by Will Durant
But he had overreached himself. The United Provinces persuaded Sweden and England to join them in a Triple Alliance against France (January, 1668); all three states recognized that their political or commercial freedom would wither if the power of France should extend to the Rhine. Louis saw that he had moved too precipitately toward his goal. The secret agreement with Leopold had stipulated that on the death of Charles II of Spain all the Netherlands and Franche-Comté were to go to France; it seemed only a matter of a year or so when the sickly Charles would die; perhaps it was better for France to wait and let the fruit fall peacefully into her lap. Louis offered terms to the Alliance; his trained diplomats worked on England and Sweden; at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (May 2, 1668) the War of Devolution was ended. France returned Franche-Comté to Spain, but she retained Charleroi, Douai, Tournai, Audenaarde, Lille, Armentières, and Courtrai. Louis had kept half the spoils.
In 1672 he resumed his march to the Rhine, and now his real goal appeared—not Flanders but Holland. We shall see this tragedy later from the standpoint of the Dutch; in summary, the attack reached almost to Amsterdam and The Hague before it was checked by the opening of the dykes. But again Europe rose against the new threat to the balance of power. In October, 1672, Emperor Leopold joined the United Provinces and Brandenburg in a “Great Coalition”; Spain and Lorraine entered it in 1673; Denmark, the Palatinate, and the duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, in 1674; and in that year the English Parliament compelled its Francophile King to make peace with the Dutch.
Louis faced bravely this nemesis of his pride. Despite Colbert’s complaints that he was impoverishing France, he raised more taxes, built a navy, and expanded his armies to 180,000 men. In June, 1674, he directed one force to a second siege of Besançon; in six weeks Franche-Comté was again conquered. Meanwhile Turenne, in the most brilliant and ruthless of his campaigns, led twenty thousand soldiers to victory over seventy thousand Imperial troops; to prevent the enemy from feeding itself, he laid waste the Palatinate, Lorraine, and part of Alsace; along the Rhine the desolation of the Thirty Years’ War was renewed. On July 27, 1675, Turenne was killed while reconnoitering near Sulzbach in Baden. Louis had him buried in St.-Denis with almost royal honors, knowing that that one death equaled a dozen defeats. The Great Condé, after bloody victories in the Netherlands, replaced Turenne, and drove the Imperials from Alsace; then the Prince, worn out by years of passion and war, retired to a life of philosophy and government at Chantilly. Louis now took charge of the campaign in the Netherlands; he besieged and captured Valenciennes, Cambrai, St.-Omer, Ghent, and Ypres (1677–78). France acclaimed the King as a general.
But the drain upon his people had become unbearable. Revolts broke out in Bordeaux and Brittany; in south France the peasantry neared starvation; in the Dauphiné the populace was living on bread made of acorns and roots. 125 When the Dutch offered peace, Louis signed with them (August 11, 1678) a treaty restoring to the United Provinces all the territory that France had taken from them, and lowering the tariffs that had kept Dutch products out of France. He made up for these surrenders by forcing Spain, now in disintegration, to yield to him Franche-Comté, and a dozen towns that advanced the northeastern frontier of France into the Spanish Netherlands. A treaty with the Emperor kept for France the strategic cities of Breisach and Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Alsace and Lorraine remained in French hands. These treaties of Nijmegen (1678–79) and St.-Germain-en-Laye (1679) were a triumph for the United Provinces, but not a defeat for Louis; he had prevailed over the Empire and Spain, and, here and there, he had reached the coveted Rhine.
Despite the peace he kept up his immense army, knowing that an army in being is a force in diplomacy. With that power behind him, and taking scandalous advantage of the Emperor’s preoccupation with the advancing Turks, he established in Alsace, Franche-Comté, and Breisgau “Chambers of Reunion” to reclaim certain frontier districts that had formerly belonged to them; these were occupied by French troops; and the great city of Strasbourg was induced, by the lavish lubrication of its officials, to acknowledge Louis as its sovereign (1681). In the same year, by like means, the Duke of Milan was led to cede to France the town and fortress of Casale, which controlled the road between Savoy and Milan.* When Spain dallied in handing over the Netherland cities, Louis again sent his armies into Flanders and Brabant, overcame resistance with indiscriminate bombardment, and absorbed the duchy of Luxembourg en route (June, 1684). In the Truce of Regensburg (August 15) these conquests were provisionally recognized by Spain and the Emperor, for the Turks were besieging Vienna. By an alliance with the Elector of Cologne Louis in effect extended French power to the Rhine. Part of the Gallic aspiration to reach natural boundaries was realized.
