FRx^NCE UNDER RICHELIEU AND COLBERT BY J. H. BRIDGES, M.B. Iv\.TE FELLOW OF OIUEL COLLEGE, OXFOKD. E D I N 1^> IJ E G H EDMONSTON & DOUGLAS 1 8GG. £>*'hECKas PREFACE. These Lectures were originally delivered before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, under the title of the 'Age of Louis xiv.' But the title here given seemed more appropriate. Of the six eminent rulers of France during the seven- teenth century, the first two, Henry iv. and Sully, do not fall within the period here treated. Of the remain- ing four, — Eichelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and Louis xiv., — the first and third have a better claim than the second, and certainly than the fourth, to connect their names with the Culmination of the French Monarchy and the splendid intellectual development with which it was simultaneous. From the accession of Eichelieu to the deatli of Colbert, we have a period of about sixty years. At VI PREFACE. Eichelieu's death in 1^42, Antoine Arnaiid, Descartes, Corneille, Poussin, had reached their prime. Pascal, Moli^re, Lesueur, Puget, had attained or were approach- ing manhood. At Colbert's death in 1683, Descartes, Moliere, and Pascal had long ago disappeared ; Corneille was in his last year. Eacine and Lafontaine had written most of their best works. The last thirty years of Louis XIV. 's reign were not indeed so totally barren of intellect as Mr. Buckle has asserted. But the palm of genius, as Voltaire recognised so frankly, had passed for a while from France to the country of Locke and Newton. TABLE OF CONTENTS, LECTURE I. FORMATIOX OF THE FREXCH MONARCTIV. PA 01 Plan of Treatment adoi)ted in these Lectures, . . 1-5 Twofold Movement of Western Eurojie during the last five Centuries, ...... 5-9 Decomposition of Catholicism in Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, . . . . . .10-12 Feudahsm undermined by the groAvth of the Boroughs, . 13 In England the Boroughs side with the Aristocracy; in France with the Monarchy, . . . .14-10 Gradual Victory of the Central Power in France over the Local Aristocracy from Louis le Gros to Louis xi., . 17-19 Appearance and rapid Decline of the Parliamentary System in France, ...... 19-22 Connexion of Protestantism in France Avith the Aristocracy, 22-24 Progress of the Monarchy under Henry iv. and Sully, . 25 Richelieu, ....... 2G His anti-feudal Policy, ... 27-3(1 VIU TABLE OF CONTENTS. His disregard of Parliamentary Government, Decimation of Aristocratic Chiefs, Destruction of tliei Castles, ...... His Death, ...... Culmination of French Monarchy, . PAGE 30-32 33-36 37-38 39-41 LECTURE II. INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE UNDER MASiARIN AND COLBERT. Mazarin chosen by Richelieu to succeed him ; his Character, His aptitude for Foreign Policy ; unfitness for Internal Government, ...... The Fronde : a temporary union of the Aristocracy with the Middle Class, .... Parlement of Paris ; contrast "vvitli English Parliament, Principal Actors in the Fronde ; Cardinal de Retz, Outbreak of August 1648, Comparison of the Fronde with the English Revolution, Character of Louis xiv., .... Colbert, First Minister of France, . His Financial Reforms, .... Exemption of Clergy and Noblesse from Taxation, . Injustice of Taille ; attempts of Statesmen to remove it. Comparison of Colbert's Government with that of Sully and Henry iv., Removal of Restrictions from Commerce, . Development of Industry ; Navigation Laws, 42-43 - 44 . 45 46-48 48-51 » 52-56 ' 57-61 61-ja4>_ 65-66 67-68 60-73 76 77-80 81 82-83 TAr>T,E OF CONTENTS. ]\ r.\r:i- (.'anal ot Laugucdoc, S4 Encouragement to ScicMice and Liteiatiuf, 8o-8() Note on Fkencii Tiieoiues of Taxation in the .Seven- teenth Cext('i;y, .... S7-l()(» LECTURE .HI. ^ RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EITROPE UNDER KlCIIELIEr, MAZAUIN, AND LOUIS XIV. Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, 101 State-System of Western Europe, originates in lloman Empire, ...... 102-104 Catholicism succeeds Imperialism, 104-105 Precedence of France in Western Europe, lOG Dangers to Europe from the Disru])tion of Catholicism in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries, 107 Aggrandi^icmcnt of the Austrian House, . 108 The Great Design of Henry of France, 109 Thirty Years' War, . . . .110 111 JBi^lielieu's Policy ; Balance of Power ; Toleration of Religions, . .112-118 His Difficulties with the Coui-t, and the French Protes- tants, 11;^ His Moderation in War, . .114-115 "^ ^s TeiTitorial Acquisitions not, dangerous to the Peace of Emope, . I 10- US ^J^Mazarin carries out Richelieu's P'diey ; Treaty of th«^ Pyrenees, 1650, 110] 20 TABLE OF CONTENTS. Y Relations of France with Europe at the Accession of Loiiis to Power, 1661 :— England, ..... The Dutch RepulDlic, Sweden, Germany, . .* . . Italy, Spain, ..... Causes that prevented European Peace ; Commercial Rivalry, ..... Religious Discord ; the Jesuits, . War with Holland, 1672-1678, . . . "War of the League of Augsburg, 1688-1697, . War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1713, Peace of Utrecht, 1713, .... 121-122 122-125 125-127 127-128 129-130 131-134 134-137 137-140 141-144 145-148 149 Note on the ' Holy Roman Empire, ' 149-152 LECTURE IV. I'ROORESS OF THOUGHT DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Connexion of Individual with Social Development, . 153-155 (xradual Growth of the Conception of Invariable Law, 155-157 Distinction of the (constructive and Destructive Move- ment of Modern Euroi)e, . . . 158 The former has proceeded less rapidly than the latter, . 159-162 Partial and Provisional attempts at Reconstruction, 163-165 I'liilosophical Character of the Seventeenth Century, . 165 TABLE OF CONTENTS. xi I'At.K Influence of Kepler, Oaliloo, and Bacon, . . 1GG-16S Descartes ; his attempted Synthesis of Positive Philo- sophy', ...... 168-170 His Critical Philosophy, . . .171-175 Poetry of the Seventeenth Century ; Historical Conditions favourable for Poetry, ..... 175-178 Humanist Character of Western Poetry, 170 Its Relation to Philosophy, . . .180-182 Corneille and Molit^re, . . . .183-185 Religious Movement in France during the Seventeenth Century, . 185 Toleration of Protestantism under Richeleu, Mazarin, and Colbert, . . . 18G-188 The Jesuits, . . . .189-191 The Jansenists, . . . . .192-194 Bossuet, ....... 195-197 Preparations for the Eighteenth Century, . 198-199 Note on Mr. Buckle's View of Louis xiv.'s Peeiod, . 199-201 LECTUEE T. FORMATION OF THE FRENCH MONARCHY. TI IE views held in the present day of the vahie and [)urpose of historical study, are so various, so con tradictory, and so ill defined, that it is well for a lec- turer on any historical period to prepare his audience, in as few words as possible, for the general line of treatment which he intends to take. Those who have not accustomed themselves to regard human affairs as subject to any constant laws of co- existence and succession, to Avhom the phenomena of society and of man seem swayed by oscillations as inde- finite and arbitrary as those of the solar system seemed a few centuries ago, or those of the winds and clouds till very recently, will be interested in isolated periods of history merely as they would listen to an exciting drama. They will study the play of opposing passions, the plastic influence of strong wills and master minds ; or, if their turn be more practical, may draw vague and trite maxims from the spectacle of great crimes fol- A 2 FORMATION OF lowed by great calamities ; may moralize on the vicis- situdes of fortune and the downfall of empires ; and may flatter themselves that in studying history they are listening to philosophy teaching by example. Such readers will frequent, I say^ isolated fields of history where the dramatic interest is high, the play of pass'ion fierce and hot, the character of the chief actors strongly marked, or where the narrower sympathies of the spec- tator are roused by appeals to patriotism or sectarian feeling. But in history as a connected whole they will take but slight interest. For the Past of the human race has never presented itself to their minds as a continuous and progressive development, subject, like all other phenomena of the universe, to invariable and ascertainable laws. It is, however, from this latter point of view that the subject of this course of lectures has been regarded, 'o those who look at the history of -the advanced por- tion of our race — at the history, that is, of Southern and Western Europe and its colonies, — as the continuous and uninterrupted growth of one vast organism, each cen- tury will be seen to I'orm an organic part of the living- whole, and, apart from that whole, to have no separate life nor meaning. For the last two centuries this con- ception has gradually been growing into full and fuller Till-; FKKNril MONAKCIIV. 3 ]n-omiiience. ' The present,' said Leibnitz, ' is the crea tion of the past, and is big with the future.' ' The human race,' said Pascal, in the same century, Ms a colossal man, ever growing and ever learning.' Sucli glimpses of a stupendous trutli, developed in subse- quent geuerations by Vico in Italy, by Kant and Herder in Germany, by Turgot and Condorcet in France, have formed the starting-point ^ of the great intellectual achievement of our own century, the historical and social philosophy of Auguste Comte. ~^ So much seemed necessary to premise as the key- note to what follows. For the leading question to be dealt with in these lectures, the question which more r>r less visibly will underlie the whole series, is, What place in the chain of universal history does the age of Louis XIV. occupy ? How far can we see it to be con- sequent on the previous histoiy of France and of Europe ? What permanent- results did it bequeath to the future, to the eighteenth century, and to all future time ? It is obvious that this mode of treatment, if consistently carried out, will exclude the vast mass of dramatic anecdote and amusing detail which fills two hundred volumes of contemporary memoirs, and whirh, always entertaining and sometimes instructive as it may be, is for the most part wholly foreign to the ])urp()se 4 FOKMATION OF of these lectures. Nor will military campaigns and glorious victories be alluded to other than in the most cursory manner ; their results only so far as they are permanently important being stated. I ])ropose, in the present lecture, to sketcli very rapidly the rise and progress of the French monarchy. I shall pomt out its importance as an intermediate stage between the Catholic feudalism from which it sprang and the republican in- stitutions for which it prepared the way. Briefly men- tioning the names and the achievements of its successive founders, I shall dwell at greater length on the last and greatest, the establisher of the national unity, the de- stroyer of feudalism, the predecessor of the Kevolution ; Cardinal de Eichelieu. The internal government of France during the reign of Louis xiv. will be the sub- ject of the second lecture. Our attention will princi- pally be fixed on the splendid yet abortive efforts of Colbert to develop the industrial and mental resources of France, to advance peacefully towards the modern era, and to attain the results of the great Revolution without the putrescent decay and the disastrous struggle. The third lecture will deal with the relations of France to Europe, from the Peace of Westphalia to the Peace of Utrecht, llichelieu will come au;ain before us as the first of European statesmen, the founder of that system THK FREXriI MONAI^CHV. 5 df eqiiililii'ium of States, witli(.)ut wliicli tin- iVce develop ineiit of Western Eun)pe (liiriii!^ tlie last two cciitiiries would have been impossible. We shall see how and why France under Louis xiv. degenerated from lliche- lieu s principles, and was the first to incur the penalties which that great statesman had pre-appointed for their infraction. In my last lecture I shall endeavour to characterize that which underlies all social and political agitations, and is the key to their right interpretation, the progress of European thought during the period that we are considering. The movement of Western Europe during the last five centuries, complex, various, confused as it seems at first sight to be, may be more clearly comprehended l\y dis- tinguishing its two separate processes ; the destruction of Avhat is effete and old, the constniction of the new. Decomposition, more or less rapid, of the Catholic and feudal^ mode of life ; gradual accumulation of fresh materials, scientific and industrial, to supply its place : these are the two distinct aspects of modern history. The ancient mode of life, based morally on l)clief in the dogmas of the C'liurch, and on sul)jection to the spiri- tual authorities by whom those, dogmas were inter- ])reted ; l)ased politically on the feudal institutions handed down from the Koman Enii»iri', and nioditied 6 FOILMATIOX OF more or less l)y the Celts and Teutons, wlio adopted the imperial institutions ; the military spirit dominant, though restrained from the offensive warfare of ancient Eome, and limited to the defence of Christendom against Mohammedan and Pagan ; the military caste supreme over every other ; the military life, outside the Church, the only honourable life ; the great mass of the working population elevated, indeed, above their condition in ancient Eome, no longer liable to be bought and sold, possessing the elementary rights of the family, but bound to the soil, and politically unrecognised, — ele- vated, in fact, from slavery to serfage, but not yet from serfage to freedom ; industry tolerated, but not yet held in honour ; commerce neglected, or abandoned to a de- graded or persecuted race : this medicTval mode of life, called for the sake of precision Catholic Feudalism, under which men had lived, and in spite of modern prejudice had lived nobly, for many centuries, was be- coming, towards the close of the thirteenth century, intolerable to men ; and its gradual decomposition, a process which in most countries is very far from com- plete, is one of tlie two chief aspects of modern history. The other aspect is the inverse process of construc- tion of the new system of life destined to supersede and replace the old ; the system based on industrial TIIK Flir.XCII Mt^XAUniV. 7 activity and ,sL'i(Mititic t'onvictioii, as ()])])()S(mI to tlic military activity and tlic supernatural l)cliefs oi" the middle ages. When we speak of one era, of one sei'ies of centuries as sliarply opposed to another, Ave do so for the sake of clearness. In every subject of tliought tlie mind recpiires distinctions" to be drawn tar more de- fniitely than they exist in nature The zoologist defines the animal and vegetable world, or demarcates tlie ^SloUusca from the Eadiata, although in actual fact the transitions from one order or kingdom to another are imperceptible. So it is with History. In saying that modern life is opposed to ancient and to mediicval life by the substitution of industry for warfare, it is not meant that men in ancient day^^ did not weave or spin, buy or sell, or that in modern centuries they did not fight ; what is meant is, tliat military thoughts and purposes \vere paramount, that the military class preponderated, in ancient Eome, and, to a somewhat less degree, in the middle ages ; whereas in modern times industrial thoughts aii(t~pTnposesTiavebecome more and more paramount, and the industrial or capitalist class has been, for four or five centuries, rapidly tending to become supreme. The mercantile class was in ancient Kome, or even in mediicval Paris, of secondary importance^ : it is now rapidly becoming of primary importances Industry, 8 FORMATION OF which used to be the work of slaves or serfs, is now the work of free men. Warfare, which once occupied the entire life of the free citizen, is now the special occupa- tion of a subordinate class. The progress of this mar- vellous substitution of industry for warfare is then one of the master facts of modern history. And correlatively with this prodigious revolution in the secular world, we find a similar change in the spiritual. Scientific con- viction in every branch of thought, whether in astro- nomy, in physics, in politics, or in morals, has taken the place, or is rapidly taking the place, of the supernatural beliefs of the ancient or mediaeval world. Not that there are no students of theology now, or that there Avere no astronomers or mathematicians in Athens, or in mediiieval Paris or Oxford ; but that scientific investi - gation and method, applied to every branch of thought, to the motions of the heavens or to the changes of society and the precepts of morality, has been for the last four centuries more and more completely concen- trating the efforts of the master spirits of the time. The spiritual leadership which from the fifth to the thirteenth century was held by Augustine, Gregory, Hildebrand, Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bernard, men who devoted their high powers to the maintenance of the siipornatural dogmas of the Church, has been possessed TIIF. FRKXCll MoXAPvClIV f^ in later ceiiturios by Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, ami Leibnitz. The gradual downfall of the Feudo- Catholic system ; the gradual growth of the new industrial scientific sys- tem : such, then, are the two essential features of the history of Western Europe during the last five centuries. In each successive period the progress of this double movement is the primary object to be kept steadily in view ; and the business of the lecturer is to clear it from all the accidental and insignificant detail, by which, in most historical writing, it is encumbered and concealed. And here it must be borne in mind, as one of the fun- damental truths without which modern history is mean- ingless, that no one country can be considered to the exclusion of the rest. The French, British, German, Spanish, and Italian populations, with their outlying appendages, must for the purpose of this examination be regarded as members of one and the same political whole. The general laws of modern progress are not to \ be gathered from the history of England, of Spaifl, or of any other single country. Works written on the prin- ciple of exclusive nationality, useful as tliey may be as collections of material, have to the student of the science of history something of the character of pruvin fial or parochial records. Western Eurupf must be w I 10 FOIIMATIOX OF garded as a wliole, united in mediaeval times by a com- mon religious faith, united no less in modern times by a uniform system of industrial activity, of scientific study, and aesthetic culture. Taking then the destructive movement first, the question before us will be, At what stage had this move- ment arrived in the period before us, and what advance was made in it durmg that period ? The essential feature of the mediaeval system, that feature on which all its greatness depended, and which marked an era in the progress of humanity, was the separation of the temporal or secular from the moral or spiritual power. Under the old theocracies, whether we look at the Jewish or the Pagan world, there liad been priests and there had been kings, but the two powers were closely connected and combined, and one of tliem was at the mercy of the other. Either the civil magis- trate, as in ancient Eome, usurped the functions of the priest, or, as in ancient Egypt, the priests usurped the office of tlie magistrate, and regulatc^l tlie civil govern- ]iient, or at least the secular occupations of the people. The essential feature of .Catholic society was, tliat a power arose, for the first time in history, wholly inde- ]jendent of and disconnected from the State. From the time that the early Christians obeyed thcMv bishops ami rilK 1 UKNCll MoNAlMllV. 1 I disobeyed their magistrates ; iVum tlic time that St. Ambrose, from the tlireshold of his t-hurcli in ^klihin, forbade the entrance of Theodosius, the supreme magis- trate of the civilized world, because he came there stained with unlawful and unrepented massacre, it was evident that a new power had arisen among men ; a power acting by other laws than those of force, mea- suring by another standard than that of kingly favour or aristocratic birth. Charlemagne recognised that power as superior to his owti imperial dignity. Henry iv. re- cognised it when he sued for pardon barefoot at Hilde- brand's gate. It was by the power of the Catholic Church antagonizing and balancing the rude furce of feudalism, that the condition of the labouring classes was made tolerable. For the first time in tlie history of the world, the moral law^ was separated from the civil law ; the law^ of conscience and duty from the law of judicial ordinance and magisterial compidsion ; the law^ persuading the will from the law compelling the action. Tlie Cluirch wliolly separate from and superior to the State ; binding the feudal States of Europe into a vast commonwealth, a spiritual democracy, where intellec- tual and moral force took precedency of birtli, office, wealth, and regal power : such was ihv ideal partially realized bet\veen the tentli and the tliirtccntli century. 12 FORMATION OF Partially realized, I say, for at no time was the separa- tion between Church and State so perfect as the tlieory of Catholicism indicated. Fully to have attained its high ends, the power of that Church should have been not less than it was, but gi^eater. The Church, in her best days, v/as the safeguard of spiritual liberty against feudal oppression ; but in its best days it was too weak for the task, and those days were far too short. The intellectual basis on which it rested was too mcoherent ; it was impotent to withstand the irresistible march of metaphysical and scientific thought, finding utterance in Abelard, in Eoger Bacon, and in Dante ; it was powerless to deal with the nascent feature of the modern time, the problem of free industry then rising in the emancipated boroughs ; and two centuries before the days of Luther and of Calvin, the disruption of Catholicism began. The subjection of the Papal power to the power of Councils, the triumph of the kings over the popes in the long and vital struggle of ecclesiastical appoint- ments, were the sure signs tliat tlie life of tlie Catholic Churcli as a separate and independent modifying force was gone for ever. And in consequence of its fall the power of feudal- ism would have been intolerable to tlie human race, had not feudalism itself beiMi undergoing a similar dc- TIIR FUKNCII MoNAIU'IIV. 13 cliiio; had not a new clement ot" prodigious significance, destined wholly to supersede ieudalisni, be(ni risin<4 to take its place. That element was the growth of free industry in the boroughs of Western Europe during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Not only ^Yere the free burghers the rivals of the feudal power, but by the very mode in which they obtained their freedom, they decomposed and undermined that power. Of the two elements of which the feudal power consisted, royalty and aristocracy, they allied themselves with one, to the inevitable ruin, sooner or later, of the other. But the mode in which they did so was not the same in every European country; and in the clear understanding of the distinction lies the key to the important differences wdiich, amidst still more important and essential uniformities, demarcate the history of France from the histoiy of England. In England, the burghers, the tiers -etat, united with the aristocracy against the kings ; in France, it united with royalty against aristocracy. The explanation as to England may perhaps be sought in the peculiar circum- stances of the Norman Conquest. There the monarchical element of feudalism was exceptionally strong ; there too there was a quasi- feudal element, that of the small Saxon gentry, who, sharing the oppression of their 1 4 FU KM ATI ox OF country 111 en in the towns, shared their resistance, and were ultimately joined by the great barons. Hence the peculiar cliaraeter of the English constitution : aristo- cratic rather than monarchic, provincial rather than metropolitan, localized not centralized. From Eunny- mede to the aristocratic appropriation of Church pro- perty at the dissolution of the monasteries, from the dissolution of the monasteries to the aristocratic Eevo- lution of 1688, the power of the great landowning families in England relatively to the monarchy has been, with the tacit consent of the English people, ever on the increase ; and at the death of AYilliam iii. these families became virtually supreme, and the monarch, as has been well said, was reduced to the condition of the Venetian Doge. In France, from inverse causes, the process was inverse. There, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the feudal nobility was very strong, the monarchy sin- gularly weak ; and there the Third Estate made com- mon cause with the monarchy against the aristocratic power. Hence the different colour of subsequent French history. In France, in England, and in eveiy other country of Europe, the ultimate goal was, and still remains— for it is as yet far from comidetely attained, — the same : the elimination of feudalism, of privileged TiiK fki:n( n moxaki iiv. IT) classes, the full establisliineiit uf the modern system of free iiichistry, the complete incorporation of the working classes into the political body. But whereas in Eng- land the people, in their progress towards this goal, have accepted the government of a strong provincial local aristocracy, depressing the feudal monarchy, and more or less effectually heading the industrial move- ment ; in France the people have co-operated with the monarchy against the aristocracy. For the French people, the growth of the monarchy was for many cen- turies the standard, the true measure of political pro- gress. With the growth of the monarchy, the growth » of the Third Estate, that is, of the professional and com- mercial class, went hand in hand. By its means the aristocratic power in France gradually lost its influence and its vitality, while retaining the semblance of life, until little remained for the revolutionists of 1789 but to clear away the husk, and from beneath the d^ris of the middle ages reveal the young and puissant form of modern France. Therefore the steps by which the kings of France attained their vast centralizing power deserve more attention and respect than republican politicians might at first sight be disposed to afford ; for the progress of the French monarchy has l)een the progress of the French people. 