The 18th century, like the 17th, opened with a political coup d’état. Louis XV. was five years old, and the duke of Orleans held the regency. But Louis XIV. had in his will delegated all the power of the government to a The Regency (1715-1723). council on which the duke of Maine, his legitimated son, had the first, but Madame de Maintenon and the Jesuits the predominant place. This collective administration, designed to cripple the action of the regent, encountered a twofold opposition from the nobles and the parlement; but on the 2nd of September 1715 the emancipated parlement set aside the will in favour of the duke of Orleans, who thus together with the title of regent had all the real power. He therefore reinstituted the parlement in its ancient right of remonstrance (suspended since the declarations of 1667 and 1673), and handed over ministerial power to the nobility, replacing the secretaries of state by six councils composed in part of great nobles, on the advice of the famous duc de Saint-Simon. The duc de Noailles, president of the council of finance, had the direction of this “Polysynodie.”
The duke of Orleans, son of the princess palatine and Louis XIV.’s brother, possessed many gifts—courage, intelligence and agility of mind—but he lacked the one gift of using these to good advantage. The political crisis Philip of Orleans. that had placed him in power had not put an end to the financial crisis, and this, it was hoped, might be effected by substituting partial and petty bankruptcies for the general bankruptcy cynically advocated by Saint-Simon. The reduction of the royal revenues did not suffice to fill the treasury; while the establishment of a chamber of justice (March 1716) had no other result than that of demoralizing the great lords and ladies already mad for pleasure, by bringing them into contact with the farmers of the revenue who purchased impunity from them. A very clever Scotch adventurer named John Law (q.v.) now offered his assistance in dealing with the enormous debt of more than three milliards, and in providing the treasury. Being well acquainted with the mechanism of banking, he had adopted views as to cash, credit and the circulation of values which contained an admixture of truth and falsehood. Authorized after many difficulties to organize a private bank of deposit and account, which being well conceived prospered and revived commerce, Law proposed to lighten the treasury by the profits accruing to a great maritime and colonial company. Payment for the shares in this new Company of the West, with a capital of a hundred millions, was to be made in credit notes upon the government, converted into 4% stock. These aggregated funds, needed to supply the immense and fertile valley of the Mississippi, and the annuities of the treasury destined to pay for the shares, were non-transferable. Law’s idea was to ask the bank for the floating capital necessary, so that the bank and the Company of the West were to be supplementary to each other; this is what was called Law’s system. After the chancellor D’Aguesseau and the duc de Noailles had been replaced by D’Argenson alone, and after the lit de justice of the 26th of August 1718 had deprived the parlement, hostile to Law, of the authority left to it, the bank became royal and the Company of the West universal. But the royal bank, as a state establishment, asked for compulsory privilege to increase the emission of its credit notes, and that they should receive a premium upon all metallic specie. The Company of the Indies became the grantee for the farming of tobacco, the coinage of metals, and farming in general; and in order to procure funds it multiplied the output of shares, which were adroitly launched and became more and more sought for on the exchange in the rue Quincampoix. This soon caused a frenzy of stock-jobbing, which disturbed the stability of private fortunes and social positions, and depraved customs and manners with the seductive notion of easily obtained riches. The nomination of Law to the controller-generalship, re-established for his benefit on the resignation of D’Argenson (January 5, 1720), let loose still wilder speculation; till the day came when he could no longer face the terrible difficulty of meeting both private irredeemable shares with a variable return, and the credit notes redeemable at sight and guaranteed by the state. Gold and silver were proscribed; the bank and the company were joined in one; the credit notes and the shares were assimilated. But credit cannot be commanded either by violence or by expedients; between July and September 1720 came the suspension of payments, the flight of Law, and the disastrous liquidation which proved once again that respect for the state’s obligations had not yet entered into the law of public finance.
