
 the free discharge of that pre-eminent franchise. 
 
 There is, indeed, a loose and popular impression, that the 
 Norman Conquest swept away all the institutions of the An- 
 glo-Saxons, and among them the wittenage-mote, substituting 
 no other legislative body in its place. It is easy to detect the 
 causes of that belief. In no other European history do we 
 meet with any conquest which effected so complete, so abrupt, 
 and so lasting a change in the state and fortunes of the con- 
 quered people. It has even become the era of our insular 
 chronology ; and, for reasons which I can not now pause to 
 explain, has gone far to obliterate the memory and the records 
 :>f our earlier political constitution. Yet no fact admits of 
 readier or of more complete proof than that all the most im- 
 portant of the legal customs, and legal principles, and national 
 sentiments of England beneath her Brettwaldas, were yet in 
 force in England beneath William the Norman and his de- 
 scendants to the fourth generation. New names, Norman or 
 Latin, were indeed, in many cases, substituted for the Saxon 
 , titles. Thus to the wittenage-mote succeeded the curia regis. 
 
'ENGLISH MONARCHIES COMPARED. 709 
 
 But the two were really identical, though nominally distinct. 
 For the most complete and triumphant proof of that fact, 1 
 would refer to a dissertation (obviously from the pen of the 
 very learned Sir Francis Palgrave) which is to be found in the 
 sixty-ninth number of the Edinburgh Review. It will enable 
 any student to satisfy himself that the Parliament in which 
 we and our forefathers have so long and so justly gloried, may 
 be traced, through a long but unbroken genealogy, back to the 
 Saxon assemblies which hailed the Confessor, and Canute, and 
 Edgar as their kings. 
 
 For the history of our commonwealth from the earliest epoch 
 to our own is that of a people looking before and after, whose 
 retrospect is unwearied, that their progress may be at once 
 constant and secure. Amid all the errors, and all the crimes, 
 and all the miseries which have disgraced and burdened our 
 land, it has ever cherished reverence for the traditions, for the 
 achievements, for the struggles, and for the sufferings of pre- 
 ceding generations reverence for the church in which they 
 worshiped, for the crown which they honored, for the tribunals 
 which they obeyed, and for the Legislature which, at much 
 cost of blood, and toil, and treasure, they perpetuated rever- 
 ence for the laws which they transmitted as a patrimony to 
 their descendants and reverence for the liberties which they 
 bequeathed as a birthright to ourselves. Nor has our land ever 
 yet been wanting in hope in a hope sustained by an unfalter- 
 ing faith in the expansive power of those great principles, of 
 which the truth has been tried by the severest tests, and has 
 been proved alike in our good and in our evil fortunes. To 
 improve, not to subvert to adapt our institutions to the suc- 
 cessive exigencies to which Time has given birth to encoun- 
 ter and subdue evils real and remediable, not evils imaginary 
 or inherent in the indestructible conditions of all human so- 
 ciety to abandon to the schools all Utopian reveries to re- 
 gard the constitution of the realm, not as the absolute proper- 
 ty of any one generation of men, but as a sacred trust for 
 which each generation is in turn responsible such (except 
 during the Cromwellian usurpation) have been the invariable 
 maxims of the English monarchy during a period exceeding 
 that which intervene^ between the foundation and the extinc- 
 tion of the power of Rome. 
 
710 THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MONARCHIES, ETC. 
 
 To the question of Yoltaire then, "Why has England so long 
 and so successfully maintained her free government and her 
 free institutions ? I answer, "because England is still, as she 
 has always been, German ; because her national franchises are 
 the spontaneous and legitimate fruit of her national character ; 
 of that character, dutiful, serious, persevering, reverential, and 
 hopeful, which has been transmitted to us from our Anglo- 
 Saxon ancestors, and which it now remains for us to transmit 
 to our remotest descendants. 
 
 . Far different from this is the answer returned by M. Gfuizot 
 in his " Essai des Causes de PEtablissement du Grouvernement 
 Representatif en Angleterre." The powers of that great writer 
 were never exhibited with greater felicity than in that remark- 
 able treatise, in which he traces the liberties of England to the 
 relative positions into which the Conquest brought the Norman 
 people and government on the one hand, and the Saxon people 
 and nobles on the other hand. Luminous and comprehensive 
 as is that commentary on our annals, I think it essentially de- 
 fective, for the reasons which I have already mentioned; and 
 even inaccurate, for reasons which the time at my command 
 will not now allow me to mention. Yet to any one who wishes 
 to pursue the inquiry which I proposed at the outset of this 
 lecture, it would be impossible to recommend any guide who 
 couk! be followed with greater confidence, with more advant- 
 age, or with equal pleasure. 
 
 Here, then, I close the Lectures which it will be in my 
 power to address to you on the History of France during the 
 present academical term. If the necessary time and opportu- 
 nity shall be allowed to me, I hope, in a future term, to com- 
 plete them by a review of the Causes of the Decline and Fall 
 of the French Monarchy at the Revolution of 1789. 
 
 THE END.