It was in 1598 that Henry IV. issued the Edict of Nantes, which secured to the long and bitterly persecuted Huguenots the rights they demanded. It marked a new era in history. It was the first formal recognition of toleration in religion made by any leading power of Europe, and anticipated a similar act in England by nearly a century.
The king saw what all have since come to see, that freedom of conscience is one of the surest guarantees of national strength.
Henry IV. of France was essentially the people’s king. He was popular with the masses to the same extent that Louis XV. was unpopular. To the Common People in France, Henry IV. represented as much democracy in that age of tyranny as Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland do in a better age and country. Henry was murdered on the streets of Paris by the fanatic Ravaillac, whose dagger inflicted an almost mortal wound upon France herself.
With the aid of Richelieu, the absolute power of the crown was built up; then followed the despotisms of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.; the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; the disastrous failure of the Mississippi Scheme; the struggle between England and France for mastery in the New World, and the complete triumph of the former, and the preparation for the awful revolution of 1789.
France had materially and powerfully assisted the American colonies in their struggle with Great Britain for independence. Many illustrious sons of France, like Lafayette and Rochambeau, had joined and fought side by side with those sons of liberty who were then creating the great republic of America. America was a storehouse of freedom, liberty, and concentrated hate of “caste” and class distinction, from whence Frenchmen like Lafayette carried to France the spirit of freedom. It may fairly be said that the struggle on this continent lighted the torch of liberty which has illuminated the world since, torn Spain’s oppressed colonies in America from her grasp, and made possible the existence of the French Republic, which has now taken its place among the most powerful nations of the earth.
The dormant desire had long been present in the breasts of the poor of the French nation for equality and liberty. The quickening influences and light radiating from the new Republic of the West, among whose children the sons of France had served in the struggle for independence, soon ignited the fires in the heart of the impetuous Frenchman.
Louis XVI. had been more condescending than any of his predecessors; he occupied, possibly, a higher position in the hearts of the people than any king the French had had since Henry IV. But the time had come when, inspired by the example of the Americans, the crime of “caste” in France had become unendurable. Louis XVI. was, of all the Bourbon kings, probably the least objectionable.
His character, while weak and influenced by the stronger will of Marie Antoinette, did not represent the worst phases of the character of Louis XV. or Louis XIV. Gradually, but irresistibly by attrition, the will of the people had been making marks upon the royalty of France. The tyranny, insolence, and arrogance of Louis XIV., in whose presence one dared not speak, had been lessened in Louis XV. to the extent that one could speak in a whisper; but in the presence of Louis XVI. one might speak aloud. With tireless, resistless, sullen determination the billows of the sea of humanity, wherein all is equality and fraternity, had beaten upon this rock of adamant until these divine Bourbon kings had become impressed by its constant, ceaseless energy.
Weak, amiable, and pliable as Louis XVI. was, poor Jacques had been so long deprived of one heart-beat of feeling that his bosom could no longer restrain the emotions of liberty and equality. The nobles of France, more than Louis XVI., retained the impress of the reign of Louis XIV., “the Glorious” (?), who had proclaimed that he was a Sun; and while the ruling monarch, as the bulwark of royalty, “caste,” and social inequality, had received the first shock of the wave and been marked thereby; still the nobility, sheltered behind the bulwark of the personality of the king, continued to indulge the wild license of their privileges and “caste” distinction, gamboling like lambs upon the greensward of their delusion, becoming fattened for the knife of that butcher that was sure to follow, the guillotine. A more powerful, touching, and realistic picture was never drawn of the arrogance and presumption of the nobles, privileged classes, “higher caste,” than that made by the people’s author, the man who of all others has nearer touched the hearts of the Common People, who will be loved and revered when others more learned may be forgotten, because he wrote of scenes of sensation, emotion, and relations of the Common People—Charles Dickens—in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and for our purpose it would be impossible to find words more fitting than those used by this master delineator of the feelings, thoughts, heart-throbs, and wrongs of the Common People:
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out. A tall man in a night-cap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of the horses and had laid it on the base of the fountain, and was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise—is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis, it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed, for the street opened where it was, into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man in wild desperation, extending both arms at their lengths above his head and staring at him. “Dead!”
The people closed round and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing of anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all as though they had been mere rats come out of their holes. He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is forever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done to my horses. See! give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down as it fell. The tall man called out again, with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were silent, however, as the men.
“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my Gaspard. It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”
“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling.
“How do they call you?”
“They call me Defarge.”
“Of what trade?”
“Monsieur the Marquis, the vender of wine.”
“Pick up that, philosopher and vender of wine,” said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they all right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it and could afford to pay for it, when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into the carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! who threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge, the vender of wine, had stood a moment before; but the wretched father was groveling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark, stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose; “I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men not one. But the woman who was knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word, “Go on!”