1 6 FOKMATION OF • The first kings of tlie Capetian dynasty seemed hardly to deserve the name. They were but the first in rank among a long list of feudal nobles, and they were by no means the first in power. Tlieir dominions were not nearly so large as the county of Yorkshire. The Dukes of Normandy, whether before or after their Englisli conquests, openly scorned their ascendency. South of the Loire, the powerful principalities of Aquitaine and Languedoc hardly recognised their existence. To the country east of the Meuse, the Saone, and the Rhone, that is, to the provinces of Lorraine, Burgundy, Franche Comte, Dauphine, and Provence, France laid no claim whatever ; those provinces in the division of the Carlo- vingian empire having fallen to the German empire, or to the kingdom of Italy ; and even west of the Saone, the Counts of Champagne and Artois, doing nominal homage, exercised practical sovereignty within thirty miles of Paris. But since the time of Julius Cicsar the tradition of a central authority had never wholly died out in France. The Carlo vingian dynasty revived the tradition of the Roman Empire. The Capetian dynasty revived the tradition of Charlemagne. Every influence favoured the movement. The boroughs, as we have seen, made common cause with the king, or, in other parts of Tin: KKKNCH M()NAi;(TIY. 1 7 France, with the great suzerains, against the petty tw anny of the small barons, and welcomed the establish nient of central courts of appeal, from which nobles were gradually excluded, and in which lawyers, men of their own class, became gradually supreme. The Church, witli instinctive prescience of the secret agita- tion of free thought rising from the free boroughs, or wafted in subtle miasmata from the East, began to feel its need of a strong secular arm, abnegated its supe- riority to the temporal power, and accepted the protec- tion of a vigorous monarchy, purchasing bare subsistence at the cost of independence and morality. The great Crusading expeditions meantime wasted the wealth and blood of tlie military caste, Ijanished them for long years from the kingdom, and left the pacific elements of society, the burghers and the law^yers, free to organize their settled government at home, and substitute Koman law for barbarous Germanic custom. One by one tlie great fiefs were united to the French crown. Xormandy in 1210, Champagne in 1284, Dauphine in 1343, Toulouse in 13G1, Aquitaine in 1461, Burgundy in 1477, Provence in 1481, Britany in 1491, yielded to the gravitating influence wdiich, during the disastrous period from the middle of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteentli century, had been neutralized by the English wars and B 18 FORMATION OF the desperate struggles of the Burgundian house, but which resumed its intensity under the eleventh Louis, one of tlie wisest, and, popular prejudice apart, one of the most useful of European statesmen. The efforts of Louis le Gros, of Suger, of Philip Augustus, and of Saint Louis, to break down feudal anarchy and establish a common authority and a uniform administration throughout France, had relaxed under the house of Yalois, who had yielded to the aristocratic instinct of providing rich appanages for their family. John, in 1361, by be- queathing the Duchy of Burgundy, which had escheated to the Crown, to his fourth son, Philip the Bold, founded a rival dynasty, which, by intennarriage with the family of Flanders, became for a time the strongest throne in Europe, and paralysed the resistance of France to the English invader. It seemed for a time doubtful whether France was not destined to the political dis- persion of Italy and Germany. This formidable danger, increased by the union of other feudal magnates with the house of Burgundy, veiling their instincts of self- preservation under tlie guise of a League for the Com- mon Good, Louis xi. met and crushed. Military ambition of the vulgar Napoleonic kind he had none ; his sole aim was to constitute the French nation, by removing the incubus without which its existence was impossible : TIIK FKKNCII MONAKCIIV. 19 iViulal aristocracy. Thoi-oughly tlevotcd to the industrial and commercial interests of the nation, looking on the Irivolons etiquette of tlie noljlcs \\ith undisguised scorn, assuming the dress, and frequenting the society of com- moners, Louis XI. was the true })recursor of Eichelieu, and the Revolution. The English student (jf French history will seek for the analogue of that in which, when reading his own annals, he has taken a deep, a just, though a somewhat exaggerated pride : a free permanent representative assembly. And, for the most part, he will seek in vain. There were indeed two institutions in France, one per- ^ manent, the other intermittent, either of winch exercised, ; in its w^ay, a clieck upon the central power, and seemed ! to contain germs capable of development into the Eng- lish type of government. These were the States-General and the Parlement of Paris. The States- General, co^ sisting of the tliree estates of nobles, clergy, and com- mons, were assembled for the first time by Philip le Bel in the first year of tlie fourteenth century, thirty-five years after the first English Parliament had been called ]jy Simon de Montfort. The popular element in this body was chosen l)y a system of double election, in the first stage of which every free man in every city, town, and village, took part ; the deputies so elected assem- 20 FORMATION' OF bled in the chief city of the district, and sent a member to the metropolis. It was convoked six times in the fourteenth century, five times in the fifteenth, three times in the sixteenth, once in the early part of tlie seventeenth ; from that time it was not heard of, until, after an interval of 170 years, it was again convoked to inaugurate the French Eevolution. That these assem- blies acted as a check upon expenditure, and as a safety-valve for discontent, is unquestionable. They kept alive the old theory, a theory far older than is imagined, that freemen could not be taxed without their own consent. They nursed the germ of modern repub- licanism ; the dogma which has its roots deeper in the past than is generally thought, and is therefore the more certain of the future, that the common welfare of the people, res ^n(.&/^cables de faire dos ravages que la i>osterite jiar leurs terribles effets aurait peut-etre de la peiup a les croire.' — De Motteville, vol. i. p. "JoT, vol. ii. p. 270. 50 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE his hand- to- month budgets, amassing an enormous pri- vate fortune, yet never losing sight of that which alone redeems him, the liigh aim of his European diplomacy, — such was political life in Paris while the Thirty Years War was bemg closed at Munster, Spanish armies alone standing stubbornly against young Conde in the Nether- lands. The drama, after all, would have hardly sufficient interest for us, but for the inimitable skill of its nar- rators, who, like insects in amber, have immortalized their own and their friends' littleness in the brilliant transparency of their French style. AYe liave memoirs of a Mademoiselle de Montpensier, bravest and unbash- f uUest of Amazons, fighting and intriguing for a hus - band, royal, princely, ducal, or, if better might not be, at least noble; of a Madame de Motteville, Queen's favourite, sweet, faithful, ladylike, the insolence of her caste and breeding contrasting so strangely with the delicate gentleness and candour of her nature ; finally, of the Archbishop,-^ and arch- conspirator himself, John Francis Paul de Gondi, afterwards Cardinal de Eetz ; iiitriguing over night with every disaffected man, whether prince of the blood, parliamentary orator, hungry trader, or starving artisan ; moving the market women to tears ' More properly acting archbishop, or coadjutor, to his uncle. INDEIJ MAZAinX AND COLBKKT. 51 next inuriiiug, in tli(j nave of Notre Dame, by elof|iieiil discourses on the duty of forgiveness to enemies ; har- anguing the mob from his coacli, wlien the service was over, witli cautious, cunning, stimulating exhortations to obey tlie Queen, and disobey her chosen minister ; pre- senting himself at Court in the afternoon with the cool, shrewd audacity of a Parisian gamin, and offerhig to quell the rioters ; and finding leisure in this busy life for scandalous intrigues with tlie most fashionable ladies of tlie period; De Eetz, bright-eyed, impudent ecclesiastical demagogue, vicious, witty, veracious hypo- crite, has in his inimitable memoirs left photograpliic images of all that passed around him. The excitement of Paris, and mdeed in many other Large towns in France, was very great in these months. War, famine, and inisgovernment were doing their work. Every class in society was agitated. The aristocracy, j^ resuscitated for a brief moment from the death-blow dealt by Eichelieu, and indulging to the full their busy frivolous ambition ; the bourgeoisie, unprepared for radical changes, but disgusted with extravagant ex- penditure and repudiation of State loans, amounting to national bankruptcy ; the members of the Parlement and other Courts, terrified at the creation of new offices, and the threatened suppression of their hereditary pri- f^ ^ 52 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE vileges ; the working classes maddened by the recent octroi on provisions : all these things made inflammable material enough. The Queen, going to mass one morn- ing, was beset by two hundred starving women, who followed her into the church doors, and clamoured for justice. She told us, says Madame de Motteville, on her return, that she had half a mind to speak to tliem ; ' mais elle avait apprehende les insolences de cette canaille qui n'ecoutent jamais la raison et qui n'ont dans la tete que leur petit interet.'^ The Advocate -General, Omer Talon, with speech more bold than courtly, in full Parle- ment, on 15th January 1648, told her that she was the Queen, not of slaves, but of free subjects ; yet that these subjects were so loaded with subsidies and taxes that, if they could still call their souls their own, it was because it was the only thing left that could not be sold by auction ; that laurels and glorious victories were well, but that, once for all, they were not food and clothing.^ The Parlement was the sheet anchor of all men's hopes. They united in June, with the other supreme Courts, and sat permanently in the Salle de St. Louis. The pressure which they were bringing to bear on the ' De Motteville, vol. ii. p. 11. - Ibid. p. 14. UNDER MAZAKIX AND COLBERT. 53 Government seemed likely to be effectual ; checks on taxation and a Habeas Corpus law wore already in progress, when, on the 10th of August, the news came of Condes victory over tlie Spanish at Lens. The Court was in exultation. 'How sorry the Parlement will be !'^ said Louis, now ten years old, and already accustomed, Madame de Motteville tells us, to look on the Parlement as his enemies. Against these enemies the Court now resolved to strike a decisive blow. On the 26th of August, the Queen went to Xotre Dame to hear the Te Deum for her victory; as she left it, she whispered to Cominges, the lieutenant of her guards, orders to seize the three leaders of the Parlementary opposition ; foremost among them Broussel, the people's idol, an elderly man, ' the Pioman tribune,' simple, upright, noisy, and um^^se. How Cominges seized this ' tri- bune of the people' at his dinner-table, and put him struggling into his coach ; how the coach was over- turned, chains stretched across the streets, and the prisoner all but rescued, but at last got safely to St. Germain ; the teiTor of the courtiers ; the Queen brave and ignorant ; crushing with ironical replies the im- pudent De Eetz, who offers his services to quell ' De ^^otteville, vol. ii. )>. 2;18. 54 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE the tumult, and is answered only by a ' Pray, don't put yourself to such trouble, sir,' — ' Allez vous re- poser, vous avez bien travaill^,' laughing heartily at good, gentle De Motteville, who naively confesses her fright ; these, and other things, those who like good French and good comedy may read in the memoirs as with the very eyes and ears of the chief actors. Very soon the comedy seemed likely to become tragic enough ; all night the streets were hushed with dismay and ex- pectation, but, at six o'clock next morning, as Seguier, the Chancellor of France, was proceeding along the Quai des Augustins, with orders from the Court to shut the doors of the Palais de Justice against the Par- lement, a band of armed citizens incited, De Pietz tells us, by himself, their leader, Argenteuil, in the disguise of a journeyman mason, attacked the Swiss Guard, drove the Chancellor into the courtyard of the house nearest at hand, followed him there, and would assuredly have torn him to pieces, but for a small closet into which he managed to creep, and where it may well be believed, says De IMotteville, that as he heard the crowd hustling and hunting for him in every corner, he could not have felt very comfortable, and must have felt that after all he was but a man like the rest (qu'il n'^tait pas k son aise, et qu'il sentit qu'il etait homme). He confessed himself, UNDER MAZARIX AND COLBEKT. :>:» she goes on to add, wliile in this closet, to his brotlier the Bishop of Meaux, and in every way prepared lii in- self for death. Paris meantime had hlazed out into lull rebellion. The train had caught fire, and every quarter of tlie city was exploding. Xever in after times were those two startling features of Parisian outbreaks, in- stantaneous contagion and instinctive organization, more signally displayed. ' Every one,' says Ptetz, ' without exception, took up arms. We saw children of five or six years old with daggers in their hand ; we saw mothers putting them into their hands themselves. In less than two hours there were more than twelve hun- dred barricades, girt with banners and with weapons of all sorts left from the old days of the League. I saw in the Eue Neuve Notre-Dame, a little lad of eiglit or ten years dragging, rather than carrying, a lance which certainly must have come from the old English wars. One man carried about an image of the monk who killed Hemy in., w^ith the inscription, " Long live St. Jacques Clement !" This I ordered to be broken, amid shouts on all sides of " Long live the King !" and echo- ing answers, " I)Q^yn with Mazarin !" ' The barricades remained standing all that day. There was panic in the Court, and last of all that panic reached the Queen. To the cries of the people, ' (^ive us back 56 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE our Broussel !' enforced by deputation after deputation from the Parlenient, she replied by sullen refusal or irritated menace ; till at length, persuaded that the safety of the throne was at stake, she yielded. Xext morning Broussel reappeared, borne through the streets on men s shoulders. ' In an hour,' says De Retz, ' the barricades had disappeared, and Paris was as quiet as if it had been Good Friday.' ^ With this 27th of August 1648 the historical im- portance of the Fronde really begins and ends. A civil war followed, and it lasted four years ; but a very few months of it were sufficient to convince the Parisian people tliat from the princes and princesses, archbishops and rulers, who were professing to manage and defend their interests, nothing was to be hoped, and much was to be feared. The wiser councillors of the Parlement were not slow to see that the bevy of fine ladies and gentle- men who were actively engaged in parcelling out the rich provincial governments of France between them, or creat- ine:, when it seemed desirable, fresh sinecures, were in no respect worthier, and in every way more expensive, than a strong central government, even with a Mazarin at its head. Order at any price was necessary ; but the 1 De Retz, Memoir-'^, Charpentier's edition, vol. i. pp. 145, 179 ; De Motteville, vol. ii. pp. 247-275. UNDEK MAZARIX AND COLBEIJT. 57 Fronde was disorder at an extravagantly high price. ' The pleasure of being waited on by a duke,' says De jMotteville, ' may be very great : mais Ics gages de telles gens sont grands; such personages expect very handsome wages for their services.'^ Wlien Louis xvi. heard that the Bastille had been taken, he remarked, ' Why, this is a revolt ! ' ' Sire/ answered his informant, * it is not a revolt, it is a revo- lution ! ' The insurrection of the Fronde illustrates '\ ^^_ / the contrast ; it was not a revolution, but a revolt. The difference between the insurrection of the Fronde and the political events, somewhat similar in appearance, wliich were going on at the same time in England, may be summed up in one brief word. The English Indepen- dents had a doctrine, a faith ; the Frondeurs, even the ' best of them, had none. That small minority of brave \^ and noble -hearted men, who, with the bravest and ■ noblest of all modern statesmen at their head, wielded for ten years the destinies of England, had as definite a f ^ purpose, as fixed a theory of life and of government as the band of heroes who, in the seventh century, fled from Mecca to Medinah with the Arabian prophet. To carry out their ideal of a Christian polity, and make it a living reality, a practical standard of social life ; to 1 De Motteville, vol. ii. p. 502. 58 INTERNAL COXDITIOX OF FRANCE sweep away all social distinctions but those based on spiritual superiority, or, as they would call it, on Di^'ine election ; to recognise no political alliances except those based on the religious principle of encouraging the Pro- testant interest and suppressing Popery ; such was the Puritan faith, modified, no doubt, in practice by the extraordinary practical wisdom of Cromwell, but acknowledged by his followers, and indeed by its nar- rowness most seriously hampering the genius of the leader. The English Puritans, I repeat, had a faith ; by virtue of that faith they did mighty things, and by reason of the incompleteness of that faith even their mighty efforts failed, and the Cromwellian revolution, — that one of our revolutions which alone deserves the name of Glorious, — was yet, as far as its avowed purpose went, essentially abortive. Its permanent value con- sisted in the strong stimulus it gave to free political and religious thought. By it men's minds were edu- cated, the minds of isolated thinkers in England first, and subsequently of a far larger public in France ; for that far greater revolution four generations afterwards, which, by its more complete destruction of the old, and by the more perfect preparation that in the meantime liad been made for social reconstruction, has initiated a new era in the history of Man. UNDER MAZATJIX AND COLBERT. ^9 But the iiisurrectionists of the Fronde had no uuidhiu political principle whatever. Of tlie utter vacuity, of the self-seeking frivolity of its aristocratic leaders I have said enougli. Ko)i ragio7iiam di lor. But I speak of the bourgeoisie of France ; of that cultivated pro- fessional non- aristocratic class from which, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, ahnost all that makes her illustrious amon;^ the nations has proceeded ; I speak especially of her legists, whose in- fluence in the present century it is perhaps time to diminish rather than increase, but wlio, from the, thirteenth to the eighteenth century, have played so honourable a part in eliminating the aristocratic ele- ment from France, and in replacing feudal customs by sounder principles of civil justice. The legists of France had, from the time of St. Louis, always supported tlie monarchical element of feudalism against the aristocratic. Guided by the traditions of the Eoman Empire, they felt that in the strength of the central power lay the surest guarantee that the forces of tlie nation would be concentrated t(j ])ublic and national purposes. The time for republicanism not being come, it was far easier to approximate to the real purpose of repul^licanism by a strong monarchy than by a strong nobility. Accord- ingly they co-operated invariably, and in no servile GO INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE spirit, with the founders of the French monarchy ; with Louis IX., Louis XL, and Henry iv. Eichelieu found them strenuous supporters, and indeed without them would have been powerless. Stimulated for a brief moment by the contagious example of the English revolutionists, they broke from their traditions. The English constitutional system tempted them, as French revolutionists Imve so frequently been tempted, into the dangerous error of limiting the monarchical power by checks which, under the decorous veil of popular self- government, simply substitute for monarchy the far more oppressive influence of oligarchical cliques. It is to the credit of the French Parlements, that, after three years' experience of aristocratic misrule, tliey awoke from their delusion. They abandoned the unprincipled and trai- torous intriguers, the Cond^s, the Bouillons, the Epernons, whose miserable ambition would ha^-e parcelled their country into petty principalities, and so degraded her to the political level of Germany. Conde's reckless massacre of unoffending citizens at the Hotel de A^ille, in May 1652, opened their eyes to their true political position ; they rallied round the monarchy as, for the present, the safeguard of French destinies ; ]\Lazarin, twice banished, was for the second and last time recalled ; and, after four years of civil war, the I'oyal power was firmly fixed UNDKU MAZAKIX AND CULBKim 01 at Paris, not to be shaken till, four generations after- wards, the storm came that was finally to uproot it. In 1659 Mazarin fulfilled the great object of his life, the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended the war with Spain. Two years afterwards he died ; and Louis xiv., now twenty-four years old, resolved to govern France with his own hands. The man himself, the outer man at least, is probably better known than any character in liistory ; and I have no pretension to repeat a portrait which has been drawn so frequently and so elaborately from the life by many a cunning hand. Who is there who cannot picture to himself the dignified courtesy, the gracious, affable address, the chivalrous respect for women of every rank, and all the other virtues of social intercourse between man and man, and between man and woman, which made the French Court the model for Europe ? But with the Court of Louis xiv. our business does not lie. The practical results of the man himself to France and to Europe are what we w^ant to know. His blood was strangely mixed, and his char- acter was mixed not less doubtfully. Every feature of it might be traced to his Spanish or to his French ancestry. From Anne of Austria came the sublime and somewhat stolid pride ; the Spanish dignity inten- sified by solid Austrian phlegm, the chill and tardy (52 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE flow of tliuuglit, the proud diffidence of his powers, and the nervous fear of ridicule and failure. From his French grandfather came tlie nobler and more generous aspects. The shrewd Gascon sense of Henry of Navarre had left its traces. Something, too, Louis had inherited of his large views of policy, of the true patriotic instinct ; some traditional sense of the grandeur of his position ; the position envied by the great Frederic, the first position incomparably in the civilized world. Nor was he des- titute of honest sympathies for the misery of his fellow- countrymen, nor wanting in noble ardour to relieve them, so far as his power extended. The conception of France, happy and prosperous at home, powerful and respected abroad ; of France as the centre of the Euro- pean state-system, more than a match for any other single state, and fearless even of combined attacks ; of France, lastly, as the leader of the movement of thought in Europe, the patroness of intellect and art in every sphere and in every nation : this gxand conception was not wholly wanting to him. Under such a ruler, a political bystander, placed at the middle of the seventeenth centuiy, would not have found it easy to foretell the immediate destinies of France. Two things only were clear. First, the young Louis was determined not to be a puppet- king, a king UNDEK MAZAlilN AND COLBEKT. 