This was the first convulsive movement made by the people. Defeated though they were, and with their fetters riveted anew, they obtained new ideas of power and right which they never forgot. Already we begin to hear many of the phrases which four hundred years later were upon all lips, when the monarchy and the feudal aristocracy were buried in one common grave.
The house of Valois retained the throne for two hundred and sixty-one years. During these two and a half centuries, as generations came and went, storms of war and woe were incessantly sweeping over France. The history of the kingdom during these dreary ages is but the record of the intrigues of ecclesiastics, the conflicts between monarchs and nobles, and the sweep of maddened armies. The Third Estate, the people, continued to be deprived of almost all social and political rights. They were debased by ignorance and depressed by intolerable burdens. The monarchy was gradually centralizing power. The chiefs and sub-chiefs of the conglomerated tribes were losing their feudal authority and lapsing into nobles of higher and lower rank, whose splendor was obtained by exemption from all the burdens of the state, and by enormous taxation of the people. The Roman Catholic Church, under the Popes, blazed with almost supernatural splendor over Europe; and the high dignitaries of the Church, as lords spiritual, were as luxurious, haughty, and domineering as were any of the lords temporal.
Henry III., the last of the Valois race, was stabbed by a friar in 1589, and died leaving no issue. Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, as the nearest relative, claimed the crown. He ascended the throne as Henry IV., and after several years of civil war put down all opposition. He was the first of the Bourbon family who swayed the sceptre, and by far the most able and energetic. Under his vigorous sway the kingdom became consolidated, the throne attained a great supremacy over the nobles, and the resources of the realm were greatly developed. Henry IV. was sincerely devoted to the interests of France. He encouraged commerce, manufactures, and the arts; endeavored to enforce equitable laws, and under his wise administration the people made decided advances in wealth and intelligence. He retained the throne for twenty-one years, until 1610, when he died beneath the dagger of an assassin. Though Henry governed for the people, he did not admit them to any voice in public affairs. During his long reign no assembly was convened in which the people had any representation.
Henry IV. at his death left a son, Louis, nine years of age. The mother of this child, Mary of Medicis, was invested with the regency. When this prince was fourteen years of age he was considered by the laws of France as having attained his majority. He accordingly, while thus but a boy, marrying a bride of fifteen, Anne of Austria, ascended the throne as Louis XIII. For twenty-eight years this impotent prince sat upon the throne, all the time in character a bashful boy devoid of any qualities which could command respect. Cardinal Richelieu was during this reign the real monarch of France. Measurelessly ambitious, arrogant, and cruel, he consolidated the despotism of the throne, and yet, by far-reaching policy, greatly promoted the power and grandeur of the kingdom. This renowned minister, stern, vindictive, cruel, shrinking from no crime in the accomplishment of his plans, with the dungeons of the Bastilles of France and the executioner's axe at his command, held the impotent king and the enslaved kingdom for nearly thirty years in trembling obedience to his will.
The Chateau of Versailles was commenced by Richelieu. He also, in the year 1635, established the French Academy, which has since exerted so powerful an influence upon literature and science throughout Europe. Richelieu died in December, 1642, and six months after, in May, 1643, Louis XIII., who, during his reign, had been but a puppet in the hands of the cardinal, followed him to the tomb. As the monarch was lying upon his dying bed, he called his little son, five years of age, to his side, and said to him, "What is your name?" "Louis Fourteenth," answered the proud boy, already eager to grasp the sceptre. "Not yet, not yet," sadly rejoined the dying father.
Anne of Austria held the regency for nine years, until her son, having attained the age of fourteen, had completed his minority and assumed the crown. Under this powerful prince the monarchy of France, as an unlimited despotism, became firmly established. The nobles, though deprived of all political power, were invested with such enormous privileges, enabling them to revel in wealth and luxury, that they were ever ready to unite with the king in quelling all uprising of the people, who were equally robbed by both monarch and noble. During the long reign of this monarch, for Louis XIV. sat upon the throne for seventy-two years, if we consider his reign to have commenced when he was proclaimed king upon the death of his father, France made vast strides in power, wealth, and splendor. Palaces arose almost outvying the dreams of an Oriental imagination. The saloons of Marly, the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles, were brilliant with a splendor, and polluted with debaucheries, which Babylon, in its most festering corruption, could not have rivaled. The nobles, almost entirely surrendered to enervating indulgence, were incapacitated for any post which required intellectual activity and energy. Hence originated a class of men who became teachers, editors, scientific and literary writers, jurists, and professional men. In the progress of commerce and manufactures, wealth increased with this class, and the king, to raise money, would often sell, at an enormous price, a title of nobility to some enriched tradesman.
A numerous and powerful middle class, rich and highly educated, was thus gradually formed, who had emerged from the people, and whose sympathies were entirely with them. The nobles looked upon all these, however opulent, or cultivated in mind, or polished in manners, with contempt, as low-born. They refused all social intercourse with them, regarding them as a degraded caste. They looked with even peculiar contempt upon those who had purchased titles of nobility.
They drew a broad line of distinction between the nobles and the ennobled. The hereditary aristocracy, proud of a lineage which could be traced through a hundred generations, and which was lost in the haze of antiquity, exclaimed with pride, instinct to the human heart:
"You may give a lucky tradesman, in exchange for money, a title of nobility, but you can not thus make him a nobleman; you can not thus constitute him a lineal descendant of the old Frank barons; you can not thus constitute him a Lorraine, a Montmorency, a Rohan. God alone can create a nobleman."
Thus they regarded a man who had been ennobled by a royal decree, or who had descended from a father or a grandfather thus ennobled, as a new man, an upstart, one hardly redeemed from contempt. The doors of their saloons were closed against him, and he was every where exposed to mortifying neglect. A noble whose lineage could be traced for two or three centuries, but whose origin was still distinctly defined, was considered as perhaps belonging to the aristocratic calendar, though of low estate. The fact that the time once was, when his ancestors were known to be low-born, was a damaging fact, which no subsequent ages of nobility could entirely efface. He only was the true noble, the origin of whose nobility was lost in the depths of the past, the line of whose ancestry ran so far back into the obscurity of by-gone ages that no one could tell when it commenced.