Volume 4 — THE FOUNDERS OF FRENCH UNITY. [Footnote 38] BY THE COUNT DE CHAMPAGNY.

Our readers are certainly not ignorant of the name or the book of M. de Carné. The work which he published in 1848, on the eve of the revolution of February, attracted the interest as well as the suffrages of all serious times, and the mass of those who read may know and appreciate it.

The idea of this book is well known. M. de Carné has been struck with what constitutes the peculiar genius of the French nation, its unity. He has wished to ascertain and trace the origin of that unity; and has found it summed up in a few proper names, and has condensed in the history of a small number of statesmen that of the nation.

Nothing could be more proper. We are the republican of any nation that God has made, and we are so because the French nation is more strictly one than any other, and more than any other needs a chief. Abandoned ourselves, and obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to take each a personal part in the common action, we are worth very little; but we are admirable when we are commanded. I do not know if Shakespeare is right when he calls France the Soldier of God, but what appears to me certain is that we are much better soldiers than citizens. In France the citizen is a stupid lout who, three-fourths of the time, lets himself be led, and miserably led, either by a journal or a spouting chief of a club; he abdicates himself and consents to be led blindly by the passions of others. He cries "Harrah for Revolution!" when he thinks he is only crying "Hurrah for Reform!" and makes a revolution without intending it, and makes it to the profit of his enemies. The soldier, on the contrary, finds in obedience the element of his spontaneity, of his intelligence, I had almost said, of his liberty. He was but a peasant, very dull and lubberly when he was free; put upon him the coat of passive obedience, and he acquires abilities which seem to belong only to liberty. He is prompt, he is sagacious, he is intelligent; faithful to his commander when his commander guides him, full of activity and spontaneity, if by chance the commander fails him. Why is this? Why is the English citizen so intelligent in commercial and political life, so hampered under the red coat? Why is the French peasant so stupid when he is taken from his plough, so much at his ease when in uniform? To this I know no answer, unless it be, that God has so made us. In France, the soldier is more himself when under discipline than the citizen in his liberty. It is not, then, surprising that the history of a people, I will not say so royalist, but so monarchical in the etymological sense of the word, should be summed up in the proper names of a few men.

The Abbé Suger, St. Louis, Du Guesclin, Joan of Arc, Louis XI., Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin: such are the personages whom M. de Carné has selected, and who he shows have gradually effected the development of French unity. It is in the succession of these names that we can follow with him that development.

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However, it is not necessary to believe, and M. de Carné does not pretend it, that these men made French unity. It has been made by itself. France was really one in fact before being made so by the government and laws. From the tenth century, when all Gaul was parcelled out, when the large provinces all belonged to masters independent in fact, save for the nominal law of vassalage, hardly acknowledged, this divided nation felt herself already one, felt herself already a nation. She has been one ever since, in reacting against the yoke of the Austrasian dynasty of the Carlovingians, she commenced to reject from her midst the Germanic race, language, and institutions. She had her language—we find it distinctly in the oath of 843; she had her capital—that little mud city which began to pass the arm of the Seine and to spread itself from the island over on the right bank, was already the centre of French life. She had her dynasty—that kinglet possessor of a narrow domain, which he disputed with great feudatories more powerful than he, was already and for all the king of France. She was already herself advancing to the time when the grandson of Robert the Strong would make himself obeyed from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, the langue d' Oyl would become the common tongue of Christendom, and all the fiefs from Flanders to the Mediterranean would hold from the great tower of the Louvre.