Reaction on a no less extensive scale characterized foreign policy during the Regency. A close alliance between France and her ancient enemies, England and Holland, was concluded and maintained from 1717 to 1739: France, The Anglo-Dutch Alliance. after thirty years of fighting, between two periods of bankruptcy; Holland reinstalled in her commercial position; and England, seeing before her the beginning of her empire over the seas—all three had an interest in peace. On the other hand, peace was imperilled by Philip V. of Spain and by the emperor (who had accepted the portion assigned to them by the treaty of Utrecht, while claiming the whole), by Savoy and Brandenburg (who had profited too much by European conflicts not to desire their perpetuation), by the crisis from which the maritime powers of the Baltic were suffering, and by the Turks on the Danube. The dream of Cardinal Alberoni, Philip V.’s minister, was to set fire to all this inflammable material in order to snatch therefrom a crown of some sort to satisfy the maternal greed of Elizabeth Farnese; and this he might have attained by the occupation of Sardinia and the expedition to Sicily (1717-1718), if Dubois, a priest without a religion, a greedy parvenu and a diplomatist of second rank, though tenacious and full of resources as a minister, had not placed his common sense at the disposal of the regent’s interests and those of European peace. He signed the triple alliance at the Hague, succeeding with the assistance of Stanhope, the English minister, in engaging the emperor therein, after attempting this for a year and a half. Whilst the Spanish fleet was destroyed before Syracuse by Admiral Byng, the intrigue of the Spanish ambassador Cellamare with the duke of Maine to exclude the family of Orleans from the succession on Louis XV.’s death was discovered and repressed; and Marshal Berwick burned the dockyards at Pasajes in Spain. Alberoni’s dream was shattered by the treaty of London in 1720.
Seized in his turn with a longing for the cardinal’s hat, Dubois paid for it by the registering of the bull Unigenitus and by the persecution of the Jansenists which the regent had stopped. After the majority of Louis XV. had been proclaimed on the 16th of February 1723, Dubois was the first to depart; and four months after his disappearance the duke of Orleans, exhausted by his excesses, carried with him into the grave that spirit of reform which he had compromised by his frivolous voluptuousness (December 2, 1723).
The Regency had been the making of the house of Orleans; thenceforward the question was how to humble it, and the duc de Bourbon, now prime minister—a great-grandson of the great Condé, but a narrow-minded man of Ministry of the duc de Bourbon. limited intelligence, led by a worthless woman—set himself to do so. The marquise de Prie was the first of a series of publicly recognized mistresses; from 1723 to 1726 she directed foreign policy and internal affairs despite the king’s majority, moved always more by a spirit of vengeance than by ambition. This sad pair were dominated by the self-interested and continual fear of becoming subject to the son of the Regent, whom they detested; but danger came upon them from elsewhere. They found standing in their way the very man who had been the author of their fortunes, Louis XV.’s tutor, uneasy in the exercise of a veiled authority; for the churchman Fleury knew how to wait, on condition of ultimately attaining his end. Neither the festivities given at Chantilly in honour of the king, nor the dismissal (despite the most solemn promises) of the Spanish infanta, who had been betrothed to Louis XV., nor yet the young king’s marriage to Maria Leszczynska (1725)—a marriage negotiated by the marquise de Prie in order to bar the throne from the Orleans family—could alienate the sovereign from his old master. The irritation kept up by the agents of Philip V., incensed by this affront, and the discontent aroused by the institutions of the cinquantième and the militia, by the re-establishment of the feudal tax on Louis XV.’s joyful accession, and by the resumption of a persecution of the Protestants and the Jansenists which had apparently died out, were cleverly exploited by Fleury; and a last ill-timed attempt by the queen to separate the king from him brought about the fall of the duc de Bourbon, very opportunely for France, in June 1726.
From the hands of his unthinking pupil Fleury eventually received the supreme direction of affairs, which he retained for seventeen years. He was aged seventy-two when he thus obtained the power which had been his unmeasured Cardinal Fleury, 1726-1743. though not ill-calculated ambition. Soft-spoken and polite, crafty and suspicious, he was pacific by temperament and therefore allowed politics to slumber. His turn for economics made Orry,[33] the controller-general of finance, for long his essential partner. The latter laboured at re-establishing order in fiscal affairs; and various measures like the impost of the dixième upon all property save that of the clergy, together with the end of the corn famine, sufficed to restore a certain amount of well-being. Religious peace was more difficult to secure; in fact politico-religious quarrels dominated all the internal policy of the kingdom during forty years, and gradually compromised the royal authority. The Jesuits, returned to power in 1723 with the duc de Bourbon and in 1726 with Fleury, rekindled the old strife regarding the bull Unigenitus in opposition to the Gallicans and the Jansenists. The retractation imposed upon Cardinal de Noailles, and his replacement in the archbishopric of Paris by Vintimille, an unequivocal Molinist, excited among the populace a very violent agitation against the court of Rome and the Jesuits, the prelude to a united Fronde of the Sorbonne and the parlement. Fleury found no other remedy for this agitation—in which appeal was made even to miracles—than lits de justice and lettres de cachet; Jansenism remained a potent source of trouble within the heart of Catholicism.
