The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

Personal power and territorial aggrandisement, the motives of policy.

The monarchs and statesmen who were succeeding to the responsibilities of government in the middle of the seventeenth century found themselves in a very different position from that which their fathers had inherited. No longer were there great ideals around them to take captive their imaginations and absorb their energies. No longer were there obvious difficulties of home government to conquer or avoid. There were no struggling nationalities like that of Holland to protect, no overgrown dominating tyranny like that of Spain to oppose, no turbulent territorial baronage to crush, or be crushed by, the Crown. These questions had worked themselves out in the earlier part of the century and had left a blank behind them. A young king, who took up the reins of government after the middle of the century, found an open map before him. Unique position of the Crown. His country was much exhausted by war, longing above everything for rest, ready to make any sacrifices for order. The nobles, thinned and impoverished by war, were not in a position to dispute his authority. The army, well organised and obedient, gave him a power over the lives and property of his subjects, wholly unknown to former generations. A highly developed system of diplomacy enabled him to conduct negotiations secretly with all the important states of Europe, while as yet the comity of nations had established no general moral standard to which diplomatists were expected to conform. Under these circumstances it was only natural that the ambition of sovereigns should impel them to try and make their own power supreme at home, and to enlarge the boundaries of their territories abroad. Absolute power and territorial aggrandisement become the main objects of European kings. The nation is identified with the king; the larger and the richer the territory he rules, the greater his glory and circumstance. Before that all things give way. Differences of speech, differences of race, differences of religion, differences of government, count for nothing, and whole peoples are tossed about from one ruler to another like counters at the table of the diplomatists, not in cynicism but in sheer unconcern. Wrapped up in the supreme importance of gaining for their respective masters one district or one town the more, politicians have become wholly oblivious of everything else; until from the sheer necessity of having some principle to which to appeal, they eventually evolved the doctrine of the balance of power, which, when pushed to its logical development in the succeeding century, meant little else than that, if one European state managed to steal something, all the other states had the right of stealing something too. In the nineteenth century, the cause of oppressed nationalities has most powerfully influenced the map of Europe. It is the glory and the boast of the greater powers to have assisted in the unification of Italy, or the liberation of the Christian states of the Balkan Peninsula. At the end of the seventeenth century it was quite otherwise. To establish beyond all question the authority of the crown, to maintain a powerful and perfectly equipped army, to astonish the world by the splendour of the court, to push ever further and further away the frontiers of the nation, to extend a lordly protection, little short of vassalage, to weaker countries,—such were the objects of a patriot king, such the rewards of successful statesmanship. The nation was focussed and crystallised into the person of the king. It worked, fought, lived, conquered for him alone. In his glory it saw its own reflected, it recognised him as its representative and its champion, it surrendered its independence to him ungrudgingly, and in his success it reaped its reward. The rights of peoples were not so much set aside, as not even thought of, for everything was absorbed in the personality of the king.

Louis XIV. the type of seventeenth century kingship.

Of this type of kingship Louis XIV. is always looked upon as the representative if not the founder. Its founder he certainly was not, for his was not the mind to found anything. There is nothing original, no initiative, about Louis XIV. He can use, he cannot produce. The productive power seems wholly wanting in him. He is essentially a barren man, singularly skilful in making use of the material with which he is provided, but unable to add to it. It has often been pointed out how he inherited everything which has made him great, and left nothing great behind him. Condé and Turenne, Lionne and Servien, Colbert, Corneille, and Racine were the products of the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, and only utilised by Louis, while Villeroy and Tallard and Boileau were the work of his own hands. Louis a man of second-rate abilities. The statement requires some modification, but the principle which underlies it is true. Nearly everything which was great in France at the time of his accession to power Louis had the ability to use. For the most part what became great in France during his reign was not trained by him, and indeed in the case of Port Royal attained its greatness in spite of him, and what was directly trained by him was not great. The reason is not far to seek. It is the vice of an absolutely centralised monarchy, where the king is all in all, that it cannot in the nature of things tolerate any one greater than the king. The ministers are servants, and no servant can be greater than his master. His determination to admit of no rival. Even in the Prussian monarchy of to-day there is no room for a Bismarck, still less could one have been permitted to exist at the court of Louis XIV. An absolute monarch sets the standard of his ministers, if he absorbs the whole state into himself as did Louis, and does not merely let things govern themselves as is the fashion among Oriental despots. From the time of the death of Mazarin, Louis determined he would never have another prime minister. He himself, like Napoleon after him, would be the head and motive power of the whole of the governmental and social machinery. He kept his word with singular patience and pertinacity, and working harder probably than any sovereign had worked, since the days of Philip II., never permitted a minister, not even Louvois, to rise above the merest departmental independence. The result was inevitable. A commonplace man himself, without insight, without originality, without independence of mind, he could not inspire genius, and could not tolerate it if he found it. He wanted diligence and accuracy, not genius and statesmanship, clerks not ministers of state, and he got what he wanted. It is significant that in all departments of administration except one, when he had used up the men whom Richelieu and Mazarin had left to him, he found no others to take their places. In diplomacy alone France remained unrivalled to the end of the century, the one department of which Louis himself was complete master, and in the conduct of which he was thoroughly competent to take the lead.

