History of Civilization in England, Vol. 2 of 3

by Henry Thomas Buckle

The truth of this picture is well known to those who have studied the history of Louis XIV., and the connection between it and the French Revolution. That prince adopted, during his long reign, the mischievous practice of rewarding literary men with large sums of money, and of conferring on them numerous marks of personal favour. As this was done for more than half a century; and as the wealth which he thus unscrupulously employed was of course taken from his other subjects, we can find no better illustration of the results which such patronage is likely to produce. He, indeed, has the merit of organizing into a system that protection of literature which some are so anxious to restore. What the effect of this was upon the general interests of knowledge, we shall presently see. But its effect upon authors themselves should be particularly attended to by those men of letters who, with little regard to their own dignity, are constantly reproaching the English government for neglecting the profession of which they themselves are members. In no age have literary men been awarded with such profuseness as in the reign of Louis XIV.; and in no age have they been so mean-spirited, so servile, so utterly unfit to fulfil their great vocation as the apostles of knowledge and the missionaries of truth. The history of the most celebrated authors of that time proves that, notwithstanding their acquirements, and the power of their minds, they were unable to resist the surrounding corruption. To gain the favour of the king, they sacrificed that independent spirit which should have been dearer to them than life. They gave away the inheritance of genius; they sold their birthright for a mess of pottage. What happened then, would under the same circumstances happen now. A few eminent thinkers may be able for a certain time to resist the pressure of their age. But, looking at mankind generally, society can have no hold on any class except through the medium of their interests. It behoves, therefore, every people to take heed, that the interests of literary men are on their side rather than on the side of their rulers. For, literature is the representative of intellect, which is progressive; government is the representative of order, which is stationary. As long as these two great powers are separate, they will correct and react upon each other, and the people may hold the balance. If, however, these powers coalesce, if the government can corrupt the intellect, and if the intellect will yield to the government, the inevitable result must be, despotism in politics, and servility in literature. This was the history of France under Louis XIV.: and this, we may rest assured, will be the history of every country that shall be tempted to follow so attractive but so fatal an example.

The reputation of Louis XIV. originated in the gratitude of men of letters; but it is now supported by a popular notion that the celebrated literature of his age is mainly to be ascribed to his fostering care. If, however, we examine this opinion, we shall find that, like many of the traditions of which history is full, it is entirely devoid of truth. We shall find two leading circumstances, which will prove that the literary splendour of his reign was not the result of his efforts, but was the work of that great generation which preceded him; and that the intellect of France, so far from being benefited by his munificence, was hampered by his protection.

I. The first circumstance is, that the immense impulse which, during the administrations of Richelieu and of Mazarin, had been given to the highest branches of knowledge, was suddenly stopped. In 1661 Louis XIV. assumed the government;[443] and from that moment until his death, in 1715, the history of France, so far as great discoveries are concerned, is a blank in the annals of Europe. If, putting aside all preconceived notions respecting the supposed glory of that age, we examine the matter fairly, it will be seen that in every department there was a manifest dearth of original thinkers. There was much that was elegant, much that was attractive. The senses of men were soothed and flattered by the creations of art, by paintings, by palaces, by poems; but scarcely any thing of moment was added to the sum of human knowledge. If we take the mathematics, and those mixed sciences to which they are applicable, it will be universally admitted that their most successful cultivators in France during the seventeenth century were Descartes, Pascal, Fermat, Gassendi, and Mersenne. But, so far from Louis XIV. having any share in the honour due to them, these eminent men were engaged in their investigations while the king was still in his cradle, and completed them before he assumed the government, and therefore before his system of protection came into play. Descartes died in 1650,[444] when the king was twelve years old. Pascal, whose name, like that of Descartes, is commonly associated with the age of Louis XIV., had gained an European reputation while Louis, occupied in the nursery with his toys, was not aware that any such man existed. His treatise on conic sections was written in 1639;[445] his decisive experiments on the weight of air were made in 1648;[446] and his researches on the cycloid, the last great inquiry he ever undertook, were in 1658,[447] when Louis, still under the tutelage of Mazarin, had no sort of authority. Fermat was one of the most profound thinkers of the seventeenth century, particularly as a geometrician, in which respect he was second only to Descartes.[448] The most important steps he took are those concerning the geometry of infinites, applied to the ordinates and tangents of curves; which, however, he completed in or before 1636.[449] As to Gassendi and Mersenne, it is enough to say that Gassendi died in 1655,[450] six years before Louis was at the head of affairs; while Mersenne died in 1648,[451] when the great king was ten years old.

