An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  Timid, sickly, and depressed, he spent most of his life trying to assert himself; first toward his mother, the fat, silly, overbearing regent Marie de’ Medici; then toward his minister, Richelieu, on the one hand, and toward Richelieu’s innumerable enemies, on the other. Despite his personal problems, Louis wanted very much to be a great king. History has only recently begun to do him justice, noting that he had the sense to recognize his own limitations and the guts to play second fiddle to a minister he hated for what seemed, at the time, to be the good of France. HIS MATE

  Anne of Austria: The daughter of the King of Spain (Spain was then under Hapsburg rule), she was selected by Louis’ mother, who hoped to cement an alliance between the two countries. Louis responded by ignoring Anne; it took four years for him to consummate the marriage, and twenty to father their first child. Anne had a strange life, but not the worst imaginable for a French queen; although she was perpetually at loggerheads with Richelieu, who was both arrogant and vehemently anti-Hapsburg, her husband, at least, lacked the energy to be actively unfaithful to her. She became regent once the king and his minister were dead. HIS MINISTER

  Cardinal Richelieu: The proud, ruthless power behind the throne, whom you may best remember as the villain in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Any French schoolchild would be able to recite Richelieu’s famous three-point program for consolidating the power of the monarchy and the French state: Suppress the Protestants, curb the nobles, and humble the House of Austria. “Red Robe,” as the Cardinal was known, succeeded, up to a point—he had a knack for crushing conspiracies and, importantly, he had the support of the king—but he nearly bankrupted the state through sheer financial ineptitude.

  HIS MOTTO:

  “Now I am king.”

  HIS CHAIR:

  THE MAN: LOUIS XIV (1638-1715)

  This little man, believe it or not, ruled the France that produced Corneille, Racine, Molière, and Pascal, and was himself the greatest repository of personal power in an age that was crawling with absolutist, divine-right monarchs. Short (which is why you’ll always see him in heels and a mile-high wig), not pretty (that hooked nose and receding chin were the trademarks of the Bourbon dynasty), harsh, egotistical, and only moderately intelligent, he succeeded in getting himself nicknamed “The Sun King” largely because France was ripe for a leader. He did, however, have certain qualifications for the job: common sense, an ability to recognize talent, stand-out style, a strong feeling for the state, and an absolute delight in the day-to-day business of being king. Under his rule (which lasted seventy-two years, making him the longest-running monarch in French history) France became the most powerful and prestigious country in Europe, although it was financially ruined in the process. HIS MATES

  Marie Thérèse of Spain: Louis’ small, swarthy, somewhat insipid queen, whom he married to fulfill a treaty agreement. She played little part in his life, produced several children who died in infancy and one rather mediocre prince, the Grand Dauphin, who died before he could become king.

  The Duchesse de la Vallière: She loved him, bore him children, and retired, heartbroken, to a nunnery when he abandoned her.

  Mme. de Montespan: An intriguer who, after replacing the Duchesse de la Vallière, managed to hang on for twelve years, and to bear the king eight illegitimate children. She fell into disgrace during the Affair of the Poisons, a court scandal involving the mysterious deaths of various nobles, among them the woman Louis had recently chosen to replace her.

  Mme. de Maintenon: A pious widow in her forties, renowned for her successful literary salon. Louis gave her the task of raising his children by Mme. de Montespan. These two were friends before they were lovers; Louis, an aging libertine, admired Mme. de Maintenon’s intelligence and austerity. After the death of the queen, they were married secretly. She played an important role in politics, caused a major change in the king’s lifestyle, and transformed the later years of his reign—making them, some thought, slightly depressing. HIS MINISTERS

  Cardinal Mazarin: An Italian, inherited from Louis’ mother, Anne of Austria, to whom, it was rumored, he was secretly married. Mazarin’s aims and policies were much the same as Richelieu’s, although his style leaned more toward subtlety and unscrupulousness than open ruthlessness. His ongoing attempts to center power in the crown led to the open rebellion known as La Fronde, in which nobles and bourgeoisie nearly succeeded in toppling the monarchy, but ended by turning on each other instead. Mazarin ran the country while he lived, but after his death, the young Louis dispensed with the office of chief minister altogether and held the reins himself.

