“Many thought that, within a short time, one of the men close to me would rule my mind and my kingdom. Most thought that the assiduity with which I worked was a temporary phase which would soon be over … Time has shown them up and this is now the tenth year* that I have progressed steadily in the same direction, never letting up my effort; listening to the lowest of my subjects; knowing at all times the number and quality of my soldiers and the condition of my fortresses; giving my orders every day for all their needs; negotiating at every moment with the foreign ambassadors; receiving and reading the dispatches; writing part of the answers myself and giving the gist of the rest to my secretaries; regulating the income and expenditure of the state; hearing the direct reports of those whom I place in important offices; keeping all my business more secret than anyone ever had before me; distributing favors according to my own preference and keeping those who serve me, although laden with my kindnesses to them and their families, in a modest condition very different from the power and elevation of the prime ministers.
“As people noticed all of this over time, they began to feel respect for me; and that opinion has greatly contributed to the success of my undertakings.”109
With this nod to the power of publicity, the king once again shows how very prudent he was: Far from rushing ahead at any risk, the triumphs he most enjoyed were those which had cost the least: It was thus typical that when, in October 1662, he decided to recover Dunkerque, which had been the price paid for Cromwell’s alliance in the fifties, he went about it in a completely unconventional manner. His predecessors would have laid siege to the city; Louis XIV waited until Charles II needed money even more badly than usual and then offered to take Dunkerque off his hands for the sum of 5 million livres. This lure was irresistible; too good to be true, in fact: As a result of last-minute adjustments and some use of a fluctuating rate of exchange between French and British currencies, the actual payment sank to some 3.5 million. Nor was it merely a question of pride: As soon as Dunkerque was French, a formidable set of fortifications began to rise. These had a triple purpose: They made the city a safe harbor for the rapidly developing fleet; they would serve to slow a Spanish attack if the need arose; they could be used to intimidate Charles II if ever he thought of returning to Cromwell’s policy.
In many ways, the purchase of Dunkerque is exemplary, both of the way the king did business - prudently and without shedding a drop of blood - and of the possibilities opened up by his careful watch over the finances. Having a well-filled Treasury meant that money could be spent instead of men in gaining important advantages, while at the same time a stronger army served to deter any possible aggression. Thus, in spite of his solar emblem and proud motto, in spite of what naïve people thought of as his impetuous youth, Louis XIV governed like the most seasoned of statesmen.
That, however, was perfectly compatible with great and visible pride. Already in 1661, the king felt quite sure that France was the first power in Europe; as we know with the benefit of hindsight, he was perfectly right, but most people, including his ministers, had yet to discover this fact. An incident in London now proved it to the world.
On the occasion of the formal entry of the Swedish Ambassador into London, the comte d’Estrades, Louis XIV’s Ambassador and his Spanish colleague, the baron de Vatteville, quarreled about whose carriage was to go first. Vatteville, who had provoked the dispute and was therefore prepared for it, had not only brought along an unusually large escort, but also bribed men in the crowd; thus, from the very beginning, he was in a position of strength. First, his people killed the horses which drew the French carriages; then Estrades’s gentlemen were attacked and in some cases severely wounded, upon which, triumphantly, the Spaniards rejoined the procession.
As is so often the case in international disputes, both sides were partly right: It had long been understood that the ambassadors of Spain would be given precedence, so Estrades was wrong to dispute it; on the other hand, strong-arming and wounding the French was inexcusable. Here, obviously, was a situation made for a compromise solution, and that is just what Brienne, who was still in office, and Lionne recommended.
The king, however, had a clearer view of the relative strength of France and Spain. Far from negotiating a compromise, he sent a strongly worded letter to Charles II demanding the expulsion of M. de Vatteville. He then recalled his own envoy from Madrid, expelled the Spanish Ambassador, and recalled his negotiators from the conferences then held in Flanders to work out border details not clearly set out in the Treaty of the Pyrenees. More, he informed Philip IV, his uncle and father-in-law, that unless Spain recognized French precedence while offering a public apology, the war would start again.
This demand seemed the height of imprudence to the French ministers. Because, to a degree, they still lived in the past, because they remembered that, as late as 1636, the Spanish Army had very nearly taken Paris, because finally Spain had been the leading European power for nearly a century and a half, they thought it mad to risk war over a point of etiquette. The king, however, perceived very rightly that Spain was no longer in any state to make war; its long decline, in fact, was already well under way, and the risk, therefore, very small. Ignoring the advice offered by his Council, he proceeded as he pleased, and events soon confirmed his perception. Vatteville was recalled from London, and in March 1662, the count of Fuentes, Philip IV’s envoy, arrived in Fontainebleau. There, before the entire Court and the diplomatic corps, he announced that henceforth, Spanish ambassadors would give France precedence.
Once again, no blood had been shed, but Louis XIV’s triumph shook Europe just the same. For the very first time since the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spain had been openly humbled, and France, clearly, had now taken its place as the leading power. More, the king’s determination and coolness impressed, and sometimes frightened, his neighbors. If he was ready to start a war on a point of etiquette, it was obvious that he would not hesitate when more substantial French interests were at stake. Of course, Louis himself saw the disputed precedence as a very substantial point indeed: By showing firmness in a minor matter, he avoided many a future conflict while ensuring his gloire.