Thus it seems to me that one of the most important facts in our history, though little remarked, is the first armed manifestation of France under Louis the Fat. At the time the Emperor Henry V. penetrated into Champagne with a German army, the king, who, according to his own expression, had grown old at the siege of Montlhéry, in a few weeks found himself at the head of three hundred thousand men, united as a thick cloud of grasshoppers, who cover the banks of the rivers, the mountains, and plains. A few weeks more, and the great vassals, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Aquitaine, the Count of Brittany, brought him new reinforcements, and his army, raised to four hundred thousand men, was double that of the emperor, which was itself enormous for the middle ages. The political bond, however, which united those different countries which are to-day called France, was very feeble. These vassals, present at the camp of Louis the Fat, rendered him scarcely a ceremonial homage. What bond could unite so many different populations for the defence of a territory which, at that epoch, had scarcely a name, if it was not community of origin and a common aversion to the Germanic domination? The French nation was then one, even at that epoch, when the king was king of only five of our present departments at most. She made herself one by herself and her blood, before being made so by kings and laws.

In all we have been ourselves, and more ourselves than we think. We are neither Franks nor Visigoths; we are Gallo-Romans. We are Gauls civilized by Rome, and baptized by the church. The influence of the Frank domination has been more superficial than was believed in the last century; the name remains to us, but what else remains? In the language, which is the great symbol of nationality, the Germanic element, whether in words or in forms of speech, has evidently been only secondary; and it has left no traces in the national character. In institutions the Germanic element dominated for a time, for the simple reason that it possessed the political power; but it was the labor of the middle ages, and we can say their glory, to efface it.

In fact, the struggle against feudalism and feudal institutions was, to speak truly, a national struggle. There were traces of German domination during four centuries which it was necessary to efface. The day when France demanded of the house of Robert the Strong a chief, king or not, but a chief to oppose to the Rhenish sovereignty of the Carlovingians, that day she commenced, without knowing it, the struggle against the institutions which grew out of the Germanic {199} conquest. That struggle was continued under St. Louis, the epoch of the great radiation of French power, when the Mediterranean was almost our domain; when we established colonies even on the coasts of Africa; when our missionaries penetrated even to Thibet; when the sons of Genghis Khan were in diplomatic relations with us, and when even in Italy they spoke by preference our language as "the most delightful" and the most generally understood of any in the world.

In this work the church came to our aid. The great struggle of the papacy was also against the pride of the Germanic supremacy. It was against the feudalism planted in the church, against feudatory bishops who bore armor, and carried the falcon on their wrist, who held their dioceses as fiefs, and received their investiture from the German suzerain, and against the kings their patrons, that St. Gregory VII. wielded the papal power. It was against the institutions of Germanic barbarism, against the feudal aristocracy, against tests by fire and water, against private wars and judicial combats, that the church, and especially the papacy, never ceased to struggle. There was, then, during a whole century a perfect accord between the kings of France and the pontiffs of Rome, between the independence of the commons and the franchises of the religious orders, between the authority of the legists and that of the councils.

And for these institutions introduced by the Germanic conquests, and which we in accord with the church combated, what have we in accord with the church substituted? The institutions proper to our race, proper to our traditions as a civilized people, proper to our manners as Christians. For feudalism the idea of direct power such as Rome had taught, and such as Charlemagne comprehended and attempted to revive; in other words, for suzerainty sovereignty; for the jurisdiction of lords was substituted in spirituals that of ecclesiastical judges, in temporals that of royal justices; consequently, for feudal law the canon law of Christian, and the civil law of imperial Rome. For the right of private battle we substituted the possession of arms remitted to the sovereign alone, as in Rome and in all civilized countries. For duels and judicial trials by fire and water we substituted trials by witness, according to the Roman law and the law of the church and of all civilized nations. In a word, we effaced the traces of Germanic paganism and barbarism, to become in our laws once more what we were by blood, Gallo-Romans; what we were by our faith, Christians; what we still are by our reminiscences, civilized men. Such was the work of our race from Robert the Strong to St. Louis, of the popes from Gregory VII. to Gregory IX., of our commons from the first communal revolt to the enfranchisement of the serfs under Louis le Hutin, of the church from the day when she proclaimed the truce of God, and constituted to sustain it a sort of universal Landwehr, to that in which she canonized, in the person of St. Louis, the type, not of the feudal chief, but of the Christian king. Only from this union of all forces in reference to a single end, essentially national, legitimate, and Christian, there was one unhappy exception, that of the nobility, the heir, whether by blood or position, of the Germanic traditions, investitures, and institutions, and who became a sort of common enemy. They were found, in spite of their patriotism, standing apart from the nation, and unpopular in spite of the many ties which bound them to the people. The church, royalty, even the legists had their place in the popular affection, but the nobility had none. They were suspected by the government and abandoned by it to the suspicions of the people. Hence they were so much the further removed from the political tendency of the nation as they were nearer to its political action, and all the less disposed to co-operate in the work of national elaboration as they were more open to the seductions of foreign {200} politics. Hence they could make the war of the Annagnacs in the fourteenth century, the war of the Public Good in the fifteenth, the religious wars of the sixteenth, and of the Fronde in the seventeenth; but it was never theirs to exercise that popular, regular, pacific action, the action of patronage and defence, exercised by the aristocracy of England. They had only the choice, on the one hand, of a selfish, unpopular revolt against the king—a revolt resting on the enemies of France for its support, or on the other, of service to the crown, a service which they gloriously and courageously rendered indeed, but which was a service of perfect obedience, in which there was nothing to be gained for their order, in which indeed they could reap glory, but not power. Never has there been a real aristocracy in France—there has been only an obedient or an insubordinate feudal nobility.

