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Géricault, Théodore --- Géricault, Théodore.

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France --- History.

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Inquisition

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Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, --- France --- History

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I am writing a general history and not that of a reign. I had to condense into one volume the period which extends from 1661 to 1690, a period enormously loaded with facts and events, religious and political acts, and literary works. Forced to abbreviate or omit an infinity of details, I examined all the more seriously and weighed their relative importance. History must not only say true things, but tell them in true measure, not putting them all at once in the foreground, not subordinating the big ones by exaggerating the small ones. Difficult assessment, in that contemporaries help him very little. On the contrary, they all work to deceive us in this. Each one, in his Memoirs, does not fail to highlight his little importance, such secondary thing, that he saw, knew, or did. We ourselves, all brought up in the literature and history of this time, having known them early, before any criticism, we retain prejudices of feeling about this work or this act whose first impression is linked to our childhood memories. We know a lot of things, but very unevenly. Such a detail is enormous for us, and such a great fact, learned later, seems insignificant to us. We are upset and disoriented when our history, our anecdotes, certain favorite words, established in our memory for many years, are reduced to their value by serious history. The words , for example, of a provincial lady, who sees very little of Versailles and colors it with her charming spirit, have remained pleasant and dear to us, much more than the stories of those who lived there, who saw and judged: I am talking about the courageous Memoirs of the great Mademoiselle and Madame, mother of the Regent. It is a virile work of a historian to thus resist his own childhood prejudices, and those of his readers; and finally to the illusions that contemporaries themselves have devoted. He needs a certain strength to walk firmly through all this, pushing aside the vain shadows, establishing, or even rejecting, a number of minimal truths that would obstruct the path. But if he keeps himself like this, his reward is to see the chain of great living causes emerge from the confused ocean. Knowledge generally denied to contemporaries who saw day by day, and who, too close to things, were often blinded to the details. They have seen the victories, the festivals, the official events, very rarely felt the dull circulation of life, a certain latent work which nevertheless one morning bursts forth with the sovereign force of revolutions and changes the world. The great claim of this reign is to be a political reign. Our moderns are wrong to take him at his word on this. The great diplomatic and administrative jumble imposes too much on them. Careful study shows that deep down, in the most important things, religion takes precedence over politics. In this respect, the reign of Louis XIV, even at its best, is a reaction after the absolute indifference of Mazarin and the boldness of the Fronde. The papacy rose again under this reign. She was very fallen and a little forgotten. Ranke noticed this. Active and influential at the Treaty of Varvins (1598), the Pope was a simple spectator, not requested, not consulted, at the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and no longer even attended the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659); Mazarin closes the door on him. Louis XIV gave it importance. As bishop of bishops, the king always looks at Rome! sometimes for, sometimes against, he always takes care of it. Under the haughty forms of a half-rebellion, the king serves it in the desired point, requested for a hundred years by the Church, and strikes the great failed coup d'état on Saint-Barthélemy's Day. The place that the Revolution occupied in the eighteenth century was filled in the seventeenth by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes , the emigration of Protestants and the English Revolution, which was its aftermath. The whole century gravitates towards Revocation . Little by little we can see it coming. As soon as Henry IV died, France moved there. It only succeeds Spain by following the same paths. Neither Richelieu nor Colbert can deviate from it. They only cut corners by obeying this fate and going down this slope. The conquest of a few provinces which sooner or later came to us of their own accord, the establishment of a Bourbon in Spain which served France in no way, that is not the great object of the century. - Centralization, still so powerless, a majestic accumulation of orders (poorly executed) is not this great object either. - Much less the little internal quarrels of Catholicism. From 1668, Jansenism appeared to be an impasse, a deliberately powerless opposition, much ado about nothing. The Gallican clamor subsides even more easily. This proud Church, with Bossuet at the head, at the first change of the king, made honorable amends to Rome, showing itself what it is, the servant of royalty, nothing but a shadow of a Church which humiliates itself before a shadow. Revocation is in no way a matter of speech. It is a heavy reality, materially immense (morally appalling). Was emigration less than that of 1793? I do not know. That of 1685 was very probably three to four hundred thousand people. Either way, there is a big difference. France, in that of 