V.
There cannot be a more painful subject for consideration than the reign of Louis XIV. This aged king, nearly alone, outliving all the great men of his era; the irreparable void left in his court by the death of his children and his grandchildren; an unhappy war, exposing the frontiers of his kingdom to the enemy; three millions of debt; the people overwhelmed with imposts which they could no longer pay; commerce destroyed, industry extinguished, a part of the country lying fallow; the monarch hated by the nation, of which he had once been the idol, consuming his days in the duties of a puerile etiquette, or of a devotion more puerile still, and supporting with difficulty a royalty, whose splendour and prestige, were decaying with him. What an expiation was this for his despotic and insatiable pride!
The quarrels of religion pursued him unceasingly, and left him no repose. His court and council were divided upon the controversies of Jansenism and Quietism. When he thought he had appeased them on one side, they reappeared on the other, and his death-bed was also troubled by the disputes of theologians concerning the bull Unigenitus.
The Protestants were seldom, and then unwillingly, alluded to before him, and he himself also avoided mentioning them. [Their repression] was an undertaking that had failed, and he sought a refuge in oblivion from his humiliating miscalculations.
The Reformed of Paris were treated more than ever with caution, in order to spare the king painful reflections. The celebrated lieutenant of police, Voyer-d’Argenson, expressly recommended toleration. “The Inquisition, which is sought to be established in Paris against the Protestants, whose conversion is very doubtful,” he said, in a memorial addressed to the council, “would be attended with great difficulties. It would force them to purchase certificates, either for money or by sacrilege. It would drive away from this city those who are born subjects of neutral princes, would alienate more and more the unfriendly Protestants, blast the peace of families, excite relations to become denouncers of each other, and cause perhaps an universal murmur in the capital of the kingdom.” The council took the hint, and declined to interfere with the Protestants.
In the provinces everything depended more or less upon the humour of the governors and intendants. Bâville renewed from time to time his sanguinary expeditions, although he had ceased to conceal from himself their impotency. “There are districts of twenty and thirty parishes,” he wrote, “where the curate is the most unhappy and the most useless of all the inhabitants, and where, whatever care may have been taken, not a single Catholic has been made, nor even one established from without.”
The Protestants bore the burdens of the state, as soldiers, sailors, and tax-payers, without enjoying any of the benefits which should have belonged to all, of common right. The gentlemen served in the army, where they were less scrupulous than elsewhere about acts of Catholicity. The men of the middle class applied themselves to agriculture and commerce; and they prospered, in spite of the oppression of the laws, through that spirit of individuality and activity which so eminently distinguishes Protestantism. The Marquis d’Aguesseau avowed this, when new measures of severity were proposed against them in 1713. “By an unfortunate fatality,” he said, “in nearly every kind of art, the most skilful workmen, as well as the richest merchants, belong to the pretended Reformed religion; it would therefore be very dangerous to exact that they should become Catholics.”
Things would probably have been allowed to continue under this semi-toleration, but that the Jesuit Letellier, who had succeeded in 1709 to Father La Chaise in the office of confessor to the king, would not permit it. “He was,” says the Duke de Saint-Simon, “a man of hard and obstinate temper, of incessant application, and of only one idea—the triumph of his order and the overthrow of every other school. His nature was cruel and ferocious; his personal appearance no less unpromising; he would have excited fear, if met with in a wood. His physiognomy was dark, gloomy, false, and terrible, and his eyes were fierce, evil, and extremely sinister: one was struck on seeing him.”[110]
Letellier extorted from the king, then verging on decrepitude and death, the declaration of the 8th March, 1715. The title alone of this law “makes one’s blood curdle,” to use the expression of the Baron du Breteuil to Louis XVI. It is as follows: “It shall be a law, that those who shall have declared that they will persist and die in the pretended Reformed religion, whether they have abjured or not, shall be reputed as having relapsed.” It therefore acted upon the monstrous fiction that there were no longer any Protestants in France, and that there could never be any more! All were held to be legally (Roman) Catholics, since the refusal of the sacraments exposed them to suffer the frightful penalties pronounced against those who relapsed! It is with reason that Lamontey says in his book upon the monarchical establishment of Louis XIV.: “The annals of the world do not offer another example of a code wholly based upon a lie.”[111]
The authors of this declaration relied upon the following reason: “The sojourn that those who were of the pretended Reformed religion, or who have been born of Calvinist parents, have made in our kingdom, since we have abolished all exercise of the said religion, is a sufficient proof that they have embraced the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, without which they would have been neither suffered nor tolerated.”—Neither suffered nor tolerated!—Had the law commanded the killing of all the recusants to the very last? No! Or had they been all banished from the kingdom? No! on the contrary, they had been prohibited from quitting it, and this interdiction had been renewed two years previously. Thus, on one side, they were prevented from quitting France, and on the other, it was concluded that they were (Roman) Catholics because they remained in it!
The Parliament of Paris, so complaisant up to this time where laws of intolerance were concerned, delayed the registration of the declaration of 1715 for a month. “The king,” said the procurator-general, “has indeed abolished the exercise of the pretended Reformed religion by his edicts, but he has not precisely ordained that the religionists should abjure, and embrace the Catholic religion. It is difficult to understand how a man who does not appear to have been ever converted, should nevertheless have fallen back into heresy, and that he should be condemned as if the fact were proved.”
Louis XIV. died five months afterwards, declaring to the Cardinals de Rohan and de Bissy, and to Father Letellier, that he was wholly ignorant of the affairs of the Church, that he had acted according to their desire, and that he threw upon them the responsibility before God. At this last hour, when pride is silent, and all illusions fall away, did he not find himself confronted face to face with grievous errors and deep remorse?
Under the regency of Philippe d’Orléans, who hated the Jesuits and drove Letellier from the court, the Reformed again entertained some hope. This hope was increased, too, when the regent allied himself with the Protestant powers against Spain. Far from being blinded by bigotry, this prince was even wanting in any religious conviction at all. His indifference, in the absence of a superior and more praiseworthy principle, would probably dispose him to lend a favourable ear to the complaints of the Reformed.
He did, in fact, debate whether he should retrace the step of the Edict of Revocation. But besides that his libertine life hindered him from long engaging upon important affairs, two things turned him from his project. One was the fear of raising the great majority of the clergy against him, the other was the recollection of the old wars of religion. The Duke de Saint-Simon represented to him the renewal of these wars as imminent, if he abolished the ordinances of Louis XIV. This was at once a gross anachronism and contradiction; for the Reformed would have been so much the more peaceable, as they would have been better guaranteed in the free exercise of their religion; however, the Duke d’Orléans, who understood and cared nothing about these matters, thought it expedient to leave the ecclesiastical laws as they were.
The idea was also conceived of founding a colony of refugees, who by obtaining freedom of worship, might enrich the state by their industry. The council of the interior inclined to this; but the council of conscience refused, and the regent spoke no more about it. It would in reality have been too evidently illogical to have permitted the exercise of the Protestant religion in one part of the kingdom, while continuing to exclude it in every other.
The Duke d’Orléans replied to the numerous petitions of the religionists, that he hoped to find in their good conduct the opportunity of showing them a treatment conformable to his prudence. Several convicts, on account of religion, were liberated; departure from the kingdom became unrestricted, and the intendants of Dauphiny, Guienne, and Languedoc, who would have continued the system of the dragonnades, received commands to be more moderate. Although this was not toleration, yet persecution began to flag.