It is the misfortune of men, even of the greatest, to fall short of their destiny. Louis XIV. had wanted to exceed his, and to bear a burden too heavy for human shoulders. Arbiter, for a while, of the affairs of all Europe, ever absolute master in his own dominions, he bent at last beneath the load that was borne without flinching by princes less powerful, less fortunate, less adored, but sustained by the strong institutions of free countries. William III. had not to serve him a Conde, a Turenne, a Colbert, a Louvois; he had governed from afar his own country, and he had always remained a foreigner in the kingdom which had called him to the throne; but, despite the dislikes, the bitternesses, the fierce contests of parties, he had strengthened the foundations of parliamentary government in England, and maintained freedom in Holland, whilst the ancient monarchy of France, which reached under Louis XIV. the pinnacle of glory and power, was slowly but surely going down to perdition beneath the internal and secret malady of absolute power, without limit and without restraint.
CHAPTER XLVII.
LOUIS XIV. AND RELIGION.
Independently of simple submission to the Catholic church, there were three great tendencies which divided serious minds amongst them during the reign of Louis XIV.; three noble passions held possession of pious souls; liberty, faith, and love were, respectively, the groundwork as well as the banner of Protestantism, Jansenism, and Quietism. It was in the name of the fundamental and innate liberty of the soul, its personal responsibility and its direct relations with God, that the Reformation had sprung up and reached growth in France, even more than in Germany and in England. M. de St. Cyran, the head and founder of Jansenism, abandoned the human soul unreservedly to the supreme will of God; his faith soared triumphant over flesh and blood, and his disciples, disdaining the joys and the ties of earth, lived only for eternity. Madame Guyon and Fenelon, less ardent and less austere, discovered in the tender mysticism of pure love that secret of God’s which is sought by all pious souls; in the name of divine love, the Quietists renounced all will of their own, just as the Jansenists in the name of faith.
Jansenism is dead after having for a long while brooded in the depths of the most noble souls; Quietism, as a sect, did not survive its illustrious founders; faith and love have withstood the excess of zeal and the erroneous tendencies which had separated them from the aggregate of Christian virtues and doctrines; they have come back again into the pious treasury of the universal church. Neither time nor persecutions have been able to destroy in France the strong and independent groundwork of Protestantism. Faithful to its fundamental principle, it has triumphed over exile, the scaffold, and indifference, without other head than God himself and God alone.
Richelieu had slain the political hydra of Huguenots in France; from that time the Reformers had lived in modest retirement. “I have no complaint to make of the little flock,” Mazarin would say; “if they eat bad grass, at any rate they do not stray.” During the troubles of the Fronde, the Protestants had resumed, in the popular vocabulary, their old nickname of Tant s’en fault (Far from it), which had been given them at the time of the League. “Faithful to the king in those hard times when most Frenchmen were wavering and continually looking to see which way the wind would blow, the Huguenots had been called Tant s’en fault, as being removed from and beyond all suspicion of the League or of conspiracy against the state. And so were they rightly designated, inasmuch as to the cry, ‘Qui vive?’ (Whom are you for?) instead of answering ‘Vive Guise!’ or ‘Vive la Ligue!’ they would answer, ‘Tant s’en fault, vive le Roi!’ So that, when one Leaguer would ask another, pointing to a Huguenot, ‘Is that one of ours?’ ‘Tant s’en fault,’ would be the reply, ‘it is one of the new religion.’” Conde had represented to Cromwell all the Reformers of France as ready to rise up in his favor; the agent sent by the Protector assured him it was quite the contrary; and the bearing of the Protestants decided Cromwell to refuse all assistance to the princes. La Rochelle packed off its governor, who was favorable to the Fronde; St. Jean d’Angely equipped soldiers for the king; Montauban, to resist the Frondeurs, repaired the fortifications thrown down by Richelieu. “The crown was tottering upon the king’s head,” said Count d’ Harcourt to the pastors of Guienne, “but you have made it secure.” The royal declaration of 1652, confirming and ratifying the edict of Nantes, was a recompense for the services and fidelity of the Huguenots. They did not enjoy it long; an edict of 1656 annulled, at the same time explaining, the favorable declaration of 1652; in 1660 the last national synod was held at Loudun. “His Majesty has resolved,” said M. de la Magdelaine, deputed from the king to the synod, “that there shall be no more such assemblies but when he considers it expedient.” Fifteen years had rolled by since the synod of Charenton in 1645. “We are only too firmly persuaded of the usefulness of our synods, and how entirely necessary they are for our churches, after having been so long with out them,” sorrowfully exclaimed the moderator, Peter Daille.
For two hundred and twelve years the Reformed church of France was deprived of its synods. God at last restored to it this corner-stone of its interior constitution.
The suppression of the edict-chambers instituted by Henry IV. in all the Parliaments for the purpose of taking cognizance of the affairs of the Reformers followed close upon the abolition of national synods. Peter du Bosq, pastor of the church of Caen, an accomplished gentleman and celebrated preacher, was commissioned to set before the king the representations of the Protestants. Louis XIV. listened to him kindly. “That is the finest speaker in my kingdom,” he said to his courtiers after the minister’s address. The edict-chambers were, nevertheless, suppressed in 1669; the half and half (mi partie) chambers, composed of Reformed and Catholic councillors, underwent the same fate in 1679, and the Protestants found themselves delivered over to the intolerance and religious prejudices of the Parliaments, which were almost everywhere harsher, as regarded them, than the governors and superintendents of provinces.