This worn-out septuagenarian, who prized rest above everything, imported into foreign policy the same mania for economy and the same sloth in action. He naturally adopted the idea of reconciling Louis XIV.’s descendants, Fleury’s foreign policy. who had all been embroiled ever since the Polish marriage. He succeeded in this by playing very adroitly on the ambition of Elizabeth Farnese and her husband Philip V., who was to reign in France notwithstanding any renunciation that might have taken place. Despite the birth of a dauphin (September 1729), which cut short the Spanish intrigues, the reconciliation was a lasting one (treaty of Seville); it led to common action in Italy, and to the installation of Spanish royalties at Parma, Piacenza, and soon after at Naples. Fleury, supported by the English Hanoverian alliance, to which he sacrificed the French navy, obliged the emperor Charles VI. to sacrifice the trade of the Austrian Netherlands to the maritime powers and Central Italy to the Bourbons, in order to gain recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction. The question of the succession in France lay dormant until the end of the century, and Fleury thought he had definitely obtained peace in the treaty of Vienna (1731).
The war of the Polish succession proved him to have been deceived. On the death of Augustus II. of Saxony, king of Poland, Louis XV.’s father-in-law had been proclaimed king by the Polish diet. This was an ephemeral success, ill-prepared War of the Polish Succession (1733-1738). and obtained by taking a sudden advantage of national sentiment; it was soon followed by a check, owing to a Russian and German coalition and the baseness of Cardinal Fleury, who, in order to avoid intervening, pretended to tremble before an imaginary threat of reprisals on the part of England. But Chauvelin, the keeper of the seals, supported by public opinion, avenged on the Rhine and the Po the unlucky heroism of the comte de Plélo at Dànzig,[34] the vanished dream of the queen, the broken word of Louis XV., and the treacherous abandonment of Poland. Fleury never forgave him for this: Chauvelin had checkmated him with war; he checkmated Chauvelin with peace, and hastened to replace Marshals Berwick and Villars by diplomatists. The third treaty of Vienna (1738), the reward of so much effort, would only have claimed for France the little duchy of Bar, had not Chauvelin forced Louis XV. to obtain Lorraine for his father-in-law—still hoping for the reversion of the crown; but Fleury thus rendered impossible any influence of the queen, and held Stanislaus at his mercy. In order to avenge himself upon Chauvelin he sacrificed him to the cabinets of Vienna and London, alarmed at seeing him revive the national tradition in Italy.
Fleury hardly had time to breathe before a new conflagration broke out in the east. The Russian empress Anne and the emperor Charles VI. had planned to begin dismembering the Turkish empire. More fortunate than Plélo, The Eastern question. Villeneuve, the French ambassador at Constantinople, endeavoured to postpone this event, and was well supported; he revived the courage of the Turks and provided them with arms, thanks to the comte de Bonneval (q.v.), one of those adventurers of high renown whose influence in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century is one of the most piquant features of that period. The peace of Belgrade (September 1739) was, by its renewal of the capitulations, a great material success for France, and a great moral victory by the rebuff to Austria and Russia.
France had become once more the arbiter of Europe, when the death of the emperor Charles VI. in 1740 opened up a new period of wars and misfortunes for Europe and for the pacific Fleury. Everyone had signed Charles VI.’s War of the Austrian Succession. Pragmatic Sanction, proclaiming the succession-rights of his daughter, the archduchess Maria Theresa; but on his death there was a general renunciation of signatures and an attempt to divide the heritage. The safety of the house of Austria depended on the attitude of France; for Austria could no longer harm her. Fleury’s inclination was not to misuse France’s traditional policy by exaggerating it, but to respect his sworn word; he dared not press his opinion, however, and yielded to the fiery impatience of young hot-heads like the two Belle-Isles, and of all those who, infatuated by Frederick II., felt sick of doing nothing at Versailles and were backed up by Louis XV.’s bellicose mistresses. He had to experience the repeated defections of Frederick II. in his own interests, and the precipitate retreat from Bohemia. He had to humble himself before Austria and the whole of Europe; and it was high time for Fleury, now fallen into second childhood, to vanish from the scene (January 1743).