This was the zenith of the Roi Soleil. Not since Charlemagne had France been so extended or so powerful. Immense and costly spectacles celebrated the successes of the Sun King. The Council of Paris officially declared him Louis le Grand (1680). Le Brun painted him as a god on the vaults of Versailles; and a theologian argued that Louis’ victories proved the existence of God. 127 The populace, amid its destitution, idealized its ruler, and took pride in his apparent invincibility. Even foreigners praised him, seeing some geographical logic in his campaigns; the philosopher Leibniz hailed him as “that great prince who is the acknowledged glory of our time, and for whom succeeding ages will long in vain.” 128 North of the Alps and the Pyrenees, west of the Vistula, all educated Europe began to speak his language and imitate his court, his arts, and his ways. The sun was high.
CHAPTER II
The Crucible of Faith
1643–1715
I. THE KING AND THE CHURCH
THE historian, like the journalist, tends to lose the normal background of an age in the dramatic foreground of his picture, for he knows that his readers will relish the exceptional and will wish to personify processes and events. Behind the rulers, ministers, çourtiers, mistresses, and warriors of France were men and women competing for bread and mates, scolding and loving their children, sinning and confessing, playing and quarreling, going wearily to work, stealthily to brothels, humbly to prayer. The quest for eternal salvation occasionally interruped the struggle for daily survival; the dream of heaven grew as the lust for life declined; the cool naves of the churches gave respite from the heat of strife. The marvelous myths were the people’s poetry; the Mass was the consoling drama of their redemption; and though the priest himself might be a covetous worldling, the message he brought lifted up the hearts of the defeated poor. The Church still rivaled the state as a pillar of society and power, for it was through hope that men submitted patiently to labor, law, and war.
The higher Catholic clergy knew their importance in the miracle of order, and shared with the nobility and the King the revenues of the nation and the splendor of the court. Bishops and archbishops associated in polished intimacy with the Condés, the Montpensiers, and the Sévignés; and a thousand abbés, half-ordained, half-married, flirted with women and ideas. By and large, however, the mentality and morals of the Catholic clergy—perhaps under the stimulus of competition from Huguenot ministers—were better than for centuries before. 1
The nunneries were not the “hotbeds of vice” imagined by the mythopoetic frenzy of religious hate. Many were retreats of sincere, sometimes ascetic piety, like the Carmelite convent to which Louise de la Vallière retired. Some others served as havens for genteel young women whose parents could find no husband or dowry for them, or who had committed some offense, or had offended some potentate. In such nunneries the inmates thought it no sin to receive a visitor from the outisde world, to dance with one another, to read secular literature, or to mitigate the tedium of their lives with billiards or cards. It was by reforming such a convent that Jacqueline Arnauld made Port-Royal the most famous nunnery in the history of France.
Of the monastic orders we cannot speak so leniently; many of them had relaxed their rules, and led lives of idleness, formal prayer, and mendicant importunity. Armand Jean
de Rancé reformed the Monastery of Notre-Dame de la Trappe in Normandy, and established the austere Trappist order that still silently survives. The Jesuits entered more actively into the life and history of France. At the beginning of the seventeenth century they were under a cloud as defenders of regicide; at the end they were the confessors and guides of the King. They were experts in psychology. When the nun Marguerite Marie Alacoque, inspired by a mystic vision, founded (1675) the society devoted to the public worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Jesuits encouraged the movement as an outlet and stimulus for popular piety. At the same time they made religion easier for sinners by recognizing the naturalness of sin, and developing the science of casuistry as a means of mitigating the difficulties of the Ten Commandments and the neuroses of remorse. They were soon in demand as confessors, and gained authority as “directors of conscience,” especially for the women who dominated French society, and who sometimes influenced national policy.
