General History of Civilisation in Europe, From the Fall of the Roman Empire Till the French Revolution. A Treatise on Death Punishments.

by François Guizot

Thus the papacy ultimately prevailed, and remained in possession of the field of battle and of the government of the church. The councils had been unable to accomplish what they had undertaken, but the consequences of their acts survived their failure. At the time the Council of Basle miscarried in its essays at reform, certain sovereigns availed themselves of the ideas which it had promulgated, and of the institutions it had recommended. In France, Charles VII. issued the pragmatic sanction, founded on the decrees of the Council of Basle, which he proclaimed at Bourges in 1438. It maintained the election of bishops, the suppression of first fruits, and the reform of the principal abuses prevalent in the church. The pragmatic sanction was declared the law of the state in France. In Germany, the diet of Mayence adopted it in 1439, and likewise made it a law of the German empire. Thus what the spiritual power had attempted without success, the temporal power seemed determined upon accomplishing.

The reforming projects were destined to encounter fresh reverses. As the councils had failed, so also did the pragmatic sanction. In Germany, it perished with great abruptness; the diet formally abandoned it in 1448, in consequence of a negotiation with Nicholas V. In France, Francis I. likewise gave it up in 1516, and substituted in its stead his concordat with Leo X. Thus the princely reform was not more successful than the clerical. But we are not to conclude that it completely died away. As the councils had done things which left consequences behind, so also had the pragmatic sanction effects which survived it, and were destined to play an important part in modern history. The principles asserted by the Council of Basle were vigorous and fruitful. Some superior and determined men adopted and maintained them. John of Paris, D'Ailly, Gerson, and a great number of distinguished men of the fifteenth century, devoted themselves to their defence. Although the council was dissolved, and the pragmatic sanction abandoned, their general doctrines upon the government of the church, and upon the reforms necessary to be worked out, had taken root in France, and were there perpetuated. They passed into the parliaments, gradually grew into a powerful opinion, and gave birth first to the Jansenists, then to the Gallicans. All that series of maxims and efforts tending to reform the church, which commenced with the Council of Constance and terminated in the four propositions of Bossuet, emanated from the same source, and proceeded to the same goal. It was an identical fact successively transformed. In spite of the failure of the legal and regular attempts at reform in the fifteenth century, they had taken their station in the course of civilisation, and exercised indirectly a prodigious influence.

The councils showed wisdom in pursuing their legal reform, for it alone could avert a revolution. Almost at the same moment that the Council of Pisa endeavoured to bring the great schism of the west to a cessation, and the Council of Constance to reform the church, the first efforts of a popular religious reform broke out with violence in Bohemia. The preachings and progress of John Huss date from 1404, the period that he commenced to teach at Prague. Thus there were two reforms marching side by side; the one in the very bosom of the church, experimented by the aristocratical ecclesiastics themselves, a prudent, timid, and thwarted reform; the other a reform outside the church, opposed to it, violent and fierce. War soon raged between these two powers or designs. The council summoned John Huss and Jerome of Prague to Constance, and condemned them to the stake as heretics and revolutionists. These events are perfectly intelligible to us at the present day. We can very readily understand the simultaneousness of separate reforms, the one undertaken by governments, the other by the people, enemies of each other, and yet emanating from the same source, and conducting to the same end; reforms which, although making war upon each other, actually and definitively agreed in a common object. Such was the occurrence in the fifteenth century. The popular reform of John Huss was momentarily stifled; the war of the Hussites did not break out for three or four years after the death of their master. It continued for a long time with great violence, but the Empire finally triumphed. But as the reform attempted by the councils was unattended with effect, as the object they had pursued was not attained, the popular reform ceased not to ferment; it waited only for an opportunity, and it found one at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Had the reform undertaken by the councils been carried to a beneficial length, the popular reform perhaps would have been prevented. But the success of the one or the other was unavoidable, for their coincidence proves a necessity.

