A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume VI Part 11

Pitt still reigned over Parliament and over England, governing a free country sovereign-masterlike. His haughty prejudice against France still ruled all the decisions of the English government, but Lord Bute, the young monarch's adviser, was already whispering pacific counsels destined ere long to bear fruit. Pitt's dominion was tottering when the first overtures of peace arrived in London. The Duke of Choiseul proposed a congress. He at the same time negotiated directly with England. Whilst Pitt kept his answer waiting, an English squadron blockaded Belle-Isle, and the governor, M. de Sainte-Croix, left without relief, was forced to capitulate after an heroic resistance. When the conditions demanded by England were at last transmitted to Versailles, the English flag was floating over the citadel of Belle-Isle, the mouth of the Loire and of the Vilaine was blockaded. The arrogant pretensions of Mr. Pitt stopped at nothing short of preserving the conquests of England in both hemispheres; he claimed, besides, the demolition of Dunkerque "as a memorial forever of the yoke imposed upon France." Completely separating the interests of England from those of the German allies, he did not even reply to the proposals of M. de Choiseul as to the evacuation of Hesse and Hanover. Mistress of the sea, England intended to enjoy alone the fruits of her victories.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANTWERP----233]

The parleys were prolonged, and M. de Choiseul seemed to be resigned to the bitterest pill of concession, when a new actor came upon the scene of negotiation; France no longer stood isolated face to face with triumphant England. The younger branch of the house of Bourbon cast into the scale the weight of its two crowns and the resources of its navy.

The King of Spain, Ferdinand VI., who died on the 10th of August, 1759, had not left any children. His brother, Charles III., King of Naples, had succeeded him. He brought to the throne of Spain a more lively intelligence than that of the deceased king, a great aversion for England, of which he had but lately had cause to complain, and the traditional attachment of his race to the interests and the glory of France. The Duke of Choiseul managed to take skilful advantage of this disposition. At the moment when Mr. Pitt was haughtily rejecting the modest ultimatum of the French minister, the treaty between France and Spain, known by the name of Family Pact, was signed at Paris (August 15, 1761).

Never had closer alliance been concluded between the two courts, even at the time when Louis XIV. placed his grandson upon the throne of Spain.

It was that intimate union between all the branches of the house of Bourbon which had but lately been the great king's conception, and which had cost him so many efforts and so much blood; for the first time it was becoming favorable to France; the n.o.ble and patriotic idea of M. de Choiseul found an echo in the soul of the King of Spain; the French navy, ruined and humiliated, the French colonies, threatened and all but lost, found faithful support in the forces of Spain, recruited as they were.

by a long peace. The King of the Two Sicilies and the Infante Duke of Parma entered into the offensive and defensive alliance, but it was not open to any other power in Europe to be admitted to this family union, cemented by common interests more potent and more durable than the transitory combinations of policy. In all the ports of Spain s.h.i.+ps were preparing to put to sea. Charles III. had undertaken to declare war against the English if peace were not concluded before the 1st of May, 1762. France promised in that case to cede to him the Island of Minorca.

All negotiations with England were broken off; on the 20th of September, Mr. Pitt recalled his amba.s.sador; this was his last act of power and animosity; he at the same time proposed to the council of George III.

to include Spain forthwith in the hostilities. Lord Bute opposed this; he was supported by the young king as well as by the majority of the ministers. Pitt at once sent in his resignation, which was accepted.

Lord Bute and the Tories came into power. Though more moderate in their intentions, they were as yet urged forward by popular violence, and dared not suddenly alter the line of conduct. The family pact had raised the hopes--always an easy task--of France, the national impulse inclined towards the amelioration of the navy; the estates of Languedoc were the first in the field, offering the king a s.h.i.+p of war; their example was everywhere followed; sixteen s.h.i.+ps, first-rates, were before long in course of construction, a donation from the great political or financial bodies; there were, besides, private subscriptions amounting to thirteen millions; the Duke of Choiseul sought out commanders even amongst the mercantile marine, and everywhere showed himself favorable to blue officers, as the appellation then was of those whose birth excluded them from the navy corps; the knowledge of the n.o.bly born often left a great deal to be desired, whatever may have been their courage and devotion.

This was a last generous effort on behalf of the shreds of France's peris.h.i.+ng colonies. The English government did not give it time to bear fruit; in the month of January, 1762, it declared war against Spain.

Before the year had rolled by, Cuba was in the hands of the English, the Philippines were ravaged and the galleons laden with Spanish gold captured by British s.h.i.+ps. The unhappy fate of France had involved her generous ally. The campaign attempted against Portugal, always hand in hand with England, had not been attended with any result. Martinique had shared the lot of Guadaloupe, lately conquered by the English after an heroic resistance. Canada and India had at last succ.u.mbed. War dragged its slow length along in Germany. The brief elevation of the young czar, Peter III., a pa.s.sionate admirer of the great Frederick, had delivered the King of Prussia from a dangerous enemy, and promised to give him an ally equally trusty and potent. France was exhausted, Spain discontented and angry; negotiations recommenced, on what disastrous conditions for the French colonies in both hemispheres has already been remarked; in Germany the places and districts occupied by France were to be restored; Lord Bute, like his great rival, required the destruction of the port of Dunkerque.