  Colbert: Louis’ finance minister for twenty years, he was one of the great practitioners of mercantilism, the system of building national wealth by exporting goods in exchange for gold and other precious metals. Hoping to make France economically self-sufficient, he encouraged industry, built roads, began construction of a navy, and patronized the arts, but in the end most of his programs—and his reputation—collapsed under the weight of Louis’ personal extravagance.

  HIS MOTTO

  “L’état c’est moi.” (“I am the state.”)

  HIS CHAIR:

  THE MAN: LOUIS XV (1710-1774)

  Handsome and frail, he was dubbed “le Bien-Aimé” (the Well-Beloved) by his adoring subjects early in his reign; before long, the epithet was purely ironical. Louis wasn’t stupid, but he was spoiled rotten; an incorrigible débauché, he chose to flirt rather than rule. His method of governing consisted of fomenting gossip and intrigue at court and setting up an elaborate spy network, known as “le Secret du Roi,” abroad. By the end of his reign, royal authority at home and French influence in Europe were just pleasant memories and Louis was, personally, the most hated man in France. HIS MATES

  Maria Leszcynska: The daughter of a dethroned Polish king, and considerably older than Louis, she was the best that could be found in a hurry. They were married when he was fifteen, and for a while they got along fine; she was modest, sweet, and able to produce ten children in ten years. Eventually, however, she refused to sleep with the king for the sake of her health, after which she had to resign herself to being a good sport while Louis threw sexual discretion to the wind.

  Mme. de Pompadour: Her bourgeois background scandalized the court more than loose morals ever could. Louis made her a marquise, and she did whatever was necessary to hang on to power for the next nineteen years. This was no small feat since, according to the history books, Louis was sexually insatiable and Mme. de Pompadour was “frigid”; she solved the problem by procuring beautiful mistresses for him. An inveterate schemer, she had a genius for stirring up trouble at court, and she helped Louis shape his disastrous foreign policy. On the plus side, she had taste and wit and was committed to encouraging artists. She provided Voltaire with support and protection and Paris with the Place de la Concorde.

  Mme. du Barry: She played Lolita to Louis’ Humbert Humbert. His last official favorite, la du Barry was a pretty, vivacious, rather vulgar courtesan who got on many people’s nerves, but apparently meant no harm. She was, at least, an aristocrat. She reportedly sat on the arm of the royal chair during council meetings, making faces at the minsters like a pet monkey. HIS MINISTER

  Cardinal Fleury: Already seventy when he took office, he ran the state honestly, economically, and cautiously. But he couldn’t live forever; when he died in office, at the age of ninety, Louis decided not to appoint another minister in his place. HIS MOTTO

  “Aprés moi, le déluge.” (Louis never really said this; it was a measure of his unpopularity that everyone believed he had.) HIS CHAIR:

  THE MAN: LOUIS XVI (1754-1793)

  Flabby, sluggish, humble, and shy, he was probably cut out for something, but it wasn’t being king. He read slowly, danced poorly, made conversation barely at all, and always looked a mess, no matter how much trouble his valets took. Even if his piety and basic good-heartedness had been leadership qualities, Louis lacked the will to put them to work. The only things he reall
y cared about were food, his wife, and the hunt, in ascending order. To him, a day without hunting was a day not really lived. On July 14, 1789, he wrote in his diary, “Nothing.” HIS MATE

  Marie Antoinette: She’d been the Archduchess of Austria and she was everything Louis wasn’t: majestic, charming, sophisticated, proud, and frivolous. He adored her; she despised him. The fact that a genital malformation kept Louis from consummating their marriage for eight years didn’t do much to keep her home at night or to make her treat him kindly. Still, rumors that she was unfaithful were probably false; she was more interested in shopping than in sex. Although her extravagance earned her the nickname “Madame Déficit,” it was her Austrian background that the French found really unforgivable. In fact, letters discovered after her death revealed that the queen’s mother, Maria Theresa, had had every intention of using her daughter as a tool of the Austrian government (and her meddling in politics certainly shooed the Revolution along its way), but the French had no way of knowing that at the time. HIS MINISTERS

  Maurepas: An old courtier intent on offending no one, he missed his chance to squelch lethal court factions and refused to support the financial reforms proposed by the liberal minister Turgot because he was jealous. By the time he died, the Revolution was only eight years away.

