Never had closer alliance been concluded between the two courts, even at the time when Louis XIV. placed his grandson upon the throne of Spain. It was that intimate union between all the branches of the house of Bourbon which had but lately been the great king’s conception, and which had cost him so many efforts and so much blood; for the first time it was becoming favorable to France; the noble and patriotic idea of M. de Choiseul found an echo in the soul of the King of Spain; the French navy, ruined and humiliated, the French colonies, threatened and all but lost, found faithful support in the forces of Spain, recruited as they were. by a long peace. The King of the Two Sicilies and the Infante Duke of Parma entered into the offensive and defensive alliance, but it was not open to any other power in Europe to be admitted to this family union, cemented by common interests more potent and more durable than the transitory combinations of policy. In all the ports of Spain ships were preparing to put to sea. Charles III. had undertaken to declare war against the English if peace were not concluded before the 1st of May, 1762. France promised in that case to cede to him the Island of Minorca.
All negotiations with England were broken off; on the 20th of September, Mr. Pitt recalled his ambassador; this was his last act of power and animosity; he at the same time proposed to the council of George III. to include Spain forthwith in the hostilities. Lord Bute opposed this; he was supported by the young king as well as by the majority of the ministers. Pitt at once sent in his resignation, which was accepted. Lord Bute and the Tories came into power. Though more moderate in their intentions, they were as yet urged forward by popular violence, and dared not suddenly alter the line of conduct. The family pact had raised the hopes—always an easy task—of France, the national impulse inclined towards the amelioration of the navy; the estates of Languedoc were the first in the field, offering the king a ship of war; their example was everywhere followed; sixteen ships, first-rates, were before long in course of construction, a donation from the great political or financial bodies; there were, besides, private subscriptions amounting to thirteen millions; the Duke of Choiseul sought out commanders even amongst the mercantile marine, and everywhere showed himself favorable to blue officers, as the appellation then was of those whose birth excluded them from the navy corps; the knowledge of the nobly born often left a great deal to be desired, whatever may have been their courage and devotion. This was a last generous effort on behalf of the shreds of France’s perishing colonies. The English government did not give it time to bear fruit; in the month of January, 1762, it declared war against Spain. Before the year had rolled by, Cuba was in the hands of the English, the Philippines were ravaged and the galleons laden with Spanish gold captured by British ships. The unhappy fate of France had involved her generous ally. The campaign attempted against Portugal, always hand in hand with England, had not been attended with any result. Martinique had shared the lot of Guadaloupe, lately conquered by the English after an heroic resistance. Canada and India had at last succumbed. War dragged its slow length along in Germany. The brief elevation of the young czar, Peter III., a passionate admirer of the great Frederick, had delivered the King of Prussia from a dangerous enemy, and promised to give him an ally equally trusty and potent. France was exhausted, Spain discontented and angry; negotiations recommenced, on what disastrous conditions for the French colonies in both hemispheres has already been remarked; in Germany the places and districts occupied by France were to be restored; Lord Bute, like his great rival, required the destruction of the port of Dunkerque.
This was not enough for the persistent animosity of Pitt. The preliminaries of peace had been already signed at Fontainebleau on the 3d of November, 1762: when they were communicated to Parliament, the fallen minister, still the nation’s idol and the real head of the people, had himself carried to the House of Commons. He was ill, suffering from a violent attack of gout; two of his friends led him with difficulty to his place, and supported him during his long speech; being exhausted, he sat down towards the end, contrary to all the usages of the House, without, however, having once faltered in his attacks upon a peace too easily made, of which it was due to him that England was able to dictate the conditions. “It is as a maritime power,” he exclaimed, “that France is chiefly if not exclusively formidable to us;” and the ardor of his spirit restored to his enfeebled voice the dread tones which Parliament and the nation had been wont to hear “what we gain in this respect is doubly precious from the loss that results to her. America, sir, was conquered in Germany. Now you are leaving to France a possibility of restoring her navy.”
The peace was signed, however, not without ill humor on the part of England, but with a secret feeling of relief; the burdens which weighed upon the country had been increasing every year. In 1762, Lord Bute had obtained from Parliament four hundred and fifty millions (eighteen million pounds) to keep up the war. “I wanted the peace to be a serious and a durable one,” said the English minister in reply to Pitt’s attacks; “if we had increased our demands, it would have been neither the one nor the other.”
M. de Choiseul submitted in despair to the consequences of the long-continued errors committed by the government of Louis XV. “Were I master,” said he, “we would be to the English what Spain was to the Moors; if this course were taken, England would be destroyed in thirty years from now.” The king was a better judge of his weakness and of the general exhaustion. “The peace we have just made is neither a good one nor a glorious one; nobody sees that better than I,” he said in his private correspondence; “but, under such unhappy circumstances, it could not be better, and I answer for it that if we had continued the war, we should have made, a still worse one next year.” All the patriotic courage and zeal of the Duke of Choiseul, all the tardy impulse springing from the nation’s anxieties, could not suffice even to palliate the consequences of so many years’ ignorance, feebleness, and incapacity in succession.
