Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

The Jesuits gave up morality after religion; reducing the moral merits by which man may earn his salvation to only one, the Political merit of which we have spoken, that of serving Rome.

What must the world give up in its turn?

The world (by far the most worldly part of the world, woman) will have to give up her best possessions, her family and her domestic hearth. Eve once more betrays Adam. Woman deceives man in her husband and son.

Thus every one sold his God. Rome bartered away religion, and woman domestic piety.

The weak minds of women after the great corruption of the sixteenth century, spoiled beyond all remedy, full of passion, fear, and wicked desires mingled with remorse, seized greedily the means of sinning conscientiously, of expiating without either amendment, amelioration, or return towards God. They thought themselves happy to receive at the Confessional, by way of penance, some little political commission, or the management of some intrigue. They transferred to this singular manner of expiating their faults the very violence of the guilty passions, for which the atonement was to be made; and in order to remain sinful, they were often obliged to commit crimes.[[2]]

The passion of woman, inconstant in everything else, was in this case sustained by the vigorous obstinacy of the mysterious and invisible hand that urged her forward. Under this impulse, at once gentle and strong, ardent and persevering, firm as iron and as dissolving as fire, characters and even interests at length gave way.

Some examples will help us to understand it the better. In France, old Lesdiguières was politically, much interested in remaining a Protestant; as such, he was the head man of the party. The king rather than the governor of Dauphiné, he assisted the Swiss, and protected the populations of Vaud and Romand against the house of Savoy. But the old man's daughter was gained over by Father Cotton. She set to work upon her father with patience and address, and succeeded in inducing him to quit his high position for an empty title, and change his religion for the title of Constable.

In Germany the character of Ferdinand I., his interest, and the part he had to play, would have induced him to remain moderate, and not become the vassal of his nephew, Philip II. With violence and fanaticism he had no choice but to accept a secondary place. The emperor's daughters, however, intrigued so well that the house of Austria became united by marriage to the houses of Lorraine and Bavaria. The children of these families being educated by the Jesuits, the latter repaired in Germany the broken thread of the destinies of the Guises, and had even better fortune than the Guises themselves; for they made for their own use certain blind instruments, agents in diplomacy and tactics—skilful workmen certainly, but still mere workmen. I speak of that hardy and devout generation, of Ferdinand II. of Austria, of Tilly, and Maximilian of Bavaria, those conscientious executors of the great works of Rome, who, under the direction of their teachers, carried on for so long a time, throughout Europe, a warfare which was at once barbarous and skilful, merciless and methodical. The Jesuits launched them into it, and then carefully watched over them; and whenever Tilly on his charger was seen dashing over the smoking ruins of cities, or the battle-field covered with the slain, the Jesuit, trotting on his mule, was not far off.

This vile war, the most loathsome in history, appears the more horrible, by the almost total absence of free inspiration and spontaneous impulse. It was, from its very beginning, both artificial and mechanical[[3]]—like a war of machines or phantoms. These strange beings, created only to fight, march with a look as void of martial ardour, as their heart is of affection. How could they be reasoned with? What language could be used towards them? What pity could be expected from them? In our wars of religion, in those of the Revolution they were men who fought; each died for the sake of his idea, and, when he fell on the battle-field, he shrouded himself in his faith. Whereas the partisans of the Thirty Years' War have no individual life—no idea of their own; their very breath is but the inspiration of the evil genius who urges them on. These automatons, who grow blinder every day, are not the less obstinate and bloody. No history would lead us to understand this abominable phenomenon, if there did not remain some delineation of them in the hellish pictures of that diabolical, damned Salvator Rosa.[[4]]

Behold, then, this fruit of mildness, benignity, and paternity; see how, after having by indulgence and connivance exterminated morality, seized on the family by surprise, fascinated the mother and conquered the child, and by the devil's own art raised the man-machine, they are found to have created a monster, whose whole idea, life, and action was murder, nothing more.