1602-83] The rivalry between Louvois and Colbert.

17

Louvois crossed Colbert's path at every turn. He urged Louis to spend money on Versailles, while Colbert wanted to make Paris the royal residence; he wanted to spend the revenues of France on military preparations, while Colbert wished to use them for the promotion of colonial and industrial enterprises; in short, he was for war, and Colbert, with one fatal exception, was for peace. The struggle between them for their master's support was very keen; but it was decided in favour of Louvois. For some years before his death Colbert had suffered from gout, and this decision seems to have overwhelmed him. He died in September, 1683, almost in disgrace. It was the supreme misfortune of France that Louis XIV, with all his great qualities of intelligence and character, had so imperfect a sympathy with Colbert's aims. What might not Colbert have done if he had served a Frederick the Great!

The year 1672 and the outbreak of the war with the United Netherlands mark the end of the pacific period of Louis XIV's reign, throughout which Colbert's had been the chief influence over the royal mind. During those first twelve years of the reign the prosperity of France was not unchequered nor her aims always right; but the chief effort of the Government was directed towards commercial and industrial development, the limitation of privilege and the unification of the State. The War of Devolution had been only a slight interruption to this progress, but the Dutch quarrel opened a continuous period of war lasting with little real interruption from 1672 to 1713. During this period the internal development of France was of little account. Colbert's influence had much declined even before his death. The King's mind was absorbed by military glory and religious orthodoxy; and these two tendencies were represented in his Court by Louvois and Madame de Maintenon.

Louvois was the son of Le Tellier, of whom mention was made above, and who in 1655 had procured for him the right of succession to his office, in accordance with the dangerous custom which established a sort of heredity in many of the highest positions in the State. In 1662 the King raised Louvois to the position of Secretary of State; and from that date he became one of the chief influences with the King and the rival of Colbert. He was a man exactly suited to win and to retain the favour of Louis XIV. To the rest of the world he was disdainful, arrogant, and violent; but in his dealings with the King he showed himself pliant and servilely deferential. It flattered the pride of the King to see his power over one who submitted to no other authority. Louvois did not, like Colbert, strive to thwart the King's natural disposition. Rather, he impelled him towards the goal to which his natural bent directed him. War, glory, dominion, and self-worship-these were the objects that Louvois held up before the eyes of Louis XIV, and to which he was by nature only too much inclined.

18

Army administration of Louvois.

[1662-91

There are two sides to the work of Louvois, and our judgment on him will vary widely according as he is regarded as an administrator or a statesman. As a statesman he not only urged the King on to those military adventures which brought the "Age of Louis XIV" to so disastrous an end, but he also approved and cooperated in the tragic blunder of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But as an administrator and organiser he deserves the very highest praise. He found the French army, famous indeed and victorious, but full of gross corruption and so bound by traditions, usually of feudal origin, that it was far from answering quickly to the wishes of the central Government. Louvois, acting in agreement with the whole tendency of the ideas and policy of Louis XIV, centralised the administration of the army, made the control of the King direct and paramount, and eliminated what remained of aristocratic influence. At the same time he improved its weapons, tightened its discipline, punished abuses and brought its different parts into organic connexion.

The abuses in the army were chiefly due to the power and influence which the nobility still held in the recruiting and organisation of the army. It was the nobles, not the Government, who collected and equipped the troops. They had themselves purchased the posts which they held, and they found various ways of making a profit out of their positions. The chief of these was to make a return of, and consequently to receive pay for, more men than were actually to be found in the ranks, On days of official inspection the gaps were filled up by paid substitutes (passe-volants), whom Louvois strove to suppress by the severest penalties. The scandals and corruptions in the provisioning of the army were also notorious.