93, lost the idlers, and in the other the workers. The Terror of 93 struck the individual, and everyone feared for their lives. The Terror of the Dragonade struck the heart and the honor; we feared for our own. The most valiant did not expect this, and fainted. This is the most serious attack on the religions of the Family that has ever been dared. It had the strange and incredible appearance of a military insurrection ordered by authority, of a war in complete peace against women and children. The consequences were shocking. The general level of public morality seemed to decline. Since the mutual control of the two parties no longer existed, hypocrisy was no longer necessary; the underbelly of morals appeared. This immense succession of living men, which suddenly opened up, was prey. The king threw out the windows; we fought to pick it up. Vile scene. What remained lasted for a whole century; it is the existence of a people of helots (barely less than a million men) living under Terror, under the Law of Suspects. The deplorable outcome of the reign of Louis XIV cannot, however, make us forget what was beautiful and great about society, the civilization of that time. It must be recognized. In the phantasmagoria of this reign, the most imposing that has surprised Europe since the solid grandeur of the Roman Empire, not everything was an illusion. There is no doubt that there was a harmony there that was hardly seen before or since. It made the singular ascendancy of this power which was not only feared, but authorized, imitated. A rare tribute not obtained by the great military tyrannies. It subsists, this authority, continued in education and society by grace, by the luminous character of a kind and entirely human literature. They all start with her. Many do not exceed it. How much time I spent! the thirty years that I spend here have, I believe, cost me thirty years. Not that I worked there all that time straight away. But, from my childhood and throughout my life, I have been concerned with the reign of Louis XIV. It is not that there was a great invention then, if we think of little Greece (this miracle of fertile energy), of magnificent Italy, of the nervous and powerful sixteenth century. But what do you want! It's a harmony. These people thought they had a complete world, and ignored the rest. The result was something pleasant and suave, which also has a relative grandeur. I was very young when I read this honest Boileau, this melodious Racine; I learned the fanfare, not very diversified, from. Bossuet. Corneille, Pascal, Molière, La Fontaine, were my masters. The only thing that warned me and made me look elsewhere is that these very great writers finish rather than begin; Their originality (for most at least) is to bring into exquisite form the infinitely more grandiose things of Antiquity and the Renaissance. There is nothing in them that reaches the colossal height of Greek drama, of Dante, of Shakespeare or of Rabelais. The literary character of the administration of the time has been rightly praised. His actions have an elegance of style, an unusual nobility. Such diplomats write like Madame de Sévigné. All this is full of interest, and I am not surprised at the passionate admiration with which my friends have published these documents. The value of this is very real. However, let's not exaggerate it. Behind this superb pyramid of Colbert's ordinances, behind this lively and amusing diplomacy of Lyonne, etc., there is something else, a superior and often contrary power - the master himself, his temperament, his personal action which, at times, abruptly, unceremoniously, throws himself through Colbert's ideas, ignores them, sometimes even seems to ignore them. Example (1668): at a time when the minister was laboriously organizing his great commercial and industrial system, the king, well above these base mercantile ideas, wrote in England, like Alexander the Great, that, "if the English are content to be the merchants of the earth and to let it conquer, we will easily arrange things. Of world trade, three quarters to the English and a quarter to France," etc. ( Negotiation of the succession of Esp ., Mignet, III, 63.) It will be said that he wanted to deceive and amuse the English. Error. It's not a trick. And that's not a joke. His conduct is consistent. Leibnitz, young and gullible in 1672, imagined that the king was a politician, that he could be diverted from his war in Holland by the ease of conquering in the East. He does not know, or does not want to know, what the king and Louvois had said: "It is a religious war. » If it had succeeded, it would begin the general crusade of England and Europe that the Church of France hoped for. The publication of the Administrative Correspondence has done us a great service. It is only a specimen (4,000 pages in-4o ) . The largest subjects are reduced to a few pieces. The great affair of the century, that of the Protestants and, of the Revocation, occupies only a few pages. The summary introductions of the editor, Mr. Depping, are far from making up for the prodigious quantity of pieces that he has discarded. However, from the little he gives we gain great insight. For the first time we saw the underside, we were able to pass behind this colossal machine from Marly which was so imposing with the immensity of its cogs. The machine, seen in this way, remains large, certainly, but cruder than one would have thought. They are enormous wooden wheels, poorly meshed, the friction of which is very painful, which groans, which screams, which squeaks, which would often turn in the opposite direction if one did not have the hand. It is necessary that at every moment it intervenes, this human hand, to