Passing from the nation to the government, we see facts of the same nature accomplished, an advancement to the same result. The French government was never more powerless, or more stripped of unity and connecting ties, than under the reign of Charles VI., and in the first part of that of Charles VII. At the end of that reign, things assumed a very different aspect. There was then evidently a consolidated, extended, and organised power; whilst all the great instruments of government—taxation, military force, and the administration of justice—were arranged upon a great scale, and with an appearance of forming parts of one whole. It was at this time that a standing soldiery was formed, composed of regular companies of cavalry, and archers as infantry. With these forces Charles VII. re-established some order in the provinces desolated by the debaucheries and rapine of the troops, even after the war had ceased. All contemporary historians expatiate upon the wonderful effects of the regular companies. It was at the same epoch that the poll-tax, one of the principal sources of the royal revenue, became perpetual; certainly a heavy blow aimed at the liberty of the people, but which powerfully contributed to the regularity and force of government. At the same time that great instrument of power, the administration of justice, was extended and organised. The number of parliaments was increased. Five new parliaments [Footnote 15] were instituted in a very short space of time; under Louis XI. the parliaments of Grenoble (in 1451), of Bordeaux (in 1462), and of Dijon (in 1477); under Louis XII. the parliaments of Rouen (in 1499), and of Aix (in 1501). The parliament of Paris then also assumed much more importance and stability, both with regard to the administration of justice, and as charged with the police of its jurisdiction.
[Footnote 15: From the very different meaning implied by the word parliament in Britain, it will be proper to remind the English reader that the parliaments of France were mere local tribunals, invested with scarcely any political or legislative character.]
Therefore under the heads of military force, taxation, and judicature—that is to say, in what forms its essence—the government acquired in France, during the fifteenth century, a character of unity, regularity, and stability which was previously unknown. The public power then definitively supplanted the feudal or local powers.
Identical with this fact was the accomplishment of another change, one less visible and less noticed by historians, but perhaps of still greater importance; namely, that which Louis XI. effected in the manner of governing.
Much has been said of the contest waged by Louis XI. against the nobles of the realm, of their reduction, and of his favour for the burghers and weaker individuals. There is some truth in all that, though much exaggeration has been made use of in describing it; and it is also true that the conduct of Louis XI., with the different classes of society, far oftener disturbed than served the state. But he did something much more important. Before his time, the government had scarcely ever proceeded except by force, by physical means. Persuasion, address, the art of managing men, and enticing them into the purposed vein—in a word, policy, properly so called, the policy of falsehood and of deceit doubtless, but also of skill and prudence, had previously been little used. Louis XI. substituted in his government intellectual for material means, trickery for force, the Italian system of policy for the feudal. Take the two men whoso rivalship fills that epoch of French history, Charles the Bold, [Footnote 16] and Louis XI.
[Footnote 16: Charles the Bold was the last Duke of Burgundy. The general reader cannot do better than take a glance at Sir Walter Scott's 'Quentin Durward' for an admirable picture of these two men.]
Charles was the representative of the ancient mode of governing; he proceeded by violence alone, and his appeal was incessantly to war. He was a person incapable of calm or patient reflection, or of addressing himself to the minds of men to mould them into instruments of success. It was, on the contrary, the delight of Louis XI. to avoid the employment of force, and to win men individually, by personal persuasion, or by apt appeals to their interests and understandings. He changed not the institutions or the outward system, but the hidden courses, the tactics of power. It was reserved for modern times to attempt a yet greater revolution, by tending to the substitution of justice in lieu of grasping selfishness, of candid and open dealing for falsehood and secrecy, as well as in the means adopted to gain political ends as in the ends themselves. Yet it was a great step to make, to cease the continual employment of force, to appeal to an intellectual superiority, to govern through the understandings of men, and not by inflicting injuries upon all existences. This Louis XI. commenced, in the midst of his crimes and errors, and in spite of his own perverse nature, at the instigation of his strong intellect alone.
From France I pass into Spain, where I find events of the same nature. It was likewise in the fifteenth century that the national unity of Spain was formed; and in that era was finished, by the conquest of the kingdom of Grenada, the long strife between the Christians and the Arabs. Then also the territory was consolidated: by the marriage of Ferdinand the Catholic with Isabella, the two principal kingdoms, Castile and Arragon, were united under the same power. As in France, the royal power was extended and strengthened; institutions of a harsher order, and bearing names more pregnant with wo, served as its props; instead of parliaments, it was the Inquisition which was established in Spain. It contained the seeds of what it afterwards became: but at the commencement it was very different: it was at first more political than religious, intended rather for the maintenance of order than for the defence of the faith. The analogy between the two countries is carried beyond the institutions to the very persons of the sovereigns. With less subtlety, with less of the mental movement, and with a smaller portion of restlessness and trickery, the character and government of Ferdinand the Catholic greatly resembled those of Louis XI. I attach little importance to arbitrary comparisons, to fantastic parallels, but here the analogy is really profound, and imprinted on general facts as well as on details.