More surprising, this bold new policy was carried out without a murmur from anyone in France, partly because there had been no leaks before the decisions were announced, partly because the ministers had, indeed, learned to obey. Even under the fearsome Richelieu, disputes and leaks were commonplace: The Court, the royal family, and, to some extent, the government were divided between the strong anti-Habsburg policy practiced by the cardinal and its reverse, an alliance with Spain against the Protestants. Now, with the ministers absolutely dependent on the king, it was at last possible for France to have a strong, steady, and effective policy.
“Le Tellier, who had studied the King’s mind with great care,” Mme de Motteville noted, “confirmed what my brother told me about the seriousness and severity which he [the King] added to his natural kindness, so as to create a feeling of respect in all those who saw him and a feeling of fear in those who came closest to him so that they were not tempted to abuse the freedom he gave them of speaking out.”110 That, in fact, was a key element of Louis XIV’s new style of government: He expected no flattery, no fawning, from his ministers. They were free, and expected, to defend their point of view or criticize another. But then, having listened to them, the king made the final decision, and after that, the minister’s job was to carry out his orders.
“Our elevation,” Louis XIV wrote, “removes us in a way from our people to whom the ministers are closer; they are thus better able to see a thousand details of which we are not aware … but when, on important occasions, they have argued out all the possible solutions, all the reasons pro and con, and reported what is done abroad in similar cases, then it is up to us, my son, to decide what must actually be done. And that choice, I daresay that if we lack neither courage nor common sense, no one else can make it as well as we. For decisions require a master’s mind
; and it is incomparably easier to be what we are than to imitate what we are not …
“In certain circumstances, wisdom calls for leaving much to chance; reason itself then makes us give in to I know not what blind instincts or reactions, beyond reason and which seem inspired by God* to all men, but which those he has placed in the first rank have the greater obligation to acknowledge. No one can say when we must distrust these instincts, and when we must obey them, that is not to be found in books or taught by experience … And although my ministers saw that they would always be just what they should be,† they were all the happier in an office where, with a thousand other advantages, they could feel absolutely safe when they did their duty.”111
The “thousand other advantages” Louis XIV mentions were very substantial indeed. Where, earlier, some ministers had made rapid but uncertain fortunes by robbing the state, and then worried about possible retribution - it occasionally followed - now men like Colbert or Lionne or Le Tellier grew immensely rich legitimately and legally, on the king’s gifts. By 1665, palaces were going up which belonged to them, and that, too, reflected the king’s policy. Obviously, a happy subordinate will work harder and be more faithful, but also by giving his ministers the means to live like princes, by seeing to it that their children married into the great noble families,* Louis XIV was also making a point about his own power. The people who carried out his will were rapidly becoming the first in the state because they were a reflection of himself; and in no time at all, baseborn men like Colbert or Le Tellier were addressed as monseigneur, an appellation heretofore reserved to dukes and the royal family.†
Naturally, the ministers then tried to bring their relatives into the royal service, so that clans developed: Colbert’s brother and his son both had important positions, while Le Tellier’s son was the equivalent of Undersecretary of War, but these new groupings had no independent power, no connection to entrenched aristocratic families. They held office solely because the king wanted them to, and while he would have had great difficulty in dismissing a prince of the blood royal from his Council, there were a thousand candidates waiting to replace the ministers, and no one of any consequence to resist their dismissal.
This new method of government was immensely shocking - so much so, in fact, that at Louis XIV’s death in 1715, fifty-four years later, the ministers were dismissed and the great nobles put in charge once more. What the outraged aristocracy had failed to perceive, however, was that a modern state required a competent government: In short order, the ministers came back and the system inaugurated in 1661 continued until the end of the Ancien Régime.
Just because the ministers were powerful and respected, however, did not mean that they formed a united, independent cabinet; indeed, a lively enmity soon developed between the Colbert and Le Tellier clans, with their representatives often taking opposing positions at the Council. That, too, was useful: It is clearly better to hear different points of view before arriving at a decision, and the king used the very rivalries between his servants in order to rule better and more effectively. Then, too, for the first time, private interests were unable to shape the Council’s decisions. Fouquet, for instance, could always be counted on to defend the Parlement, as had ministers under Louis XIII and Richelieu; cardinals, whether they were prime ministers or just members of the Council, were likely to favor the pope’s policy. With the removal of these two important factions, the king now found himself free to deal with those two states within the state, the Church and the Parlements.
“It was necessary,” Louis XIV wrote, “to abate the excessively great authority of the main Parlements … which considered themselves to be so many independent and separate sovereigns. I made it clear that I would not allow their usurpations, and soon acted in consequence. The cour des aides* was the first to forget its duty; I exiled a few of its members because I thought that this remedy, used immediately, would preclude any need for it henceforth, and so it did.