This was not enough for the persistent animosity of Pitt. The preliminaries of peace had been already signed at Fontainebleau on the 3d of November, 1762: when they were communicated to Parliament, the fallen minister, still the nation's idol and the real head of the people, had himself carried to the House of Commons. He was ill, suffering from a violent attack of gout; two of his friends led him with difficulty to his place, and supported him during his long speech; being exhausted, he sat down towards the end, contrary to all the usages of the House, without, however, having once faltered in his attacks upon a peace too easily made, of which it was due to him that England was able to dictate the conditions. "It is as a maritime power," he exclaimed, "that France is chiefly if not exclusively formidable to us;" and the ardor of his spirit restored to his enfeebled voice the dread tones which Parliament and the nation had been wont to hear "what we gain in this respect is doubly precious from the loss that results to her. America, sir, was conquered in Germany. Now you are leaving to France a possibility of restoring her navy."

The peace was signed, however, not without ill humor on the part of England, but with a secret feeling of relief; the burdens which weighed upon the country had been increasing every year. In 1762, Lord Bute had obtained from Parliament four hundred and fifty millions (eighteen million pounds) to keep up the war. "I wanted the peace to be a serious and a durable one," said the English minister in reply to Pitt's attacks; "if we had increased our demands, it would have been neither the one nor the other."

M. de Choiseul submitted in despair to the consequences of the long-continued errors committed by the government of Louis XV. "Were I master," said he, "we would be to the English what Spain was to the Moors; if this course were taken, England would be destroyed in thirty years from now." The king was a better judge of his weakness and of the general exhaustion. "The peace we have just made is neither a good one nor a glorious one; n.o.body sees that better than I," he said in his private correspondence; "but, under such unhappy circ.u.mstances, it could not be better, and I answer for it that if we had continued the war, we should have made, a still worse one next year." All the patriotic courage and zeal of the Duke of Choiseul, all the tardy impulse springing from the nation's anxieties, could not suffice even to palliate the consequences of so many years' ignorance, feebleness, and incapacity in succession.

Prussia and Austria henceforth were left to confront one another, the only actors really interested in the original struggle, the last to quit the battle-field on to which they had dragged their allies. By an unexpected turn of luck, Frederick II. had for a moment seen Russia becoming his ally; a fresh blow came to wrest from him this powerful support. The Czarina Catherine II., Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst and wife of the Czar Peter III., being on bad terms with her husband and in dread of his wrath, had managed to take advantage of the young czar's imprudence in order to excite a mutiny amongst the soldiers; he had been deposed, and died before long in prison. Catherine was proclaimed in his place. With her accession to the throne there commenced for Russia a new policy, equally bold and astute, having for its sole aim, unscrupulously and shamelessly pursued, the aggrandizement and consolidation of the imperial power; Russia became neutral in the strife between Prussia and Austria. The two sovereigns, left without allies and with their dominions drained of men and money, agreed to a mutual exchange of their conquests; the boundaries of their territories once more became as they had been before the Seven Years' War. Frederick calculated at more than eight hundred thousand men the losses caused to the belligerents by this obstinate and resultless struggle, the fruit of wicked ambition or culpable weaknesses on the part of governments. Thanks to the indomitable energy and the equally zealous and unscrupulous ability of the man who had directed her counsels during the greater part of the war, England alone came triumphant out of the strife. She had won India forever; and, for some years at least, civilized America, almost in its entirety, obeyed her laws. She had won what France had lost, not by superiority of arms, or even of generals, but by the natural and proper force of a free people, ably and liberally governed.

The position of France abroad, at the end of the Seven Years' War, was as painful as it was humiliating; her position at home was still more serious, and the deep-lying source of all the reverses which had come to overwhelm the French. Slowly lessened by the faults and misfortunes of King Louis XIV.'s later years, the kingly authority, which had fallen, under Louis XV., into hands as feeble as they were corrupt, was ceasing to inspire the nation with the respect necessary for the working of personal power: public opinion was no longer content to accuse the favorite and the ministers; it was beginning to make the king responsible for the evils suffered and apprehended. People waited in vain for a decision of the crown to put a stop to the incessantly renewed struggles between the Parliament and the clergy. Disquieted at one and the same time by the philosophical tendencies which were beginning to spread in men's minds, and by the comptroller-general Machault's projects for exacting payment of the imposts upon ecclesiastical revenues, the Archbishop of Paris, Christopher de Beaumont, and the Bishop of Mirepoix, Boyer, who was in charge of the benefice-list, conceived the idea of stifling these dangerous symptoms by an imprudent recourse to the spiritual severities so much dreaded but lately by the people. Several times over, the last sacraments were denied to the dying who had declined to subscribe to the bull Unigenitus, a clumsy measure, which was sure to excite public feeling and revive the pretensions of the Parliaments to the surveillance, in the last resort, over the government of the church; Jansenism, fallen and persecuted, but still living in the depths of souls, numbered amongst the ranks of the magistracy, as well as in the University of Paris, many secret partisans; several parish-priests had writs of personal seizure issued against them, and their goods were confiscated. Decrees succeeded decrees; in spite of the king's feeble opposition the struggle was extending and reaching to the whole of France. On the 22d of February, 1753, the Parliament of Paris received orders to suspend all the proceedings they had commenced on the ground of refusals of the sacraments; the king did not consent even to receive the representations. By the unanimous vote of the hundred and fifty-eight members sitting on the Court, Parliament determined to give up all service until the king should be pleased to listen. "We declare," said the representation, "that our zeal is boundless, and that we feel sufficient courage to fall victims to our fidelity. The Court could not serve without being wanting to their duties and betraying their oaths."

