Richelieu felt that all force, that every principle of peace, grandeur, and unity, was at the time in royalty. Royalty was in the sphere of things possible, or imaginary, the only regular, and even the only popular power. Outside of it there were only resistances, or rather attacks, more or less inconsequent and factious. The liberties of the middle ages, such as they had then, could appear only as turbulent and irregular liberties, incompatible with that order and that regularity which were a necessity for the genius of the cardinal and his age. Richelieu rendered absolute that power which alone could be a protection, well the others would be only sources of danger. In doing this he abolished no liberties, for there were then no liberties in the modern sense of the word. He had little else than privileges to suppress, and absolute monarchy conferred more privileges then it destroyed. We had only insubordinations to quell, and misdeeds to punish. That, in this struggle, his untempered severity amounted even to cruelty, sometimes odius, and almost always useless, M. de Carné does not deny, and I concede it even to a greater extent, perhaps, than he would approve; but what had been the triumph of the party, or rather of the contradictory parties? What monarchy—national, constitutional, and legal—could have resulted from the victory of those great lords, leagued together, and constantly intriguing against the government ever since the death of Henry IV.; sometimes open rebels, sometimes submissive; ever uniting, or separating, allying themselves at the the exigency of the moment; enemies to their friends of yesterday, faithful to-day with the factious of the morrow, Protestants with Catholics, Catholics with Huguenots, Frenchmen with Spain! What a magnificent bill of rights the Duchess de Chevereuse would have drawn up for Louis XIII. to sign!
Richelieu did the only thing which in his time was possible, and that is the justification of the political order which he founded. But his work was not complete, and was not completed, I dare add, solely because it was sanguinary. The blood shed, as M. de Carné well says, was not so abundant as is commonly believed; twenty-six men in all perished on the scaffold. How many politicians have the reputation of great benignity, who have put to death a much larger number! But on more than one occasion Richelieu's proceedings were odious, his cruelty refined, his vengeance useless. It belonged to a man of quite another nature to finish the work which he, with less violence, might have accomplished. The cardinal, when he died, left feudal opposition humbled, but living area The blood of Montmorency had implanted still more hate than fear. All the uneasy and restless forces, which, with no purpose, or only that of personal satisfaction, agitated France for nearly a century, crushed by the hand of the cardinal, drew themselves up anew when he was no longer there, and made themselves immediately felt and feared, under the reign of a child, the regency of a Spanish woman, and the ministry of an Italian. The work, then, was not complete, and the last germ of that aristocratic faction had not been extinguished on the scaffold of Cinq-Mars.
M. de Carné, who overrates Richelieu, greatly underrates Mazarin. Certainly, the man had less grandeur, and was more sullied; there were defects in his genius, and undeniably dark shades in his character; his morality was certainly of a low order, but his intellectual power was something marvellous. I am astonished to see that foreigner, that adventurer, that man who was never popular, that minister with greedy and grasping instincts, triumphing over enemies which the great cardinal had not been able to subdue, surviving the spirit of faction that had survived Richelieu,—to see him accomplish the work which Richelieu had not been able to accomplish by violence; and accomplishing it without having to reproach himself with erecting a single scaffold. This Italian, so furiously decried, who on re-entering Paris, after his victory, had not a word of anger to utter, nor a vengeance to inflict on any one; who re-established in their seats the magistrates of Parliament who had set a price on his head; who, vilified to satiety by the men of letters, tranquilly, and without ostentation, restored to them their pensions; who granted to the grandees of the kingdom—who were his enemies—nearly all they had asked, except their independence; this man, in all this, may indeed have been more able than generous, but I much like that kind of ability, and regard it as worth imitating. And what is curious, is that, from that minister, so many times dishonored, from that peace in which the factious were so well treated, from that struggle in which royalty was often so hard pressed, and in which it was so often forced to give way, royalty itself came forth stronger, more absolute, more venerated, more adored, than it was left by the lofty struggle maintained by Cardinal Richelieu, and in which his victories were ratified by the hangman.
It is in this way that monarchy was established in France; and, be it said in passing, without recurring to the necessity and legitimacy of this work, it has produced, in spite of its many imperfections and excesses, the most normal epoch in our history since that of St. Louis. This epoch had only brief duration, and it is sometimes, said, that what is called the ancient régime, was only a period of transition. I grant it. In this passing world, what century is there that is not a century of transition? When is it that the nations can stop, pitch their tents, and say, "It is good to be here?" I remember still all in my youth, the defunct Saint-Simonian school, which, perhaps, is not so defunct as is supposed, divided the history of the world into critical periods and organic periods; but as for its organic periods, they could not tell where to find them. It is the same with us all. I see, indeed, in history, times of passage, but not the time of sojourn; and I know not any century in which it might not be said with as much truth has in our own, "We are in the moment of transition." But if ever there was really an organic epoch, it was that of which we speak. If any age could really pass for a normal age, not indeed for the perfection of its virtue, but for the plenitude of its principle, it would certainly be the age of Louis XIV. That was essentially, in good and in evil, in greatness and littleness, in its good deeds and in its evil deeds, in its legitimate honor and in its idolatrous apotheosis, the age of royalty.