Louvois sought to remedy this state of things, chiefly by bringing the army under more direct control of the Government. He was not prepared to revolutionise the whole system; but, by indefatigable attention to detail and by the strictest severity against proved malefactors, he succeeded in abolishing or diminishing the worst evils. The army was still recruited by the nobles; but Louvois appointed inspectors to ensure that the soldiers, for whom the Government paid, really existed, and to repress the licence and indiscipline of the noble officers. The cynical hardness of Louvois' nature-the brutalité that is so often attributed to him-here stood France in good stead; and he was excellently served by two inspectors, the famous Martinet for the infantry and de Fourilles for the cavalry.

But Louvois was not satisfied with the enforcement of honesty. Equipment and organisation both underwent important modifications. The bayonet was introduced; the fusil (flint-lock) took the place of the mousquet, which had been discharged by means of a match. The grenadiers were organised into an important force; the status of the engineers and of the infantry was raised; the artillery was brought into

1661-79] Mlle. de La Vallière and Mme. de Montespan. 19

closer relationship with the other parts of the army. An uniform was not yet insisted on for the whole army, but much was done to improve and regularise the appearance of the troops. Much thought also was devoted to the question of victualling. The slowness of the movements of earlier armies was often explained by the impossibility of procuring supplies. By Louvois' orders magazines were established, which greatly improved the mobility of the armies in the earlier wars of the reign. He carried on the work of Richelieu too by abolishing certain posts whose occupants held an almost independent position. The position of colonelgeneral of the infantry was suppressed; and, though the colonel-general of the cavalry and the grand maître of the artillery still remained, their powers were so reduced that they no longer conflicted with Louvois' chief aim of concentrating all military power in the hands of the King. A reform of a different kind must also be mentioned. He made generous provision for disabled soldiers by the establishment of the Hôtel des Invalides.

In sum, Louvois was efficient in the highest degree; as energetic as Colbert, and capable of infusing his own energy into his subordinates; ready to take responsibility and usually able to justify it by success. Without the efficiency of the French War Office under Louvois it is impossible to conceive of all the triumphs dating from the earlier part of Louis XIV's reign.

Before the death of Colbert another influence besides that of Louvois had begun to be strong with the King. Orthodox pietism had triumphed over him in the person of Madame de Maintenon. The political marriage, which had been arranged for him at the Peace of the Pyrenees, was not likely to retain exclusive control of his heart. The licence which had become traditional with the kings of France would not be checked by loyalty to Maria Teresa, who was a true and virtuous wife, but neither intellectual nor attractive. The King had been strongly attached in the first instance to Maria Mancini, the niece of Mazarin, and it needed all the power of the Cardinal to induce Louis XIV to carry out the stipulated treaty and marry Maria Teresa. Immediately after the marriage gossip was busy with the King's infidelities, and soon it was known that Louise de La Vallière was the chosen favourite. The King felt for her probably the purest passion of his life. She was only seventeen at the time of their first acquaintance, and her great beauty, charm of manner and sweetness of disposition sufficed to maintain her influence for many years. But she was in many ways singularly unfitted to maintain her position at Court. Her conscience was not easy; the religious life was always attractive to her; and, when at last she found her power waning and a rival preferred to herself, it was chiefly her genuine love for the King that made her regret the change. In 1674 she retired to a Carmelite nunnery. Her successor was Madame de Montespan, who had intrigued desperately against Mademoiselle de La Vallière and held the first place in the King's affections from 1670 to 1679,

20

Madame de Maintenon.