Indolent and indifferent as he was, King Louis XV. acted as seldom and as slowly as he could; he did not like strife, and gladly saw the belligerents exhausting against one another their strength and their wrath; on principle, however, and from youthful tradition, he had never felt any liking for the Parliaments. "The long robes and the clergy are always at daggers drawn," he would say to Madame de Pompadour "they drive me distracted with their quarrels, but I detest the long robes by far the most. My clergy, at bottom, are attached to me and faithful to me; the others would like to put me in tutelage. . . . They will end by ruining the state; they are a pack of republicans. . . . However, things will last my time, at any rate." Severe measures against the Parliament were decided upon in council. Four magistrates were arrested and sent to fortresses; all the presidents, councillors of inquests and of requests, were exiled; the grand chamber, which alone was spared, refused to administer justice. Being transferred to Pontoise, it persisted in its refusal. It was necessary to form a King's Chamber, installed at the Louvre; all the inferior jurisdictions refused to accept its decrees.

After a year's strife, the Parliament returned in triumph to Paris in the month of August, 1754; the clergy received orders not to require from the dying any theological adhesion. Next year, the Archbishop of Paris, who had paid no attention to the prohibition, was exiled in his turn.

Thus, by mutually weakening each other, the great powers and the great influences in the state were wasting away; the reverses of the French arms, the loss of their colonies, and the humiliating peace of Paris aggravated the discontent. In default of good government the people are often satisfied with glory. This consolation, to which the French nation had but lately been accustomed, failed it all at once; mental irritation, for a long time silently brooding, cantoned in the writings of philosophers and in the quatrains of rhymesters, was beginning to spread and show itself amongst the nation; it sought throughout the state an object for its wrath; the powerful society of the Jesuits was the first to bear all the brunt of it.

A French Jesuit, Father Lavalette, had founded a commercial house at Martinique. Ruined by the war, he had become bankrupt to the extent of three millions; the order having refused to pay, it was condemned by the Parliament to do so. The responsibility was declared to extend to all the members of the Inst.i.tute, and public opinion triumphed over the condemnation with a " quasi-indecent " joy, says the advocate Barbier.

Nor was it content with this legitimate satisfaction. One of the courts which had until lately been most devoted to the Society of Jesus had just set an example of severity. In 1759, the Jesuits had been driven from Portugal by the Marquis of Pombal, King Joseph I.'s all-powerful minister; their goods had been confiscated, and their princ.i.p.al, Malagrida, handed over to the Inquisition, had just been burned as a heretic (Sept. 20, 1761).

The Portuguese Jesuits had been feebly defended by the grandees; the clergy were hostile to them. In France, their enemies showed themselves bolder than their defenders. Proudly convinced of the justice of their cause, the Fathers had declined the jurisdiction of the grand council, to which they had a right, as all ecclesiastical bodies had, and they had consented to hand over to the Parliament the registers of their const.i.tutions, up to that time carefully concealed from the eyes of the profane. The skilful and clear-sighted hostility of the magistrates was employed upon the articles of this code, so stringently framed of yore by enthusiastic souls and powerful minds, forgetful or disdainful of the sacred rights of human liberty. All the services rendered by the Jesuits to the cause of religion and civilization appeared effaced; forgotten were their great missionary enterprises, their founders and their martyrs, in order to set forth simply their insatiable ambition, their thirst after power, their easy compromises with evil pa.s.sions condemned by the Christian faith. The a.s.saults of the philosophers had borne their fruit in the public mind; the olden rancor of the Jansenists imperceptibly promoted the severe inquiry openly conducted by the magistrates. Madame de Pompadour dreaded the influence of the Jesuits; religious fears might at any time be aroused again in the soul of Louis XV. The dauphin, who had been constantly faithful to them, sought in vain to plead their cause with the king. He had attacked the Duke of Choiseul; the latter so far forgot himself, it is a.s.serted, as to say to the prince, "Sir, I may have the misfortune to be your subject, but I will never be your servant." The minister had hitherto maintained a prudent reserve; he henceforth joined the favorite and the Parliament against the Jesuits.