Thus may be given in brief the sum of the first part of M. de Carné s book; and this first part foretells what is to follow. The position of royalty, the nobles, and the commons respectively, was during four centuries developed only on bases furnished by the middle ages. The development effected in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries M. de Carné has personified in Suger, abbot of St. Denis, and St. Louis—an able and intelligent choice. Suger and St. Louis were two rare statesmen in an epoch when statesmanship hardly existed. Suger, formed by the rigid and wise discipline of the church, a full-grown man in the midst of the childish caprices and inconsequences of his age, a real statesman, although the minister of a king who was no statesman at all, was certainly one of the greatest and most intelligent agents in the national work, of which those even who were its instruments rarely had the slightest conception. St. Louis rose still further above his age. He pertained not more to the middle ages by his faith than by his statesmanship he pertains to our own times. No king ever labored harder to evolve from its feudal envelope the civil and political life of France; no king ever studied more diligently to place royalty on the footing of modern sovereignties, and to fashion it, as M. de Carné well observes, after the Biblical royalty, rather than after feudal suzerainty.

M. de Carné is very right, then, in seeking in these two rare men a serious and matured political plan; but he would have found it difficult to discover traces of such a plan in others, and perhaps even the habits of his own mind render him less fitted to judge other heroes of the middle ages. In the very pages he has written, I see, indeed, Suger; I see, indeed St. Louis; but I do not see enough of the middle age itself, of that age of youth with its contradictions and it's inconsistencies; and M. de Carné it seems to me to be too wise, too sensible, too logical, and too much of a modern statesman, to paint it in its true light.

I express here, I confess, a personal impression, not a judgment, and perhaps a profounder study of the monuments of the middle ages would give me a different impression. But I own that when I seek the the middle ages in modern writings, I receive an impression quite different from that which I receive when I attempt to study them in their own monuments. With the moderns, not only with M. de Carné, but with writers who are antiquaries rather than statesman, I find presented as characteristic of the middle ages profound political use, or at least a certain power of foresight and calculation in those who govern; but if I open the smallest chronicle, I discover nothing of the sort. These kings and these statesmen become only warriors, rude captains, capable of any devotion—capable also of any violence and even of any falsehood, rather than of any wise or consistent policy seriously and steadily pursued. Whether it is merely the result of the oldness of the language, and the simplicity, so often apparent, which a still unformed idiom gives to thought, I {201} must say this age has on me the effect of an age of infancy.