These were the men who flourished in France just before the system of Louis XIV. came into operation. Shortly after their death the patronage of the king began to tell upon the national intellect; and during the next fifty years no addition of importance was made to either branch of the mathematics, or, with the single exception of acoustics,[452] to any of the sciences to which the mathematics are applied.[453] The further the seventeenth century advanced, the more evident did the decline become, and the more clearly can we trace the connexion between the waning powers of the French, and that protective spirit which enfeebled the energies it wished to strengthen. Louis had heard that astronomy is a noble study; he was therefore anxious, by encouraging its cultivation in France, to add to the glories of his own name.[454] With this view, he rewarded its professors with unexampled profusion; he built the splendid Observatory of Paris; he invited to his court the most eminent foreign astronomers, Cassini from Italy, Römer from Denmark, Huygens from Holland. But, as to native ability, France did not produce a single man who made even one of those various discoveries which mark the epochs of astronomical science. In other countries vast progress was made; and Newton in particular, by his immense generalizations, reformed nearly every branch of physics, and remodelled astronomy by carrying the laws of gravitation to the extremity of the solar system. On the other hand, France had fallen into such a torpor, that these wonderful discoveries, which changed the face of knowledge, were entirely neglected, there being no instance of any French astronomer adopting them until 1732, that is, forty-five years after they had been published by their immortal author.[455] Even in matters of detail, the most valuable improvement made by French astronomers during the power of Louis XIV. was not original. They laid claim to the invention of the micrometer; an admirable resource, which, as they supposed, was first contrived by Picard and Auzout.[456] The truth, however, is, that here again they were anticipated by the activity of a freer and less protected people; since the micrometer was invented by Gascoigne in or just before 1639, when the English monarch, so far from having leisure to patronize science, was about to embark in that struggle which, ten years later, cost him his crown and his life.[457]

The absence in France, during this period, not only of great discoveries, but also of mere practical ingenuity, is certainly very striking. In investigations requiring minute accuracy, the necessary tools, if at all complicated, were made by foreigners, the native workmen being too unskilled to construct them; and Dr. Lister, who was a very competent judge,[458] and who was in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, supplies evidence that the best mathematical instruments sold in that city were made, not by a Frenchman, but by Butterfield, an Englishman residing there.[459] Nor did they succeed better in matters of immediate and obvious utility. The improvements effected in manufactures were few and insignificant, and were calculated, not for the comfort of the people, but for the luxury of the idle classes.[460] What was really valuable was neglected; no great invention was made; and by the end of the reign of Louis XIV. scarcely anything had been done in machinery, or in those other contrivances which, by economising national labour, increase national wealth.[461]

While such was the state, not only of mathematical and astronomical science, but also of mechanical and inventive arts, corresponding symptoms of declining power were seen in other departments. In physiology, in anatomy and in medicine, we look in vain for any men equal to those by whom France had once been honoured. The greatest discovery of this kind ever made by a Frenchman, was that of the receptacle of the chyle; a discovery which, in the opinion of a high authority, is not inferior to that of the circulation of the blood by Harvey.[462] This important step in our knowledge is constantly assigned to the age of Louis XIV., as if it were one of the results of his gracious bounty; but it would be difficult to tell what Louis had to do with it, since the discovery was made by Pecquet in 1647,[463] when the great king was nine years old. After Pecquet, the most eminent of the French anatomists in the seventeenth century was Riolan; and his name we also find among the illustrious men who adorned the reign of Louis XIV. But the principal works of Riolan were written before Louis XIV. was born; his last work was published in 1652; and he himself died in 1657.[464] Then there came a pause, and, during three generations, the French did nothing for these great subjects: they wrote no work upon them which is now read, they made no discoveries, and they seemed to have lost all heart, until that revival of knowledge, which, as we shall presently see, took place in France about the middle of the eighteenth century. In the practical parts of medicine, in its speculative parts, and in the arts connected with surgery, the same law prevails. The French, in these, as in other matters, had formerly produced men of great eminence, who had won for themselves an European reputation, and whose works are still remembered. Thus, only to mention two or three instances, they had a long line of illustrious physicians, among whom Fernel and Joubert were the earliest;[465] they had, in surgery, Ambroise Paré, who not only introduced important practical improvements,[466] but who has the still rarer merit of being one of the founders of comparative osteology;[467] and they had Baillou, who late in the sixteenth and early in the seventeenth century, advanced pathology, by connecting it with the study of morbid anatomy.[468] Under Louis XIV. all this was changed. Under him, surgery was neglected, though in other countries its progress was rapid.[469] The English, by the middle of the seventeenth century, had taken considerable steps in medicine: its therapeutical branch being reformed chiefly by Sydenham, its physiological branch by Glisson.[470] But the age of Louis XIV. cannot boast of a single medical writer who can be compared to these; not even one whose name is now known as having made any specific addition to our knowledge. In Paris, the practice of medicine was notoriously inferior to that in the capitals of Germany, Italy, and England; while in the French provinces, the ignorance, even of the best physicians, was scandalous.[471] Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, during the whole of this long period, the French in these matters effected comparatively nothing; they made no contributions to clinical literature,[472] and scarcely any to therapeutics, to pathology, to physiology, or to anatomy.[473]

