THE civil war called the Fronde 124 (1648-1654) ushered in the period of the Grand Monarque. Of this faction fight it should be noted that the bourgeoisie, led by the Councils of lawyers called Parliaments, who were at first on the side of the Minister Mazarin, and were used by him, were driven to take part with the “Princes” who opposed him, and who in their turn used them and flung them away, after they had drawn the chestnuts out of the fire for them; the Fronde, however, has its interest as being the germ of the disaffection of the middle classes with the nobility and government. As we have said, Louis 125 XIV. succeeded in making the French monarchy a pure autocratic bureaucracy, completely centralised in the person of the sovereign. This with an ambitious King like Louis XIV. involved constant war, for he felt himself bound to satisfy his ideal of the necessary expansion of the territory and influence of France, which he looked upon as the absolute property of the King. The general success of Louis XIV. brought with it the success of these wars of aggrandisement, and France became very powerful during his reign.
Under the rule of his minister Colbert, industrialism in France was, one may say, forced as in a hothouse. Colbert developed the new modes of production that were inevitably coming, and thereby established the workshop, or division of labour system, which is the transition from handicraft to machine production. He spared no pains or energy in bringing this about. Often, with more or less success, he drove an industry forward artificially, as with the silk and woollen manufactures. For he was eager to win for France a foremost 126 place in the world-market, which he thought but the due accompaniment of her monarchical glory; and he knew that without it that glory would have died of starvation, since the taxes would not have yielded the necessary food. It is true that even in England growing commercialism was subordinate to constitutionalism, the English form of bureaucracy; but the idea was already afoot there that the former was rather an end than a means, whereas in France commercialism was completely subordinated to the glory of the autocratic monarchy—a mere feeder of it. This overshadowing of commerce by the sovereign, and the irritation it caused to the manufacturing bourgeoisie, was undoubtedly one of the causes of the revolution.
The religion of this period of the “Grand Monarque” shows little more than an ecclesiastical struggle between Gallicanism on the one hand, which claimed a feeble spark of independence as regards Rome for the French Church, and is represented by Fénélon and Bossuet, and Jesuitry on the other hand, 127 which was the exponent of Roman centralisation. The leading intelligence of the time was on the Gallican side; but the king in the long run favoured the Jesuits, as being the readier instruments of his bureaucratic rule. Outside this ecclesiastical quarrel there was no life whatever in religion, except what was shown by the existence of a few erratic sects of mystics, like the Quietists and Jansenists. The former of these may be said to have put forward the complete abnegation of humanity in the presence of God, while the latter attempted a revivification of the pietism of the Catholic Church, accompanied by a galvanism of the mediæval faith in miracle-working. Finally the advent of the revolutionary writers, heralded by Helvetius, Condillac, and others, and culminating in the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopædists, destroyed the last vestiges of religious belief among the educated classes of France.
Two struggles, we may mention, were going on during the early reign of Louis XV.,—that with the Jesuits, with 128 their bull Unigenitus, which declared the necessity of uniformity with the Roman See, in which the Parliaments took the Gallican side, while the Court generally took that of the Jesuits: and the contest between King and parliaments (law courts) for prestige and authority. These parliaments were at first councils, called by the King from his baronage to give advice as to the laws of the realm. The barons gradually fell out of them, and the lawyers (probably their legal assessors) took their place; so that at the time we speak of they were wholly composed of professional lawyers. They had been largely used by the kings for consolidating their power over the feudal nobles, since they were in the habit of deciding all doubtful points of customary law in favour of the King: but by Louis XV.’s time they had in fact become the champions of the quasi-constitutional rights of the respectable citizens from the formally legal point of view, and were invariably opposed on the one hand to the Jesuits and on the other to the Freethinkers.
The Regency which succeeded to the 129 reign of Louis XIV. saw the definite beginnings of the last corruption which betokened the Revolution. The wars of aggrandisement still went on but were now generally unsuccessful; the industrialism set agoing by Colbert progressed steadily; but the profits to be gained by it did not satisfy the more adventurous spirits of the period, and the Regency saw a curious exposition of stock-jobbery before its time in the form of the Mississippi scheme of Law, which had its counterpart in England in the South-Sea Bubble. It was a financing operation—to get something out of nothing—founded on the mercantile theory of economy then current, which showed but an imperfect knowledge of the industrial revolution beginning under men’s very eyes, and assumed that the wealth of a country consists in the amount of the precious metals which it can retain. This assumption, we may observe, is curiously exemplified in the half-commercial, half-buccaneering romances of Defoe.