It's tongue stammers, and its diction resembles the patois of our provinces and the songs of our nurses. In art it had, not without a simplicity sometimes admirable, that awkwardness and that stiffness which mark the first toddling walk of children. Its public life was mingled with puerile ceremonies, with a fantastic symbolism, sometimes even indecent. Its faith asked for no reason, as asks the mature man; but felt, saw, understood as does the adolescent; it carried into it sometimes a puerile superstition which impaired it, sometimes an admirable simplicity which excludes the wisdom of the doctors, though not the devotedness of martyrs. It instituted the Feast of Fools and of Asses. Yet it made the Crusades. It embraced Christian morality without hesitation and without an objection; it embraced it, forgot to practise it; while professing good, it practised evil with the facility of contradiction surpassing even the ordinary powers of human nature; it was a good Catholic, but scrupled not to pillage the churches. Its submission it refused in principle to nobody—to the pope, the king, or the suzerain; and yet never did the papacy receive more frequent insults, never had royalty such trouble to make itself obeyed, never were quarrels between superior and inferior so frequent, as in the middle ages—those ages of submission and of insubordination, in which the rules of the hierarchy were better established and less observed than in any other. This contradiction, this inconsistency, this easy acceptance of the law while it is asserted only in theory, and this easy forgetfulness of it when it comes to practice, this subordination of the mind, and this revolt of the heart, is it not plainly that of boyhood? Boy seldom refuses to accept the moral truth that is taught him; he does not reject in theory even the obedience which is exacted of him; but, at a given moment, it costs him nothing to contradict that truth in practice, and to fail in that obedience; he denies never the law; he unceasingly breaks it.

It is true, that when we rise to a certain general point of view, nothing appears better regulated than the mediaeval society. Regularity, far from being defective, was in excess. A manifold foresight multiplied the laws. The church and the state, feudality and the commons, sovereignty and suzerainty, had each their codes, complicated and provident as those of a society in which right and interest are complicated and run athwart each other. Decretals, bulls, decisions of councils, feudal assizes, royal charters and commercial charters, laws and regulations of all kinds, embarrass us by their number much more than they sadden us by their absence. And the definitive result of the whole is a grand and admirable effort of Christian wisdom to establish in this world the reign of justice and peace. No right is denied, no interest is sacrificed, no power is without its limit, no liberty without its defense. Relations of the king to the subject, of the suzerain to the vassal, of the master to the serf, all are regulated there on the basis, so often forgotten, of reciprocal rights and duties. Never, perhaps, have the conciliation of order and liberty, hierarchy and the equality, the powers of the chief and the rights of the inferior, been conceived in so happy a manner.

I said conceived, not effected; for if we come to the fact, the rule fails to be translated into reality, or, rather, is so often broken that it may be said not even to exist; all relations become violent; master and serf, suzerain and vassal, king and subject, whose mutual relations were so well settled in law, are in a continual struggle against one another. That magnificent edifice presented us in theory, with the pope and the emperor at its summit, and in which the lowest serf holds his place, is in reality as unsubstantial as the fairy castles seen in our dreams.

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When I speak thus of the middle ages, I speak only of the lay society; I do not speak of the cloister and the church. They judge very improperly the middle ages who identify society in them with the church. The church was then, as now, not of her age. She struggled against it, and was more or less sullied on the points on which she came more directly in contact with the world—that is, in the secular clergy, and even the episcopacy, and more completely herself only when the cloister, the distance of places, and the diversity of origin removed her farthest from the feudal society—that is to say, in the religious orders and the papacy. I regard as a veritable chimera that dream, sometimes entertained, of a Europe gentle and submissive, obedient to the least word of the papacy, and conducted peaceably by the staff of St. Peter—in the ways of ignorance and barbarism, say unbelieving historians—in the ways of happiness and salvation, say Catholic writers. Both delight in this dream; the former because they would ruin the church by throwing upon her the responsibility of the crimes and vices of the middle ages; the latter because they would restore those ages by identifying them with the church. But I ask them to tell me at what time, during what year, what day, or what hour only this general submission existed? I ask them to tell me if there was a single day, a single minute which did not bring to the church her combat, not merely against kings and feudal lords, but against nations, and not only on one point of Europe, but on a thousand?—if once only this temporal jurisdiction of the papacy over the world was exercised otherwise than at the point of the sword—the sword of steel, as well as the sword of speech?