“Upon this, I made my intentions plainer still in a solemn decision given out by my conseil d’en haut† … I forbade them all ever to give judgments contrary to those of my Council under any pretext whatsoever … It was time to show them that I did not fear them and that the times had changed. And those whose interests made them hope that the Parlements would resist learned from their obedience what was due to me.”112 This doctrine may look like another typical instance of antidemocratic despotism, but, here too, hindsight leads straight into error.
Neither in 1661 nor in 1648 did the Parlements represent anyone but themselves: Their name gives the misleading impression that they were a representative assembly; in fact, they were a gathering of rich men who had bought judicial office: It cannot be said too often that the Parlements were tribunals and nothing more; that the judges were people who had bought their offices, so that money, and not competence, determined their membership; that the registration of laws had been started purely as a legal convenience so as to avoid having contradictory statutes; and that nothing in the selection or the training of the présidents and conseillers entitled them to behave as if they had been elected.
The Parlements, in fact, behind the veil of demagogy which they were wont to use, were interested mainly in preserving the rich from the obligation of paying any taxes; thus, even if resistance to taxation can easily be misrepresented as sympathy for the people, they stood for a markedly unfair and retrogressive policy; as for their lack of capacity to rule, it had been amply demonstrated during the Fronde, so that Louis XIV’s reassertion of his authority met with nothing but approval: Had there been elections in 1662, there can be no doubt that the king would have won them handily.
Louis XIV himself, in his memoirs, made a good case for the utility and justice of a policy which, he claimed, was wholly unaffected by private considerations. “I do not want you to think that [my policy as regards the Parlements] was due to motives of fear, hatred, or vengeance for the events of the Fronde … That satisfaction people expect from vengeance is hardly made for us: it can only flatter those whose power is fragile … As for us, my son, we are very rarely in that middle state where one takes pleasure in revenge; for, either we can do what we please without difficulty or else we find ourselves, on the contrary, in certain difficult and delicate circumstances which prevent us from imposing the fullness of our power.
“Finally, just as we belong to our people, so our people belong to us and I have yet to see a wise man taking vengeance at his own cost by hurting those who belong to him …
“The elevation of the Parlements was a danger to the realm when I was a minor; it was necessary to curb them, less because of past evils than because of what they might have done in the future.”113
Here, for the first time, Louis XIV is less than sincere. His arguments are, of course, perfectly valid, so are his fears for the future,* but there can be no doubt that he nursed a burning resentment for the men and events of the Fronde. When, like Condé, the Frondeurs had turned into obedient courtiers, they could be forgiven, but the Parlement de Paris’s humbling of the monarchy, the powerless dissembling when the mob invaded the young king’s bedroom, the grinding poverty of the Court during the civil wars, all that was never forgotten. Much of the reign, in fact, consists of policies designed to prevent any repetition of the Fronde, from the reorganization of the king’s Council to the Court’s eventual removal from Paris. In that perspective, eradicating the Parlement’s political power was an essential goal.
Nor was the supremacy of the conseil d’en haut the only step. The king was patient, but persistent. In 1666, after five years of peace, the Parlement began, once again, to resist: It refused to register an edict establishing a yearly production tax, another one in which heavy fines were imposed on the financiers who had stolen from the Treasury under Fouquet and were, in return, granted amnesty, and a third reducing the interest on the debt to 5 percent. Promptly, Louis XIV held a lit de justice and ordered the registration, upon which the chambre des requêtes, always the bold
est one, tried to protest; immediately, the king forbade the protest. “There was an assembly of the chambres of the Parlement at which M. le Premier président related the king’s prohibition and the order he had received to assemble the chambres. Once he had finished speaking, the whole company remained silent for a while; and after some time, since no one said a word, M. Le Coigneux, président of [the chambre of] la Tournelle stood up; all followed him, one after the other; and thus everyone left without a single word being said, everyone looking abashed. There is no previous example of such an event in the history of the Parlement,”114 Ormesson, one of its members, noted.
What Ormesson, who had been through the Fronde, forgets, however, is that the very refusal to register was a relative innovation, and that protests against registrations made during a lit de justice had begun precisely when the Parlement was rebelling against Anne of Austria’s authority, a time at which orders to be silent were hardly likely to be heeded. In fact, once again, the refusal to register had been purely selfish: Many of the fined financiers came from Parlement families; the new tax would raise the price of luxuries; and finally, the reduction of the rate of interest to 5 percent once again affected the rich who had lent money to the government at exorbitant rates - i.e., the Parlement families. This time, however, the king had prevailed.
Two years later, in 1668, Louis XIV went a step further. On January 16, the king told the attorney general that he wanted to see a deputation from the Parlement. “On the seventeenth, they came to Saint Germain. The King spoke to them privately behind closed doors* and told them that M. le Chancelier [Séguier] would tell them his intentions; which he did, informing them that the King wanted to have the registers of the Parlement from the year 1645 to the year 1652, inclusively, so as to remove anything concerned with the affairs of state, and that, as for all private business,† that would be carefully copied so that the public would not suffer from this.
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