On the 6th of August, 1761, the Parliament of Paris delivered a decree ordering the Jesuits to appear at the end of a year for the definite judgment upon their const.i.tutions; pending the judicial decision, all their colleges were closed. King Louis XV. still hesitated, from natural indolence and from remembrance of Cardinal Fleury's maxims. "The Jesuits," the old minister would often say, "are bad masters, but you can make them useful tools." An ecclesiastical commission was convoked; with the exception of the Bishop of Soissons, the prelates all showed themselves favorable to the Jesuits and careless of the old Gallican liberties. On their advice, the king sent a proposal to Rome for certain modifications in the const.i.tutions of the order. Father Ricci, general of the Jesuits, answered haughtily, "Let them be as they are, or not be"

(_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_). Their enemies in France accepted the challenge. On the 6th of August, 1762, a decree of the Parliament of Paris, soon confirmed by the majority of the sovereign courts, declared that there was danger (_abus_) in the bulls, briefs, and const.i.tutions of the Society, p.r.o.nounced its dissolution, forbade its members to wear the dress and to continue living in common under the sway of the general and other superiors. Orders were given to close all the Jesuit houses. The principle of religious liberty, which had been so long ignored, and was at last beginning to dawn on men's minds, was gaining its first serious victory by despoiling the Jesuits in their turn of that liberty for the long-continued wrongs whereof they were called to account. A strange and striking reaction in human affairs; the condemnation of the Jesuits was the precursory sign of the violence and injustice which were soon to be committed in the name of the most sacred rights and liberties, long violated with impunity by arbitrary power.

Vaguely and without taking the trouble to go to the bottom of his impression, Louis XV. felt that the Parliaments and the philosophers were dealing him a mortal blow whilst appearing to strike the Jesuits; he stood out a long while, leaving the quarrel to become embittered and public opinion to wax wroth at his indecision. "There is a hand to mouth administration," said an anonymous letter addressed to the king and Madame de Pompadour, "but there is no longer any hope of government. A time will come when the people's eyes will be opened, and peradventure that time is approaching."

The persistency of the Duke of Choiseul carried the day at last; an edict of December, 1764, declared that "the Society no longer existed in France, that it would merely be permitted to those who composed it to live privately in the king's dominions, under the spiritual authority of the local ordinaries, whilst conforming to the laws of the realm." Four thousand Jesuits found themselves affected by this decree; some left France, others remained still in their families, a.s.suming the secular dress. "It will be great fun to see Father Perusseau turned abbe," said Louis XV. as he signed the fatal edict. "The Parliaments fancy they are serving religion by this measure," wrote D'Alembert to Voltaire, "but they are serving reason without any notion of it; they are the, executioners on behalf of philosophy, whose orders they are executing without knowing it." The destruction of the Jesuits served neither religion nor reason, for it was contrary to justice as well as to liberty; it was the wages and the bitter fruit of a long series of wrongs and iniquities committed but lately, in the name of religion, against justice and liberty.

Three years later, in 1767, the King of Spain, Charles III., less moderate than the government of Louis XV., expelled with violence all the members of the Society of Jesus from his territory, thus exciting the Parliament of Paris to fresh severities against the French Jesuits, and, on the 20th of July, 1773, the court of Rome itself, yielding at last to pressure from nearly all the sovereigns of Europe, solemnly p.r.o.nounced the dissolution of the Order. "Recognizing that the members of this Society have not a little troubled the Christian commonwealth, and that for the welfare of Christendom it were better that the Order should disappear." The last houses still offering shelter to the Jesuits were closed; the general, Ricci, was imprisoned at the castle of St. Angelo, and the Society of Jesus, which had been so powerful for nearly three centuries, took refuge in certain distant lands, seeking in oblivion and silence fresh strength for the struggle which it was one day to renew.

The Parliaments were triumphant, but their authority, which seemed never to have risen so high or penetrated so far in the government of the state, was already tottering to its base. Once more the strife was about to begin between the kingly power and the magistracy, whose last victory was destined to scarcely precede its downfall. The financial embarra.s.sments of the state were growing more serious every day; to the debts left by the Seven Years' War were added the new wants developed by the necessities of commerce and by the progress of civilization. The Board of Works, a useful inst.i.tution founded by Louis XV., was everywhere seeing to the construction of new roads, at the same time repairing the old ones; the forced labor for these operations fell almost exclusively on the peasantry. The Parliament of Normandy was one of the first to protest against "the impositions of forced labor, and the levies of money which took place in the district on pretext of repairs and maintenance of roads, without legal authority." "France is a land which devours its inhabitants," cried the Parliament of Paris. The Parliament of Pau refused to enregister the edicts; the Parliament of Brittany joined the Estates in protesting against the Duke of Aiguillon, the then governor, "the which hath made upon the liberties of the province one of those a.s.saults which are not possible save when the crown believes itself to be secure of impunity." The n.o.blesse having yielded in the states, the Parliament of Rennes gave in their resignation in a body. Five of its members were arrested; at their head was the attorney-general, M. de la Chalotais, author of a very remarkable paper against the Jesuits. It was necessary to form at St. Malo a King's Chamber to try the accused. M. de Calonne, an ambitious young man, the declared foe of M. de la Chalotais, was appointed attorney-general on the commission. He pretended to have discovered grave facts against the accused; he was suspected of having invented them. Public feeling was at its height; the magistrates loudly proclaimed the theory of Cla.s.ses, according to which all the Parliaments of France, responsible one for another, formed in reality but one body, distributed by delegation throughout the princ.i.p.al towns of the realm.