This middle age, this docile child, this innocent lamb, which allows itself to be led gently and blindly by the shepherd's crook, I find nowhere; I see indeed a child, but a hard and rebellious child, who seldom bends, rarely except to threats, and who, however humbly he may and, finds it no fault to straighten himself immediately after. Alas! the infancy of a people is not the infancy of men. The infant man has his physical weakness, which permits him to be controlled, and in restraining protects him. The infant people, for its misfortune, has all the passions and all the material forces of the full-grown man, and by the side of this formidable infant, the papacy to me appears different in everything, different by its supernatural life, which lifts it above the human condition, by the maturity of its intelligence, which elevates it above this youthful world, by the traditions of the Italian civilization which raises it above this world, still sunk in barbarism. It is divine in the midst of men, adult in the midst of children, Italian in the midst of these Teutons, Roman in the midst of these barbarians, civilian in the midst of these soldiers.

And by this, it seems to me, is justified, even if not otherwise, the political part played by the papacy in the middle ages. When it is demanded by what right it pretended to the temporal government of Europe, I answer unhesitatingly, by

or, at least, the right which maturity has naturally over youth, science over ignorance, reason over unreason. The mature man, whom chance has placed in the midst of indocile and imprudent children, has over them by his age and reason alone a part, at least, of the rights of a father and a teacher. Only, with the father or teacher physical force supports this right, while to the papacy it was wanting, and could be supplied only by the sanctity of its character, the authority of it's words, and the intrepidity of its government.

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This will be for ever its glory. The glory of the church is far less in having reigned than in having fought. That temporal dominion of the Holy See was never in the state of a peaceable, regular, acknowledged sovereignty. It was only a form of the unrelenting warfare which the church sustained against evil,—one of the phases of her never-ending combat, one of the arms of her ceaseless struggle. The church has fought either without auxiliaries, or with auxiliaries always ready to abandon her; she herself wields not the sword of the flesh, and is never sure that those who do handle it in her name will not turn it against her; sometimes saved by kings and menaced by the people, sometimes aided by the people and crushed by kings, she has fought her fight without having, in reality, any other human power than that of her dangers, the sufferings, the exile, the captivity, the humiliations, the death of her pontiffs. She has never completely triumphed, but she has never fainted. She has never completely teamed the lion she combated, but she has been able to soften him. She has never been a peaceful and happy mother in the midst of submissive children, a pacific queen in the midst of devoted subjects; she has been rather an unwearied combatant, according to his word who said, "I am calm to bring the world not peace, but a sword."

But the moment must come when the child becomes a man. The struggle then changes front. The man is not better than the child; properly speaking, he is not wiser or more reasonable: he has simply more order in his life, and more logical sequence in his conduct. A sort of human respect induces him to study to maintain greater harmony between his principles and his actions; when he has a good theory, he tries oftener than the child to have a good practice; and oftener when his conduct is bad, he concocts a bad theory to justify it. To use a well-known word, he practices his good maxims or he maxims his bad practices, as the grace of God in him and his conscience are stronger or weaker. This accord with himself, which is the characteristic, at least the pretension, of the mature man, makes alike his greatness and his littleness. The church, when society is matured, has to combat doctrines rather than passions, ideas rather than vices. The middle ages were, then, the infancy of Christian nations; should we say the sixteenth century—the age of passion, of effervescence, of revolt, of lapses—was the age of youth? Is the present age the age of maturity or of decrepitude? This, five hundred years hence, our descendants may be able to determine.