The free-thinkers before-named were the essence of the bourgeois party from 130 its intellectual side, as the parliaments were from the legal side. These two elements formed all that there was of opposition till the first mutterings of definite revolution were heard, though of course the importance of the thinkers was out of all proportion to that of the lawyer-parliaments. The accession of the once Dauphin, now Louis XVI, to the throne, was hailed by the philosophers, especially as his calling Turgot to reform the finances was justly considered a sign of his sincerity. But his attempts in this direction were frustrated by the Court oligarchy; and as a result the discontent of the respectable bourgeois opposition became a rallying-point for the elements of the actual revolution; for though it meant nothing but intelligent conservatism, it formed a screen behind which the true revolutionary forces could gather for the attack on privilege.
It is necessary to say something about the literature and art of France before the Revolution, because that country is the especial exponent, particularly in art, of the degradation which indicated the rottenness of society.
As in England, literature was formal 131 and stilted, and produced little except worthlessly clever essays and still more worthless verses that have no claim to be called poetry. The French verse-makers, however, aimed at something higher than the English, and produced works which depend on pomp and style for any claim to attention they may have, and for the rest are unreal and lifeless. Amidst them all one name stands forward as representing some reality—Moliére, to wit. But the life and genuineness of his comedies serves to show the corruption of the times as clearly as the dead classicalism of Racine: for he, the one man of genius of the time, was driven into the expression of mere cynicism. In one remarkable passage of his works he shows a sympathy for the ballad-poetry of the people, which, when noticed at all in England at the same period, and even much later, received a kind of indulgent patronage rather than admiration. At the same time, as there was a sham tragedy current at this period, so also there Was a sham love of simplicity. The ladies and gentlemen of the period 132 ignored the real peasants who were the miserable slaves of the French landlords, and invented in their dramas, poems, and pictures sham shepherds and peasants, who were bundles of conscious unreality, inane imitations of the later classics. This literature and art would be indeed too contemptible Tor mention, if it were not a sign of a society rotting into revolution. The fine arts, which had in the end of the sixteenth century descended from the expression of the people’s faith and aspirations into that of the fancy, ingenuity, and whim of gifted individuals, fell lower still. They lost every atom of beauty and dignity, and retained little even of the ingenuity of the earlier Renaissance, becoming mere expensive and pretentious though carefully-finished upholstery, mere adjuncts of pomp and state, the expression of the insolence of riches and the complacency of respectability. Once again it must be said of the art, as of the general literature of the period, that no reasonable man could even bestow a passing glance at it but for the incurable corruption of society that it betokens.
Here, then, we have in France a contrast 133 to the state of things in England. No constitutionalism was here; nothing but an absolutism despised even by the privileged classes; a government unable to move in the direction of progress, even when, as in the case of Louis XVI, its head had a tendency to the intelligent conservatism above mentioned; bankrupt also amidst a people broken down, and a commerce hampered by the exactions of the hereditary privilege which was its sole support; discredited by unsuccessful wars, so that the door was shut to its ambition on that road; at home it had to face uneasily the new abstract ideas of liberty and the rights of man. These ideas were professed, indeed, by those who had an interest in preserving the existing state of things, but were listened to and pondered over by people who found that state of things unbearable.
The contrast between the condition of England and France, produced in either case by the unconscious development toward essential change, is remarkable. In England the material condition of the country was good, under the regime 134 of successful whiggery; the middle classes were prosperous and contented; the working classes were keeping their heads above water in tolerable comfort, and nothing was further from their thoughts than that revolutionary change, to which nevertheless they were drifting swiftly but quietly.
On the other hand, France was impoverished by the long wars of the Grand Monarch; the lower classes were sunk in misery obvious to the most superficial observer. The commercial middle classes were discontented and uneasy under the pressure of the remains of feudalism, which seemed to them to be still flourishing, though it was but the lifeless trunk of the old tree, already sapped by Louis XIV. To crown all there was a spirit of intellectual dissaffection in the air. The theories of liberty and rationalism, though originally derived from English thinkers, were developed and put into literary form by the coterie of French writers (already mentioned) who took the name of Les Philosophes, and in this form they produced far more effects than they did in the country of their birth, 135 supplying the formulae of the actual Revolution. The names of Voltaire and Rousseau, even apart from the Encyclopædists, show how eagerly the new theories were being received. In short the whole aspect of affairs was far more dramatic in France than in England; as was likely to be the case, since in France the Revolution was doomed to be primarily political, and in England mainly industrial.