On many sides, certainly, this age is open to attack: yet neither men nor human institutions are to be judged after an absolute type. The greatest must miserably fail, if so judged. All judgments of human things our relative. When we place a life, in age, a rule, any institution whatever, by the side of the ideal type which are imagination forms to itself, nothing is to be said; that life is stained, that period is wretched, that régime is odious, that institution is detestable; but if we compare it with that which has been before, after, or contemporary with it, or even that which would have been humanly possible to put in its place [{207}] Our judgment is more indulgent, because less absolute. It is our glory, but also our error, to bear in ourselves a certain passion for the beautiful and the good, which can find no satisfaction in this world; to form to ourselves in everything, an ideal type superior to all human power to realize; to have in us the measure of heaven, which we very clear that Louis XIV. was only a poor knight, Bossuet only a common-place writer. Homer a street-singer, Raphael a dauber by the side of the king, the orator, the poet, the painter, of which we dream in our imagination.
That régime, inaugurated by Richelieu, confirmed by Mazarin, and glorified by Louis XIV., had, doubtless, its baseness as every other, but not more than others. It had its cruelties, and they were often inexcusable; it had a greater and more fundamental wrong still, that of pushing power to excess, and exaggerating its rights, as well as deifying the person of the sovereign. Human powers have all a limit, however absolute they may claim to be; and whether collected in a single hand, or dispersed among many—whether they are vested in the people, in an assembly, or in one man alone, the sphere of their action is no greater. Power has its limit in right, and this limit cannot be passed without guilt; it has its limit in fact, and against that it cannot dash its head without breaking it.
This was its fault, and it was cruelly expiated. We say, however, that the monarchy of Louis XIV. perished less by his fault than by that of his successor. Louis XV. inherited a royalty in its plenitude, surrounded by the profound respect of the nation. Louis XlV. had died unpopular, but he left the throne popular. The public calamities were charged to the man, not to the monarchy. I know not in all history a king more beloved, more venerated, more adored as king and independently of his personal qualities, than was Louis XV. A child at first, then a young man, without other personal merit than that of leaving Cardinal de Fleury to govern, Louis XV., during twenty years, gathered in peace the fruits of royalty. More humane than Louis XIV.; as selfish indeed, but selfish in another manner; not taking like him his royalty in earnest, and instead of accepting it as a dignity almost divine, regarding it as a private estate he had a right to enjoy without being under the slightest obligation to look after its management, Louis XV. took pleasure in squandering the treasures of popular respect and affection which his predecessor had bequeathed him. France persisted in respecting his royalty as long as she could. Neither the scandals of the Regency, less public than they have become for posterity, nor the succession of court influences, not yet sunk to the baseness of the later years, though beginning to approach it; nor the indolence and the corruption of that prince who hardly ever opened a letter on business, hardly ever spoke in council, and hardly ever went to the army; nor that egotism of the man crudely paraded in the place of the egotism of the king professed by Louis XIV. as a religion—nothing of all this disgusted the country, so marvellously had France been imbued with the love and worship of royalty by Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV.!
The corruption of ideas was slowly effected. The eighteenth century did not begin in 1700 nor in 1715, it was only beginning in 1750. The first irreligious book which gave much scandal was that of Toussaint in 1748. Up to that time Voltaire had restricted himself to some timid allusions against priests mingled with many flatteries of the court; the Pucelle was written but not published. Twenty-eight years after the death of Louis XIV., at the time of the illness of Metz, was still seen a thing unique perhaps—a whole country, not only the nobility and the court, but the citizens, the people, all those who were most disinterested in regard to royal favors, were seen [{208}] praying with a tenderness truly filial that God would leave to them a king who had reigned for twenty-eight years without having done anything, and wresting from Providence, so to speak, by the force of supplications, a life steeped in debauchery. This great and sincere testimonial of monarchical enthusiasm, which remained so deeply rooted in the memory of our fathers, was given, I say not to the worst, but certainly to the least meritorious of all our monarchs.
It is necessary, then, to render to our country this justice, that, if it came at length to despise power, it was because in spite of itself it was driven to it by power itself. It needed that this so solemn mark of filial devotion should be returned by continued indolence and corruption. It needed more than thirty years of the cynical workings of this royalty to erase from the heart in which it was so deeply rooted, the taste and the worship of royalty. They who, in seeking the semi-metaphysical, semi-political causes for the fall of the monarchy of Louis XIV., think they find the principle of its ruin in the manner of its constitution, may, in certain respects, be right, but they should tell us how it could have been constituted differently. However, they seem to me to count for too little the abuses so flagrant and so prolonged, which were made of it.