Prussia and Austria henceforth were left to confront one another, the only actors really interested in the original struggle, the last to quit the battle-field on to which they had dragged their allies. By an unexpected turn of luck, Frederick II. had for a moment seen Russia becoming his ally; a fresh blow came to wrest from him this powerful support. The Czarina Catherine II., Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst and wife of the Czar Peter III., being on bad terms with her husband and in dread of his wrath, had managed to take advantage of the young czar’s imprudence in order to excite a mutiny amongst the soldiers; he had been deposed, and died before long in prison. Catherine was proclaimed in his place. With her accession to the throne there commenced for Russia a new policy, equally bold and astute, having for its sole aim, unscrupulously and shamelessly pursued, the aggrandizement and consolidation of the imperial power; Russia became neutral in the strife between Prussia and Austria. The two sovereigns, left without allies and with their dominions drained of men and money, agreed to a mutual exchange of their conquests; the boundaries of their territories once more became as they had been before the Seven Years’ War. Frederick calculated at more than eight hundred thousand men the losses caused to the belligerents by this obstinate and resultless struggle, the fruit of wicked ambition or culpable weaknesses on the part of governments. Thanks to the indomitable energy and the equally zealous and unscrupulous ability of the man who had directed her counsels during the greater part of the war, England alone came triumphant out of the strife. She had won India forever; and, for some years at least, civilized America, almost in its entirety, obeyed her laws. She had won what France had lost, not by superiority of arms, or even of generals, but by the natural and proper force of a free people, ably and liberally governed.
The position of France abroad, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, was as painful as it was humiliating; her position at home was still more serious, and the deep-lying source of all the reverses which had come to overwhelm the French. Slowly lessened by the faults and misfortunes of King Louis XIV.‘s later years, the kingly authority, which had fallen, under Louis XV., into hands as feeble as they were corrupt, was ceasing to inspire the nation with the respect necessary for the working of personal power: public opinion was no longer content to accuse the favorite and the ministers; it was beginning to make the king responsible for the evils suffered and apprehended. People waited in vain for a decision of the crown to put a stop to the incessantly renewed struggles between the Parliament and the clergy. Disquieted at one and the same time by the philosophical tendencies which were beginning to spread in men’s minds, and by the comptroller-general Machault’s projects for exacting payment of the imposts upon ecclesiastical revenues, the Archbishop of Paris, Christopher de Beaumont, and the Bishop of Mirepoix, Boyer, who was in charge of the benefice-list, conceived the idea of stifling these dangerous symptoms by an imprudent recourse to the spiritual severities so much dreaded but lately by the people. Several times over, the last sacraments were denied to the dying who had declined to subscribe to the bull Unigenitus, a clumsy measure, which was sure to excite public feeling and revive the pretensions of the Parliaments to the surveillance, in the last resort, over the government of the church; Jansenism, fallen and persecuted, but still living in the depths of souls, numbered amongst the ranks of the magistracy, as well as in the University of Paris, many secret partisans; several parish-priests had writs of personal seizure issued against them, and their goods were confiscated. Decrees succeeded decrees; in spite of the king’s feeble opposition the struggle was extending and reaching to the whole of France. On the 22d of February, 1753, the Parliament of Paris received orders to suspend all the proceedings they had commenced on the ground of refusals of the sacraments; the king did not consent even to receive the representations. By the unanimous vote of the hundred and fifty-eight members sitting on the Court, Parliament determined to give up all service until the king should be pleased to listen. “We declare,” said the representation, “that our zeal is boundless, and that we feel sufficient courage to fall victims to our fidelity. The Court could not serve without being wanting to their duties and betraying their oaths.”
Indolent and indifferent as he was, King Louis XV. acted as seldom and as slowly as he could; he did not like strife, and gladly saw the belligerents exhausting against one another their strength and their wrath; on principle, however, and from youthful tradition, he had never felt any liking for the Parliaments. “The long robes and the clergy are always at daggers drawn,” he would say to Madame de Pompadour “they drive me distracted with their quarrels, but I detest the long robes by far the most. My clergy, at bottom, are attached to me and faithful to me; the others would like to put me in tutelage. . . . They will end by ruining the state; they are a pack of republicans. . . . However, things will last my time, at any rate.” Severe measures against the Parliament were decided upon in council. Four magistrates were arrested and sent to fortresses; all the presidents, councillors of inquests and of requests, were exiled; the grand chamber, which alone was spared, refused to administer justice. Being transferred to Pontoise, it persisted in its refusal. It was necessary to form a King’s Chamber, installed at the Louvre; all the inferior jurisdictions refused to accept its decrees. After a year’s strife, the Parliament returned in triumph to Paris in the month of August, 1754; the clergy received orders not to require from the dying any theological adhesion. Next year, the Archbishop of Paris, who had paid no attention to the prohibition, was exiled in his turn.
Thus, by mutually weakening each other, the great powers and the great influences in the state were wasting away; the reverses of the French arms, the loss of their colonies, and the humiliating peace of Paris aggravated the discontent. In default of good government the people are often satisfied with glory. This consolation, to which the French nation had but lately been accustomed, failed it all at once; mental irritation, for a long time silently brooding, cantoned in the writings of philosophers and in the quatrains of rhymesters, was beginning to spread and show itself amongst the nation; it sought throughout the state an object for its wrath; the powerful society of the Jesuits was the first to bear all the brunt of it.
A French Jesuit, Father Lavalette, had founded a commercial house at Martinique. Ruined by the war, he had become bankrupt to the extent of three millions; the order having refused to pay, it was condemned by the Parliament to do so. The responsibility was declared to extend to all the members of the Institute, and public opinion triumphed over the condemnation with a “quasi-indecent” joy, says the advocate Barbier. Nor was it content with this legitimate satisfaction. One of the courts which had until lately been most devoted to the Society of Jesus had just set an example of severity. In 1759, the Jesuits had been driven from Portugal by the Marquis of Pombal, King Joseph I.‘s all-powerful minister; their goods had been confiscated, and their principal, Malagrida, handed over to the Inquisition, had just been burned as a heretic (Sept. 20, 1761).