The king convoked a bed of justice, and, on the 2d of March, 1766, he repaired to the Parliament of Paris. "What has pa.s.sed in my Parliaments of Pau and of Rennes has nothing to do with my other Parliaments," said Louis XV. in a firm tone, to which the ears of the Parliament were no longer accustomed. "I have behaved in respect of those two courts as comported with my authority, and I am not bound to account to anybody. I will not permit the formation in my kingdom of an a.s.sociation which might reduce to a confederacy of opposition the natural bond of identical duties and common obligations, nor the introduction into the monarchy of an imaginary body which could not but disturb its harmony. The magistracy does not form a body or order separate from the three orders of the kingdom; the magistrates are my officers. In my person alone resides the sovereign power, of which the special characteristic is the spirit of counsel, justice, and reason; it is from me alone that my courts have their existence and authority. It is to me alone that the legislative power belongs, without dependence and without part.i.tion. My people is but one with me, and the rights and interests of the nation whereof men dare to make a body separate from the monarch are necessarily united with my own, and rest only in my hands."

This haughty affirmation of absolute power, a faithful echo of Cardinal Richelieu's grand doctrines, succeeded for a while in silencing the representations of the Parliaments; but it could not modify the course of opinion, pa.s.sionately excited in favor of M. de la Chalotais. On the 24th of December, 1766, after having thrice changed the jurisdiction and the judges, the king annulled the whole procedure by an act of his supreme authority. "We shall have the satisfaction," said the edict, "of finding n.o.body guilty, and nothing will remain for us but to take such measures as shall appear best adapted to completely restore and maintain tranquillity in a province from which we have on so many occasions had proofs of zeal for our service." M. de la Chalotais and his comrades were exiled to Saintes. They demanded a trial and a legal justification, which were refused. "It is enough for them to know that their honor is intact," the king declared. A Parliament was imperfectly reconstructed at Rennes. "It is D'Aiguillon's bailiff-court," was the contemptuous saying in Brittany. The governor had to be changed. Under the administration of the Duke of Duras, the agitation subsided in the province; the magistrates who had resigned resumed their seats; M. de la Chalotais and his son, M. de Caradeuc, alone remained excluded by order of the king. The restored Parliament immediately made a claim on their behalf, accompanying the request with a formal accusation against the Duke of Aiguillon. The states supported the Parliament. "What! sir,"

said the remonstrance; "they are innocent, and yet you punish them! It is a natural right that n.o.body should be' punished without a trial; we have property in our honor, our lives, and our liberty, just as you have property in your crown. We would spill our blood to preserve your rights; but, on your side, preserve us ours. Sir, the province on its knees before you asks you for justice." A royal ordinance forbade any proceedings against the Duke of Aiguillon, and enjoined silence on the parties. Parliament having persisted, and declaring that the accusations against the Duke of Aiguillon attached (_entachaient_) his honor, Louis XV., egged on by the chancellor, M. de Maupeou, an ambitious, bold, bad man, repaired in person to the office, and had all the papers relating to the procedure removed before his eyes. The strife was becoming violent; the Duke of Choiseul, still premier--minister but sadly shaken in the royal favor, disapproved of the severities employed against the magistracy. All the blows dealt at the Parliaments recoiled upon him.

King Louis XV. had taken a fresh step in the shameful irregularity of his life; on the 15th of April, 1764, Madame de Pompadour had died, at the age of forty-two, of heart disease. As frivolous as she was deeply depraved and baseminded in her calculating easiness of virtue, she had more ambition than comported with her mental calibre or her force of character; she had taken it into her head to govern, by turns promoting and overthrowing the ministers, herself proffering advice to the king, sometimes to good purpose, but more often still with a levity as fatal as her obstinacy. Less clever, less ambitious, but more potent than Madame de Pompadour over the faded pa.s.sions of a monarch aged before his time, the new favorite, Madame Dubarry, made the least scrupulous blush at the lowness of her origin and the irregularity of her life. It was, nevertheless, in her circle that the plot was formed against the Duke of Choiseul. Bold, ambitious, restless, presumptuous sometimes in his views and his hopes, the minister had his heart too nearly in the right place and too proper a spirit to submit to either the yoke of Madame Dubarry or that of the shameless courtiers who made use of her influence.

Chancellor Maupeou, the Duke of Aiguillou, and the new comptroller- general, Abbe Terray, a man of capacity, invention, and no scruple at all, at last succeeded in triumphing over the force of habit, the only thing that had any real effect upon the king's listless mind. After twelve years' for a long while undisputed power, after having held in his hands the whole government of France and the peace of Europe, M. de Choiseul received from the king on the 24th of December, 1770, a letter in these terms:--

"Cousin, the dissatisfaction caused me by your services forces me to banish you to Chanteloup, whither you will repair within twenty-four hours. I should have sent you much further off, but for the particular regard I have for Madame de Choiseul, in whose health I feel great interest. Take care your conduct does not force me to alter my mind.