Therefore the state in which the fifteenth century left Europe, as to religious matters, was this: an aristocratical reform had been attempted without success, and a popular reform had been broached and stifled, but was ever ready to explode. But the fermentation of the human mind was not confined at that epoch to the sphere of religious dogmas. It was in the course of the fourteenth century, as is well known, that the Greek and Roman antiquity was restored, so to speak, to Europe. The ardour with which Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and all their contemporaries, sought out Greek and Latin manuscripts, and gave them to the world, is matter of notoriety. The least discovery of that sort excited an amazing bustle and transport of joy. In the midst of this excitement, a school commenced to be formed, which has played a much more important part in the development of the human understanding than is ordinarily attributed to it; I mean the classical school. I do not attach to this word the meaning in which it is used at present; it was then concerned with anything but a literary system or contest. The classical school of that epoch was inflamed with admiration not only for the writings of the ancients, for Virgil and for Homer, but also for the whole ancient society—its institutions, opinions, and philosophy, as well as literature. It must be confessed that antiquity, under the heads of politics, philosophy, and literature, was far superior to the Europe of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that it exercised so great an influence, or that the majority of enlightened, active, refined, and fastidious minds conceived an utter disgust for the coarse manners, confused ideas, and barbarous forms of their own times, and gave themselves up with rapture to the study, and almost to the worship, of a society so much more regular, and at the same time so much more developed. Thus was originated that school of freethinkers which appeared at the commencement of the fifteenth century, and in which prelates, jurisconsults, and scholars were united together.

In the midst of this movement occurred the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the settling of the fugitive Greeks in Italy. They brought with them an increased knowledge of antiquity, numerous manuscripts, and a multitude of fresh means by which the ancient civilisation might be more thoroughly studied. The classical school became animated with redoubled admiration and ardour. This was the period of the most brilliant development of the aristocratic church, especially in Italy, not in point of political power, so much as in luxuriousness and wealth. It abandoned itself with lordly pride to all the pleasures of a voluptuous, effeminate, elegant, and licentious civilisation, to a taste for letters and arts, for social and material enjoyments. See the sort of life led by men who bore an important part in politics and literature at that epoch—by Cardinal Bembo, for example. We are astonished at so singular a medley of refined sensuality and intellectual development, of enervated manners and hardihood of mind. We might imagine, in fact, when we survey that era, and behold its ideas and social relations, that we are in the middle of the French eighteenth century. We perceive the same zeal for intellectual movement and for new ideas, the same taste for a soft and agreeable life; in a word, the same effeminacy and libertinism, the same deficiency in political energy and in moral doctrines, accompanied by a remarkable candour and activity of mind. The literati of the fifteenth century were, in regard to the prelates of the church, in the same relation as the men of letters and the philosophers of the eighteenth with respect to the great aristocrats; they were all imbued with the same opinions, all pursued the same course of life, mingled harmoniously together, and looked with indifference on the agitation that was brewing around them. The prelates of the fifteenth century, commencing with Cardinal Bembo, assuredly no more foresaw the rising of Luther and Calvin, than the courtiers had any preconception of the French Revolution. The situation was analogous.

Three great facts, therefore, of the moral order present themselves at this epoch. First, an ecclesiastical reform attempted by the church itself; secondly, a popular movement for religious reform; and lastly, an intellectual revolution, which formed the school of freethinkers. And all these changes were progressing amid the greatest political alteration which had previously occurred in Europe, amid the working towards centralisation in nations and governments.

Nor was this all. It was also the period of the greatest outward activity of mankind—the period of voyages, enterprises, discoveries, and inventions of all sorts. This was the era of the great expeditions of the Portuguese along the coasts of Africa, of the discovery of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, of the discovery of America by Columbus, and of the wonderful extension of European commerce. A multitude of new inventions came forth, whilst others, previously known in a confined sphere, became popular, and passed into general use. Gunpowder changed the system of war, and the compass changed the system of navigation. The art of oil-painting was developed, and covered Europe with masterpieces. Engraving on copper, invented in 1460, multiplied and disseminated them. The use of linen paper became common. Finally, between 1436 and 1452, printing was invented, the theme of so much declamation, and of so many commonplaces, but the merit and effects of which will never be obscured by either vapid declamation or nauseous small-talk.

Such was the greatness and activity of this century; a greatness still scarcely apparent, an activity which had not yet brought its results under the disposition of mankind. Violent reforms had been suppressed; governments were consolidated, and the people hushed. It might be imagined that society was preparing merely to enjoy a better order of things, accompanied by a quickened impulse. But the revolutions of the sixteenth century were impending, which the fifteenth had only been preparing. They will be the object of my next lecture.