It still remains to know whether the childhood of a people, like the childhood of individuals, ought not to be regretted rather than disdained, and whether it does not charm us more by the memory of its joys than it humiliates us by the memory of its weaknesses. If the childhood of the individual is not capable of crimes, it is not any more capable of great deeds; the childhood of a people, on the contrary, although it may have its gentle and simple side, has also its heroic and sublime side. It was so with the child-people who passed the Red Sea, or fought under the walls of Troy. They are child-men for whom the Pentateuch was written, and who inspired the Iliad. They are child-men, our ancestors, who reconquered the tomb of Christ, who carried faith even to the depths of China, and who with Joan of Arc chased the English from France. They were not souls free from all blemish, nor hands never sullied; very often the brutality of their manners repels us, and we are borne, in seeing them, like the tender souls in those iron ages, to seek refuge in the shadow of the cloister, in order to find there, at least, peace, delicacy of heart, dignity of intelligence, and serenity of soul. But they were really of those to whom much is forgiven, for they loved much. Among their contradictions they had this grand and noble contradiction—that of having committed great faults, and yet preserving the love of God; of being soiled with vice, and yet not abandoned to it; of having removed far from the Lord, {204} but having never despaired of his mercy; of being very hard and very cruel, and yet preserving a loving fibre in their hearts, and tears in their eyes. After all, if these men were children, they were the children of whom it is said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." If the middle ages had vices, they had also faith: the world in ripening has lost the faith, and retained the vices.

Here is what, as it seems to me, may be said of the middle ages, after what M. de Carné has said, and by the side of what he has said. It may not be without some advantage to place this very different view by the side of the political view, which he has so well developed. I repeat it, that considering only the two types of Suger and St. Louis, he comprehends them, for they come within his sphere; he has, perhaps, not so well comprehended the medium in which they lived, or perhaps he partially forgets it.

We must now follow France and Europe in that more manly, or senile, epoch of their life, which M. de Carné after having given us sketches of Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc, personifies in Louis XI., Henry IV., Cardinal Richelieu, and Mazarin. These are already times which touch very closely our own. The work of Henry IV., of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV., has crumbled almost under our own eyes, and in many respects their spirit is still living in our midst. The proof is in the fact that it is still the object of attack, Richelieu especially. Louis XIV. is discussed with all the vehemence of a contemporary controversy. This indeed is not the case with M. de Carné. There is not, perhaps, in his book an appreciation more calm, more dignified, more grave than that of the policy of the great cardinal.

He has justified this policy. He shows with an evidence that seems to me incontestable, that, setting aside the severity of certain acts, setting aside the last months of a premature old age, when weariness of power began to obscure his lofty intellect, Richelieu could have done hardly otherwise than he did. The nobility, it must be said, a little in all times, and very much for a century, had yielded to a deplorable spirit of faction. Whether it dreamed, like the Calvinistic gentlemen of the sixteenth century, of a resurrection of feudalism; whether in its eyes, as in those of the Duke of Rohan, was zoning the plan of an aristocratic republic; or whether, as more frequently happens, all its ambitions were individual, and that the alliances it formed were only the coalitions of dissatisfied pretensions, always is it certain that it was in an eminent degree incapable of a serious and well-defined policy. It could not even be national, and for fourscore years there was not a chief of the party who did not seek his support in England or in Spain, and who did not treat in the beginning of his revolt with foreigners, as he counted at its close on treating with his king. The commonalty, though more national, had not a whit more case for the necessary conditions of regular political action. The parliament incontestably formed the head all the Third Estate: it was the most dignified post, the highest placed, the gravest, and the most capable of affairs; and yet the parliaments interfered in politics only with the littlenesses and caprice of children, the conceit of youngsters, or the timidity of old men; by turns submissive and rebellious, idolaters of absolute power, and rebels to every government; rash and timid, rebelling and begging pardon.

