The people had no teachers, and their manners were as neglected as their spiritual education. With rare exceptions, the provincial priest went to the wine-shops with his parishioners; if he saw fit, he went without taking off his surplice,—nor was that the worst; in every respect, and everywhere, and always, he set lamentable examples for his people. "One may say with truth and with horror," cried the austere Bourdoise, the friend of Père Bérulle, "that of all the evil done in the world, the part done by the ecclesiastics is the worst." Père Amelotte expressed his opinion with still more energy: "The name of priest," he cried, "has become the synonym of ignorance and debauchery!"
After the religious wars there were neither churches nor presbyteries, and therefore there were thousands of villages where there were no priests, but it is to be doubted whether such villages were more pitiable than those in which by their daily conduct the priests constantly provoked the people to despise the earthly representative of God. The abandoned villages were not plunged in thicker moral and religious darkness, or in grosser or more abominable superstition, than that into which the ignoble pastors led their flocks. In one half of the total number of the provinces of France, the work that the first missionaries to the Gauls had accomplished had all to be begun again.
In the world of the aristocracy the condition of Catholicism was little better. When Vincent de Paul—by a mischance which was not to be the only one in his career—was appointed Almoner to Queen Marguerite, first wife of Henry IV., he was overwhelmed by what he saw and heard. The Court was two thirds pagan.[98] A loose and reckless line of thought, a moral libertinage, was considered a mark of elegance, and that opinion obtained until the seventeenth century. The jeunesse dorée, the "gilded youths" of the day, imitated the atheists and gloried in manifesting their contempt for the "superstitions of religion." They repeated after Vanini that "man ought to obey the natural law," that "vice and virtue should be classed as products of climate, of temperament, and of alimentation," that "children born with feeble intellects are best fitted to develop into good Christians." Among the higher classes, piety was not entirely extinct; that was proven in the days of the triumphant Renaissance, when the Catholicism of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue flamed with all the strength of a newly kindled fire from the dying embers of the old religion. But the belief in God and in the things of God was not to be avowed among people of intellect. In a certain elegant, frivolous, and corrupt world, impiety and wit marched hand in hand. A man was not absolutely perfect in tone and manners unless he seasoned his conversation with a grain of atheism.[99] Under Louis XIII. in the immediate neighbourhood of royalty the tone changed, because the King's bigotry kept close watch over the appearance of religion. Men knew that they could not air their smart affectation of skepticism with impunity when their chief not only openly professed and practised religion, but frowned upon those who did not. All felt that the only way to be popular at Court was to follow the example of the King, and all slipped their atheism up their sleeves and bowed the knee with grace and dexterity, pulling on long faces and praying as visibly as Louis himself. But many years passed before the practice of religion expressed the feelings of the heart. Richelieu[100] had several intimate friends who were openly confessed infidels, and proud of their infidelity. While they were intellectual and witty and devoted to the Cardinal's interests, they were permitted to think as they pleased.
Long after the day of Richelieu,—in the reign of Louis XIV.,—the great Condé and Princess Anne de Gonzague made vows to the "marvellous victories of grace,"[101] but while they were "waiting for the miracle," the more miscreant of the Court amused themselves by throwing a piece of the wood of the true cross into the fire "to see whether it would burn."
The current of moral libertinage, though it appeared sluggish after the Fronde, had not run dry, and it was seen in the last third of the seventeenth century and in the following century shallow, but flowing freely.[102]
Whatever the general condition, the city was always better fortified against spiritual libertinage than the Court, because it contained stronger elements, and because it lacked the frivolity of the social bodies devoted to pleasure. In the city mingled with the higher bourgeoisie and the middle bourgeoisie were nobles of excellent stock who did not visit the Louvre or the Palais Royal because, as they had no title or position at Court, they could not claim the rank to which their quality gave them right; to cite an instance: Mme. de Sévigné was not of the Court; she was always of the city.
Taken altogether, the Parliamentary world, which had one foot at Court and the other foot in the city, had preserved a great deal of religion and morality. Olivier d'Ormesson's journal shows us the homes of the serious and intellectual people of the great metropolitan centres to whom piety and gravity had descended from their fathers.
The Parliamentary world of the provinces was notable for its moral attitude and for its love of religion. Taken all in all the French bourgeoisie had not felt the inroads of free thought, although there had been a few cases of visible infiltration. In the country districts the people practised religion more or less fervently.
Despite the few exceptions serving as luminous points in the universal darkness, in the reign of Louis XIII. the situation was well fitted to inspire creatures of ardent faith and exalted mysticism with horror. There were many such people in Paris then, as there have been always. Discouraged, hopeless of finding anything better in a world abandoned to blasphemy and vice, the naturally pious fled to the cloisters and too often they found within the walls of their refuges the same scandals that had driven them from their homes. The larger number of the monasteries were given over to depravity[103] and the monks were like the people of the world. As we have seen, a few prelates of rare faith and devotion furnished the exceptions to the rule, but set, as they were, wide distances apart in the swarming mass of vociferous immorality, they excited a pity which swallowed up all appreciation of their importance.
Divers questions which were not connected either with belief as a whole or with the principle of belief combined to make the Protestant minority by far more moral than the Catholic majority. Perhaps the social disadvantage attached to Protestantism was the strongest reason for its superiority. When a practically powerless minority is surrounded and kept under surveillance by a powerful majority, unless pride and vanity have blinded its prudence the minority keeps careful watch of its actions. By a natural process minorities of agitators cast cowardly and selfish members out of their ranks; in other words, they weed out the useless, the feeble, the derogatory elements, and the elements which, being dependent upon the favour of the public, or susceptible to public criticism, flinch if subjected to unfavourable judgment. The Protestant minority eliminated all who, fearing the ridicule or the animosity of the Court, shrank from standing shoulder to shoulder with the men in the fighting ranks of Protestantism. Impelled by personal interest, the converts to the reform movement went back to the Catholic majority. There were so many advantages attendant upon the profession of Catholicism that with few exceptions the great lords declared their faith in the religion powerful to endow them with military commands and with governmental and other lucrative positions. The Protestant ranks were thinned, but the few who stood their ground were the picked men of the reform movement. The ranks of the Catholics were swelled by the hypocrites and the turncoats who had deserted from the army of the Protestants. The Protestants gained morally by the defection of their converts, and the Catholics lost; the few who sustained Protestantism were sincere; the fact of their profession proved it.