adjust, redo, facilitate, to force an obstacle that would stop it. We even see that, from time to time, there are parts of the machine that no longer work; or, if they go, it is because they are pushed and someone is working in their place. The great machinator Colbert, at every moment, becomes a machine and a wheel. We suffer, or struggle to see that generally, under this vain display of powerless mechanics; the real agent is a living man. Seen from the front and at a good distance, it works with fairly regular effects. We admire. We respect. We remember Montesquieu, the noble effort of man to resemble God, "who always obeys what he once ordered". Up close, it's something else. Nothing general, the law is little, the administration is everything In the administration itself, a certain violent will intervenes and disturbs the rule of fanciful exceptions. Variations all the more striking as they contrast with the pose of the major actors, the formidable gravity of Colbert, the majestic immobility of Louis XIV. From the immobile center, or believed to be such, irregularity begins. The rudder, in Colbert's hand, under the upper hand, warps every moment. It's much worse, after him. As soon as the great administrator has disappeared, the administration, already overloaded, will become more and more entangled; it falls to the detail of individual relationships, in the surprising enterprise of leading France, man by man, directing not only the conduct, but the soul, forcing it to achieve its salvation. He who holds too much, holds nothing. Large objects escape. We have too much to do with little ones. The morals of this nun, or this convent election, occupy more than the peace of Ryswick. The succession of Spain is a matter, but how secondary compared to that of quietism! The will of Charles II holds no more place in the thoughts of the king, of France than the reform of Saint-Cyr and its ladies cloistered against their will, than the mortal fight of Bossuet and Fénelon for Madame de La Maisonfort. Very diverse methods are required to study this reign. A fine interpretation is necessary to read certain Memoirs. But, generally, it is through a simple, strong, or rather crude, method that we can understand the materiality of time. Make no mistake. It is, above all, a man of enormous importance, I was going to say, unique, who, in decisive matters, decides according to his variable mood and temperament. With all this mass of political documents, we would be mistaken at every moment if we did not have a compass in the meticulous and carefully dated history of the revolutions of the court, better still, in the golden book where, month by month, month, we can study the health of Louis XIV, recounted by his doctors, MM. Vallot, d'Acquin and Fagon. The immutability of the king's health is a ridiculous fable. We must believe these doctors who knew him all his life, and not Saint-Simon, who only saw him in his last years, when he was ossified and barely changed. We are now so cultured, so refined, that we find it difficult to return to the understanding of this robust materiality of the monarchical incarnation. It is no longer in our current Europe, it is in Tibet and with the great Lama that we must study this. At least we penetrate the Journal of Doctors, an admirable book, whose intrepid positiveness does not diminish the adoration. The king, from page to page, is purged and sung. Let us again imbibe the legend of Dangeau, so scrupulous, so punctual in noting this divine life and all its accidents. Let us rise, if we can, to the ecstatic love of Lauzun for his master, when, disgraced, he swears never to shave again. Better yet, let us understand the devotions of La Feuillade, who, from his statue, made a chapel, wanted to put a light there. The Madonna was dethroned. These are our masters. They alone make the reign of Louis XIV well understood. What gives a very strong idea of ​​the ascendancy of terror that this god exercised in Europe is the multitude of facts that we dare not write for a long time even outside France, and which are only revealed very late. , towards the end of the reign. Memories of the Fronde, which had made him flee Paris, made the press odious for him. He spared her little. The pamphlet makers were prosecuted to death. In 1694, the printer of a pamphlet was hanged, without trial, on a simple order from the police lieutenant, and the bookbinder himself was hanged. Many people, for the same affair, are questioned and die in the Bastille. We knew that the king had long arms outside France, and had people who spoke badly or who acted against him removed to neutral countries. The kidnapping of Marcilly in Switzerland frightened everyone. That of the Armenian Patriarch Avedyk had not the slightest effect. We whispered to each other, with the doors closed, about the mystery of the Iron Mask. The famous cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, where Louis XI locked up La Balue, was occupied under Louis XIV by the author of a pamphlet against the Archbishop of Reims. No less great was the terror at court and close to the king. I described the anxiety that Madame (Henriette) felt over certain imprudent things that had escaped her, and how her fear was taken advantage of. This general timidity makes the history of the court obscure. The great Mademoiselle, and Madame, mother of the Regent, are the only ones who speak frankly. Saint-Simon comes very late; it is wrong to cite it at the beginning. How can we fill the serious gaps that the Memoirs leave us? Not at all with the novelists , anecdote writers, the Bussys, the Varillas. Not at all with the pamphleteers ; the little truth they have is mixed with a lot of falsehood. We must patiently collect and