CHAPTER XII
The Revolution—S. Père
THE events recorded in the last chapter, culminating in the coronation of Henri Quatre in the Cathedral of the town which, as the Huguenot King, he had besieged three years before, are the last in which Chartres played a part of real importance in the history of France. She suffered, indeed, during the troubles of the Fronde, both from the massing of troops that occurred continually about her borders, and from many serious attacks of plague and famine, for which they were doubtless, to a large extent, responsible. But the trials which she had undergone had damped her military ardour. Bitter experiences in the past had exhausted the vehemence of her enthusiasm. Henceforth she lays aside her militant character and devotes herself to the peaceful pursuit of a quiet municipal life. The part she takes in politics is distinguished by ecclesiastical sobriety and commercial prudence.
An excellent college, founded by a good merchant, Pocquet by name, sprang into prominence in the life of the town, whilst the citadel, established by Henri Quatre at the Port S. Michel, is declared to be no longer needed. It is handed over, in 1600, to the citizens, and converted again into a church. And the Huguenots, so much has the spirit of the age changed, are provided with a church, so that each may worship in peace according to his own conscience.
The year 1623 saw two changes which affected the nominal position of Chartres and continue still to affect it. In the first place the diocese of Chartres became in that year the first suffragan of the newly-created Archbishopric of Paris, and, in the second place, the Duchy of Chartres, definitely and officially united with the crown, passed to Gaston, Duke of Orléans, and has ever since remained in the house of Orléans. The Duchy, it will be remembered, had been created by François I. in favour of Rénée, daughter of Louis XII. Louis XIII. now bought it back from the Duke of Nemours, and himself, Duke of Chartres, visited the town in October of the same year. (It was on a previous occasion that, as the historian Doyen narrates, he came to pay his devotions at the shrine of Notre-Dame, and thereafter was indulging in a game of tennis at the court in the market-place when he was informed that there was a certain woman there who played a strong game. He sent for her and played a set with her. But she beat him. Cette femme prit un caleçon et gagna le roi, en jouant par-dessous la jambe.) Three years later he presented his brother Gaston, on the occasion of his marriage and in exchange for the Duchy of Anjou, with the County of Blois and the Duchies of Orléans and Chartres. On the death of Gaston, the opponent of Mazarin, the Duchy of Chartres reverted to the Crown again, but Louis XIV., a few weeks afterwards, settled it, together with the Duchy of Orléans as an appanage, on his only brother, Philippe, on the occasion of the marriage of that prince with Henrietta of England. Since that time the title of Duke of Chartres has always been the appanage of the eldest son of the house of Orléans.
For the rest, Chartres passed more and more into the condition of a Ville de Province, where only the echoes of what is being said and done in Paris and France are to be heard.
The mystic heresy of the Illuminisme, propagated by the ‘alumbrados’ of Spain, appeared here in the first half of the seventeenth century, but was routed out before long. The method by which it was crushed is, however, significant. This heresy represented a revolt against the hierarchy of the Church. It rejected all dogmas and all ministers of religion. The chief exponent of it at Chartres was a hermit who took up his abode in the woods of Lèves, and soon secured a strong following among the unlettered classes. The heretics, in fact, began to make such progress in La Beauce and Picardie that Richelieu became alarmed. The Government gave orders that the sect was to be exterminated. The hermit of Chartres was therefore arrested and sent to Paris, where he recanted his errors.
He and his followers, in earlier days, would doubtless have been burnt at the stake without more ado. Now, such has been the growth of the central power, they were merely sent to Paris and converted. The punishment of heterodoxy had become generally much less severe. Very little hanging was now done for conscience’s sake. We only come across one instance of a monk being hung at this time, and that was for celebrating Mass without having been ordained priest.
Throughout the succeeding centuries, then, the political action of Chartres is reduced to that of an ordinary commercial municipality. It suffered none the less in common with the rest of France from all those causes which had issue in the Revolution. The crash of 1789 was precipitated by the coincidence of two events—the imminent bankruptcy of the Government and the great famine which, following on one of the worst winters on record, produced universal rioting throughout the country and ended in pure anarchy. For the Government, having no money and no credit, could not feed the people. The people might bring the King from Versailles and sack the Bastille but that did not make bread cheaper. The Constituent Assembly was as helpless as the King. The pressure in Paris was worse in October than during the siege by the Prussians. These famine riots continued in Paris and all over the country till good harvests came. Then the country would have settled down. But the Revolution had been begun, and, under the extreme party, with the aid of the Jacobin clubs, was destined to bring in its train the Reign of Terror. The Girondins wished for war and that the country should not settle down.
The Government had been more or less insolvent since 1715, but since 1783 the share taken by France in the War of American Independence had rendered total failure inevitable. The wealth of the country was not small and it was rapidly increasing. But the Government had for years put an immense strain upon their preposterous financial system, and the ridiculous machine had now completely broken down. Since 1783, one Superintendent of Finance after another had declared that the only possible way to avert bankruptcy was to introduce a sweeping change in the system of taxation. As soon as they came to that conclusion they were dismissed, for Louis XVI., who half knew that they were right, could not stand against his Court. But in the year 1788 the fact became too obvious. The Superintendent Necker declared that, unless some reform were undertaken, bankruptcy, in a few months, was inevitable. Now, the National Debt was held almost entirely by the official class in France, to whom, therefore, even the loss of their privileges, which consisted to a large extent in not paying taxes, seemed better than the bankruptcy of the country. Necker advised the King to summon the States-General and to carry out reforms in connection with it.
The demand for it to be summoned was already loud. It was the old Parliament of France, but it had not met since 1614. Then it had consisted of three separate houses, the Nobles, the Clergy, and the Third Estate, each acting independently of each other and enjoying the right of presenting petitions to the King. How the Third Estate asserted itself and, after the States-General had been converted into the Constituent Assembly, proceeded to fulfil its Tennis-Court Oath and to give a Constitution to France we need not repeat here. What from the point of view of the story of Chartres requires to be noticed is that the new Constitution, which was gradually drawn up between the years 1789-1791, represented to a great extent the ideas implied in the list of grievances, cahier des plaintes, submitted to the Chartrain representatives of the Third Estate. They had had a sufficiently bitter experience in past years of the heavy and unjust incidence of taxation, and the congestion and confusion of the judicial system, which, together with the existence of the official class, were the real grievances of the age. The administrative arrangements of the new Constitution embodied the theories of Rousseau, who advocated extreme democratic decentralisation. For this was a panacea which the followers of Diderot and the Encyclopædists, believing that the correction of bad laws and bad government would produce the millennium, that, in fact, you can change the character of the whole by changing the arrangement of the units, imagined would cure all the evils of Society. Almost all real power, therefore, was taken from the King and placed in the hands of municipal and village Councils, of what Carlyle called ‘forty thousand sovereign bodies.’ One need not emphasise the grim comment passed by history upon these theories.