63 \\lio, after the fasliiou invented by the English aristo- cracy in 1 688, was to reign and not to govern. Secondly, that, being keenly sensitive to the opinion of those around him, and not being endowed with that innate energy and genius which seizes on an ideal far distant, and relentlessly pushes on to its realization, he would fall unconsciously under the influence of men stronger tlian himself, who should master the secret springs of his character, make themselves indispensable to him by indefatigable industry and mastery of official detail, and, without his knowing it, suggest the measures that they professed only to execute at his bidding. It would be obvious that on the character and genius of these coun- sellors would depend a most momentous issue. Should the forces of the French government, concentrated as they now were in a single man, be wielded in a pro- gressive or in a retrogi'ade direction? Whither the world was tending, the great rulers of England and of France wxre beginning to find out. To Elizabeth and Cromwell, to Henry iv., Sully, and Eichelieu, war and foreign conquest were no longer the primary occupation of rulers. AVar, when they engaged in it, was a neces- sary evil, accepted only for the sake of peace. They saw, dimly indeed and incompletely, but still they saw, the two grand tendencies of the modern world : peace- G4 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE ful industry in the temporal sphere, and morality based upon unfettered thought in the spiritual. Was Louis xiv. to be the successor of these men ? Or was he to reject the noble tradition of peace and of tolerance, run counter to the current of the world's history, crush, as far as in him lay, the nascent germs of progress, assume the mantle, not of Henry iv., but of Philip of Spain, and allow France to become for a time the retrograde ele- ment in Europe ? Of these opposite hypotheses, each in turn proved true. The fifty-four years which elapsed from the death of Mazarin to the death of Louis xiv. may be divided into two periods of unequal magnitude. The. ^"^ first period, of eleven years, terminates with the Dutch war of 1672. During this period, Colbert was supreme in the counsels of France. Under his guidance the whole energy of the State was concentrated, as it had never been before, on a pacific development of its com- merce, industry, and intellect. These are tlie years that have given such lustre to the reign of Louis, the only years that can claim honourable mention in his- tory. During the second and far longer period, re- trograde influences became gradually supreme. The influence of Louvois, eclipsing that of Colbert, plunged France into a long series of aggressive wars ; the Edict UNDER MAZAKIX AND COLBKKT. fi.i of Nantes was revoked ; the Jesuitis worked their will ; and, for the last thirty years of Louis's life, they turned France into a second Spain. As Mazarin had been bequeathed to France by Richelieu, so Jean-Baptiste Colbert was bequeathed by Mazarin. The son of a respectable tradesman of Eheims, he had come to Paris to learn his business and push his fortunes ; had been introduced by an influen- tial relative to ^lazarin, who, witli a quick eye for financial talent, had taken him into his service as the steward of his enormous establishment. As Mazarin died worth £5,000,000 sterling of our money, gathered together from very questionable sources, the steward had excellent opportunities of probing to their core the monstrous abuses of the French treasury. Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finance, was accumulating plunder with a reckless rapidity only equalled by his lavish ex- penditure in luxury and license. His establishment was maintained at a yearly cost, it was said, of four millions of francs. His palace at A^aux, far exceeding in splendour the royal palace of Fontainebleau or Saint Cloud, was built at a cost of three-quarters of a million sterling. The leaden pipes that served the fountains of his garden, were sold by the Duke de Villars, a hun- dred years afterwards, for 190,000 francs. His rapacity K 66 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FKANCE was a matter of such notoriety, that at his celebrated banquet of August 1661, when Moliere's play, Les Fdcheicx, was performed before the Court and six thou- sand guests, the King, irritated at the impudent display of ill-gotten wealth, was on the point of ordering his arrest there and then. Fear of the culprit's power alone deterred him. Fouquet had bought golden opinions everywhere. His possessions on the coast of Britany were strongly fortified ; and papers found in his posses- sion after his arrest, proved what was then suspected, that he was prepared for nothing less than a revival of civil war. Wild as the scheme was, it was enough to frighten the Government to singular precautions. ' Of all the affairs,' wrote Louis to his son, ' that I have had to manage, tliis of the arrest of Fouquet has given me the most trouble and anxiety.' He was arrested by stealth, and unawares, at Xantes, and imprisoned at Pignerol till his death in 1680.^ Colbert succeeded ; not indeed to the post of superintendant of finance, for Louis had openly declared that for the future he would be his own superintendant and his own prime minister; but 1 For a most interesting accoimt of Fouquet's administration, conspiracy, and trial, see introduction to P. Clement's Histoire de Colbert ; a work wliich contains much valuable and authentic in- formation relative to the financial condition of France during the seventeenth century. INDEK MAZAKIN AND (joLBKKT. 07 under the hiiinble title of chief clerk of the Council of Finance, Colbert rapidly assumed the substance of both offices, and left his royal master well contented with tlie shadow. He found French finance ruined by twenty- five years of war, by the dissensions of the Fronde, and by the peculations of his predecessor. The gross receipts in the first year of his office, 1669, amounted to 84,000,000 of francs (equal probably to about £8,000,000 at present). But of this 84,000,000, 52,000,000 were absorbed by in- terest of loans ; leaving the net revenue only 32,000,000. In six years he had made sucli a clearance of the Augean stables, that while the gross receipts had in creased 10 per cent, the net revenue had increased 90 per cent. ; and at the end of liis eleventh year of office, in 1671, the net receipts had increased 140 per cent., while the addition to the year's revenue was only 23.^ This astonishing result was obtained by redemption of State loans, and by vigorous prosecution of the financial peculators who, for the last twenty- four years, had l>layed their game with impunity. A High Court of Justice was established to incpiire into the books oi" these gentry ; and under its firm pressure they dis- 1 That is to sa}-, the gross revenue was 104,000,000, against 84,000,000; the net revenue. 77,000,000 a^^ainst 32,000,000. 68 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE gorged a sum equal to £16,000,000 sterling of our money. A brief sketch of what Colbert did, and what he vainly tried to do, is all that can be here attempted. It is not too much to say, that, had his policy prevailed, the horrors of the French Eevolution, and of the counter - revolution that followed it, would have been spared. The French Eevolution itself would none the less have taken place ; nay, it would have taken place probably far sooner. But the inevitable disappearance of the last relics of feudalism, the inevitable transition from hereditary monarchy to republican government, from an antiquated State religion to spontaneous forms of faith better adapted to the time, would have taken place, not without a struggle, but without the sangui- nary tragedy, without the military orgies that for twenty years convulsed and paralysed Europe. But r4t was not so to be. Colbert's schemes of government embraced every sphere except one. Eeform of judicial abuses, codifica- tion of. the law, establishment of an efficient police, a just system of taxation, freedom to internal commerce, encouragement to manufactures and to agriculture, de- velopment of the canal system, formation of new colonies, J creation of the French navy,~such was the programme l- UNDER MAZARIN AND COLBERT. 69 of the last statesman worth}- of the name, if we except the two short }-ears of Turgot, who was to administer tlie government of France till the Eevolution. One department only he did not dare to touch ; and yet, as a great minister of finance, if on no other ground, he must have longed to handle it. The annual revenues of the established church of France, from tithe and from landed property, were estimated a hundred years afterwards at 200,000,000 of francs; equal at least to £10,000,000 of our money. ^ In the latter half of the seventeenth century, after the conquests of Louis xiv. in Flanders and elsewhere, they were, as far as can be ascertained (for ecclesiastical bodies have always been jealous of accurate estimates of their income), not much less. It would be perfectly safe to say that the revenue of the Church was, at the time of Colbert's ministry, not less than the revenue of the State. And yet this vast in- come was whoUy exempt from taxation. In the social system of old France, two of the three estates of the realm, the nobility and the clergy, paid no direct taxes. Tliey were exempt from the taille and the gahelle, that 1 See E(jH<€ de France, by the Abbe Delbos, vol. i. p. 59, quoted in Louis Blanc's Hi.st. de la Revolution Fran^aise, vol. ii. p. 311. The tithes were estimated at 120,000,000, other jiroperty at 80,000,000. 70 IXTEKNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE is, from the property-tax and the salt-tax, which formed four- fifths of the revenue. The reason for this exemption is to be sought far back in the Middle Ages, when feudalism was a reality, and the spiritual power of Catholicism was still vigorous and vital. Tlie feudal barons were supposed to serve their sovereign, and in the best times of the Middle Ages did really serve him, with their sword far more than with their purse. But their right over the soil was not in its origin ab- solute, as it afterwards tended to become ; and as in England, whether to the national gain or loss may be questioned, it still remains. It depended on the will of the suzerain, and was conditional on the performance of certain duties, or, subsequently, on tlie payment of cer- tain dues. But on both sides of the Channel feudal •institutions had become degenerate, if not decrepit ; and the similarity in the process of degeneration - is interesting to notice. At the restoration of Charles II., or, as tliat period may more justly be called, the acces- sion to supreme power of the English aristocracy, the question of dealing witli these feudal dues was raised. If mere justice was to be considered, how to deal with them was obvious. Tlie lords of England held the land of England in consideration of important services, de- (I UNDER MAZARIX AND COLBERT. 71 fence of the soil, defence of the sovereign, etc., yearly rendered. The occasion of these particular services ha\4iig passed away, they should have been commuted for an equitable land-tax. But a Parliament of land- owners preferred to raise the required sum by excise duties ;^ and the land-tax in England, in the middle of the nineteenth century (the rental, by the mere in- crease of population and industry, having meantime enormously increased), still remains at a mere fraction of the sum to which an equitable system of taxation would raise it. In France a similar result had been obtained in a different way. The old duty of military service had never, as in England, been completely commuted for pecuniary payments. The feudal militia had been re- placed, towards the close of the fifteenth century, by standing amiies ; and in these armies the French nobi-» lity were still supposed to sers'e their king gratuitously, and on this plea were exempt from all other direct 1 ' Two schemes (for the commutation of military tenures) were suggested, the one a permanent tax on lands held in chivalry ; the other an excise-duty on beer, and some other liquors. It is evi- dent that the former was founded on a just principle, while the latter transferred a particular burden to the community. But the self-interest which so unhappily prevails even iu representative assemblies . . . caused the latter to be carried.' — Hallam's CoiiatUutlonal History, vol, ii. p. 11, 5th edit. 72 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE taxation. The result was a monopoly to their class, the same monopoly which exists at present in England, of all high military posts and of the rich perquisites which they involved, and immunity from all pecuniary contributions to the necessities of the State. So much for the exemption of the noblesse. The exemption of the clergy is still easier to explain. The poor missionaries of the seventh and eighth cen- turies, who devoted a life of rigorous self-denial to the physical, moral, and spiritual elevation of Franks, Gauls, and Saxons, were not very hopeful subjects for the tax-gatherer, and, at a time when land was the sole source of taxation, naturally paid no taxes at all. And when the piety or the remorse of the great landowners had raised a thick growth of convents, and endowed them with rich field and pasture, it was still felt that the men who taught the poor, and saved the starving from starvation, fulfilled their full measure of obliga- tions to tlie State. The result was an enormous ao-o-re- gate revenue, supplying in tlie better tinies of the Church the purposes of an education rate and of a poor- rate, but which, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, became more and more corrupt, more and more encrusted with sinecures, more and more separated from the intellectual progress of the v: UNIVERSI ) , UNDKK MAZARIN AND COLBERT. 73 nation. Tlie (Tallican C'lmrcb, in sliort, was un(lerg(jin_n the decay which every religious body representing the faith, not of the whole nation, but only of a dominant sect within the nation, and nevertheless supported by a compidsory charge on the rent of land or on the national income, must infallibly undergo. There was a temporary reform in the Gallican Church during- the seventeenth century, induced Ijy the pressure of its Protestant rival. Of this more in the concluding Lecture. Enough to say, that sucli reform was from its nature only temporary. The clergy of France then, like the noblesse, were exempt from all direct taxation. Occasionally they consented to meet in convocation, and vote what they called a gratuitous donation of a few thousand pounds to Government. But their gigantic revenue, a revenue which, as I have stated, was at least equal to the total revenue of the State, was a mine of wealtli which Colbert did not dare to penetrate. The time was not yet ripe. A few^ words on the old French system of taxation. When I have said that l)y far the larger portion of the revenue was raised by direct taxation, 'financial reformers,' and indeed, most students of political economy, might expect to find tlie system of the old French monarchy comparing favourably with our own. 74 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE in which six -sevenths are still raised by duties on articles the great bulk of which is consumed by the labouring population. That the principle of direct taxa- tion, consistent as it is with the fundamental rule that each person should pay according to his means, is thoroughly just, no thoughtful person could for a moment dispute. But the manner in wliich these direct taxes were assessed was so iniquitous, that the worst abuses of Customs and Excise seemed justice when compared with. them. The taille was a tax on property. Of its principal injustice, the exemption of the clergy and noblesse, I have already spoken. It must be added that large numbers of the middle class, all holders of Government offices, judicial or financial, had also obtained exemption. In the outlying provinces of Provence, Dauphine, Languedoc, Burgundy, and Britany, the taille was raised in a comparatively equitable way. These provinces were in many ways, as I have before re- marked, peculiar and distinct from the rest of France. Their position will be partly understood by comparing it with the independence of Scotland in the seventeenth, or of Ireland in the eighteenth century. They had their own elective assemblies, wliich voted supplies to the Government ; they lived to a great extent under their uwn peculiar laws. In these provinces, which taken UXDEE ^lAZARIN AM) COLBERT. 75 together made up nearly a third of France, the taille was levied not on income or personal property, but on land ; terres nohles, the land of nol)les or clergy, or land which had been theirs formerly, being exempt. But in the rest of France the taille was an income and property-tax ; not land alone, but every other source of income was assessed. So far, if we leave out of sight the exemption of the governing classes, tlie principle of taxation was just enough. It was the mode of its application, added to tlie iniquity of this exemption, which made it so thoroughly oppres- sive.^ The three great administrators of the seventeenth century, Sully, Eichelieu, and Coll^ert, had seen the cruel injustice of a property-tax, from which the prin- cipal ow^ners of property were exempt, and had striven to rectify it. They endeavoured in various ways to convert the tax upon the working and trading class into one that should weigh on all classes without distinction. But they strove in vain. The power of the old French monarchy is sometimes thought to have been absolute. But strong as the monarchy was, strong enough to annihilate the aristocracy as a political power, it was not a match for their internal social power. When the * See note appeudcil to this Lecture. 76 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FRANCE time came for taxing the nation equitably, monarchy and aristocracy crumbled down together. The two institutions were too closely bound up together for a just system of taxation to become possible, unless both were united in desiring it. Colbert, in attempting it, and he never relaxed his efforts to bring it about, was the predecessor of the statesmen of the Convention. The miserable crew of fine ladies and gentlemen around him cannot be said to have seen this. They saw nothing ; were incapable of seeing anything ; but they felt it with the low animal instinct of self-preservation. They feared and they hated that heavy, dark, beetle- browed man, working at his desk fourteen hours a day, rigid and exacting to his underlings, to his own son as severe as to the rest, with his deaf ear and his harsh, gruff refusals to all their piteous appeals for comfort- able sinecures ; with his open eye and his honest, hearty recognition of zeal and talent ; with his utter indiffer- ence to quarrels of Jesuit or Jansenist, of Catholic or Huguenot ; seeking only for the men, in every sphere and class, in every trade or profession, who could and would help him in his grand design of advancing the peaceful well-being of the French nation. To those political theorists (I use the word not in the contemptuous sense in which, to the discredit of English UNDKK MAZAKIN AND COLBEKT. 7 7 culture, the word in this couutiy is apt to be used, since wise theory in every department of human life is to the full as indispensable as wise practice), to the political theorists who believe that governments are a necessary evil, the limits of which it should be our great object to curtail ; that nothing but the bare protection of life and property falls within their province ; that in all other respects they are from their nature hostile to the wel- fare of mankind, and have invariably impeded its deve- lopment, I would recommend the careful study of t\\-o periods of French history. The first is the period of Sully's and Henry iv.'s government, from the treaty of Vervins in 1598 to the King's assassination in 1610. The second is the administration of Colbert, from 1661 to 1672. I am not pretending that these two admini- strations are models for the literal imitation of every modem nation. For if there is one lesson taught im- pressively and unmistakably to the philosophical student of history, it is this, that the political institutions of a state are to be judged of not absolutely, but relatively to the degree of intellectual, moral, and social develop- ment which that state may have reached. The form of government, and the limits of state intervention suited to one period of its history, may be utterly unsuited to another. The continuous problem of re -adapting the iS INTEKNAL CONDITION OF FKANCE goveriiiiieiital institutions of a cotnitry to the changing phases of its moral and social growth, is thus one of continuous difficulty ; is a problem making constant demands on all the theoretical and practical wisdom which the nation may have at its disposal. But with all the modifications which this principle of relativity involves, the spirit which actuated the Govermnents of Sully and of Colbert remains immortally admirable. AA'hat they did for the material well-being of France may be classed under three heads : initiation of new industries ; liberation of trade from restrictions ; crea- tion of new means of transit. It is constantly repeated in tliis country, that no Government has ever at any time succeeded in im- planting permanently any branch of industry in a country. When the intervention of Government is withdrawn, it is said, the manufacture in question has invariably perished. Yet no one can deny that if there is any branch of industry in France which has at present an intrinsic and independent vitality, it is the silk manufacture. It forms by far the largest item in her exports. In 18G3, France exported silk, raw and manufactured, to the amount of £18,000,000. Now, as an historical fact, it is certain that the silk- manufacture of France, which originated in the first UNDKK MAZAKIN AM) lOUJKKT. 