“It seemed to me, my son,” wrote Louis XIV. in his Memoires of the year 1661, “that those who were for employing violent remedies against the religion styled Reformed, did not understand the nature of this malady, caused partly by heated feelings, which should be passed over unnoticed and allowed to die out insensibly, instead of being inflamed afresh by equally strong contradiction, which, moreover, is always useless, when the taint is not confined to a certain known number, but spread throughout the state. I thought, therefore, that the best way of reducing the Huguenots of my kingdom little by little, was, in the first place, not to put any pressure upon them by any fresh rigor against them, to see to the observance of all that they had obtained from my predecessors, but to grant them nothing further, and even to confine the performance thereof within the narrowest limits that justice and propriety would permit. But as to graces that depended upon me alone, I have resolved, and I have pretty regularly kept my resolution ever since, not to do them any, and that from kindness, not from bitterness, in order to force them in that way to reflect from time to time of themselves, and without violence, whether it were for any good reason that they deprived themselves voluntarily of advantages which might be shared by them in common with all my other subjects.”
These prudent measures, “quite in kindness and not in bitterness,” were not enough to satisfy the fresh zeal with which the king had been inspired. All-powerful in his own kingdom, and triumphant everywhere in Europe, he was quite shocked at the silent obstinacy of those Huguenots who held his favor and graces cheap in comparison with a quiet conscience; his kingly pride and his ignorant piety both equally urged him on to that enterprise which was demanded by the zeal of a portion of the clergy. The system of purchasing conversions had been commenced; and Pellisson, himself originally a Protestant, had charge of the payments, a source of fraud and hypocrisies of every sort. A declaration of 1679 condemned the relapsed to honorable amends (public recantation, &c.), to confiscation and to banishment. The door’s of all employments were closed against Huguenots; they could no longer sit in the courts or Parliaments, or administer the finances, or become medical practitioners, barristers, or notaries; infants of seven years of age were empowered to change their religion against their parents’ will; a word, a gesture, a look, were sufficient to certify that a child intended to abjure; its parents, however, were bound to bring it up according to its condition, which often facilitated confiscation of property. Pastors were forbidden to enter the houses of their flocks, save to perform some act of their ministry; every chapel into which a new convert had been admitted was to be pulled down, and the pastor was to be banished. It was found necessary to set a guard at the doors of the places of worship to drive away the poor wretches who repented of a moment’s weakness; the number of “places of exercise,” as the phrase then was, received a gradual reduction; “a single minister had the charge of six, eight, and ten thousand persons,” says Elias Benoit, author of the Histoire de l’Edit de Nantes, “making it impossible for him to visit and assist the families, scattered sometimes over a distance of thirty leagues round his own residence.” The wish was to reduce the ministers to give up altogether from despair of discharging their functions. The chancellor had expressly said, “If you are reduced to the impossible, so much the worse for you; we shall gain by it.” Oppression was not sufficient to break down the Reformers. There was great difficulty in checking emigration, by this time increasing in numbers. Louvois proposed stronger measures. The population was crushed under the burden of military billets. Louvois wrote to Marillac, superintendent of Poitou, “His Majesty has learned with much joy the number of people who continue to become converts in your department. He desires you to go on paying attention thereto; he will think it a good idea to have most of the cavalry and officers quartered upon Protestants; if, according to the regular proportion, the religionists should receive ten, you can make them take twenty.” The dragoons took up their quarters in peaceable families, ruining the more well-to-do, maltreating old men, women, and children, striking them with their sticks or the flat of their swords, hauling off Protestants in the churches by the hair of their heads, harnessing laborers to their own ploughs, and goading them like oxen. Conversions became numerous in Poitou. Those who could fly left France, at the risk of being hanged if the attempt happened to fail. “Pray lay out advantageously the money you are going to have,” wrote Madame de Maintenon to her brother, M. d’Aubigne. “Land in Poitou is to be had for nothing, and the desolation amongst the Protestants will cause more sales still. You may easily settle in grand style in that province.” “We are treated like enemies of the Christian denomination,” wrote, in 1662, a minister named Jurieu, already a refugee in Holland. “We are forbidden to go near the children that come into the world, we are banished from the bars and the faculties, we are forbidden the use of all the means which might save us from hunger, we are abandoned to the hatred of the mob, we are deprived of that precious liberty which we purchased with so many services, we are robbed of our children, who are a part of ourselves. . . . Are we Turks? Are we infidels? We believe in Jesus Christ, we do; we believe Him to be the Eternal Son of God, the Redeemer of the world; the maxims of our morality are of so great purity that none dare gainsay them; we respect the king; we are good subjects, good citizens; we are Frenchmen as much as we are Reformed Christians.” Jurieu had a right to speak of the respect for the king which animated the French Reformers. There was no trace left of that political leaven which formerly animated the old Huguenots, and made Duke Henry de Rohan say, “You are all republicans; I would rather have to do with a pack of wolves than an assembly of parsons.” “The king is hood winked,” the Protestants declared; and all their efforts were to get at him and tell his Majesty of their sufferings. The army remained open to them, though without hope of promotion; and the gentlemen showed alacrity in serving the king. “What a position is ours!” they would say; “if we make any resistance, we are treated as rebels; if we are obedient, they pretend we are converted, and they hoodwink the king by means of our very submission.”