The cardinal has been almost always reproached for having established royalty without a basis; but this basis, where was he to find it? Was it ever in his power to create it? Could he found a political aristocracy, respecting the laws, and protecting the people, where there was only a turbulent, unpopular, and unstatesmanlike nobility? Could he erect on French soil a House of Commons, animated at once with the spirit of legal obedience and of constitutional resistance, {205} at a time when it did not exist even in England, and where there were only citizens ready to revolt, as was proved in the time of the League, and ready to submit, and even to worship power, as was proved under Henry IV., but wholly incapable of resisting without rebelling? At least, it will not be said that at all hazards, and without taking any account of these facts, the cardinal should have inaugurated in France something like the charter of 1814, or that of 1830, which would be very much like reproaching Hannibal for not using gunpowder, and Christopher Columbus for not using steam!

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.

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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.

Neither am I among those who accuse the France of the old régime of servility. Its love for royalty may have been excessive, but it was, at least, sincere; and if sincere it was not servile. We may be guilty of idolatry towards those we love, but we can be guilty of servility only towards those we love not. Royalty, I admit, was regarded as a demi-god, but they who really worship the false god do it in good faith. Our fathers were, perhaps, fanatics, but they were not slaves. The great English lords who, in the eighteenth century, traversed France in a post chaise, in order to attend the court at Versailles, and to pass several weeks in Parts, doubtless judged the country to be inhabited only by the cowardly slaves of an Asiatic despot;—they found no House of Commons, no speaker nor usher with the black rod. In the same way, Sterne, seeing at a play a man who annoyed his neighbors and whom the guard ordered to leave, was confounded by the arbitrary proceeding, and could not comprehend that the citizen did not maintain by his fists the right to disturb the performance. It was a country judged on the surface by the habits of mind of another country during About the same time, another Englishman, [Footnote 39] who did not journey in a post-chaise, who went on foot from village to village, playing the flute for the peasantry, holding disputations in the monasteries, and thus paying his reckoning, judged France a little differently. He came very near, God forgive him, envying it, and preferring it to his own country! He met here not miserable slaves, but happy men, satisfied with themselves, and satisfied with all the world. The current money in this country, according to him, was not silver; was not the material favors of the government; was not, or, at least, was not only, pension and place; it was a vain money, no doubt, like all human riches, but a money, at least, more delicate and more noble. "Society here finds its life in HONOR. Praise gained by merit, or obtained by an imaginary worth, is the money which passes current from hand to hand, and by a noble commerce passes from the court to the camp and the cottage." France, which for the others was the country of servitude, was for him the country of honor.

In reality it is hardly for us to be ashamed of the servitude of forefathers. It is true, more mature than they, we no longer either worship or respect authority; but we count it no fault to beg its favors. We crowd around the altar, though we no longer believe in the god. Every revolution has shown us the ante-chambers {209} invaded in turn by a cloud of conquerors, revolutionists, or conservatives, monarchists or republicans, all men have profound conviction, of a well-tried self-respect, a liberalism true as steel, and an independence as firm as iron, but who nevertheless came to beg their bit from the budget Since we came into the world, four times, at least, have we seeing this hideous quarry to which (we must render all justice to our equalitarians) all classes, high or low, rich or for, lettered or unlettered, have flocked with a harmony truly democratic. We now no longer conceive of a public service which is not paid for, a state function which is not an income, a position which has not its money value. Have we the right, in good faith, to be ashamed of the times when they said not places but charges, because the public service was considered not a position but duty? Have we the right to attack even that court and that finance of aforetime, stained, I grant, with cupidity and adulation, but not otherwise than in all times, and are still the classes that approach power? Have we the right, above all, to attack the whole of that society much less greedy of the favors of power, much more independent of it than we are ourselves, that bourgeoisie who loved so much its king from whom it had nothing to expect, except the suppression of a fourth of its revenue? Those magistrates who gave their last penny for the right to rise at five o'clock in the morning, and pass the forenoon in the audience, well to-day the lowest deputy finds himself poorly paid by two thousand francs for rising at ten o'clock? That provincial nobility, poor, obscure, disdained, who had all the charges of aristocracy without its benefits, and who esteemed themselves but too happy when, after twenty years of service in order, where they left their patrimony at first, then an arm, a leg, their brothers and cousins, they obtained from the bounty of the king their discharge, and permission to retire to their homes with the cross of St. Louis, and the brevet of Brigadier-General; crippled, impoverished, but endeavoring, if possible, to "preserve a fortune sufficient to enable their children to replace them"? We, citizens and freemen, do we even for much money, what those servile beings did for a little honor?