  Necker: A conservative financier who came into prominence largely because of his ambitious wife, who presided over a brilliant literary salon. He ran afoul of Marie Antoinette, and by the time he’d regained power, his orthodox financial policies were too little, too late. HIS MOTTO

  “Let them eat cake.” Not his, of course; hers. HIS CHAIR:

  Special Souvenir-Program Section Persian Wars, Peloponnesian War, Punic Wars

  In the Persian Wars (500–499 b.c.), the Greeks—most notably Athens and Sparta—defeated the greatest empire the world had up to then known, an empire that embraced not only Persia, but Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and much of what is today Afghanistan. The wars began in Ionia, on the Turkish coast, as a colonial revolt against the “barbarian” landlord; Athens stepped in on the colonists’ side, and won a big victory at Marathon. The Spartans got involved and, with the Athenians, suffered a famous (though they’d been very brave) defeat at Thermopylae; but the same year (480) the Greeks had a big naval victory at Salamis. Eventually they destroyed the Persian fleet—it was Xerxes I who suffered the defeat, his father (Darius I) having started the war— then pushed the Persians inland (where Alexander the Great would zap them a century later) and opened the entire Aegean to Greek shipping. Herodotus tells the story of the Persian Wars, which mark the coming of age of Greek nationalism and sense of superiority to the “Orient,” as well as the ascendancy of Athens.

  In the Peloponnesian War (431–404 b.c.), greedy, cocksure Athens, now the preeminent Greek city-state, and its allies, the so called Delian League, took on spiteful, jealous Sparta and her allies, the so called Peloponnesian League (from the Peloponnese, the southernmost Greek peninsula, which Sparta dominated). Athens, which was all about democracy and high culture and maritime trading, initially tried to wear down the resistance of Sparta, which was all about oligarchy and military discipline and living off the land. (The Persians, happy enough to see their rivals fighting, funded both sides, first one, then the other.) Ultimately, the war ruined Athens, which made a lot of miscalculations (and wasn’t helped by a plague, in which Pericles, its leader, died, or by the revolt of several allies). Sparta, triumphant, took over the Athenian empire, where it did away with voting and playwriting; though it wasn’t able to control Athens for long, Sparta remained the dominant power in ancient Greece for another thirty years. Thucydides, who wrote about it, calls the Peloponnesian War the worst disturbance in Greek history, but then he hadn’t met the Romans.

  In the Punic Wars (three of them: 264–241 b.c., 218–201 b.c., and 149– 146 b.c.), those Romans were able to finish off their “hated city,” Carthage, in present-day Tunisia, a rival for trade and empire throughout the western Mediterranean. (“Punic” is from the Roman word for Phoenician, Carthage having been settled by the Phoenicians in the ninth century b.c.) In the first Punic War, Rome, which had just succeeded in showing the rest of the Italian peninsula who was boss, kicked Carthage out of Sicily (then grabbed Sardinia and Corsica while nobody was looking), and came to appreciate the value of naval power. In the second Punic War, Hannibal, a Carthaginian, invaded Rome from Carthaginian Spain by crossing the Alps, but wound up getting wedged into the toe of Italy’s boot. Rome relieved Carthage not only of Spain but also of its fleet, then invaded the city itself. This was the end of Carthaginian commercial and imperial greatness, though the place didn’t go down the tubes completely. Didn’t, that is, until the third Punic War, in which Rome— incited by Cato the Elder’s famous Delenda est Carthago (“Carthage must be destroyed”) speech—first blockaded, then conquered the city, taking it apart house by house and stone by stone, and finally ploughing the whole place under. The survivors became slaves and the surrounding lands the Roman province of Africa. That same year (146 b.c.), Greece was annexed. Rome was off and running. Middle Ages, Dark Ages, Medieval Times, Feudalism

  The Middle Ages are the thousand years that elapsed between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in A.D. 476 and the onset of the Renaissance in Italy in about 1500. Scholars subdivide the Middle Ages into the Early Middle Ages (476 to 900 or 1000, the central figure of which is Charlemagne), the High Middle Ages (900 or 1000 to around 1300), and the Late Middle Ages (1300 to 1500); together the three periods account for the millennium that separates the Ancient world from the Modern one.