79 instance with Louis xi., was lirst developed into its large proportions by Henry iv., with the help of two men, Olivier de Serres and Laffemas, whom he called to his counsels. jMulberry trees were planted in tlie gardens of the Tuileries, and were distributed largely by the Government to the inhabitants of the districts of Paris, Orleans, Tours, and Lyons. The church lands were called into requisition ; and all the bishops and abbots in France were required to devote a certain quantity of their domains for the pui'pose. Seed was purchased in large quantities, and distributed freely to those who were thought likely to use it. Two or three model establish- ments were set up by the Government, and placed under the care of artisans brought from Italy. All these mea- sure?, at which a certain school of political economists Avould of course shudder, resulted in the self-supportmg silk trade which is now the chief industry of modern France. France, at the beginning of Henry iv.'s reign, imported silk-stuffs to the amount of £2,500,000 ; the home manufacture being quite inappreciable. A few years after his death, in 1G20, France not only supplied her own consumption, but coiyortcd to Germany, Portugal, and England, to the amount of £5,000,000 sterling. I have not time to notice, even if this were the place to do so, the other features of Henry's industrial admini- 80 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FEANCE stration : his colonies to America ; his treaties of com- merce Avith England, the Hanse towns, Spain, and Turkey, — treaties of which the tariff was not less liberal than those that have been made in late years ; the development of the transit system of the country, both by land and by water. The splendid canal system which France now possesses was initiated in his reign, and under the special encouragement of Sully ; and the Canal of Briare deserves particular mention, as the first canal in the world which was carried over a watershed. Finally, it should be mentioned, that, so far from loading France with debt by these measures, he lightened the taxation 20 per cent., and yet left in the treasury a surplus equal to one year's income, which was, how- ever, speedily dissipated under tlie impotent Govern- ment which filled up the interval between Sully and Richelieu. The Thirty Years' A\'ar, the Protestant Eebellion, and a continual series of aristocratic conspiracies, left Kiche- lieu little power to develop tlic industrial progress in- augurated by Sully and Henry iv. But, as his Political Testament shows, it was not for want of will. Great efforts were made to diminish the taxes which pressed on tlie peasant ; the road system and canal system wqyq carried a stage further ; and the intellectual progress of UNDKi; <(.)LBi:i:i' am» m a/akin. 81 the cuuiitrv was stiinuliited 1)y tlic fuuiKUitiou of tlie French Acatleniy. ^Nfazarin, ^\•itll his Fronde rebellion, could do little in this direction ; but Colbert found in it free scope for his vast energies. Colbert has been spoken of by modern writers as if he were the uwentor of the theory of protection. Yet, in one sense, and in a very important sense, he was a most vigorous free-trader. France, when he assumed power, was, commercially speaking, not one country, but a federation of states, like modern Germany. Each of its twenty provinces had its own system of customs duties, which made it practically impossible to transport goods of any bulk from one part of the kingdom to another. This remnant of the old feudal system Col- bert set himself to destroy. He endeavoured to make France one country commercially, as Richelieu had made her one politically. Popular prejudice w^as too strong for perfect success. Three-fourths of the kingdom agreed to his reforms ; but the remaining fourth, includ- ing Languedoc, Britany, Guienne, and Dauphine still remained separate, as far as customs- duties were con- cerned, imtil the Eevolution. A volmne would be required to do full justice to his administration ; to his attempted codification of the civil law ; to his organization of the State forests ; to his F 82 INTERNAL CONDITION OF FIJANCE commercial tradin«;' companies fur the East Indies, the Mediterranean, and Northern Europe ; to his encour- agement of the French cloth manufacture ; and to his marvellous creation of the French navy. He found that navy, in 1661, consisting of thirty small ships ; in 1671 France possessed 190 vessels, of which 120 were ships of the line. Inconsistent as this may seem with the pacific character of his ministry, such a fleet was, I be- lieve, necessary for a C(3untry that wished tu preserve her commerce and her colonies from the unscrupulous aggression, and from the open connivance at piracy whicli from the time of Elizabeth had stained English commercial policy.-^ There are features of Colbert's government which admit of less defence. His attempts to cheapen food and to promote industry, by forbidding the exportation of corn, were doubtless futile and sui- cidal His minute regulations of the trade-guilds were oppressive and unwise. But Colbert is hardly to be held responsible for these measures. What he did had been d(jne repeatedly before, and formed in fact part of the traditional system of media3val industry. If he is to be blamed, it is only for being not more clear-sighted in this respect than his predecessors, or than contempo- ^ See Professor Beesly's Essay on Emjland and the Sea, contained in a work recently published on Iiit mazaimx. 85 of Languedoe, which joined the Atlantic with tlic Mediterranean by tlie rivers (laronne and Aude. To tliis great work Colltert devoted 7,000,000 francs, the rest being furnished by the province of Languedoe. The extent of his encouragement to arts, manufactures, and letters, durmg the reign of Louis xiv., is worth stating. £50,000 wxre given to the Paris observatories, £288,000 to the Gobelin and other Paris manufactures, £13G,000 to manufactures in other parts of France ; finally, £1 GO, 000 in pensions to men of letters. Considering the large expenditure, amounting to at least £12,000,000, in unnecessary royal palaces, and the smn infinitely larger, amounting probably to not less than £200,000,000, squandered in foolish and profligate wars, expenditure for which Louis xiv. and Louvois are responsible, the encouragement given Ijy Colbert to intellectual progress is but a small gnat for the modern economist to strain at. The list of pensioners is w^orth reading. It contains the names of Pierre Corneille and his brother, of INIoliere, Eacine, Perrault, the liistorian ^lezerai, and what is even more remarkable, of many eminent foreigners ; among them,Vossius the geographer, and tlie great Dutch mathe- matician Huyghens. The Academic I'ranQaise had been formed thirty years before by Pvichelieu. Colbert added the Academy of Inscriptions, the Academy of Sciences, 86 FRANCE UNDER COLBERT AND MAZARIN. and tlie Academy of Paintiii^ii- and Scnlptnre ; institu- tions which, it may be, have now served their time, and by degenerating into narrow cliques impede the progress of thought more than they promote it; but which, in an age of less advanced culture, brought the small minority of educated and thoughtful men into mutual contact, and aided in making Paris what it has ever since, with the exception of two sliort intervals, continued to be, the centre of European culture. Such was the administration of Colbert ; the last of a series of great statesmen who had governed France for nearly a century. He died in 1683, w^orn out with toil, and saddened by the failure of his highest hopes. Some time befn-e his death the tide of feudal and Catholic reaction had set in. Aggressive wars had begun, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was impending. Within thirty years the spectre of national bankruptcy, which had haunted Colbert's dreams, was to become a flesh-and-blood reality. France would lie prostrate, paralysed, and disgraced, with a national debt of £100,000,000. Ninety shameful years Avere to pass by before a statesman worthy of Colbert should be called for a brief moment to power. But Turgot found the process of putrefaction too far gone ; and after Turgot came the deluge. NOTE ON THKOKIES OF TAXxVTlON. 87 NOTE ON FRENCH THEOKIES OF TAXATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. We are too apt to fancy tliat rational notions of taxa- tion and of other economic subjects were unknown in Europe till the publication of Adam Smith's Treatise. The history of speculation on these subjects would be interestino-, and has not yet been written. Tlie sub- joined note relates to two remarkable French writers, little known in this country, whose theories of taxation were such as, even in the present day, we may study with advantaoe. The first of tliese is Pierre le Pesant, sieur de Bois- guillebert, a magistrate of Piouen. In liis two most important ^vorks. Detail de la France, and Factum de la France,^ he lays down the principles of taxation, and discusses their application to the present state of France. He begins by refuting the fallacy that the wealth of a nation consists in its specie. On tliis point A(him Smith liimself is not more eloquent. Gold is not wealtli, he remarks. A country may be extremely ' The first of these works was published in 1G07 ; the second a few years later. They are reprinted in Daire's collection of Ecouo- mistf.H du (H.r-Iiuitiei)ie ■'iiffcff. 88 NOTE OX FKENCH THEORIES OF TAXATION rich without possessing a gram of the precious metals. The richer, in fact, a country is, the more able is it to dispense with gold and silver. In a state of advanced wealth, a paper currency would suffice. ' La richesse n'est autre chose que le pouvoir de se procurer I'entre- tien commode de la vie.' ' Tout le fondement et la cause de toutes les richesses de I'Europe sont le hie, le vin, le sel, la toile ; on ne se procure les autres choses qu'a proportion qu'on a plus qu'il ne faut de ceux-ci.' Now, these products, he says, abound in France ; and France, if properly administered, should be the richest country in Europe. Yet the fact is, he continues, that, judging by the simplest test, that is by the amount of consumption of the necessaries of life, the wellbeing of France is far from being what it was a hundred years before ; from what it is actually in England, notwith- standing her costly wars ; from what it is in those parts of France (the pays cVetats) where more enlightened principles of taxation prevail. In taxation the great principle is to do the least possible injury 'a ces deux mamelles de toute la repub- lique, I'agriculture et la commerce.' But the actual sys- tem of taxation he shows to be equally ruinous to both. The two sources of the French revenue were the excise and customs, and the property-tax; the Douanes and the IN riir. SF.VKNTKKNTII fKXTri;Y. 80 Taille. The first of tliese were, by the mode of their aihuinistration, fatal to eomnierce ; tlie second, equally fatal to agriculture. The Taille, in certain privileged districts of France (the imys cVetat, Britany, Guienne, Languedoc, Provence, Burgundy, etc.) was a land tax ; and, as far as it went, was levied equitably, leaving out of sight the preposterous injustice of the exemption of terres nobles; i.e., of land which belonged, or had originally belonged, to the nobility. But in the gTeater part of France the taille was not a land tax, Init a personal tax. A computation was made of how much each man was worth, and he was taxed accordingly. To the principle itself there was nothing to object. We should our- selves do well to make use of it in the present day. It was the mode of its application that was so intoler- ably oppressive. The Privy Council fixed the amount that was to come from each province. It was then for the Intendant of the province to fix the contribution of each parish. The great object of the parish was of course to make interest through its seigneur with the Intendant, so as to be assessed lightly. Then came the business of individual assessment. This was done by the parishioners for themselves. For it must be noted that the French peasant in his worst periods of physical misery, and these have been fre<|uent and tprril)le, has 90 NOTE ON FRENCH THEORIES OF TAXATION never sunk into the condition of political degradation and nullity peculiar to agricultural labourers in Eng- land. Xever has the soil of France been monopolized, as in England, by thirty or forty thousand persons. Large numbers of the French peasantry possessed land long previous to the Eevolution ; and still larger num- bers were cottiers on the Irish system. jMoreover, they possessed what the English labourer has never known, the institution of village assemblies for pm^poses of local government. The villagers met together annually in the churchyard on a Sunday, after morning service, and elected seven of their fellow -parishioners to assess the smn demanded. Here began a scene of the most profound disorder. The members of tlie committee often, Boisguillebert assures us, sell their votes to the wealthier inhabitants of the parish, i.e., promise for a consideration to do all in their power to exempt them. All falls on the poorest class. Often the committee cannot agree ; they meet at the wine-shop, and go on debating the matter there for montlis. Meanwhile the officers of the Intendant are pressing them, holding them solely responsible, and threatening them with distraint and imprisonment. He draws a piteous and ludicrous pictm^e of the committee of assessors, seven in number, walking down one side of the street, while the committee IX TIIK .'SEVENTEENTH CENTIIIV. 91 itf tlie i^a.^^t year were cullectiiiL;- their arrears on llie (jllier side, often carrvinL;' away pots and pans wliere no money was to be liad, and pursued from house to liouse M'itli curses and imprecations. Altogether, these assessors had a bad time of it. The lawsuits, the quarrellings and heartburnings created by the system, were incredible. The one inevitable result was to induce eveiy one to secrete his wealth in odd holes and corners, wear as poor clothing and live as scantily as possible, so as not to appear rich. Adding the tolls demanded by the squire of each village, his monopoly of the corn-mill, of tlie wine-press, and of the bridge ; adding the Govern- ment monopoly of salt, and the compulsory distribution of certain quantities of it to each individual at a fixed price ; addmg the cumbrous and vexatious system of Excise which, from the expense of its collection, and above all, by the discouragement it gave to trade, took from the people, as Boisguillebert remarks, ten times the amount that it brought into the treasury ; we get some sliglit conception of the miseries of French taxa- tion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an imaginary dialogue which he supposes to take place between the king and a Normandy farmer who is bargaining with him for tlie lease of Crown lands, he puts tlie matter clearly and amusingly enougli. The 92 NOTE ON FRENCH THEORIES OF TAXATION king, in the most candid manner, is explaining to the farmer the conditions to which his life there will be subject : ' When you wish to purchase a cask of wine, you will have to pay seventeen dues at seven or eight different offices, which are only open at certain hours of certain days. If you fail in any one of them, whatever delay it may cost you, the wine and the carriage which conveys it will all be confiscated for the benefit of the officials. And I may observe that their word m the matter will always be taken against yours. Agam, when you want to sell your goods at a reasonable price, 1 shall put such a heavy tax upon them that your customers will prefer buying them elsewhere. I shall derive little good from all this, and you will lose the whole value of your labour ; but sucli is our system. Often you will find it impossible to sell your liquors, though a day's journey off they may be selling at an extrava- gant price. But if you should be induced by this price to take your goods there, you will probably find it of little use, for there are various tolls on the way which I have farmed out, tlie formalities of which are extremely difficult to observe. Tlie loss to you in this is ten times as great as the gain to me, but I am told that it is for my advantage to have things managed thus. Besides this, you will have to pay me yearly a IN IIIK SKVKNTKKNTil CKXTl KV. 93 sum bearing no fixed relation to your pro])erty, vaiying indeed from one parish to another, so that it will be most desirable for you to curry favour witli the officials who assess this tax. I should advise you not to be too regular about the payment of your taxes. The assessors find it thoroughly answers to engage in a good deal of litigation. And indeed, if I found that they gathered in their taxes too easily, I should certainly not farm the taxes to them on such favourable terms. It will be desirable for you to live as meanly and poorly as pos- sible, or you will assuredly be assessed at a higher rate. Hide up your savings in any odd corner ; beware of investing them. Avoid for the same reason puttmg any beasts on your land to manure it. ... I may mention, also, that the business of collection, which is extremely onerous, will fall on you every three or four years ; the tax-farmer will hold you responsible for the amount, and will distrain and imprison you if it is not forth- coming.' To which the farmer replies : ' Sire, I presume that all you wish is to receive a certain amount of money. Xow, the plan you have been describing seems expressly invented for the purpose of ruining yourself and me at the same time. Your wealth and mine can only come from the sale of the produce of our land, and this plan 94 N0T1-: ON FRENCH THEORIES OF TAX.VTION makes it impossible or difficult to urow any produce. Now, I offer to pay your jMajesty exactly double the sum you ask for, provided only that you will allow me to consume what I please, to grow what I please, and to sell where and how I please. The bargain will be an excellent one for me, for I shall make ten times my present profits.' -^ ' The interests of the Government and the people,' Boisguillebert continues, ' rightly understood, are pre- cisely identical ; yet the Government spoliates the people like a hostile country, by quartering on them armies of tax-gatherers, and laying the whole burden of taxation on that part of the population which is least able to bear it. And, in the end, the upper classes suffer by this plan as much as the lower. You have a given cargo to carry from Paris to Lyons with forty liorses ; you put the whole weight on three of them ; when these are knocked up you try three more, and so on till you have killed the whole. The burden ■\^'as not too much for the forty, but by unequal division the whole are ruined by it. 'II en va de la pau\Tete,' he remarks in an admirable illustration, ' comme des diamants ; il y a de certains degrt^s on tout nouveau surcroit double et triple son effet, taut pour celui qui. ^ Detail de la Franc<\ Daire's edition, pp. 236-238. L\ TIIK SKVKNTKKNTII CKNTrUV. Of) les souflre que puur TEtat.' Take from a pour cottier the twelve pounds with wliieh lie liad Ijecn intemlin.i;' to buy manure for hi.s Lmd, the loss to the State is incal- culable ; perhaps as much as £200, for the land goes out of cultivation in consecpience. Whereas the same sum taken from a rich man would produce comparatively slight injury. The remedies proposed by Boisguillebert were equit- able distribution of the property tax, abolition of Excise, and reduction of import duties. His book cre- ated considerable excitement, and had the honour of being suppressed. It gave rise to another work of still greater consequence, the Dime Royale of Marshal Vauljan ; ^ one of the nol)lest and strongest characters in the seventeenth century. As a military engineer, he had travelled and resided in every province of France, and had thought deeply on the financial chaos and physical misery that surrounded him. He finds, after careful inquiry durmg many years, that there are in France a tenth of the population who are beggars ; five- tenths on the verge of beggary ; three-tenths deeply involved in debt. ' In the remaining tenth,' he says, ' I include the clergy, the noblesse, the legal profession, government officials, and the higher mercantile class. ^ Also published in Daire's collection. 90 NOTE ON FliENCII TIIi:(JKlKS OF TAXATION Of these there may be some hundred thousand families ; and I think T am not wrong when I say that there are not more than ten thousand of these who can be de- scribed as comfortably off.' The most obvious remedy for this state of things was equitable taxation ; abolition, above all, of the iniquitous exemption from taxation of precisely the classes best able to bear it. One plan would be to substitute the taille reellc for the tailU personnelle throughout Trance ; in other words, to collect the revenue by a land-tax. The objection to this, he says, is the difficulty of fram- ing anything like an equitable valuation of the land, owing to the constant alterations which are occurrmg in its value. Besides, there are certain lands called terrcs nobles (although not necessarily occupied by noblemen), which are exempted ; distinctions which ought not to exist, but which are difficult to abolish. The simplest and most equitable method of taxation, in his opinion, is that of which we have an example in the Church Tithe. He asserts that of all taxes, there is none which is collected with so little difficulty or disturbance. The machinery for collecting it already exists, and might with great ease be extended to the collection of a State tithe. This he would fix somewhere betw^een a twentieth and a tenth. The former, that is to say, a five per cent. IX Tin: SEVENTKKNTII CKNTri;V 9' tax upon the yearly produce of the laud, would biiu^' in al)out 00,000,000 of li\Tes. He arrives at tliis hy a careful examination of the returns of Cliureh tithe. This is the first of the four items of wliich his scheme of taxation consists. The second is a tax of five per cent, levied on all income not coming- under tlie previous head, estimated as follows : — Livres. House-tax, 1,600,000 Mills, .... 742,000 Shippin-jT, 300,000 Interest of funded proi)erty, 1,000,000 Government salaries, pensions, etc., •2,000,000 Judicial fees, . 500,000 Commercial incomes, 2,000,000 Servants' wages, 1,500,000 Artisans, journeymen, assessed at 3J l)er cent. instead of 5 per cent.. Total, 6,000,000 15,642,000 His third item is the salt-tax. In place of the foolish and inicpiitous system of compelling people to buy a fixed quantity of salt from Government officials, and forbidding them to Iniy it elsewhere, he proposes that the State shall buy up the salt-marshes, and sell the produce freely to all buyers at a moderate pr<~>fit. Fr(^m this source he computed a revenue of 23,400,000 livres.^ ' The monstrous abuses of the gabelle continued unaltered, with so many others, till the French Revolution. In 17S1 the revenue from (; 98 NOTE ON FRENCH THEORIES OF TAXATION Finally, Vauban proposed to raise, under the head of customs, stamp duties, and assessed taxes, 18,000,000 livres. Tliose who compare the proportion whicli in Vauban's system direct taxation bore to indirect, with that Avhich it bears in England at the present day, will judge how far he was in advance of his time. He was w^ell aware of the opposition which his book would meet with. ' It will be opposed,' he said, ' by all finance-officers, farmers- general, tax-gatherers, the higher clergy, the nobility, lawyers, all who have obtained exemption under any pretext whatever,'— ' en fin tons ceux qui savent pecher en eau trouble, et s'accommoder au dessus du roi et du public, n'approuveront point un systeme qui doit couper par la racine toutes les pilleries qui s'exercent dans la levee des revenus de I'Etat.' He was not mistaken ; his book, published 1707, aroused a storm of indignation, and its circulation was proliibiteil. It savoured far too strongly of the Revolution, The popular spnpathies expressed in it are remarkable. 'It seems to me,' he says, * that sufficient account has never been taken in France of the lower class of the population, and that, in salt was 72,000,000 livres ; the cost of collection being 18,000,000. There were, on an average, 3500 convictions annually for smuggling. In 1782 an edict was launched against those who kept a peculiar breed of large dogs specially trained to carry contraband salt from Anjou to Britany. IN Till-: sevent^:extii ckntuky. 99 cuiisequence, it is ihc must niisunible of any in tlio kingdom. And yet it is tlie most important of all classes, whether you look at its number, or at the actual services which it renders. It is the working-class wlio l)ears the whole burden of taxation ; ^\'ho has always endured, and is now enduring, more than any other. . . . It is the lower orders of the people who, by their labour and trade, and by their contributions to taxation, enrich the king and his kingdom ; it is they who fill the ranks of our armies and navies ; to whom we owe aU our retail trade, all our manufactures ; who supply us with labourers for our vineyards and corn-lands ; in fact, it is this class who does all the productive work, whether in town or country. . . . The more money you draw from the people by taxation, the less you have to spend in trade : and there is no money in the kingdom so well employed as that which is left in their hands. There, you may be sure, it is never lying idle or useless.'