It is proper to render to Cæsar what belongs to Cæsar. The effacement of the French aristocracy is not to be laid at the door of the great Revolution, which acted only upon an accomplished fact; it was the personal work of Louis XIV.
The higher classes also, contrary to the generally received opinion, suffered from a serious moral abasement. This fact is the more striking, as at no other period has France possessed so many elements for giving to life decorum and dignity. Through a deplorable misfortune, social groups which ought, through their solid principles, to have served as the support of public morality had incurred, one after the other, the serious displeasure of royalty. Among the Catholics, the disciples of Bérulle and of Vincent de Paul had compromised themselves in the affair of the Compagnie du Saint Sacrement. No government worthy of the name can suffer itself to be led by a secret society, whatever the purpose or character of such society may be. The Jansenists had shared with the reformers in the discontent that the least expression of a desire for independence, no matter in what domain, inspired in Louis XIV.
His distrust even reached the interior life of his subjects. Every one, under penalty of being considered a rebel, must feel and think like the King. This was with Louis a fixed idea, and during his reign gave a peculiar character to the religious persecutions. Jansenists and Protestants were pursued much oftener as enemies of the King than as enemies of God.
The hostility of the Prince to the three principal seats of the French conscience, and the destruction of two of these, left the field clear for the licentiousness which marked the end of the reign. Excessive dissipation is always supposed to belong particularly to the time of the Regency, but the abscess had existed for a long time before the death of Louis XIV. caused it to break. A letter as early as 1680 states, "Our fathers were not more chaste than we are; but ... now the vices are decorated and refined."[318] The evil had made rapid progress under the mantle of hypocrisy, which covered the Court of France from the time of the rule of Mme. de Maintenon. This last well perceived the danger and groaned over it to no purpose. Strangers were struck with the conditions. "All is more concentrated," wrote one of them in 1690, "more reserved, more restrained, than the peculiar genius of the nation can bear."[319]
The real misfortune was that Louis, who had been brought up and matured in an entirely formal religion, had permitted himself to be imposed upon by scoffers, who came disguised as believers, in order to make their court. The King, who had permitted the representation of Tartuffe, had not sufficiently meditated upon its import.
A final misdeed, and not the least for which the absolute régime is responsible, was the launching of the nation in pursuit of one of the most dangerous of political chimeras, that of the need of spiritual unity. Louis XIV. revoked the Edict of Nantes in the name of the fetich that a good Frenchman must be of his King's faith. A century later, the Terror cut off heads in the name of a unity of opinion, because a Frenchman ought to be virtuous in the fashion of Rousseau and of Robespierre. The reader may continue for himself the series, and count the acts of oppression committed in the nineteenth century, while even the twentieth century, young as it still is, presents examples of the attempt to enforce upon the nation a uniformity of thought which, if once attained, would signify intellectual death. For in politics, as in religion, as in art, in literature, in all, diversity is life.
It is through this capital error that the reign of Louis XIV., so glorious in many respects, was the precursor of the great Revolution and really made its coming inevitable. The Jacobins are in some measure the heirs of the great King. Fundamentally, the mania for spiritual and moral unity is simply, under a less odious name, the horror of liberty; a sentiment old as the world, but which in the earlier portion of the seventeenth century had been far from dominant. The word "liberty" occurs again and again in the writings of many people of that period, theorists, jurists, and great nobles, at every point in which they touch politics. The expression contained for them nothing revolutionary. What they were demanding was rather a return to past methods, and, above all, it did not enter their thoughts to associate with liberty the word "equality." It is the eighteenth century, more philosophical, if perhaps less reasonable, that first conceived the idea of uniting two really incompatible things, without perceiving that one of the two was destined to annihilate the other.
If absolute royalty had remained at Paris, it would have clearly realised the point at which the nation no longer was in sympathy with its rule. At Versailles it saw nothing; it shut itself up in its own tomb. The divorce was consummated between the Court and the Capital, one contenting itself with being figurative and ornamental, the other actively controlling opinions, since royalty had renounced the office of directing the public mind and thoughts.
It will be recollected that the rôle of universal arbitrator was played by the "young Court," the youthful King at its head, at the time in which there was daily contact with Paris, and when the Court was always in the advance in ideas as in fashions. The residence at Versailles ended the possibility of these times ever returning; there was no longer any bond between the King of France and the merchant of the rue St. Denis. In consequence, Paris employed itself in the eighteenth century in the evolution of minds. The Court had decided upon the success of the plays of Molière, the Parisian parquet criticised those of Beaumarchais.
If it be considered that the interior politics of Louis XIV. were constantly dominated by a horror of the Fronde, it will be recognised that this abortive revolution brought in its train consequences almost as grave as if it had been successful. This is the reason it has seemed permissible to make the history of the ideas and sentiments existing during the wars of the Fronde and the succeeding forty years circle around the incidents in the life of the Grande Mademoiselle. She was a truly representative figure of this generation, and on this account will always merit the attention of historians, and by a double claim, through the interest in her proud conception of life, and through the importance of the evil for which she was partly responsible and by the results of which she was herself overwhelmed. No one possessed in a higher degree than this Princess the great qualities belonging to her epoch, and no one preserved them so intact without thought of the danger after the retaining of such opinions had become a cause of disgrace.