His great kingly qualities.

But in spite of his deficiencies in the higher qualities of statesmanship, not Aristides better deserved his title of the Just, than did Louis XIV. that of le Grand Monarque. It was essentially as a king that Louis was great. No sovereign of modern days has had the kingly gifts in such rich profusion. Dignity without awkwardness, courtesy without familiarity, gallantry without coarseness, a winning manner, ready tact, chivalrous bearing, refined mind, and modest demeanour, made the young king at once the pride of the French court and the boast of the French nation. But something more than this was required to make him the pattern and type of European kingship. It was not merely that his social insight brought instinctively to his lips the word which, within the bounds of good breeding, would prove most pleasing or most effective to those whom he wished to impress, or that his knowledge of character taught him almost intuitively the best mode of approaching those whom he wished to win. It was not only that his elaborate and punctual care for the etiquette and ceremonial of the court could not fail to affect the mind with a sense of the perfection of regal state, and attract it by a polished order of courtly magnificence. His theory of kingship. Versailles was not the first court in Europe to be distinguished by the splendour of its ceremonial, and the refinement of its manners, but Louis XIV. was the first great sovereign in Europe who made the perfection of his court an essential part of his system of policy. When the Popes had ceased to be the common fathers of Western Christendom, they applied themselves to make the seat of their power the centre of the wider realm of art. Rome deposed from the throne of universal faith was to be recompensed by the sceptre of universal culture. So when France was assuming the headship of Europe, and was preparing to strike for the dominion of the civilised world, her court was to be the epitome, the representation of the world’s greatness. Mirrored there in a tiny but radiant sphere was to be found all which makes humanity noble and life beautiful. Intellect and birth, genius and beauty, culture and statesmanship, art and devotion, all were to be there marshalled in an admirable perfection of order, but shining one and all with a reflected light, illuminated by the rays of the king, their sun. Not unthinkingly did Louis adopt the sun as his type. According to his theory of government he was the centre, the life-giving principle of the system in which he ruled. All that was young and beautiful in France sprang into life at his bidding, and withered into decay when he averted his face, all that was powerful drew its vigour from his favour, while from less privileged lands the kings of the earth, like the Magi of old, drawn by the light of his compelling rays, were to come from the ends of the world to find under his protecting care the pattern of life and the home of faith.

Truth of Thackeray’s caricature.

Sarcasm comes easy to the lips when dealing with a theory such as this. Men cannot stop the course of the winds of heaven by building houses of cards, and no artificial arrangements of a court can conceal national weakness or physical decay. The sturdy English pencil of Thackeray has drawn out the hollowness of this theory of seventeenth century kingship in the bitter sarcasm of the well-known sketches of Louis le Roi in his later years. In the first appears the real Louis, insignificant, decrepit, bald, and old, shaking and feeble with age, a living corpse rather than a man. Opposite to him stands le Roi—the flowing peruke curled and oiled, the royal robes bedecked with ribbons, flashing with jewels, the tailor-made divinity that doth hedge a king, standing ready for the monarch’s use on its skeleton frame. Lastly we see the human atom and its gorgeous artificial covering united in Louis le Roi, and are bidden to reflect how much of the Grand Monarque is the work of the tailor and the wigmaker, and how little of God. The argument is true, the sarcasm is just. Where the splendour of a court is part of the system of government, represents and enforces the national dignity, sets the fashion to foreign ambition, is the living embodiment of the power and genius of the state, king and courtiers must not grow old. Queen Elizabeth, encouraging protestations of love at the age of seventy, and Louis XIV. attempting artificially to conceal the advance of years, are spectacles offensive because unnaturally theatrical. The French court at the head of civilisation. But their loathsomeness never struck contemporaries as it does us. Louis XIV. never lost the respect of Europe or the love of his subjects. His kingliness was a fact which had so impressed itself upon Europe, as both the cause and effect of the greatness of France and the success of his policy, that men became insensible to the physical incongruity. And they were right. From the court of Louis flowed out influences far more potent than those which followed the feet of his soldiers or the coaches of his diplomatists. Versailles set the fashion to the civilised world. French manners, French dress, French speech, French art, French literature, French preaching, French science became the property and the models of civilised Europe. For a hundred years in every department of life, from the turning of a couplet to the drilling of recruits, from the composition of a panegyric to the design of a card-table, everything is ruled by the French instinct of order, cramped by the French love of artificial completeness, refined by the French genius for finish, illuminated by the justness of French taste. There are few kings to whom it has been given to dictate to civilisation for a century the principles by which she is to live.

The secret of the wonderful success of Louis XIV. in all those departments of life and of government which he understood lay in the close personal attention which he gave to the matter in hand. His genius certainly lay in his infinite

Louis’s attention to business.