-^ These remarks are worthy of one of the noblest of warriors, of the man by whom war was always regarded as the instrument of peace ; who even in war was always parsimonious of bloodshed. ' J'aimerais mieux,' he said to Louis xiv. at the siege of Cambrai in 1G72, • avoir conserve cent soldats k votre Majeste que d'en ' Dim*' Royal.e, erl. Daire, p]). 44-47. 100 NOTE ON FRENCH THEORIES OF TAXATION. avoir ote trois mille k remiemi.' 'II vaut mieux,' he said on another occasion, ' verser moins cle sang, dut-on bruler mi pen plus de poudre.' In 1703, he offered to accompany La Feuillade to the siege of Turin as his subordinate. 'What!' said the King, 'you a marshal, and he only a lieutenant-general V * Sire,' he answered, ' ma dignite est de servir I'Etat : je laisserai le baton de marechal k la porte, et j'aiderai peut-etre M. de la FeuiUade a entrer dans la ville.' He died in 1707, shortly after the publication of his views on taxation, the contemptuous rejection of which must have saddened his last hours. He had conducted fifty-three sieges, had built thirty-three fortresses, and repaired three hundred. LECTUEE III. RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EUROPE UNDER RICHELIEU, MAZARIN, AND LOUIS XIV. v In the middle of the seventeenth century, a treaty- was made at Miinster, in Westphalia, to which most of the States of Western Europe were parties, and which marks one of the great eras in history. It put an end to the war which for thirty years had desolated Ger- many ; it established irrevocably the fact that the Christian world ^^■as fur the future to consist of two rival sections, aU hope of preponderance for either being utterly cut off ; and it laid the foundation of the present constitution of the European Commonwealth. Between the period that elapsed from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 to the death of Louis xiv. in 1715, five European treaties were made : that of the Pyrenees in 1695, of Aix-la Chapelle in 1068, of Nimeguen in 1678, of Ryswick in 1694, and of Utrecht in 1713. But those who for the first time examine the alterations which these treaties made in the map of Euroi)e, and 102 RELATIONS OF FKA>'CE TO I^UKOPE UNDER who bear in niiiicl that forty years out of the .sixty-five were years of European war, are astonished to see how^ slight are the territorial changes, and look back with admiration at the singular stability of the political equilibrium, the Balance of Powder, established in 1648 by the genius of modern diplomacy. Fully to appreciate the historical importance of an event so big with consequences for the European future, it is necessary for a moment to throw a somewhat far- reaching glance into the European past, Nor is any apology needed for this ; since the value of history depends almost entirely upon om^ power of regarding it as a continuous and connected whole. Needful as it may be for our feeble powers of comprehension to dwell for a moment on an isolated portion of tlie picture, to listen exclusively to a single movement of the sym- phony, to study the functions of a special portion of the organism, we must never forget that the histoiy of Western Europe from the Eoman Eepublic to the French Revolution, is a continuous and unbroken series, the general law of wliich can only be grasped by com- paring the successive links. Of the five populations that make up the Western State-system, the Italian, Spanish, French, British, and German, the first four ^^•ere incorporated into the Eoman KICIIKLIKU, MAZAKIX, AND LOUIS XIV. 103 Kiupiiv. Ill till' uiutli L't'iiliny, Cluirlciiiagiic cuiiipluled tlie work wliicli tlie liomaiis liad not been able to ac- complish. By advancing the frontiers of civilisation from the Ehine to the Elbe, he forestalled the last danger of barbarian invasion ; and Germany now took her place as an integral member of the Western lle- pnblic. His celebrated revival of the Western Empire had its temporary value. Unreal and fictitious as the name of Empire was even then, the prestige which it bore served as a rallying point until the real bond of union between Western nations, the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, was fully established. For it can- not be too often repeated, that the principal contrast between ^Iedia3val Europe and the Europe of the Roman Empire lay in the fact that the latter was bound together by the compulsory force of military govern- ment, or, when the necessity for war had ceased, by a uniform administrative system ; the Europe of the Middle Ages by the moral force of a common faith and a common spiritual authority. But the Treaty of Verdun in 843 was really the recognition that France, Germany, and Italy were for the future to have a separate existence. Spain and Britain had never been included even by Charlemagne, ^lediicval Europe was a loose and shifting collection 10 i RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO i:UllOPE UNDER of inniiiuerable feudal States, falling more and more distinctly every century into one of the five popu- lations which I have mentioned ; owning more and more definitely a central authority, either German, Spanish, British, or French, to which allegiance was to be paid, but held together by the far stronger tie of membership in the Catholic Church, and subordi- nation to the Papal authority. The political action of this aggregate of States upon the world outside it, dif- fered widely from that of the Eoman Empire. For ancient Rome, the one absorbing object was aggressive war ; the conquest of the surrounding nations, and their incorporation into her own system of polity. It is her glory that she accomplished this work ; and that war, the sole honourable employment for free men in the ancient world, became in her hands, what it had seldom been before, the instrument of human progress, the high road of modern civilisation. But for Mediaeval Europe, war, which still remained as the most honourable, if not the only honourable occupation for the governing class, had changed its purpose. From being aggressive, it had become defensive. The object was no longer to incorporate fresh nations by conquest into Western civilisation, but to protect that civilisation against the aggTessions of the l^agau and ]Mohaniniedau world. KU'llKLIKU, MAZAUIN, AND LOL'IS XIV. 105 The caiiiiJiiigns of Charles ^lartel a.^aiiist tlie Ai-al) invaders of Spain and Southern France, in the eightli century ; tliose of Charlema<,nie in the next generation against the Saxons, obviously defended Christian civili- sation from the most imminent peril. Not less necessary for the same purpose were the Crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. If we remember the terror caused l)y the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and that at the very end of the seventeenth century Austria saw the Ottoman beneath the walls of her capital, we shall be more ready to believe that the Popes, in stimulating Western Europe to the crusades, were guided not by mad fanati- cism, but by wise and statesmaidike instincts. In this defensive system of European warfare, one of the five populations I have mentioned had stood out with peculiar prominence. France, which under the Carlo vingian dynasty had been the scene of the great series of battles which turned the tide of Mohammedan invasion, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the mainspring of tlie crusading movement. The first crusade was preached in Central France l)y Peter of Amiens, and was headed by Robert of Normandy, by Godfrey of Bouillon, by Hugo, brother of Louis, and by Piaymond of Toulouse; tlie second was inspirc^d bv th.^ lOG KELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EUROPE UNDER preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux ; in the third, Philip of France shared the work with Frederick of Germany and Eichard of Enghihd ; the fourth was principally headed by French noblemen ; and the sixth (for the fifth was merely nominal) was enthely conducted by St. Louis. The action of France in the Crusades is the first of her titles to political precedence in Europe.-^ ^ The scene of Ariosto's great poem, representing the struggle of the East and West, ranges occasionally over every part of Europe and of Asia. But for the most part it lies in France, and the cen- tral action of the poem, to which all the rest gravitates, is at Paris. The greatest of the Orders of Chivalry was founded entirely by Frenchmen ; and at the time of its suppression they constituted a large majority. In the Order of Hospitallers, the second in import- ance. Frenchmen preponderated no less. Intellectually, the claims of France to precedence during the Middle x\ges may be questioned by the Tuscans, but by no one else. The University of Paris was the centre of the great philosophical movements of the time. The cen- tral position of France in Western Europe has of course favoured, as it still favours, her influence. Another cause is to be sought in the fact, that she, of all the western nations, if Italy be left out, has the most continuous history. Italy has had continuity, but con- tinuity without unity. English history dates from the consolidation of the Saxon power. German history begins with the treaty of Verdun ; the continuity of Spanish development was broken by the Saracen conquest. But the history of the French people l)egins with the Roman conquest. The invasion of the Franks and other Teu- tonic tribes was a very important modifying influence, as was our Norman invasion, or that of the Tartars in China ; but the Franks did not, like the Saxons in Britain, cut short the national filiation and begin afresh ; although this has been imagined the case by those to whom the history of a nation consists in the annals of its dynasties. laCHKLIKl', MAZAIMN, ANJ) LUUIS XIV. lO? The liegiiiiiing uf the loiirtceutli century, two cen- turies before the insurrection of IMartin Luther, may be fixed upon as the period ^\•llen the disruption of the Catholic system became evident and certain. Into the causes of that disruption we have not now to enter. Enough to say, that the miserable anarcliy of the four- teenth and fifteentli centuries, of which the purposeless invasion of France by the English was but one though the most striking example, was the first result of the absence of a central mediating power whicli kmgs and emperors had been forced to respect. The old basis of order was shifting under men's feet, and the mate- rials for the new order, based on free scientific inquiry, and peaceful and unfettered industry, were as yet very few and scanty except in Italy. It is to tlie eternal credit of L7 ill both eoimtries was for the time successt'Lil. The commercial marine of both countries took a rapid stride ; and both secured a rich recruiting ground for their navies. But it was very certain that commerce, carried on witli such principles, would, just in proportion to its prosperity and its extent, promote sooner or later the very hostile contact against which it w^ould seem in- tended as a remedy. Tlie commercial and colonial wars of the eighteenth century proved this abundantly. But though Colbert's policy, this point excepted, was essentially peaceful and progTessive, there w^as an op- posite influence at work before which he was destined to succumb. I speak of the spirit of religious reaction, organized and embodied in the order of the Jesuits. That remarkable body, of which no candid and philo- sophical appreciation has ever yet appeared, had under- taken the defence and political restoration of Catholicism now for more than a century. Their task was of course hopeless ; and after the first generation the wisest and best of the order had fully recognised its hopelessness. All that was noble and great amongst them (and let it be hoped that we shall soon recognise how much that was) had betaken themselves to missions in America, India, or China, where their veiy failures shine side bv side with the alleged success of other sects. 138 DELATIONS OF FEAXCE TO EUROPE UNDER Those who reiiiaiiied in Europe were iu every respect inferior, intellectually and morally. In Europe their influence was, it must be said, due justice being done to their useful efforts m education, irritating, unsettling, and noxious. They had devoted themselves hitherto to Spain, as the most important and most hopeful of European powers. That motive led them now to the Court of France. France was now the only strong power in Europe ; a Catholic reaction in France was the sole chance of securing the ultimate victory of their cause. With their efforts in England under the Stuarts we are all sufficiently familiar. Of the Eng- lish Government at least they thought themselves secure. But their one great obstacle was the Dutch Eepublic. Its Eepublicanism was more fatal to them than its Cal- vinism. Holland was the most important centre of free thought in Europe. Spinosa had been born there. Descartes had lived there twenty years. Bayle could live nowhere else. Every attack on the orthodox sys- tem, wliether in Church or State, could be published in Holland. The extraordinary number of French books published in the seventeenth and beginning of tlie eighteenth century hi Amsterdam illustrate the mental activity of the country. Holland was just then the lilCIIELIEU, MAZAKIX, AND LOUIS XIV. 13 9 centre of the lievulutiuii ; a word nut invented as yet in its abstract sense ; but as a thing, as a force, perfectly well felt by the acute instincts of the Jesuit mind. There can be no question that the same influence which was brouQ-lit to bear -on Louis xiv.'s mind, with the view of expelling the Protestants from France, also wrought strongly in favour of the Dutch war. Had Louis been a stronger man, that influence might have worked in vain. But there were fatal weaknesses in his character, fatal defects in his training, likely to make him the slave of religious terrors. It would compensate, they told Imn, for the stains of his private life, for the scan- dalous obtrusiveness of his adulteries, if he turned the vast power he wielded to the interests of the Church. Subtle appeals to his vanity, to his weakness for mili- tary fame, and again to his fear of republican disturb- ance, were, we may be sure, not wanting. It is no part of my aim in these Lectures to describe military campaigns. Voltaire's admirable r4sii.m4 is sufficient for most readers. The pompous apparatus of war ; the union of the splendid talents of Conde and Turenne; the passage of the Pdiine with 100,000 men ; the capture of city after city ; the agitated terror of the Dutch capital, brought face to face with political annihilation ; the resolution, should all fail, to take 140 KELATIOXS OF FKANCE TO EUROPE UNDElt to their ships and transport their country, except the soil of it, to Batavia ; the desperate and strong defence ; the dikes opened ; the submersion of large provinces throughout the long winter; the sea fights with the united fleets of England and France ; the fury of the fierce democracy, and the tragic death of the De Witts, powerless to wield it to their will ; the stern defiance of young William of Orange, who can do one thing at least, if no other, ' die in the last ditch rather than see the ruin of his country ;' or who answers the insolent summons of the French King, that ' he shall know one day what it is to have offended a Prince of Orange;' the expulsion of the vast army after two short cam- paigns : these things are known to all wdiose blood rises at the names of Marathon or Salamis, of Morgarten, Bannockburn, or Valmy. Ignominiously repulsed in Holland, Louis found some compensation in attacking Spain, who, with her scat- tered incoherent dominion, was now ' the sick man of Europe.' Five years previously to the Dutch war, John de Witt, the wisest statesman of his time, had proposed that the Spanish Netherlands should be made an inde- pendent State under the joint protection of France and Holland. The wisdom of this plan was evident, both i'rom the Dutch and from the European point of view. KiniELIEr, MAZAKIX, AND LOUIS XIV. Ill This being unacceptable, the next best plan was an equitable division of Belgium between the two coun- tries. Louis rejected both offers with scorn. 'Wliat have these traders/ he said, ' usurpers themselves, to do with settling the interests of the two great kings of Cliristendom?' He hoxl invaded the Spanish Nether- lands in 1667, and taken Lisle and other important frontier towns. He had also occupied Franche-Comte, but had been compelled, at the treaty of Aix-la- Chapelle, to restore it. He now occupied Franche- Comte permanently. The last relic of the old Bur- gundian rivalry was thus cleared away, and France gained, at the treaty of Nimeguen, 1678, the boundary of the Jm^a mountains. It must be admitted, I think, that this acquisition, which seems to have been accepted most willingly by the population of the pro- vince, was not inconsistent with the peace and equili- Ijrium of Europe. But it began now to be evident to all the world that France was embarking in a retrograde career, danger- ous alike to the political and to the spiritual freedom of Europe. The Jesuits were becoming supreme in France ; one l)y one the tolerant provisions of the Edict of Nantes disappeared, and the time for its entire repeal was evidently approaching. An unscrupulous and am- 142 RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EUROPE UNDER bitious war minister, Loiivois, directed the French armies ; and the seizure of Strasburg, three years after the treaty of Nimegueu, without provocation or excuse in a time of peace (1681), the occupation of Luxem- burg, and the monstrous bombardment of Genoa (1684), showed that a successor to Philip of Spain had arisen in France. And now came into play the machinery which Eichelieu and his great school of diplomatists had set in motion half a century before. The treaty of Westphalia stood then as a standard of international law, a basis upon Avhich the statesmen of all countries could negotiate. In that treaty, and in the treaty of the Pyrenees, the immediate sufferers had been Spain and Austria ; but the principle underlying those treaties had been that no power should henceforward be allowed to gain overweening preponderance in Europe ; and to this principle Spain and Austria were now not slow to appeal. The pressure of European diplomacy had been felt by Louis in the treaties of Nimeguen and of Aix- la-Chapelle, in which he had been forced to resign his pretensions to Lorraine. All the old allies of France ranged themselves against her. Holland, the first to rise against Philip IL, and bound to France by every traditional tie, was now, under William iii.'s stron.o- lUCIIELIKU, MAZAKIN, AXD LOUIS XIV. 14.'') guidance, tlie very soul of the league against her. England, or rather the English Government, had hitherto been ignoniiniously sul)servient. Charles li. had sold Dunkirk to Louis (and in this, without in- tending it, he had done well, for on that side of the channel England should have no place) ; he had been l^ribed by the French Government into complicity with the nefarious attack on Holland ; and it was evident that he too and his brother were under Jesuit influence. It must be owned too that the commercial jealousy of Holland, the spirit which led Englishmen to engage in war with Spain and France throughout the eigh- teenth century for colonial aggrandizement, induced the English to acquiesce in Charles's policy. But before the end of the Dutch war the opposition to it had become intense. The Parliament had impera- tively demanded the recal of English troops from French service in the Palatinate ; Cliarles ii. had been forced into conciliating English feeling by marrying his niece Mary to the most formidable enemy of France ; and England had co-operated, during the treaty of Nimeguen, in forcing France to restore many of her conquests. The current of English feeling during the five years' reign of James ii., from 1G83 to 1G88, under the dominion of a Jesuit clique closely allied with tliat whicli in France 144 KELATIONS OF FIIANCE TO EUROPE UNDER was expelling and persecuting the Protestants, is well known. In 1688 the climax was reached, and the bubble burst. Louis stood absolutely alone in Europe, with an expelled king and a handful of conspiring Jesuits his sole allies. The league against him, known as tlie League of Augsburg, was joined by Sweden, by the North German Protestants, by Bavaria, by the Emperor Leopold, and by Spain. Holland and England were, of course, not wanting. The very Pope had refused to support James in his insane attempts to subvert Protestantism, on the ground of his being a creature of Louis ; and the Jesuit Peters stood in direct antagonism with the Papal Nuncio. The blind and criminal folly that in the face of such a coalition pushed Louis into European war can only be compared with the folly equally great, and still more culpable because more personal, of Napoleon's expedi- tions in Spain and Eussia a hundred and twenty years afterwards. The war lasted nine years. It brought few territorial changes. The chief event was the destruction at the battle of La Hougue of the French fleet, —the fleet which had been created with such marvellous activity by Colbert's son, tlie Marquis of Seignelai ; and wliich, at the battle of Beachy Head two years before, had with inferior numbers beaten the English and Dutch fleets I^iniKLIKU, MAZAKIN, AND LOUIS XIV. 145 united. The peace of Hyswick in 1G97 restored to Spain some of her Belgian frontier towns ; it left France with territory but slightly diminished, but with dis- ordered finance, with exorbitant taxation, with ruined industry. Her wisest men and best generals were gone. Turenne had died, and Conde had retired before the war began (1675). Colbert had not lived to see the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Louvois the great war minister had died in 1G91 ; Seignelai the minister of marine the year after ; Luxemburg, Louis's best general, in 1695. Catinat, by far the greatest general surviving, had not been thought sufficiently aristocratic to succeed him, and the incompetent Villeroi had taken his place. Many of the ablest officers had been pro- scribed as Protestants. Schomberg and Ruvigny had joined the ranks of William. It was in this condition that France, governed now by a very small and dull clique of Jesuits, old women, and bigots, plunged, three years after the peace of Piyswick, into the most hopeless and foolish of her wars, the war of the Spanish Succession. Charles ii. of Spain being without children, appointed Philip of Anjou, a grandson of the king of France, and brother to the heir to tlio throne, as his successor. The arrangement was not objectionable, provided only that proper security was K 14G RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EUROPE UNDER giveu that the two crowns of France and Spam should never under any circumstances be united. By refus- ing to give such security, Louis a second time united Europe agamst him. England, loaded with the. heavy debt, might have hung back ; but when, on the death of James IL, Louis with blind fatuity persisted in re- cognising his son as heu' to the English cro^vn, she threw her whole w^eight into the anti-French league, joined with the exception of Bavaria and Spain by every power in Europe. Of that league Eugene and Marlborough were the arms ; Heinsius, grand pension- ary of the Dutch Eepublic, was the animating spirit. The result could not be doubtful. At Blenheim and Ramillies and Oudenarde, the worst generals in Europe were arrayed against the best. A Marsin, a Tallard, a Villeroi, afforded excellent sport to a Eugene and a Marlborough. The war was ended by the peace of Utrecht in 1713. It lasted twelve years, it should not have lasted six. As early as 1706, Louis offered reasonable terms of peace ; but the allies w^ere now in their turn un- reasonable. Nothing less than a partition of France was at one time talked of, and Louis was told, in answer to a second offer of peace in 1709, that if he wished for peace he must send his own armies into KICIIKLIEU, MAZAIJIX, AND LOUIS XIV. 147 Spain, ;iikI assi.