[1683-4 though not without occasional rivals. She was in point of character and person almost the antithesis of her predecessor, haughty, domineering, proud of her position, striking and imperious in her type of beauty. She had innumerable enemies at Court, both among the nobles and the clergy; but she out-faced them and for nearly ten years she triumphed over them. Her eclipse came from a strange quarter. She had borne the King several children, and it was necessary to find a discreet person to attend to their education. She met Madame Scarron at the house of a friend, induced her to accept the charge of the children, and thus introduced to the King the woman who was destined to be her successful rival. Madame Scarron, who soon received at the King's hands the title of Marquise de Maintenon, is perhaps the most interesting figure in the Court of Louis XIV. She was the grandchild of Agrippa d'Aubigné, the famous Protestant leader of the sixteenth century. Her father had been a worthless spendthrift, and she had passed through many remarkable changes in life before she came to be the unacknowledged wife of the most splendid of the French kings. She was born in the ante-chamber of a prison; had spent some portion of her early life in Martinique, had been left an orphan at the age of seven, and, following the tenets of her protectors, had passed from Catholicism to Protestantism and from Protestantism back to Catholicism. In her seventeenth year she had married Scarron, a comic dramatist of reputation in Paris, preferring, as she has told us, such a marriage to the cloister; at twentyfive years of age she was left a widow, and lived for some time an obscure life, until an accidental meeting with Madame de Montespan made her the governess of the King's children. In her new task she came into contact with the King and soon became a well-known figure in the Court. She played a part of extraordinary difficulty with the utmost adroitness. Though she was in name the servant of the King's mistress, she gained great influence with the King himself. It was partly due to her that he severed himself from Madame de Montespan and was reconciled to his much-injured wife. After the death of Maria Teresa in 1683, Madame de Maintenon was secretly married to the King in January, 1684, in the presence of Harlay, Archbishop of Paris, and Louvois. She was a woman of great charm and dignity of manner; demure, self-restrained, and even cold in temperament; loving sobriety and reason both in thought and action; a character apparently little fitted for so romantic a destiny. She was, too, a woman sincerely, if not passionately, religious, and it was the religious element in her mind and character which contributed much to her conquest of Louis XIV.

The religious vein had never been wanting in Louis XIV even in his careless and licentious youth, and his confessor had always been one of the chief influences upon him. But under Madame de Maintenon the whole tone of the Court had changed. The splendid gaiety of the early years was thrown aside, and the practices of religion became the

1661-6] Ecclesiastical opposition to Protestant liberties. 21

mode at Versailles. Madame de Maintenon's influence cooperated with this religious development and did much to make the once brilliant Court of Versailles decorous and dull. As Louis XIV drew near to the Church, his personal morality underwent a most welcome improvement; but the new influence was unfortunately answerable for the worst political mistake in his reign, which contained so many. For, unfortunately, the conversion of Louis XIV was one which "had no root in reason and bore no fruit of charity." The Church had never abandoned her desire for uniformity, or her belief that physical coercion might be legitimately used to enforce it. And thus Louis XIV was led on to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The

The attack upon the Protestants of France which culminated in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due, almost entirely, to religious intolerance, little complicated by the political and social motives which had intensified the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. Huguenots of France had lost the political ambitions and aristocratic connexions which made them a serious danger in the days of the League and perhaps in the time of Richelieu. They had taken no part in the wars of the Fronde, and Louis XIV in 1666 publicly acknowledged the vigour and success with which they had resisted the party of rebellion during that period. They supported the commercial schemes of Colbert with a force out of proportion to their numbers. Nor did they threaten the Church any more than the State. There were fine orators and some scholars of distinction in their ranks, but their propagandist zeal had waned. They only needed to be left alone to provide France with a great source of strength both moral and material.

Two forces drove France down the fatal descent, from being the foremost representative of religious toleration to becoming a belated exponent of religious persecution in its most odious character. First, the King's personal feelings counted for something. Religion had come to be a strong and genuine motive with him, and, together with his vanity, impelled him towards the establishment of religious unity. But the Church in France was the strongest driving force. She was at the zenith of her power: her clergy were distinguished by sincerity, learning, and even by social sympathies. But they had always regarded the Edict of Nantes as an insult, and passionately desired its withdrawal, or, if that were not attainable, its restriction within the narrowest possible limits. The assemblies of the clergy, held every five years, continually demanded fresh measures of persecution. The fact that the clergy of France were about the same time engaged in a serious controversy with the Papacy as to the question of Gallican liberties made them all the more anxious to prove their orthodoxy by measures against the Protestants; and it is upon them that the chief responsibility must fall.

The end of the struggle was not foreseen. Neither King nor clergy had any intention of abolishing the Edict from the first. They desired