  The Dark Ages is what Renaissance people, looking down their aquiline noses, called the whole of the Middle Ages. Scholars, however, stepping in once again, preempted the term for the Early Middle Ages only, arguing that the five centuries after the year 1000 weren’t, give or take the Hundred Years’ War, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Great Plague, really as bad as all that.

  Medieval times—or the medieval era, or whatever—is simply, and literally, a Latinate way of saying “Middle Ages,” from the Latin medius, “middle,” plus aevum, “age.” And feudalism describes not a period of time but a political system that prevailed during it, in which vassals (the ancestors of our nobles) pledge fealty (our loyalty) to their liege lord (our king) exchanging their service in time of war for inheritable fiefs (our real estate). As it happens, feudalism was in effect in most of Europe from about the tenth century until the end of the fourteenth. But while it coincides with much of the Middle Ages, that doesn’t mean you get to substitute one term for the other. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Becket, Thomas à Kempis, Thomas More

  All four are saints. Think of them as the scholastic, the martyr, the mystic, and the humanist, respectively. But let’s do this in chronological order.

  Thomas à Becket, a twelfth-century Englishman, is the martyr. After a somewhat loose-living youth, during which he gave his friend King Henry II every reason to think he’d make an easygoing enough Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket fooled everybody, including himself, by either, depending on whom you talk to, getting religion or going on a power trip. Anyway, he interfered enough with Henry’s attempts to consolidate national power at the expense of the Church that he wound up being assassinated in 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral. Thus began a martyrdom that would see immediate baronial rebellion (and the consequent withering of royal power), subsequent canonization, an enormous and centuries-long tourist industry (it’s Thomas’ shrine that Chaucer’s pilgrims are headed for), plus all those plays (by Tennyson, Eliot, and Anouilh) and movies (with Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole).

  Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Italian, is the scholastic, one of that breed of philosophers who liked to argue about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and, regardless of that answer, whether or not they had navels. In a sense, he transcended the genre, managing to channel some of that endless Q&A energy into arguing with the real dopes about how faith cou
ldn’t be endangered by reason, which meant it wasn’t a sin to go on thinking. Known to some as the Angelic Doctor, to others—the result of the slowness of his delivery—as the Dumb Ox.

  Thomas à Kempis, a fourteenth-century German, is the mystic. Purported author of something called The Imitation of Christ, which charted the progress of the individual soul up to and including its union with God, in fact he spelled big trouble for the Catholic Church. After all, emphasize enough how we can all commune directly with God in perfect solitude, without need of words, worship, or sacraments, let alone church property, and a few of us are going to stop showing up on Sunday. This wasn’t Kempis’ intention (he still honored the Church’s pattern of salvation), but it got Martin Luther, among others, thinking.

  With Thomas More, we’re back in England and it’s the sixteenth century. A northern humanist, like the Dutchman Erasmus and the Frenchman John Calvin (see below), he took Renaissance energy—which tended to be employed down in Italy to make beautiful things and explore the infinite riches of the human personality—and applied it to thinking about God, society, science, and human nature. A statesman (and the author of Utopia, his version of which was a severe and snobbish agricultural community with plenty of slaves to take care of the degrading stuff), he, like Becket, was put to death for refusing to do his king’s bidding. Required by Henry VIII to sign the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared the English monarch to be the “Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England,” thereby getting England out from under the thumb of the Pope and allowing Henry to get his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, More demurred. He was offed the following year and canonized four centuries later. John Wyclif, John Huss, John Calvin, John Knox

  Another group who, basically, gave the Catholic Church a bad time. John Wyclif, an Englishman teaching at Oxford, had noticed, like Thomas à Kempis, that it was possible to do without the elaborate possessions of a church and, if you were devout by nature, even without priests. The difference is that in 1380 or so, he, unlike Kempis, said as much, furthermore recommending that everybody simply go home and read the Bible, which he just happened to have translated into English.