Whereupon I pray G.o.d, cousin, to have you in His holy and worthy keeping."

The thunderbolt which came striking the Duke of Choiseul called forth a fresh sign of the times. The fallen minister was surrounded in his disgrace with marks of esteem and affection on the part of the whole court. The princes themselves and the greatest lords felt it an honor to pay him a visit at his castle of Chanteloup. He there displayed a magnificence which ended by swallowing up his wife's immense fortune, already much encroached upon during his term of power. Nothing was too much for the proud devotion and pa.s.sionate affection of the d.u.c.h.ess of Choiseul: she declined the personal favors which the king offered her, setting all her husband's friends the example of a fidelity which was equally honorable to them and to him. Acute observers read a tale of the growing weakness of absolute power in the crowd which still flocked to a minister in disgrace; the Duke of Choiseul remained a power even during a banishment which was to last as long as his life.

With M. de Choiseul disappeared the st.u.r.diest prop of the Parliaments.

In vain had the king ordered the magistrates to resume their functions and administer justice. "There is nothing left for your Parliament,"

replied the premier president, "but to perish with the laws, since the fate of the magistrates should go with that of the state." Madame Dubarry, on a hint from her able advisers, had caused to be placed in her apartments a fine portrait of Charles I. by Van Dyck. "France," she was always reiterating to the king with vulgar familiarity, "France, thy Parliament will cut off thy head too!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "France, thy Parliament will cut off thy Head too!"--249]

A piece of ignorant confusion, due even more to a.n.a.logy of name than to the generous but vain efforts often attempted by the French magistracy in favor of sound doctrines of government. The Parliament of Paris fell sitting upon curule chairs, like the old senators of Rome during the invasion of the Gauls; the political spirit, the collected and combative ardor, the indomitable resolution of the English Parliament, freely elected representatives of a free people, were unknown to the French magistracy. Despite the courage and moral, elevation it had so often shown, its strength had been wasted in a constantly useless strife; it had withstood Richelieu and Mazarin; already reduced to submission by Cardinal Fleury, it was about to fall beneath the equally bold and skilful blows of Chancellor Maupeou. Notwithstanding the little natural liking and the usual distrust he felt for Parliaments, the king still hesitated. Madame Dubarry managed to inspire him with fears for his person; and he yielded.

During the night between the 19th and 20th of January, 1771, musketeers knocked at the doors of all the magistrates; they were awakened in the king's name, at the same time being ordered to say whether they would consent to resume their service. No equivocation possible! No margin for those developments of their ideas which are so dear to parliamentary minds! It was a matter of signing yes or no. Surprised in their slumbers, but still firm in their resolution of resistance, the majority of the magistrates signed no. They were immediately sent into banishment; their offices were confiscated. Those members of the Parliament from whom weakness or astonishment had surprised a yes retracted as soon as they were a.s.sembled, and underwent the same fate as their colleagues. On the 23d of January, members delegated by the grand council, charged with the provisional administration of justice, were installed in the Palace by the chancellor himself. The registrar-in- chief, the ushers, the attorneys, declined or eluded the exercise of their functions; the advocates did not come forward to plead. The Court of Aids, headed by Lamoignon de Malesherbes, protested against the attack made on the great bodies of the state. "Ask the nation themselves, sir,"

said the president, "to mark your displeasure with the Parliament of Paris, it is proposed to rob them--themselves--of the essential rights of a free people." The Court of Aids was suppressed like the Parliament; six superior councils, in the towns of Arras, Blois, Chalons-sur-Marne, Lyon, Clermont, and Poitiers parcelled out amongst them the immense jurisdiction of Paris; the members of the grand council, a.s.sisted by certain magistrates of small esteem, definitively took the places of the banished, to whom compensation was made for their offices. The king appeared in person on the 13th of April, 1771, at the new Parliament; the chancellor read out the edicts. "You have just heard my intentions,"

said Louis XV.; "I desire that they may be conformed to. I order you to commence your duties. I forbid any deliberation contrary to my wishes and any representations in favor of my former Parliament, for I shall never change."

One single prince of the blood, the Count of La Marche, son of the Prince of Conti, had been present at the bed of justice. All had protested against the suppression of the Parliament. "It is one of the most useful boons for monarchs and of those most precious to Frenchmen," said the protest of the princes, "to have bodies of citizens, perpetual and irremovable, avowed at all times by the kings and the nation, who, in whatever form and under whatever denomination they may have existed, concentrate in themselves the general right of all subjects to invoke the law." "Sir, by the law you are king, and you cannot reign but by it,"

said the Parliament of Dijon's declaration, drawn up by one of the mortarcap presidents (_presidents a mortier_), the gifted president De Brosses. The princes were banished; the provincial Parliaments, mutilated like that of Paris or suppressed like that of Rouen, which was replaced by two superior councils, ceased to furnish a centre for critical and legal opposition. Amidst the rapid decay of absolute power, the transformation and abas.e.m.e.nt of the Parliaments by Chancellor Maupeou were a skilful and bold attempt to restore some sort of force and unity to the kingly authority. It was thus that certain legitimate claims had been satisfied, the extent of jurisdictions had been curtailed, the salability of offices had been put down, the expenses of justice had been lessened. Voltaire had for a long time past been demanding these reforms, and he was satisfied with them. "Have not the Parliaments often been persecuting and barbarous?" he wrote; "I wonder that the _Welches_ [i. e., Barbarians, as Voltaire playfully called the French] should take the part of those insolent and intractable cits." He added, however, "Nearly all the kingdom is in a boil and consternation; the ferment is as great in the provinces as in Paris itself."