^t tlieiu in ibiviiig his own grandson from his throne. It was in answer to these intolerable terms that Louis, risino- in his old acje to the memories of better days, issued the well-known appeal to the French nation : ' I have offered fair terms of peace ;' he said, ' but seeing that our enemies in their pretence to negotiate are palpably insincere, we ha\"e only to consider how to defend ourselves, and show them that France united can resist the united powers of Europe in their attempts, by fair means or by foul, to ruin her. All tlie ordinary sources of revenue are exhausted ; I come before you for your counsel and assistance, at a time when our very safety as a nation is at stake ; let us show our enemies that we are still not sunk so low but that we can force upon them such a peace as shall consist with our honour and with the good of Europe.' The glorious defeat of Malplaquet and tlie triumphant victory of Denain were the answer to this appeal. The overthrow of Marlborough and his party in 1710, the accession of a Tory government, and the consequent w^ithdrawal of England from the war, were conducive to a general peace. By the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, England secured her main object of ambition, the French colonies of Newfoundland and Acadia ; for England was ah'eady 148 RELATIONS OF FRANCE TO EUROFE. launclied into that career of colonial aggression and aggrandizement afterwards to be continued by the elder and the younger Pitt, to which so many of the wars of the eighteenth century were due. The territory of France was undiminished : The Belgian frontier differed hardly at all from what it had been fifty years before. Spain was left to its Bourbon dynasty ; but her Italian possessions were much narrowed. INIilan was given to Austria. Sicily was given to the Duke of Savoy. Prussia becomes for the first time a kingdom. Such were the alterations on the map of Western Europe. In Eastern Europe important changes had taken place. In the heat of the French struggle, in the year of Ouden- arde, the battle of PultoAva had been fought. Sweden disappears from among the great powers of Europe ; and Eussian influence becomes from that time forward a prominent and a perturbing, because alien, force in Western Europe. Indeed it might appear as if there were only two strong forces left in the world : the brute force of Russia outside the Western Piepublic ; the nobler and mightier force of Great Britain within. In Germany, Spain, Italy, and France, the signs of political vitality Avere few. England, triumphant and strong, was fast approaching an era of political aggrandizement and mate- NOTE ON THE GERMAN EMPIRE. 1 PJ rial prosperity. Her splendid aristocracy headed by the elder Pitt, her commerce and her industry soon to be developed by AVatt, Arkwriglit, and their fellows, seemed to assure her the future of the world. Yet there was a force miiihtier than the brute force of Paissian armies ; subtler and not less mighty, than the forces of the steam-engme, or than the lust for gold. What that force was 1 leave to the next Lecture. Enough to say, that France of the eighteenth century, starving and bankrupt as she might be, was the centre of its action. NOTE ON THE GERMAN EMPIRE, P. 126. These Lectures were delivered before I had read ]\Ir. Bryce's valuable essay on the Holy Ruman Enqnre. It- will be seen that I hardly share his belief in the im- portance and influence of this Institution during the Middle Ages. Interesting as it is to trace the length to which ancient institutions prolong their shadow^s, and conceal from view the living forces of the present, it is yet most desirable to distinguish shadows from sub- stances. The semblance of Imperialism that survived through the ]Middle Ages, like the semblance of Ke- 150 NOTE ON THE GEKMAN EMPIRE. publicanism that was preserved during the first two centuries of the Empire, disguised the real forces that were at work, and thus may possibly have made the transition from the old to the new easier. I am far from wishing to detract from the greatness of Charlemagne's or Otho's policy. Charlemagne stands out as one among the two or the three greatest statesmen of the world. His influence, extending as it did over Italy, France, Spain, and Germany, is one of the leading facts in the history of European civilisation. But the Othonic empire, which Mr. Bryce most judiciously distinguishes from the Carlovingian, is of importance rather to German than to European history. In the first place, its power was lunited to Germany and a portion of Italy. Even in Italy its power was always disputed ; and, except durino- the reisrns of the first and third Otho, and of Henry ill., was disputed successfully. Secondly, its duration as a strong central power even within this comparatively narrow radius was very brief. Founded in 962, it feU, as Mr. Bryce himself says, with Frederick ii. in 1250 ; ' emerging from the ruin indeed, and destined to a long life, but so shattered, crippled, and degraded, that it could never more be to Germany and Europe what it once had been.'^ And even during 1 Bryce's Hohj Borne n Empire, 2cl edit. p. 231. NOTE ON THE GERMAN EMl'lKK. 151 these three centuries of comparative vitality it would be hard to select a hundred years during which the power of the emperors in Italy was more than nominal.. AVe should form, I think, a very inadequate concep- tion of the great struggle of the jMiddle Ages if we reduced it to a contest between the Papacy and the Empire. It was a contest between Catholicism and Feudalism ; between the Popes as the representatives of the one spiritual poAver, and the various representa- tives of feudalism in Germany, England, France, and Cpain. The sort of honorary precedence given to the German monarch, and which to contemporaries seemed of far greater consequence than it was, must not blind us to the fact that a struggle precisely identical with that between Pope and Emperor was going on in other countries between P(.»pe and King. To Hildebrand the submission of William the Conqueror was not less important than that of Henry iv. In fact the Emperors were by no means the most formidable antagonists that the Popes had to meet. The strongest of the Emperors bowed lower, as the porch of St. Mark still testifies, than the feeblest of the Plantagenets. AVith regard to the statement made in the text, that the pretensions of Empire have resulted in the disunion of Germany, Mr. l>ryce and myself are fully at one. 152 NOTE ON THE GEKMAN EMPlllE. ' Italy terribly avenged the wrongs she suffered. Those who destroyed the national existence of another people, forfeited their own : the German kingdom, crushed beneath the weight of the Koman Empire, could never recover strength enough to form a compact and united monarchy, such as arose elsewhere in Europe. The want of national union and political liberty from which Germany suffers, cannot be attributed to the difference of her races ; . . . rather is it due to the decline of the central government, which was induced by its strife with the Popedom, its endless Italian wars, and the passion for universal dominion, which made it the assailant of all the neighbouring countries. The absence or weakness of the monarch enabled his feudal vassals to establish petty despotisms, debarring the nation from united political action, and greatly retarding the eman- cipation of the Commons, Thus, while the princes became shamelessly selfish, justifying their resistance to the throne as the defence of their own liberty, — liberty to oppress the subject, — and ready on the least occasion to throw themselves into the arms of France, their subjects were deprived of all political training, and find the loss of such experience baffle their efforts to this day.'^ 1 Bryce's Hohj Roman Ewjiire, p}). 418-19, 2(1 edit. LECTURE IV. PKOGEESS OF THOUGHT DLTJNG THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. FOR five centuries the system of thought and of life under which men had lived from the third cen- tuiy to the thirteenth, from St. Augustine and St. Ambrose to St. Bernard and St. Erancis, has been crumbling to decay. The great institution of the Middle Ages, the power which, belonging to no country, to no caste, existing apart and distinct from the temporal power, could modify by the spiritual agencies of faitli and opinion the physical force and brute selfishness of feudal tyranny, was already losing its vitality when Dante wrote his great poem. The Papacy was doomed, and the doom was in course of execution, two centuries before Luther began to fulminate. The Catholic struc- ture fell because the dogmas upon which it rested were iiTeconcilable with the progress of modern thought. Ideas nile the world. It has been said that not ideas, \i but passions, desires, interests rule the world. Roth, in M ^ 154 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING a sense, are true. The ship is ruled by the helm ; it is driven by the winds or the steam- engine. Passion impels ; opinion guides. The fabric of meditneval society rested upon a basis of supernatural dogma. The acceptance of such dogma proves no inferiority in the great Catholic thinkers. If indeed the individuality of Man were as complete and self-sufficing as many writers of our time claim that it is, such powerful minds, it may be thought, would have long ago burst their shackles. But the mental evolution of the human mind is to be studied in the collective human race far more surely tlian in any isolated member of it. To study a living organism apart from its environment is noAV recognised by biolo- gists as an absurdity. In the case of the human being, the environment to be studied is not merely physical, but sociological. The liigher aspects even of the life of an animal cannot be studied without reference to its social relations, simple as they may be ; limited, in most cases, to the most elementary relations of the family. In man the impossibility of comprehending the individual apart from the society of which he is a member, is incomparably more direct and certain. In the lower tissues the isolated cell may be studied, though even there most imperfectly ; but who would profess to Tin-: SKVEXTKKXTII ('KNTUliV. 155 explain the actions of a single cell of musculav or nervous substance ? It Avoulil be easy and fallacious to press this analogy too far. But it may serv^e to represent, though in an exaggerated form, the compli- cated influences which man exercises over his fellow. The laws by which the evolution of the human mind proceeds are the same for all ; but the rapidity of growth is infinitely various ; and the movement of the stronger minds is affected in ways far more intricate probably than we shall ever be able to analyse, by the contagious inferiority of those around them. In attempting then to explain the extraordinary difference in the mental framework of St. Bernard in the twelfth century, and of D'Alembert in the eighteenth, it is the collective evolution of society at those different periods that must be studied in the first instance ; differences in the" individual leaders of thought being to so great an extent dependent on it. It has been shown by Auguste Comte that all mental conceptions pass, or tend to pass, through three stages : in the first of which phenomena are attributed to the direct intervention of imaginary beings ; in the second it is sought to account for them by metaphysical abstractions ; and in the third it is not sought to account for them at all, but simply to study the laws or general 15G PKOGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING methods of tlieir succession or co-existence. Take, as an instance, the simple phenomenon of the sleep pro- duced by the action of opium on the hmnan body. The Arabs even in the present day are content to attribute it to the 'will of God.'-^ Moliere's medical student accounts for it by a ' soporific principle' contained in the opium. The modern physiologist knows that he cannot account for it at all. He can simply observe, analyse, and experiment upon the phenomena attending the action of the drug, and classify it wdth other agents analogous in character. To this law of Evolution must be added the law of the rapidity with which different classes of conceptions tend to pass through these phases. Other circumstances being equal, the rapidity varies with their complexity. The simpler phenomena, those embraced in the sciences of geometry or astronomy, are brought into the Positive stage first. The more complex, those of animal life, or of human society, remain longest under the influence of supernatural or metaphysical dogmas. Thus the three methods of philosophizing may co- exist in the same mind in different departments of thought, and in the same department of thought in different minds. In these two laws, rightly understood, we have a clue ' Sec Pal grave's Tracds in Arabia. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 157 \vliicli goes far to unravel the complicated lal)yriiitli of European thouglit during the last two tliousand years. Already in ancient Greece, under the influence of the great thinkers of Athens and Alexandria, the concep- tion of invariable Law had been applied to the simpler phenomena of the universe. The more complex were still left to the dominion of innumerable gods. But Polytheism, under the impulse given by Plato and Aristotle, the latter of whom was always recognised by mediaeval thinkers as their predecessor, condensed itself into Monotheism ; and the conception of universal Law became now less difficult, though still profoundly con- tradictoiy to the dominant faith. The dogmas on which the spiritual power of Catholicism rested became gradu- ally to the stronger minds incredible. The central dogma, above all, the belief in Transubstantiation, wliicli, by bringing men weekly and daily into contact with the region of miracle, accustomed them to the idea of constant supernatural intervention, was undermined deeply by the celebrated controversy between the Nominalists and Ptealists in the thirteenth century. That controversy disposed men to content themselves with studying phenomena, the facts of the universe as they appear to our limited and imperfect senses, and 158 PROGKESS OF THOUGHT DURING abandon tlie discussion about hidden and underlying causes as inscrutable, and therefore useless. And while these changes were taking place in the world of thought, changes of equal importance were going on in the world of common life. The rise of the modern indus- trial system, the enfranchisement of the borouglis, the contact with Asiatic countries in the Crusades, the great discoveries of the compass, of paper, of printing, of gun- pow^der, the limitation of the military spirit by the formation of standing armies, the evident fact that peaceful industry was henceforth to be substituted for war as the permanent occupation of free men, — all these things had gone far to shatter the old system, and contained in themselves the germs, undeveloped as yet, of the new. During the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies the Papal power, neutralized by schisms, heresies, and general councils, became in almost every country in Europe wholly subordinate to the civil power. In the sixteenth century the destruction went on far more systematically and rapidly. The audacious speculations of Copernicus, the Renaissance of classical art and litera- ture in Italy, made less noise perhaps, but were of even greater permanent importance than the religious insur- rection of Luther, consolidated by the systematizing genius of Calvin. By the Protestant movement Catho- THE Sf:VENTEi:NTH CENTUKV. lol) licism was shorn of half its dimensions. Whether that movement has proved so favourable to the permanent progi'ess of the human mind as is generally thought, is a question open to grave doubts. Of this I shall have more to say afterwards. But its immediate effect on the intellect of Northern Europe was strongly to stimu- late the growth of literature, art, and science, which hitherto had been almost limited to the South. In the confused and tangled course of modern history it is useful, as I have before said, to distinguish two processes, which bear mutually upon one another, but wliicli yet are separate : the decomposition of the old ; the composition of the new. It is obvious, in the first place, that the former movement has always proceeded, or rather has always tended to proceed, far more rapidly than the latter. From Wiclifte and Huss to Luther, from Luther to Calvin, from Calvin to Socinus ; from tlie L'nitarianism of Socinus to the Deism of Voltaire, and still onward to the complete negativism of D'Alem- bert and Diderot, the logical steps seem easy and rapid. Eeading the great Italian and French writers of the sixteenth centuiy, — Ariosto, Piabelais, Montaigne, we seem on the very verge of that mighty revolution which yet was not to burst out till two centuries afterwards. The destruction of the authority of the Church, and of 160 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING the daily miracle of the Mass, seems at first sight as if it involved prompt and speedy destruction of all the rest ; and this, with many isolated minds, was assuredly the case. Meantime the constructive movement had been going on far more slowly. The system under which men had lived for centuries was breaking up ; the system under which they were to live for the future was hardly visible. The rules of life, of duty, of right and wrong, had been based hitherto on a structure of supernatural faith. That structure having given way, the problem for men to solve was how to frame a scheme of life, a standard of duty based on the foundation which it was clear could for the future be the only firm foundation ; on scientific thought. The problem then was, stated in other words, how to bring the moral and social rela- tions of men within the sphere of Positive Science. Towards the solution of this mighty problem most of the great thinkers of Western Europe, during the last three centuries, have, in ways more or less imperfect, each in their special department, been labouring. But in the sixteenth century the approximations to it were but very slight. At a time when even the planets were supposed by most men to be under the dominion, not of regular laws, but of arbitrary spiritual influences, it was not likely that discovery of hiws of society and THE SF.VKNTKENTll CKNTrUY. IGl uf liunian development slioiiUl Le tlioiiglit possible. The sciences of Physics, Chemistry, and rhysioh)gy still remained uncreated, or under the influence of the wild- est metaphysical abstractions, except so far as the mechanical or medical arts connected with them had infused some positive nut ions of a practical or elemen- tary kind. When the reason of a candle burning was said to be that it contained a large quantity of an in- flammatory principle called phlogiston ; when philoso- phers thought they could explain the ultimate causes of heat and electricity by reference to imponderable and purely imaginary substances called caloric or elec- tric fluids ; wlien the orl.)its of the planets were sup- posed to be necessarily circular because the circle is the most perfect of geometrical figures ; when the simplest^ facts of disease were accounted for by depression or exaltation of a mysterious something called the vital spirits, delusions many of which continued to haunt scientific men till the end of the eighteenth century, if indeed all of them are yet thoroughly extinct, it was not surprising that human affairs should be considered wholly beyond the reach of scientific law ; and that those moralists and politicians who no longer believed in special interventions of tlie Deity, or in the divine right of kings, should still explain all social ([uestions L 1G2 rr.OGRESS OF TITOUGIIT DURING l)y reference to an imaginary entity called Nature, or by tlie metaphysical abstraction of the Eights of Man. The condition, therefore, of men's minds during the greater part of modern history has been this. The ancient structure of thought and belief has been giving way, and has constantly seemed on the verge of utter dissolution ; the materials for a new Synthesis, a new system, that is, of life, of belief, of duty, have been gra- dually and silently accmnulating ; but the process of accumulation has been very slow, and the putting togetlier, the building up, the synthesis of these mate- rials has been very long delayed. But the nature of men and of human society is so constituted that utter anarchy is repugnant to it, and a long continuance of anarchy is wholly impossible. Isolated exceptions apart, men in the mass revolt, have always revolted, and will always revolt against Chaos. Eather than Chaos, they will tolerate the most slavish spiritual despotism, and cling to it as to an ark of refuge. Some principle to dominate conflicting passions, some bond other than self-interest to bind them to their fellow-men, some theory of life, some rule of action, men must and will have. Philosophers may chafe at this necessity, may strive impatiently to ignore it ; if they deserve the name, will end by accepting it. TlIK SEVEXTEEXTII CENTUrvY. 1G3 Cousecjuently, t'vev since tlie sixteeiitli century in- cessant attempts have l)een made, and are yet being- made, to patch up the rents in the old system of thought, or, when this seemed plainly impossible, to construct some fresh system out of the fragments. The modes of these attempts were infinite. Protestantism, after its first revolutionary burst, became consolidated in the hands of Melanchthon into Lutheranism ; by the organizing genius of the French reformers into Calvinism ; by English statesmen into Anglicanism. And the Catliolic world had its own varieties of recon- struction too. Ignatius Loyola, Jansenius, Pascal, Bos- suet, Fenelon, each had his own conception of which fragment of the old to take up, which to reject ; how far to revive the past, how far to conciliate the future. Each of these men had his band of followers ; and the conflicts between them were frequent and fierce. It will surely be allowed by every one, be he Protestant, Catholic, or sceptic, that the founders and co-operators of these partial and temporary reconstructions were for the most part men of no mean force and wisdom. In intellect, in energy, or in purity of character, Calvin and Ignatius Loyola were certainly not inferior to Vol- taire or Piousseau. In singleness of purpose, and in mental calibre, Bossuet will certainly stand a fair com- 1G4 PKOGRESS OF THOUGHT DUHIXG parison with Diderot. The insight of these men was amply sufficient to reveal to them the logical inconse- quence of the position they maintained ; their integrity and courage was not inadequate to the effort of pro- claiming it, had it seemed desirable. We stand face to face here with a difficult problem. Men have ac- counted for the course taken by a Bossuet or a Crom- well by supposing them imbecile, or by supposing them hypocrites. Either hypothesis is to me equally unten- able. Strong sympathy with the spiritual, or, if you prefer the word, with the moral necessities of their fellow-men ; strong conviction of the utter emptiness and misery of Irreligion, that is to say, of spiritual anarchy ; of the hopelessness, while that lasted, of a right solution of any social problem, forced such minds as these to choose a practical rather than a speculative career. Leaving it to others to continue the work of destruction, or to dig deep into unpenetrated mines of truth, and so prepare the way for future builders, they chose rather to construct temporary shelter out of the ruins of the old ; fairc de Vordre avec le d4sordre, to organize, in however transient a way, the disorder around them. Tliese considerations I should not have obtruded had they not seemed to mo absolut(dy necessary for the TIIK SKVKNTKKNTII (KXTrKV. 