I have passed here a little beyond the work of M. de Carné, who stops with Mazarin. He will pardon me, even thank me, for not permitting myself to go farther still, and to broach the hackneyed subject of 1789. I have elsewhere had occasion to set forth my views on that subject, by the side of M. de Carné's, happy to agree with him in many respects, though more severe, perhaps, in my judgment of that revolutionary movement than he is. The tendency of minds toward reforms might have been legitimate, but the way taken to effect them was false, and in my eyes infected with evil from the first. In fact, the groundwork of French unity, which M. de Carné represents for us with so much love, what has been its use, if, after the labor of so many centuries, it could be attained only by a national convulsion, the most violent, perhaps, which has figured in history? Civil equality, unity of territory, reform in legislation, were they not already sufficiently prepared by St. Louis, Charles VII., Louis XI., Richelieu, and Louis XIV., and was it necessary that they should be purchased by the revolt of the jeu de paume, by the blood of Versailles, and by the crimes of the reign of Terror? Were our countrymen not criminal, at that epoch, in repulsing a past in which they might, on the contrary, have found a firmer support for the reforms needed?

Be that as it may, I cannot but thank M. de Carné, in the name of all those who still read, for the work which he achieved in 1848, and for the return which he has just made to his former studies. Whoever we may be, and whatever may be the present, it is not necessary that it should absorb us. As the spectacle of the present age serves to explain past ages, so should a return to the past cool and calm in our minds {210} the agitation of the present. Of this freedom from contemporaneous reflection, M. de Carné has given us a noble example. On two or three points, at most, the statesman of our times is a little too perceptible. I much doubt, for instance, if in the sixteenth century, the Balafré could have founded in France a dynasty and a citizen royalty like that of Louis Philippe. Still it might have been had the Balafré been a cadet of the Capetian family, and if the dynasty of the Valois had been for forty years shaken by two revolutions. What strikes me, on the contrary, in the history of the League, and what appears to me one of the greatest proofs of the spirit of nationality and of loyalty which then reigned in the commonalty, is the repugnance which they always manifested to accepting a foreign dynasty, the timid and reluctant manner with which the proposition was made, and the unpopularity with which it was received. At the time of the League, the nation wished two things which then seemed irreconcilable—Catholic royalty and French loyalty; it wished, so to speak, an impossibility, but it willed it with decision and perseverance, and that impossibility it obtained.

But, save these slight traces of the man of the present, M. de Carné has been able, with rare facility, to identify himself with past ages; he has known how to take from erudition what was necessary to enlighten his political point of view, without suffering it absorb him. He has been perfectly able in surveying all these different subjects to identify himself by turns with each of them. Without neglecting details and without losing himself in them, without disdaining to speak to the imagination, and without suffering himself to be carried away by the fascinations of the picturesque, without abandoning himself to political theories, and without dispoiling history of them, he has in turn as fully known his Abbot Suger, his St. Louis, is Du Guesclin, and each one of his heroes, as if he had never studied else. He makes himself master of each one of these subjects in brief time, but with a sagacity worth more than time, and with a quick perception of the dominant idea which often escapes the simple erudite. He has not me what is called a philosophical history, a task become facile and commonplace, and he has not made what is still more easy, purely contemporary politics à propos of the past; he has not made a history, if by history we understand the detailed recital of events; but he has known how to keep constantly at his disposition the philosophical view which illuminates history, the political sense which helps to judge it, and the knowledge of facts which is its foundation. He has not made a history, but he has made a luminous summary, and given us a necessary complement of all the theories of French history.