The ferment subsided without having reached the ma.s.s of the nation; the majority of the princes made it up with the court, the dispossessed magistrates returned one after another to Paris, astonished and mortified to see justice administered without them and advocates pleading before the Maupeou Parliament. The chancellor had triumphed, and remained master; all the old jurisdictions were broken up, public opinion was already forgetting them; it was occupied with a question more important still than the administration of justice. The ever-increasing disorder in the finances was no longer checked by the enregistering of edicts; the comptroller-general, Abbe Terray, had recourse shamelessly to every expedient of a bold imagination to fill the royal treasury; it was necessary to satisfy the ruinous demands of Madame Dubarry and of the depraved courtiers who thronged about her. Successive bad harvests and the high price of bread still further aggravated the position. It was known that the king had a taste for private speculation; he was accused of trading in grain and of buying up the stores required for feeding the people. The odious rumor of this famine pact, as the bitter saying was, soon spread amongst the mob. Before its fall, the Parliament of Rouen had audaciously given expression to these dark accusations; it had ordered proceedings to be taken against the monopolists. A royal injunction put a veto upon the prosecutions. "This prohibition from the crown changes our doubts to certainty," wrote the Parliament to the king himself; "when we said that the monopoly existed and was protected, G.o.d forbid, sir, that we should have had your Majesty in our eye, but possibly we had some of those to whom you distribute your authority."

Silence was imposed upon the Parliaments, but without producing any serious effect upon public opinion, which attributed to the king the princ.i.p.al interest in a great private concern bound to keep up a certain parity in the price of grain. Contempt grew more and more profound; the king and Madame Dubarry by their shameful lives, Maupeou and Abbe Terray by destroying the last bulwarks of the public liberties, were digging with their own hands the abyss in which the old French monarchy was about to be soon ingulfed.

For a long while pious souls had formed great hopes of the dauphin; honest, scrupulous, sincerely virtuous, without the austerity and extensive views of the Duke of Burgundy, he had managed to live aloof, without intrigue and without open opposition, preserving towards the king an att.i.tude of often sorrowful respect, and all the while remaining the support of the clergy and their partisans in their attempts and their aspirations. The Queen, Mary Leczinska, a timid and proudly modest woman, resigned to her painful situation, lived in the closest intimacy with her son, and still more with her daughterin-law, Mary Josepha of Saxony, though the daughter of that elector who had but lately been elevated to the throne of Poland, and had vanquished King Stanislaus.

The sweetness, the tact, the rare faculties of the dauphiness had triumphed over all obstacles. She had three sons. Much reliance was placed upon the influence she had managed to preserve with the king, and on the dominion she exercised over her husband's mind. In vain had the dauphin, distracted at the woes of France, over and over again solicited from the king the honor of serving him at the head of the army; the jealous anxiety of Madame de Pompadour was at one with the cold indifference of Louis XV. as to leaving the heir to the throne in the shade. The prince felt it deeply, in spite of his pious resignation.

"A dauphin," he would say, "must needs appear a useless body, and a king strive to be everybody" (_un homme universel_).

Whilst trying to beguile his tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves, like the court and the philosophers, about the stiffness of his manners and his complete devotion to the cause of the clergy. The new dauphin, who would one day be Louis XVI., was still a child; the king had him brought into his closet. "Poor France!" he said sadly, "a king of fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven!" The dauphiness and Queen Mary Leczinska soon followed the dauphin to the tomb (1767-1768). The king, thus left alone and scared by the repeated deaths around him, appeared for a while to be drawn closer to his daughters, for whom he always retained some sort of affection, a mixture of weakness and habit. One of them, Madame Louise, who was deeply pious, left him to enter the convent of the Carmelites; he often went to see her, and granted her all the favors she asked. But by this time Madame Dubarry had become all- powerful; to secure to her the honors of presentation at court, the king personally solicited the ladies with whom he was intimate in order to get them to support his favorite on this new stage; when the youthful Marie Antoinette, Archd.u.c.h.ess of Austria, and daughter of Maria Theresa, whose marriage the Duke of Choiseul had negotiated, arrived in France, in 1770, to espouse the dauphin, Madame Dubarry appeared alone with the royal family at the banquet given at La Muette on the occasion of the marriage.

After each reaction of religious fright and transitory repentance, after each warning from G.o.d that s.n.a.t.c.hed him for an instant from the depravity of his life, the king plunged more deeply than before into shame. Madame Dubarry was to reign as much as Louis XV.