105 understanding of what is tlie subject of this Lecture, the movement of European thought during tlie seven- teenth century. It was a century, by comparison witli its predecessor and its successor, of spiritual calm. It stands midway between the century of the lieformation and the century of the lievolution. Tt partook, in its outward surface at least, of tlie excitement of neither. The religious movement had spent its force ; Protestant- ism and Catholicism were abandoning the struggle, or at least abandoning all hope of victory in the struggle ; and were crystallizing as best they might into consoli- dated systems within their respective boundaries. The revolutionary attack upon both w^as hidden as yet in a future not distant, yet visible to few. But the calm of the seventeenth century was not stagnation. Mighty changes were incubating; revolutions of unheard-of vastness were transacting ; not in the f()rests of tlic Xew World, not in the Hall of the Convention, not even in the wide-spreading pages of the Encycloimlic or the Cmitrat Social, but in the silent depths of four or five mighty minds. Four men, whose labours extend more or less over the first generation of the seventeenth century, were the leaders of tliis vast revolution — Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes. The first two placed tlie auda- IGG PliOGUESS OF THOUGHT DUWNG cious hypothesis of Copernicus as to the constitution of the universe within the pale of demonstrated science. It is very hard for us to realize the prodigious shock given by this new conception to all the notions of man's position in the universe that had become ingrained hereditarily from the first origin of the human race. The logical instinct of the Catholic Church warned her of the danger. Her strenuous and futile persecution of Galileo shows how keenly she felt it, and how impotent she was to deal w^ith it. It was not merely the conflict of the new discovery with the language of Genesis ; tliat was but a small matter, with which the practical wisdom of Catholic divines was fuUy competent to deal. It was the necessity of wholly shifting the point of view from which man's position in the world liad hitherto been regarded. He had been hitherto the absolute centre of the universe : the sole and special object of Divine intervention. He now^ saw himself and liis ])lanet to be an inconceivably insignificant atom, a mote in the sunbeam, a grain in the sand-storm whirled in infinite space through boundless years. It was a com- plete and total transference of man's thoughts from the Absolute to tlie Eelative. For in one sense, indeed, the old conception must remain for ever true. Still, man must remain to himself the centre of the universe ; luit THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 1G7 tlic centre no longer absolute, but relative to the lile and wellbeing of his own race ; to the past, present, and future, of Humanity. And what Kepler and Galileo did by their dis- coveries, that Bacon and Descartes did still more thoroughly by tlieir method. The importance of tlie first is perhaps even overrated in this country, by comparison with the great thinkers of the Continent. He is spoken of too much as we speak of Isaac Newton, as if he stood alone as the founder of inductive philosophy. Yet of the four men we are speaking of, he is the one who did the least for inductive philosophy with his own hands. Xot a single important physical discovery is due to him. It seems indeed surprising, when we think of the time he gave to it, that he did so little. His title to fame rests on his strong grasp of two great truths : first, that the intellect of the world must, and would for the future, take a wholly different course from that whicli it had previously taken ; that metaphysical in- quiries into inscrutable causes must henceforth give way altogether to study of the laws of phenomena, founded on obsen'ation and experiment; secondly, that the exertions of tlie intellect must be bounded by con- siderations of human welfare, determined not in the spirit of narrow Utilitarianism, but in a laige and far 1G8 riJOGKKSS OF THOUGHT DUKING sighted spirit. In the Novum Orgamim, we have the germs of that subordination of intellectual effort to social and moral requirements which has brought the severe censure of scientific specialists upon the philo- sophical and political speculations of Auguste Comte. But great as Bacon was, a still greater and more important figure in the intellectual movement of the seventeenth century was Bene Descartes. Those who read his admirable discourse on Mdliod, the value of which time will not impair, will see tliat he too had grasped the conception of organized and systematic exploration of the world around us with a power and effectiveness fully equal to that of Bacon. INIorally, he had the vast advantage over Bacon of being single- minded in the pursuit of the great mission which he liad marked out for himself while yet a schoolboy. The two great obstacles to the fulfilment of that mission, ambition of power or wealth, and literary vanity, he had put utterly aside. He fled from the interminable discussion, metaphysical pedantry, and intellectual con- ceit of the scliools of Baris, to mix in utter obscurity witli the world of practical life, where men, he said, reasoning about their own affairs and interests, were far more likely to reason vigorously and wisely. As a soldier Tin: SKVKNTKKNTIl CKNTLKV. IGO or as a truveller, he iiuxlhI Avitli Gvi-iy phase ul" lile in every country in Europe. Then he phmted himself in Amsterdam, where every one but himself, as he ol)serves M'itli much satisfaction, being absorbed in ti'ade, he might hope to work out his problems in that repose and perfect freedom from discussion, which was to him the one supreme blessing. In Holland he remained twenty years, studying geometry, physics, and anatomy, occa- sionally visiting the philosophical world of Paris. There he came into contact with Hobbes, Pascal, Fermat, Eoberval, and others. He ^^'as there when the civil war of the Fronde luoke out ; but the excitement of Paris \\as always too much for him, and after the day of the Barricades, in August 1648, he left Paris never to return. Christina of Sw^eden invited him to Stockholm hi 1G50, where, in three months, the climate killed him in his 54th year. His work can only be described as a synthesis of I'ositive Philosophy, so far as it was then possible. The grand object was, first to penetrate men with the conception, so wholly foreign to the modes of thinking then prevalent, of the existence of invariable laws in every department of nature; secondly, by the know- ledge of these laws, to increase man's power over the 170 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING world around liim, and above all, over his own physical organization ; mastery over disease being to him a matter of even greater moment than increased power of producing wealth. His actual success in the different departments of this vast sphere was very unequal. But in every department he gave a stimulus to scien- tific thought far greater than that of Bacon ; and in his own special region of discovery, neither Bacon nor any other philosopher has rivalled him. His splendid gene- ralization of geometrical method, commonly called the application of algebra to geometry, by which infinite numbers of problems, each formerly requiring a special study, were now solved by a miscellaneous process, is the starting-point of modern mathematics. In Physics his labours were not unfruitful, as his researches on light, and his explanation of the rainbow, sufficiently prove. The study of animal life, to which he devoted so many years, was less accessible to liim. He was, perhaps, the first to accept and disseminate Harvey's great discovery, then recent, of the circulation of the blood. But the time for discovering the principal laws of vital phenomena had not yet come. AVhat can be said is, that he gave a strong impulse in the right direction. I spoke of his work as a synthesis of Positive Science. THE SEVKNTEKNTII CENTUKY. 171 It was a synthesis inevitably inipeifect. One domain, and tliat the most important, was left out, or rather was left to be treated not by positive but by metaphysical methods. The social and moral nature of man was not brought by him, and could not be brought, within the sphere of Positive Science. He did not neglect these subjects however. Indeed it is by this part of his labours that he is best known to the mere literary world. He dealt with the sphere of morality and reli- gion by metaphysical as opposed to positive methods ; but his metaphysical writing, which gave the impulse successively to Locke, Leibnitz, Hume and his Scotch opponents, Kant and Kant's successors, was of the most formidable and destructive kind. To reduce all truth to the two ultimate axioms of God and of Con - sciousness, to make individual consciousness the supreme test of truth, was a process at which Catholic or Protes- tant divines might well shudder. Descartes, anxious for repose as the one condition of successful w^oi'k, not feeling that the time for doing the work of Diderot or Voltaire had come yet, writing, as he distinctly tells us, not for his own generation but for generations to come, was always willing to profess conformity to the Church ; but no outward conformity could compensate for a mode of reasoning which, if followed out, led men inevitably 172 I'ROCJKESS OF THOUGHT DIKING to make a clean sweep of the whole structure of tradi- tional belief, and begin again from the very foundations. Descartes had gone to Holland, hoping to be left in quiet obscurity. He was much mistaken. The Cal- vinists dreaded his philosophy far more tlian tlie Catholics. The ministers of Utrecht, wdio had been preaching zealously for the last ten years against the discoveries of Galileo, now did all in their power to imitate Galileo's persecutors. It was by a very narrow escape, due only to influential friends, that Descartes escaped being convicted of the cliarge of atheism, and having his books burnt by the common hangman. The Catholics, strange to say, were far more lenient, and wiser in their generation, though not perhaps wiser for the veneration to come after them. Trusting- to the o o immense power of resistance contained in the social fabric of tlieir Church, a power wholly independent of logic, they met tlie danger boldly by adopting his pliilo- sophy, fatal as it could not but prove to them in the end. I liave gone S(jniewhat more fully into the life and work of Descartes, because lie is to my mind not only the most powerful, l)ut the most representative intellect of the seventeenth century. From him more distinctly than from any other man we can trace the two great THE SF.VEXTKENTII CF'.NTL-KV. 173 intellectual niovcmeiits of the eiglitccntli and nineteenth centuries; the Ciitical philosophy and the Positive philosophy. The first, exposing the weakness of all such beliefs as from their nature are insusceptible either of proof or disproof, tlius demarcated the knowalde from tlie unknowable, and fixed the limits within which it is alone useful ibr the human intellect to exert itself; the second, building up within those limits a new structure of scientific conviction, formed a far securer basis than has ever existed before for the social and moral relations of man ; opened a new and wider sphere for his primaeval instincts of Love, of Eeverence, and of Duty. Of these two great modern movements, Descartes is the first and most typical representative. I am not proposing to give you the history of philosophy or of science in the seventeenth century. I can but mention, in passing, his great co-operators in the critical move- ment, Hobbes, Spinosa, IMalebranche, Locke, Leibnitz, Bayle. AVith their special opinions we can have little to do here. From the confused and tortuous conflict of their metaphysical speculations, one result shaped itself more and more ctcarly, the impossibility of metaphysics; and, as a consecpience, the limitation of tlie human in- tellect to the sphere of Positive inrpiiry. 174 TROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING Meantime, while so mncli was being destroyed, miicli was being built up. The Critical philosophy was clear- ing the ground; the Positive philosophy was rapidly preparing to occupy it. Descartes and Leibnitz stand out from all the other thinkers of the seventeenth cen- tury as distinguished for equal services in either field. It was their privilege to build up as Avell as to destroy. They combined the work of Newton and of Locke. They were great scientific discoverers as well as great meta- physicians. Descartes took up the chain of geometrical discovery where the Greek geometers, eighteen cen- turies before, had left it off. He generalized their methods by reducing questions of quality to questions of quantity, by showing that every kind of curved line could be represented by an algebraic equation ; and thus prepared the way for the greatest achievement of modern science, due to the simultaneous eftorts of Leibnitz and Newton, the Infinitesimal Calculus. These men pursued science with aU the rigorous exactitude and with more than the practical success of the narrow scientific specialists of modern times. But the aimless dispersion characteristic of modern scientific societies would have been repugnant to them. Science to them was not a barren collection of disconnected truths indiscriminately massed together without refer- THE SEMilXTEENTH CKNTUIJV. 175 ence to tlicir bearing on the social interests of the luunan race ; it was tlie foundation-stone of a vast edifice destined for the aggrandizement and ennoljling of human life. In their very errors there was much that was not only noble and grand, but profoundly use- ful Descartes' theory of Vortices was a bold scaffolding of conjecture thrown out to hold together isolated facts, till Newton's memorable discovery of the laws of gravi- tation, prepared as it was by the previous efforts of Kepler, Galileo, and Huygliens, destroyed it by replac- ing it. I do not propose, in this course of Lectures, to give any synopsis, however brief, of the literature of the period. I only touch upon it to illustrate the historical principles upon which we have all along been proceed- ing. In studying the movement of European thought in the seventeenth century, it is impossible to avoid allusion to the place which Art and Poetry occupy in that movement. The works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere belong to aU future ages. But they belong- also, in a peculiar sense, to their own age. Their pro- duction was an historical event of gTeat magnitude, the significance of which it is worth while attempting to appreciate. Tlie periods of liistory distinguished for great works 17G PROGKESS OF THOUGHT DURING of art are very few. In the twenty-seven or twenty- eiglit centuries of wliicli the evohition of Western Europe consists, we shall find not more than seven, speaking roughly, ^^'hich have produced works destined to be immortal. If we leave out the periods of Homer and Hesiod, of ^schylus and Aristophanes, of Lucretius and Lucan, of Dante and Petrarch, of Ariosto and Tasso, of Shakespeare and Eacine, of Goethe and Scott (I have chosen for the most part names that mark the limits of each period), we shall find twenty- one centuries, each of them with their own peculiar importance as links in tlie chain of progress, but poetically barren. The Aloe- tree of Poetry has very seldom blossomed. Of the laws which regulate this distribution of talent, many lie, no doubt, and will probably for a long time lie, beyond our analysis. It seems clear, however, that many of the conditions favourable for poetic growth have very seldom existed, and that all of them have never as yet existed simultaneously. Periods of intense activity either in building up or in pulling down, periods of intense struggle, whether mental or physical, are not likely to leave vigorous minds at leisure for verse-making. The building up of tlie Eoman Empire, or of the early Christian Church, the struggle of tlie Itcformation in Nortliorn Europe, the revolutionary THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUlJV. 177 logic of the eighteenth centuiy, were processes of over- intense and one-sided vitality; utterly foreign to that calm, harmonious, and many-sided development of human powers which Art requires. It must be owned, too, though tlie discussion of the point would lead me far from my province, that Art and Religion have seldom or never lent that mutual assistance of which some par- tial fruit was seen in the days of Homer and of Phidias, and of which far richer results lie no doubt before us in times to come. The metaphysical theology of the Middle Ages was not propitious, and this Dante knew, either to poetry or painting : and Raphael's Madonnas, like the Sybils and Prophets of jNIichael Angelo, indicate an ideal Future rather than a venerated Past. Be this as it may, it would seem that the times most favourable to the rise of great poets have been those brief intervals of cahn immediately following or preceding a great crisis. The excitement of a political storm, acting on those who stand on its verge, spectators but not par- takers, has been the stimulus, so history teaches, to great poets. Athens in the century after Marathon and Salamis ; Rome when the civil wars and the work of conquest were over, and the 'pax Romana was estab- lished ; Florence of the fourteenth century, triumphant in the long contest with the German Emperors ; Italy M 178 PllOGKESS OF THOUGHT DURING in the sixteenth century, stunulated by the Eenais- sance, and yet saved from the noise and turmoil of the Lutheran outbreak ; England in the inters'al between the Eeformation and the Commonwealth, — enjoyed the calm of which I speak, the calm not of death, but of strong sensitive life. And such a time was the middle of the seventeenth century for France. The religious wars were over ; the victory over Spain without and the feudal aristocracy within had been fully won ; the national unity had been strongly constituted, the national forces ^^Tought to a high pitch; everything pointed to an immediate future of vigorous, peaceful, harmonious development. It was not a time of intense activity in pulling down or building up ; or rather the process of demolition, as I have pointed out before, was confined as yet to a small number of minds. The age of Eichelieu and of Colbert was singularly favourable to all the peaceful arts of life; and above all, to that highest of the arts, that production of idealized types of human nature which we call I'oetry. For the Poetry of the AVestern nations has been from its very outset positive and humanist in its character. Even with Homer, whose polytheistic machinery played so important a part as to liave given rise to the super- THE SEVENTKKXTII CEXTUIIV. 170 ficial notion tliat lie invented the popular niytliologv, even in the Iliad and Odyssey, the human interests rise immeasurably superior to the super-human. Even in ^schylus, even in Dante, this is the case; and how much more so in Ariosto, in Shakespeare, in Corneille ! Indeed, it is not too much to say that the positive tudy of human nature, in which the gTeatest philo- sophic intellects have made hitlierto such slender pro- gress, has been cultivated almost exclusively by the great poets of Western Europe. Xor is this singular. The science of human nature only follows in this respect the history of other sciences; all of Avhich have originated, as Geometry originated, in their corresponding arts : in the practical and empirical pursuits of common life. From the pedantry of metaph3'sicians, wlio reduce the study of human nature to its purely intellectual aspects, or who, if they treat of tbe moral side at all, endeavour to reduce all human motives to self-interest ; from the narrowness of theologians, who reiterate only that human nature is simply and totally corrupt, we take refuge with the poets who show us Man as he really is ; removing indeed the mere accidents of his life, the clogs and cumbrous appendages of destiny and chance, and i)lacing liim in a free, clear medium, where the complex play of rival sympathies and passions becomes 180 rROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING for the first time visible. Examine the seven or eight hundred characters of Shakespeare's dramas ; how many totally corrupt persons will you find there ? Hardly three. Not even in Milton's Lucifer will you find total corruption ; and there are germs of unselfish tenderness in the lowest circles of Dante's Hell. Every great poet then has, in his own implicit and empu'ical way, added fresh materials for the study of man's moral powers ; has prepared the way for the highest of all sciences, — the science of Human Nature. And on this ground alone the century of Shakspere's Lear and Hamlet, of the Don Quixote of Cervantes, of Corneille's Cid, Horace, and Polyeucte, of Moliere's TartufPe, of Eacine's Athalie, of Calderon's Magico Prodigioso, and of Milton's Paradise Lost, claims immortal praise. Poets have been called philoso- phers. It would seem unwise to confound two words required for two such different modes of mental activity. But it is true to say that the intellectual powers called into play are very nearly identical in both ; and that great poets, born in another age, would have been great philosophers. The first process of the mind is the same in both. Both begin by Abstraction. Both abstract, clear away from their object many of the properties which in actual life it may possess, concen- THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 181 tratiiig their atteution ou certain special equalities. There the reseiiiblaiice between them ends. The philosoplier abstracts in order to generalize ; the poet in order to idealize. The philosopher abstracts or selects certain qualities from objects in order to find the general prin- ciple or law common to these qualities ; the poet selects certain aspects of man (rejecting others) in order to heighten them, to increase their force, to put them into fuller prominence. Let it not be forgotten that the poet's mission has its practical side. His office, as Aristotle said long ago, is KuOapai^; tojv irdOcov ; that is to say, by terror, by sympathy, by ridicule, to purify the passions ; not indeed to preach pedantic truisms, or rose-coloured benevolence ; the poet is no moralist or preacher, but to represent the play of conflicting passions strongly and faithfully, clearing them only from the low, the common, the paltry, and the trivial. The poet has no call to turn away from life's darker side. No crimes were so deadly but Dante could find a place for them in his Inferno ; those alone among the damned of whom he could say nothing, scathing them as he passes by with speecliless scorn, being those who were neither good nor bad, neither faithful to God nor to His enemies, ma iicr sc furo, who lived only for themselves. Choosing from the 182 PIIOGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING confused prosaic mass of life its broader, larger, grander aspects, whether dark or bright, aggrandizing what is noble, aggTandizing no less, if need be, what is fierce and hateful, then fusing the conflicting parts into a perfect whole, dominating his angry discords by sovereign har- monies, the poet raises men from the dust, purges their passions of the petty griefs and joys that have clogged and choked them, sweeps for a while the dull disguise of triviality away, and makes us ' feel that we are greater than we know.' The place thus occupied by the great poets (among whom, I need hardly say, are to be included the great masters of form, colour, and sound), in the world's his- tory is very liigh. They are not philosophers ; yet they supply in richer abundance than metaphysicians or theo- logians the materials for the scientific Theory of Human Nature. They are not moral preachers; yet by contagious sympathy they lift us unconsciously, without will or effort, to a higher atmosphere, where we have at least the chance, if we so resolve, to stay. I speak here, of course, of the very small number of great poets, not of the mediocre mass, whom neither gods nor men should tolerate. And of that small minority were assuredly Moli^re and Pierre Corneille. It is not too much to say that the nobler features of the French character, the THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 183 fearless frankness, the keen sense of honour, the bril- liant sense, above all the unsparing hatred of cant, Avhich are prominent among French virtues, have been strengthened and heightened by the eftbrts of these two great men. ^loliere is known moderately well, though not well enough, in England, as in every other part of the civilized world ; Corneille is known to us by name, and very little more. The loss is ours, and I venture to say it is a very serious loss. One reason is, perhaps, that no great poet ever produced so many works, which, though grand in parts, yet as a whole are faulty. But if those who open him for tlie first time limit their reading to his four masterpieces, the Cid, the Horace, the Cinna, and the Polyeucte, they will find themselves brought face to face with a spirit of heroic stamp. They had best put all comparisons with the great English dramatist utterly aside. Between the 'myriad -minded' magician of our own land, and the manly, limited, straightforward simplicity of Corneille, there is no simi- larity whatever. If Corneille is to be compared to other poets, it should be to the Greek dramatists, to Virgil and Lucan, or to our own ^Milton. The motive in each of his works is simple and usually the same ; the conflict between private and pul»lic passions, between love and duty, between love and honour, between love and religion : 18-i PKOGKESS OF THOUGHT DURING eternal problems which will vex the noblest natures to the end of time. It is not for the artist to solve the problem, to give the victory to either of the combatant passions. His it is simply to array either foe in his strongest armour, to strain the energies of both to the highest, then to portray the conflict, and let the nobler sympathies of those who witness it take their free course. But detailed criticism of Corneille's poetry must not detain us. We have only to allude to its bearing as an historical event of the seventeenth century. And from this aspect there is one further remark to be made. Cor- neille entered more systematically than any previous poet into a domain where the great poets of future times may find an exhaustless harvest : the domain of history. To the idealization of the successive phases of Eoman history, a field into which Shakespeare, with what glori- ous success we know, had entered before him, he devotes no less than twelve dramas. In tlie movement of European thought during the seventeenth century, the culture of the historical sense thus promoted in the most powerful way by Corneille is not to be overlooked. Nor sliould the chef-cVceuvrc of Eacine, his Athalie, less powerful perhaps, but of such consummate perfection in form as no poet north of the Alps has rivalled, be passed by. