A Short History of France

by Mary Platt Parmele

When declared of age, in 1723, a marriage was arranged for Louis with Marie Leczinska, daughter of the exiled Polish King Stanislas. Europe at this time was agitated over the succession to the throne of Austria, as the empire was now called. The Salic Law excluded female heirs, and the emperor, Charles VI., had died in 1718, leaving only a daughter, Maria Theresa, one year old. But a pragmatic sanction, once more invoked, seems to have covered the necessities of the situation by providing that the succession in the absence of a male heir might descend to a female, and so there was a young and beautiful empress on the throne at Vienna, who was going to make a great deal of history for Europe; and who would open her brilliant reign by a valiant fight for possession of Silesia, which the young king of Prussia intended to seize as an addition to his own new kingdom. This young King Frederick was also making history very fast, and after a stormy career was going to convert his Kingdom into a Power, and to be the one sovereign of his age whom the world would call Great! But at this particular period of his youth, Frederick and his nobility, still blinded by the splendors of the reign of Louis XIV., were mere servile imitators of the court at Versailles, and the culture and the civilization for which they hungered were French—only French; and for Frederick, an intimate companionship with Voltaire was his supreme desire. But a closer view of the witty, cynical Frenchman wrought a wonderful change. The finely pointed shafts of ridicule when aimed at himself were not so entertaining. And his guest, no longer persona grata, was escorted over the frontier to France.

A nearer view of Versailles at this time might also have disenchanted these worshippers at the shrine of French civilization. A king absolutely indifferent to conditions in his kingdom, immersed in debasing pleasures, while Madame de Pompadour actually ruled the state—this is not the worst they would have seen! Destitute of shame, of pity, of patriotism, and of human affection, what did it mean to the king that his people were growing desperate under the enormous taxation made necessary by incessant wars and by the extravagant expenditures of the court? Louis simply turned his back upon the whole problem of administration, and left his ministers, Fleury, and later de Choiseul, to deal with the misery and the discontent and to make their way through the financial morass as best they might.

The power of Madame de Pompadour may be imagined when we learn that Maria Theresa, empress and proud daughter of the Caesars, when she needed the friendship of Louis XIV., in her struggle with Frederick of Prussia, in order to win him to her side, wrote a flattering letter to this woman.

This friendship, so artfully sought by the empress, led to another very different and very momentous alliance. A marriage was arranged between her little daughter, Marie Antoinette, and the boy Louis, who was to be the future king of France. The dauphin, the dauphiness, and their eldest child were all dead. So Louis, the second son of the dauphin, was the heir to his grandfather, Louis XV.

How should the empress of Austria, born, nurtured, and fed in the very centre of despotism, utterly misunderstanding as she must the past, the present, and the future, how should she suspect that the throne of France would be a scaffold for her child? Hapsburg and Bourbon were to her realities as enduring as the Alps.

In the meantime England and France had come into collision over their boundaries in America, and the war opened by Braddock and his young aide, Washington, had been a still further drain upon impoverished France. With the loss of Montreal and Quebec, those two strongholds in the north, the French were virtually defeated. And when the end came, France had lost every inch of territory on the North American Continent, and had ceded her vast possessions, extending from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, to England and Spain.

So while England was steadily building up a world-empire, penetrated with the forces of a modern age, France, loaded with debt, was taxing a people crying for bread—taxing a starving people for money to procure unimaginable luxuries and pleasures for Madame du Barry, who had succeeded to the place once, held by Madame de Pompadour. Did she desire a snowstorm and a sleighride in midsummer, these must be created and made possible. And one may see to-day at Versailles the sleigh in which this mad caprice was realized.

The various instructors of Louis XV. had not taught him anything about mind and soul processes. They were quite unaware that there had commenced a movement in the brain of France, which was going to liberate terrific forces—forces which would sweep before them the work of the Richelieus and the Mazarins and the Colberts as if it were chaff.

The human mind was probing, questioning doubting, everything it had once believed. And as one after another cherished beliefs disappeared, it grew still more daring. The whole religious, social, and political system was wrong. The only remedy was to overthrow it all, and crown reason as the sovereign of a new era. Such was the ferment at work beneath the surface as Louis was devising incredible extravagances for du Barry. And there was rage in men's hearts as they wrote insulting lines upon his equestrian statue in the Place Louis Quinze.

The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.