Before his fall the Duke of Choiseul had made a last effort to revive abroad that fortune of France which he saw sinking at home without his being able to apply any effective remedy. He had vainly attempted to give colonies once more to France by founding in French Guiana settlements which had been unsuccessfully attempted by a Rouennese Company as early as 1634. The enterprise was badly managed; the numerous colonists, of very diverse origin and worth, were cast without resources upon a territory as unhealthy as fertile. No preparations had been made to receive them; the majority died of disease and want; New France henceforth belonged to the English, and the great hopes which had been raised of replacing it in Equinoctial France, as Guiana was named, soon vanished never to return. An attempt made about the same epoch at St.

Lucie was attended with the same result. The great ardor and the rare apt.i.tude for distant enterprises which had so often manifested themselves in France from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century seemed to be henceforth extinguished. Only the colonies of the Antilles, which had escaped from the misfortunes of war, and were by this time recovered from their disasters, offered any encouragement to the patriotic efforts of the Duke of Choiseul. He had been more fortunate in Europe than in the colonies: henceforth Corsica belonged to France.

In spite of the French occupations, from 1708 to 1756, in spite of the refusals with which Cardinal Fleury had but lately met their appeals, the Corsicans, newly risen against the oppression of Genoa, had sent a deputation to Versailles to demand the recognition of their republic, offering to pay the tribute but lately paid annually to their tyrannical protectress.

The hero of Corsican independence, Pascal Paoli, secretly supported by England, had succeeded for several years past not only in defending his country's liberty, but also in governing and at the same time civilizing it. This patriotic soul and powerful mind, who had managed to profit by the energetic pa.s.sions of his compatriots whilst momentarily repressing their intestine quarrels, dreamed of an ideal const.i.tution for his island; he sent to ask for one of J. J. Rousseau, who was still in Switzerland, and whom he invited to Corsica. The philosophical chimeras of Paoli soon vanished before a piece of crus.h.i.+ng news. The Genoese, weary of struggling unsuccessfully against the obstinate determination of the Corsicans, and unable to clear off the debts which they had but lately incurred to Louis XV., had proposed to M. de Choiseul to cede to France their ancient rights over Corsica, as security for their liabilities. A treaty, signed at Versailles on the 15th of May, 1768, authorized the king to perform all acts of sovereignty in the places and forts of Corsica; a separate article accorded to Genoa an indemnity of two millions.

A cry arose in Corsica. Paoli resolved to defend the independence of his country against France, as he had defended it against Genoa. For several months now French garrisons had occupied the places still submitting to Genoa; when they would have extended themselves into the interior, Paoli barred their pa.s.sage; he bravely attacked M. de Chauvelin, the king's lieutenant-general, who had just landed with a proclamation from Louis XV. to his new subjects. "The Corsican nation does not let itself be bought and sold like a flock of sheep sent to market," said the protest of the republic's Supreme Council. Fresh troops from France had to be asked for; under the orders of Count Vaux they triumphed without difficulty over the Corsican patriots. Mustering at the bridge of Golo for a last effort, they made a rampart of their dead; the wounded had lain down amongst the corpses to give the survivors time to effect their retreat. The town of Corte, the seat of republican government, capitulated before long. England had supplied Paoli with munitions and arms; he had hoped more from the promises of the government and the national jealousy against France. "The ministry is too weak and the nation too wise to make war on account of Corsica," said an ill.u.s.trious judge, Lord Mansfield. In vain did Burke exclaim, "Corsica, as a province of France, is for me an object of alarm!" The House of Commons approved of the government's conduct, and England contented herself with offering to the vanquished Paoli a sympathetic hospitality; he left Corsica on an English frigate, accompanied by most of his friends, and it is in Westminster Abbey that he lies, after the numerous vicissitudes of his life, which fluctuated throughout the revolutions of his native land, from England to France and from France to England, to the day when Corsica, proud of having given a master to France and the Revolution, became definitively French with Napoleon.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Defeat of the Corsicans at Golo----256]

Corsica was to be the last conquest of the old French monarchy. Great or little, magnificent or insignificant, from Richelieu to the Duke of Choiseul, France had managed to preserve her territorial acquisitions; in America and in Asia, Louis XV. had shamefully lost Canada and the Indies; in Europe, the diplomacy of his ministers had given to the kingdom Lorraine and Corsica. The day of insensate conquests ending in a diminution of territory had not yet come. In the great and iniquitous dismemberment which was coming, France was to have no share.

Profound disquietude was beginning to agitate Europe: the King of Poland, Augustus III., had died in 1763, leaving the unhappy country over which he had reigned a prey to internal anarchy ever increasing and systematically fanned by the avidity or jealousy of the great powers, its neighbors. "As it is to the interest of the two monarchs of Russia and Prussia that the Polish commonwealth should preserve its right to free election of a king," said the secret treaty concluded in 1764 between Frederick II. and the Empress Catherine, "and that no family should possess itself of the elective throne of that country, the two undermentioned Majesties engage to prevent, by all means in their power, Poland from being despoiled of its right of election and transformed into an hereditary kingdom; they mutually promise to oppose in concert, and, if necessary, by force of arms, all plans and designs which may tend thereto as soon as discovered."