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 185 MoliM'e too must be noticed from the historical point of view solely. His direct influence on social and men- tal progress is perhaps greater than that of any other poet. His attacks on all that was most retrograde and most powerful in his time, on theological hypocrisy, on metaphysical pedantry, on aristocratic frivolity, well merit mention in the series of influences of which the French Eevolution was the issue. Thoroughly pene- trated as he was with the Positive and Eepublican spirit, dreaded by the clergy, hated by the aristocracy, his existence at the Court of Louis xn^ is a singular anomaly. The storm aroused by his wTitings was such that, but for the King's protection, he could not have lived in it an houi\ ]\Iolifere died before Louis xiv. became fatally retrograde. The shelter that Louis gave to Moli^re is, it has been said, his best title to the gratitude of posterity. We are now in a position to appreciate more distinctly what was briefly alluded to at the beginning of this Lec- ture, — the religious movement of the seventeenth cen- tury. We shall not lose much by confining our review to France, where each extreme phase of the religious world was developed to its height, and where many in- termediate phases may be seen which elsewhere are less distinct. In France the philosophic movement was 18G PKOGEESS OF THOUGHT DUIU^'G most intense ; equally intense, therefore, was the move- ment of reaction. The two great rival camps, Protestant and Catholic, which elsewhere were separated, in France were brought into close and intimate contact. In Hol- land, in Great Britain, in Sweden, the worship of the Mass was, for the greater part of the century, as rigidly prohibited as the Calvinistic sermon in Italy or Spain. Protestantism neither inculcated toleration, nor even professed to inculcate it. For the toleration Avliich we now enjoy we have to thank neither of the rival sects, but rather the statesmen and philosophers who utilized their mutual antagonism so as to procure a compromise. How Piichelieu effected this equilibrium of the two reli- gions in Europe has been already shown ; and what the Continent gained by the treaty of Westphalia, France had gained fifty years before by the Edict of Nantes. By that edict the French Protestants, who numbered perhaps a tenth of the total population, 2,000,000 out of 20,000,000 obtained absolute liberty of conscience ; performance of public worship in 3500 castles, as well as in certain specified towns in each province ; a state endowment equal to £20,000 a year ; civil rights equal in every respect to those of Catholics ; admission to all public colleges, hospitals, etc. ; finally, eligibility to all offices of State. Two hundred towns which they had THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 187 occupied during the religious wars, cliieHy in Poitou, Guyenne, Languedoc, and Daupliine, were to be lor several years exclusively occupied by Protestants ; the governors in all cases to be of their religion. They secured also the right of holding assemblages where the political as well as the religious interests of their body were decided on. This right of assembly, vested in a body holding 200 garrisoned towns, constituted an impcrium in impcrio, and was a state of things that could not last. The public declaration of one of their synods in 1G03, that * the bishop of Eome w^as properly the anti- Christ and the son of perdition foretold in the Word of God under the emblem of the whore clothed in scarlet,' and a long series of violent intolerances like those described by Mr. Buclde, indicated no wish to avail themselves wisely and peaceably of their admirable position as the only tolerated minority in Europe. At last their pre- tensions rose to the level of rebellion. Eichelieu spent two years of his valuable life in besieging their strong- hold. The capture of La Piochelle removed what, for nearly a century, had l)een one of the great obstacles to the unity of France, one of the most obvious step- ping-stones for feudal ambition. Eichelieu crushed Protestantism in France so far as it was a separate political organization claiming \.<^ f'X(»r(ise separate 188 PIIOGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING sovereignty. But Protestants in their equal civil rights, as secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, he scrupu- lously protected. Mazarin, and after Mazarin Colbert, followed in the same track. Many of the most important manufactures which Colbert was so anxious to encourage were carried on by Protestants ; and he found amongst them many men fit for important financial posts. Louis xiv., though personally disliking the Protestants, yet in his memoirs, written in 1670, expressly lays down the duty of leaving the Act of Toleration undisturbed. Up to the time Avhen his Government became retrograde, and Col- bert's influence sank before that of the Jesuits and of Louvois, — up to the time, that is to say, of the war with Holland, — the Protestants held a position in France which strangely contrasts with the severity of the legislation against Catholics enacted during the same period in England and Ireland. And yet, with all these advan- tages, their numbers during the whole of this period, and indeed from the beginning of the century, had been steadily diminishing ; partly from the tendency of the dominant religion in every country to absorb those whose conformity to either sect is merely nominal and outward; partly also from the inherent logical weak- ness of the Protestant position. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 189 Let us turn to the opposite camp. We find it united against all outsiders ; by no means united within itself. I have explained already that, in the innumeral)le attempts that have been made since the close of the INIiddle Ages to re -construct out of the ruins of the old Catholic system some imperfect and temporary shelter, each of these partial re-formations based itself on some isolated portion of the old doctrine, rejecting the rest. The Protestants were broadly distinguished from the Catholics in rejecting the Church and taking their stand upon the Bible. But there was bitter dissension within the Catholic no less than within the Protestant camp as to the particular direction in which to conciliate, the exact point at which to stand fast. Of these attempts to reconstruct, that of the Jesuits was by far the boldest, the ablest, and nltimately the most dangerous and noxious. The Catholics from the fourteenth century, and almost every sect of Pro- testants afterwards, had abandoned the great political principle of the Middle Ages, — the separation and inde- pendence of the spiritual power. Long before the Eefor- mation the kmgs of Europe had placed themselves above the popes. The reformation of Ignatius Loyola aimed at nothing less than the re-establishment of the Papal inde- pendence. They saw veiy clearly that a Church subor- 190 PIIOGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING dinate to the State is no Churcli in the proper sense at all. The dogmas of State churches would become, as they knew, fixed institutions of the country, very difficult to modify without a political convulsion, consequently certain to grow more and more out of harmony with the changing spirit of the age. But a European church wholly independent of any particular State, could modify its institutions, and even its doctrines, as need might arise. And in such modification the Jesuits were pre- pared to go great lengths. They saw how^ the scheme of Catholic doctrine had branched out into full develop- ment in the course of centuries from its germ in the New Testament. They were prepared, no doubt, for further development in the future. Certain it is, at least, that they alone among the Catholic sects dared to face and to accept the intellectual movement of the age. No Protestant sect has approached the wisdom and largeness of their educational system. In this respect at least it must be allowed that their means have been better than their ends. Doubtless their aim of re-establishing the spiritual power was wholly chimerical and hopeless, and by the abler and more honest of the l3ody it was soon seen to be so. I have already pointed out the distinction that is to be made between the first generation of Jesuits THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUIiV. 1 1 and their successors. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, and during the whole of the seventeenth cen- tury, all that is noblest amongst 'them is to he found in foreign missions. In India, in China, in Paraguay, their fearless and untiring devotion, and their wise con- ciliating spirit, had free scope. The history of the Chinese mission alone is enough to redeem them from the foolish sneers of Protestant writers. Their introduc- tion of Western science into China, their acceptance of the two great institutions of the country, the worship of Heaven and the worship of Ancestors, as a common basis of sympathy on which to work, contrasts strangely with the narrower spmt of Protestant missionaries. It was indeed, as might be imagined, far too liberal for the rest of the Catholic world, and the discussion that took place in Europe upon ' Chinese ceremonies ' is not the least important feature in the religious history of tlie seventeenth century. As much cannot be said of the Jesuits in Europe. To the last, indeed, they remained distinguished from the other Catholic sects for practical wisdom, knowledge of the world, and successful education of the young. Put the pursuit of their political ideal, chimerical at the best, degenerated at last, when followed by men of nar- rower minds and lower characters, into unscrupulous 192 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING intrigue. Their simultaneous suppression by every Catholic Government in the eighteenth century, marked the avowed impotence of the old religion to avail itself of the only philosophical attempt to adapt it to modern progress. Opposed to the Jesuits stood the Jansenists. A phase of faith which attracted the great intellect of Pascal, and grouped together such men as Saint -Cpan, Arnauld, Nicole, and the poet Eacine, cannot be passed over in silence. The general history of Port-Eoyal is more familiar to Protestant even than to Catholic readers. The Port-Ptoyalists were the Calvinists of Catholicism. Their attempt at reconstruction embraced exactly those parts of the Mediteval religion which the Jesuits had neglected. Wholly abandoning what the Jesuits had taken hold of, the social and political side of Catholicism, they clung to its personal, mystical, and ascetic side. Like the Protestants, they reverenced St. Augustin beyond all other divines. They drew out into prominence doctrines which the wiser instinct of the Mediaeval theologians had usually left in tlie back- ground. The damnation of unbaptized infants, the ne- cessity of prevenient grace, and its corollary doctrine, the predestination of every human soul before its birth to salvation or damnation, were points on which their THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 193 authors loved to dwell. With them, as with the Cal- viuists, such doctrines formed the basis of stern ascetic discipline, by which they vainly hoped to resist and remedy the general corruption of society around them. The doctrine of election, clearly stated by Augustin, and revived by Calvin and Jansenius, had been always kept in the background by the Catholic hierarchy. They feared its tendency to subvert all spiritual disci- pline and subordination by elevating the humblest and most ignorant to an equal or a higher level than their superiors. There was latent revolution in the doctrine ; and indeed in Scotland, Holland, and Geneva it had been anything but latent. It was singular, too, that many of the leaders in the insurrection of the Fronde had been Jansenists. For these things they became suspicious in the eyes of the authorities in Church and State. jNIoreover, the severity and inflexibility of their moral code was especially repugnant to the Jesuits. The Jesuits were saving society, or attempting to save it, by making themselves all things to all men ; modify- ing their moral standard to suit men of the world ; pushing conciliation to its extreme length, and indeed often far beyond it. Jansenism they thought danger- ous, because by its severity it drove men out of the pale of the Church altogether. For all these reasons Jan sen N 19-1 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING ism became suspicious in the eyes of the authorities in Church and State. The Jesuits, their temper by no means sweetened by Pascal's Provincial Letters, attacked them under ground and above ground, at Court, at the Vatican, in the pulpit, and in the salons of Paris. The Pope fulminated several fierce Bulls against them. Louis XIV. in his memoirs warns his son to discourage them in every possible way.^ It seems that Louis xiv. in his old age was not quite alive to the signs of the times. Few of the spiritual guides of France seem to have been less blind. Certain it is that during the last years of Louis xiv. Catholicism was being torn to shreds by the dissensions of its own children. The Bull Unigenitus was the best possible preparation for the Encyclo]p4die.. One man there was, and one only, in the Catholic world, who strove in a large and philosophic spirit to ^ St. Simon tells us that the Duke of Orleans, the Kmg's nephew, afterwards llegent, on the occasion of a journey to Spain, requested that a certain Montpertuis should be allowed to join his suite : 'A ce nom voila le roi qui prend un air austere ; Comment, mon ueveu, Montpertuis, le Ills de cette janseniste, de cette folle qui a couru M. Arnaud partout ! Je ne veux point de cet homme-la avee vous ! Ma foi, Sire, je ne sais pas ce qu'a fait la mJire, mais pour le fils, il n'a garde d'etre jans6niste, et je vous en r^ponds; car il ne croit pas en Dieu ! Est-il possiljle, mon neveu ? rdpliqua le roi, en se radoucissant. Rien de plus certain. Sire. Puisque cela est, il n'y a point de mal : vous pouvez le mener.' — Quoted by Martin, Hist, de France, vol. xiv. p. 002. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 11)5 meet the danger. Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, a man of character and intellect worthy of the best days of the Mediaeval Church, stood forward to defend her, if that were possible, from foes without and from the still more threatening peril of decay within. Had Troy been to be saved, his would have been the right arm to save it. He saw the true grandeur of the Catholic structure, even in its ruin ; venerable even to sceptics, and against Protestants impregnable. His treatise on the Inconsist- encies of Protestantism, in which, quoting Luther, ]\Ielanchthon, Zwingle, and Calvin, with as few words as possible of his own, he allows each to overthrow the other ; and shows how much self-contradiction is in- herent in the nature of a theory which, while clinging to divine revelation, rejects the divine authority of the Church, must be looked upon, even by those who reject its conclusion, as a masterpiece of vigorous and tem perate controversy. His short tract, entitled Exposition of the Catholic Faith, made more converts among the French Protestants than Louvois's Dragonnades. The great Protestant general Turenne was among the lirst to be convinced by it. As a simple, clear, and philo- sophic statement of the Catholic dogma, cleared from all its non-essential accessories, it is well worth reading f^ither bv those who wish to judge their opponents can- 196 PKOGKESS OF THOUGHT DURING didly, or by all thoughtful students of the history of the human mind. His works present a complete view of Catholicism as a coherent synthesis, intellectual, social, and political. His Politique tiree de VEcriturc Bainte, System of Polity based upon the language of Holy Scrip- ture, is precisely what its title indicates : a Philosophy of Government from the theocratic point of view. As a consistent and logical development of the theoiy of Divine Pdght of Kings, this treatise is of permanent his- torical value. Its contemporary value in stimulating political thought in precisely the opposite direction, was no doubt very great. A great debt is due to the man who brings out a system of belief, whether true or false, into full daylight. Mystification is a far worse danger than error. ' Give us light,' said Ajax, ' even if we die for it.' Bossuet's Politique Sacr^e led by natural revulsion to Eousseau's Contrat Social; the divine Eight of kings, to the abstract Plights of Man. The long struggle between these two theories, neither of them superior in rationality to the other, clears the way for a final theory of human relations, founded neither on supernatural dogma nor on metaphysical abstractions, but on the scientific study of the historical Evolution of Humanity. Bossuet's theory of government did not include the THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUKY. 197 principle of ToLn'atiuii, any more than did that of his great Protestant opponent, Jurien. Both distinctly lay it down as the dut}" of Government to discourage and suppress religious error by persuasion if possible, but if necessary by force. Toleration like that sanctioned by the edict of Nantes was wholly inconsistent with any theory of government then existing. The great English philosopher Hobbes held distinctly that a State religion, which it should be criminal to attack, was, as a mere measure of police, most desirable. The severity of the penal laws against Dissenters and Catholics in England and Ireland, so far from diminishing, had steadily in- creased since the Eestoration. The revocation of the edict of Nantes, therefore, foolish and disastrous as it was, and as it was thought to be by Colbert and by all who had the commercial prosperity of the country at heart, w^as in strict accordance with the principles then prevailing in Protestant as well as Catholic countries. But though Bossuet cordially accepted the edict of Revocation, it is certain that had his voice been listened to, France would have been spared the disgrace of the brutal persecutions whicli followed it ; persecutions the most disgraceful because the most needless and gratui- tous in the whole history of religious intolerance. There was no danger of France becoming Protestant; the 198 PROGRESS OF THOUGHT DURING whole antecedents of the country, the logical and yet sympathetic character of the people, had evidently decided that question a century ago. France remaining nominally Catholic, was preparing for far deeper changes than any that Luther or Calvin had ever dreamt of. There was not the slightest tendency, nor had there ever been since the conversion of Henry of Navarre, to an increase in the Protestant numbers. The Catholic faith had provisionally been adopted by almost all thinking men. Eejected by almost every important intellect in France, Protestantism might safely have been left to its natural process of decay. The Dragonnades, and the persecution of the Port-Eoyalists, illustrate that deep saying of the Middle Ages, that madness comes first on those who are destined for destruction. They aroused strange rebellious thoughts in young minds whose lips were not yet loosed. The last years of Louis xiv.'s reign are dull and dreary, and merit no remembrance. Most of the great generals, statesmen, and poets of the age of Eichelieu and Colbert had passed away. The intellectual stagnation of France has indeed been considerably exaggerated by recent writers.^ But it is certain that intellectual life was at 'A low ebb in France. One fact is sufficient to prove ' See Note. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. I'JU it. Newton's discovery of tlie law ul' Gravitatiuii re- mained nnaccepted, and indeed almost unknown in France fur a generation after it liad been circulated in England. Yet as we tread the weary desert of tliuse years of physical misery, dead formality, spiritual tyranny, and political disgrace, we scent from afar the fresh breeze of Ocean, we hear its distant roar. The greatest Eevolution in the world's history was nigh at hand, and France, Jesuit-ridden and paralysed as she might seem, was destined to give it birth. At the death of Louis XIV., D'xUembert was not yet born; Diderot and Eoiisseau were in their cradles. But Montesquieu was approaching manhood ; and there was another young spirit who for some years had been watching the world around him ^vitli eager and impatient scorn, waiting like a wild beast chained, till the cry of joy that rang through France at the King's death should give the signal for the combat. His name was Fran(^ois- Marie Arouet, commonly called Voltaire. XUTE TO LECTURE IV. MiCHELET remarks, with some truth, that the age oi' Umis XIV. ended everything and initiated nothing. It 200 NOTE TO LECTURE IV. is certain that the greatest names of the seventeenth century belong rather to the period of Eichelieu or of Mazarin than to that of Louis xiv. Mr. Buckle, so far as I know, is the first English writer who has brought this fact into full prominence. But it must be said also that he exaggerates it. ' Louis xiv.,' he says, ' sur- vived the entii^e intellect of the French nation, except that small part of it which grew up in opposition to his principles. . . . Several years before his death, . . . there was no popular liberty, there were no great men, there was no science, there was no literature ; there were no arts.' ' If we examine the fifty-four years of his reign, from 1661 to 1715, we shall be struck by the remark- able fact, that everything which is celebrated was effected in the first half of it.'-^ I will not lay stress on the fact that Eacine's cJief-d'o&uvre was published in the latter half of the period. But we must not forget that this period could still boast of such theologians as Bossuet, Fenelon, and Bourdaloue ; of the Churcli his- torian Fleury ; of such philosophers as INIalebranche, Bayle, and Fontenelle ; of such mathematicians as L'Hopital and Varignon ; of the great botanist Tourne- fort ; of Sauveur the founder of acoustics ; of Lahire tlie astronomer ; of the two Delisles, the geographers. 1 Bucklo, Historii of Civilisation, vol. i. pp. G49, 653. NOTE TO LECTURE IV. 201 F^neldu and ^lalebranclie diod in the same year as Louis XIV. ; Vari^L^iion, tlie Delisles, Laliire, Sauveur, Fleury, and Fontenelle survived him ; to say nothing of Voltaire and Montesquieu, the first of whom was twenty - one years of age at Louis's death, the latter twenty-six. These names are certainly not all of them among the greatest ; nor would I dispute Mr. Buckle's main posi- tion, that the patronage of Louis was less favourable to intellectual development than has been represented ; but they show that at least Louis did not ' survive the entire intellect of France ;' that the intellectual filiation of France was not wholly broken off. It is singular that writers who are the most eager to maintain that governments are powerless for good, are the most prone to exaggerate not merely their wish to do mischief, but their power to do it. Or ; KDINBUROH : T. CON.STABr.K. 'IIINTKH 11) TIIK yUKEN, AMI* TO TIIK L•^•IVERSn•^ %' "i^. s -vr Return to des; irom wi xhbori -ved. This book is due on the LAST DATE and HOUR stamped below. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 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