In what are called the natural sciences, we also find the French now brought to a stand. In zoology, they had formerly possessed remarkable men, among whom Belon and Rondelet were the most conspicuous:[474] but, under Louis XIV., they did not produce one original observer in this great field of inquiry.[475] In chemistry, again, Rey had, in the reign of Louis XIII., struck out views of such vast importance, that he anticipated some of those generalizations which formed the glory of the French intellect in the eighteenth century.[476] During the corrupt and frivolous age of Louis XIV., all this was forgotten; the labours of Rey were neglected; and so complete was the indifference, that even the celebrated experiments of Boyle remained unknown in France for more than forty years after they were published.[477]

Connected with zoology, and, to a philosophic mind, inseparable from it, is botany: which, occupying a middle place between the animal and mineral world, indicates their relation to each other, and at different points touches the confines of both. It also throws great light on the functions of nutrition,[478] and on the laws of development; while, from the marked analogy between animals and vegetables, we have every reason to hope that its further progress, assisted by that of electricity, will prepare the way for a comprehensive theory of life, to which the resources of our knowledge are still unequal, but towards which the movements of modern science are manifestly tending. On these grounds, far more than for the sake of practical advantages, botany will always attract the attention of thinking men; who, neglecting views of immediate utility, look to large and ultimate results, and only value particular facts in so far as they facilitate the discovery of general truths. The first step in this noble study was taken towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when authors, instead of copying what previous writers had said, began to observe nature for themselves.[479] The next step was, to add experiment to observation: but it required another hundred years before this could be done with accuracy; because the microscope, which is essential to such inquiries, was only invented about 1620, and the labour of a whole generation was needed to make it available for minute investigations.[480] So soon, however, as this resource was sufficiently matured to be applied to plants, the march of botany became rapid, at least as far as details are concerned; for it was not until the eighteenth century that the facts were actually generalized. But, in the preliminary work of accumulating the facts, great energy was shown; and, for reasons stated in an earlier part of the Introduction, this, like other studies relating to the external world, advanced with peculiar speed during the reign of Charles II. The tracheæ of plants were discovered by Henshaw in 1661;[481] and their cellular tissue by Hooke in 1667.[482] These were considerable approaches towards establishing the analogy between plants and animals; and, within a few years, Grew effected still more of the same kind. He made such minute and extensive dissections, as to raise the anatomy of vegetables to a separate study, and prove that their organization is scarcely less complicated than that possessed by animals.[483] His first work was written in 1670;[484] and, in 1676, another Englishman, Millington, ascertained the existence of a distinction of sexes;[485] thus supplying further evidence of the harmony between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and of the unity of idea which regulates their composition.

This is what was effected in England during the reign of Charles II.; and we now ask what was done in France, during the same period, under the munificent patronage of Louis XIV. The answer is, nothing; no discovery, no idea, which forms an epoch in this important department of natural science. The son of the celebrated Sir Thomas Brown visited Paris in the hope of making some additions to his knowledge of botany, which he thought he could not fail to do in a country where science was held in such honour, its professors so caressed by the court, and its researches so bountifully encouraged. To his surprise, he, in 1665, found in that great city no one capable of teaching his favourite pursuit, and even the public lectures on it miserably meagre and unsatisfactory.[486] Neither then, nor at a much later period, did the French possess a good popular treatise on botany: still less did they make any improvement in it. Indeed, so completely was the philosophy of the subject misunderstood, that Tournefort, the only French botanist of repute in the reign of Louis, actually rejected that discovery of the sexes of plants, which had been made before he began to write, and which afterwards became the corner-stone of the Linnæan system.[487] This showed his incapacity for those large views respecting the unity of the organic world, which alone give to botany a scientific value; and we find, accordingly, that he did nothing for the physiology of plants, and that his only merit was as a collector and classifier of them.[488] And even in his classification he was guided, not by a comprehensive comparison of their various parts, but by considerations drawn from the mere appearance of the flower:[489] thus depriving botany of its real grandeur, degrading it into an arrangement of beautiful objects, and supplying another instance of the way in which the Frenchmen of that generation impoverished what they sought to enrich, and dwarfed every topic, until they suited the intellect and pleased the eye of that ignorant and luxurious court, to whose favour they looked for reward, and whose applause it was the business of their life to gain.