bring together the serious insights that literary history and political correspondence shed on the interior history of the court. Above all, it is necessary to date the smallest facts by month, by day, as much as possible. The date relationship alone can help find the causal relationship. What precedes in time is not always a cause , but it is certainly not an effect . This is already negative knowledge, which however often opens an unexpected day. What dominates, moreover, all method, all criticism, what seems to me the superior and essential point of view, is what I said earlier for one of the aspects of this time, and which is true for all; it is that with the exception of the bureaucratic machine, which is his own creation, he completes and finishes many things, but begins none . Louis XIV buries a world. Like his palace at Versailles, he faces the sunset. After a short moment of hope (1661-1666), the fifty years that followed had the general effect of the large park sadly golden in October and November, when the leaves fell. The true geniuses of that time, even when they are born, are not young, and whatever they do, they suffer from general impotence. Sadness is everywhere, in the monuments, in the characters; harsh in Pascal, in Colbert, suave in Madame Henriette, in La Fontaine, Racine and Fénelon. The triumphant security displayed by Bossuet does not prevent the century from feeling that it has exhausted its strength on outdated questions. They all said loudly and firmly, but a little more than they expected. They tried to believe and succeeded, strictly speaking, not without fatigue. This divine attribute (common in the sixteenth century), not one of them remained: Joy ! Joy, the laughter of the gods, as we say Heard in the Renaissance, that of the heroes, of the great inventors who saw the beginning of a world, we no longer hear it since Galileo. At the height of his time, his powerful comedian, Molière, dies of melancholy. The century which will follow Louis XIV will be neither Protestant nor Catholic. The two spirits in struggle in the seventeenth, having made their supreme effort, will henceforth produce little in the religious sphere. Rome, from 1607, on the advice of Saint Francis de Sales, prohibited speculation and discussion; took refuge in silence. The reformer Saint-Cyran, sincere and true prophet, predicted that his reform would be of no use. The Catholic genius followed its private path in the Direction (casuistry or quietist), a winding, obscure path, but illuminated in the end by the duel of Bossuet and Fénelon. The Protestant, theological-political genius, through men and revolutions, had its transformation in Milton, Sidney, Jurieu, Locke and the constitution of 1688. Happy event for all religion. Because political freedom, which guards other freedoms, especially that of the religious soul, alone allows this soul to freely seek its God. So, just as a ripe fruit, shedding its husks one by one, ends up revealing its inner core, this century, towards the end, reveals the mysterious background that the two great parties were harboring. - One leads to the dispute over mystical direction, the eternal minority of the soul and the death of the will . - And the other, standing opposite, gives the appeal to the will , the dogma of the social contract and the declaration of rights. Our Protestants made this appeal to will in 1689. They demanded the States General. The Letters of Jurieu, the Sighs of Slave France , these books, which will always make hearts vibrate, have no other meaning. It is said that the terrible resolution of such an amputation could not be taken without knowing from France whether it wanted to be thus mutilated. It is said that it is not only a question of bringing in the Protestants, of freeing the Catholics and of restoring to the nation the disposition of its destiny. Large and notable difference between the two emigrations. The royalist émigré, the Vendéen of 93, in their valiant efforts, what did they bring back? Nothing at all. Nothing but our old miseries, worn-out despotism. The Protestant emigrant, if he had had an echo here, if he had not been dispersed throughout Europe by the jealousy of the powers, and brought back the common deliverance. What he did not do for his country, at least he powerfully helped to do for the world. The madness of the prophets who realized by dint of predicting, the Mirabeau of that time, Jurieu, the learned sword of Schomberg, and, what is much more, the burning devotion of our people, all this contributed directly and indirectly to the glorious English revolution . I ask my friends in England to allow me to dwell on this a little. For this point has been too lightly indicated by their historians, even by the illustrious and regrettable Macaulay. Our refugees gave Guillaume and their lives and their last penny for the crusade of common freedoms. Besides the regiments they made for him, his seven hundred and thirty-six officers were French. Our France was not absent on the day when England wrote the great modern word, true divine right, free contract . And this right, promulgated in the prudent measure of a political nation, ours universalized it for every nation in the philosophical generality which made it fruitful and led to its application. From 1689, Jurieu, against Bossuet, established the rights of peoples, defending the cause of England before Europe. Locke, as we know, did not write until 1690. Sidney (earlier, it is true) was not printed. In the press, Jurieu is ahead of him. Just as Leibnitz and Newton found at the same time the calculation of infinity, the Englishman Sidney and the Frenchman Jurieu, each on his own, formulated the social contract.

France --- History