The word “casuistry” did not have in the seventeenth century the derogatory connotation left upon it by Pascal’s Provincial Letters. As a confessor or spiritual director, every priest was expected to know just what was to be considered a mortal sin, or a venial sin, or no sin at all; and he had to be prepared to apply his knowledge, and adjust his judgment, his counsel, and the penance, to the special circumstances of the penitent and the case (casus). The rabbis had developed this art of moral distinctions to great length in the legal portions of the Talmud; modern jurisprudence and psychiatry have followed suit. Long before the establishment of the Society of Jesus, Catholic theologians had drawn up voluminous treatises on casuistry to guide the priest in moral doctrine and confessional practice. In what cases might the letter of the moral law be set aside for its spirit or intent? When might one lie or steal or kill, or reasonably break a promise, or violate an oath, or even deny the faith?
Some casuists demanded strict interpretation of the moral law, and thought that in the long run severity would prove more beneficial than laxity. Other casuists—especially the Jesuits Molina, Escobar, Toledo, and Busenbaum—favored a lenient code. They urged that allowances should be made for human nature, for environmental influences, for ignorance of the law, for extreme hardship of literal compliance, for the semi-insanity of transports of passion, and for any circumstances that hindered the freedom of the will. To facilitate this complaisant morality, the Jesuits developed the doctrine of probabilism—that where any recognized authority on moral theology favored a particular view, the confessor might at his discretion judge in accordance with that view, even though the majority of experts opposed it. (The word probabilis at that time meant approvable, admitting of approbation. 2) Moreover, said some Jesuit casuists, it was sometimes permissible to lie, or to withhold the truth by a “mental reservation”; so a captured Christian, forced to choose between Mohammedanism and death, might without sin pretend to accept Islam. Again, said Escobar, the moral quality of an action lies not in the deed itself, which in itself is amoral, but in the moral intention of the agent; there is no sin unless there is a conscious and voluntary departure from the moral law.
Much Jesuit casuistry was a reasonable and humane adjustment of medievally ascetic rules to a society that had discovered the legitimacy of pleasure. But in France especially, and to a lesser degree in Italy, the Jesuits developed casuistry to such lenience with human frailty that earnest men like Pascal in Paris and Sarpi in Venice, and many Catholic theologians, including several Jesuits, 3 protested against what seemed to them a surrender of Christianity to sin. The Huguenots of France, inheriting the rigorous code of Calvin, were shocked by the Jesuit compromise with the world and the flesh. A powerful movement within Catholicism itself—Jansenism—raised at the convent of Port-Royal the flag of an almost Calvinistic ethic in an anti-Jesuit war that agitated France, and French literature, for a century. That war involved Louis XIV, for his confessors were Jesuits and his practice was not puritan. In 1674 Père La Chaise—“an even-tempered man,” Voltaire described him, “with whom reconciliation was always easy” 4—took charge of the royal conscience. He occupied the post for thirty-two years, forgiving everything and loved by all. “He was so good,” said Louis, “that I sometimes reproached him for it.” 5 But in his quiet and patient way he had great influence over the King, and helped to steer him to monogamy at last, and obedience to the pope.
For Louis was not always a good “papist.” He was pious in his official way, and rarely failed to attend daily Mass. 6 In his memoirs he told his son:
Partly out of gratitude for all the good fortune I had received, and partly to win the affection of my people . . . , I continued the exercises of piety in which my mother had brought me up. . . . And to tell you the truth, my son, we lack not only gratitude and justice, but prudence and good sense, when we fail in veneration of Him of whom we are but the lieutenants. Our submission to Him is the rule and example of that which is due to us. 7
This, however, did not include submission to the papacy. Louis inherited the Gallican tradition—the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438) and the Concordat of Francis I (1516)—which had established the right of French kings to appoint the bishops and abbots of France, to determine their income, and to appoint to all benefices in a diocese between the death of its bishop and the installation of his successor. Louis held that he was the vicar or representative of God in France, that his submission to the pope (as also a divine viceroy) should be limited to matters of faith and morals, and that the French clergy should obey the king in all matters affecting the French state.
A part of the French clergy—the Ultramontanes—repudiated these claims, and upheld the absolute authority of the popes over kings, councils, and episcopal nominations; but the majority—the Gallicans—defended the full independence of the king in temporal affairs, denied the infallibility of the pope except in agreement with an ecumenical council, and saw an advantage to the French clergy in evading the dominance of Rome. The Prince de Condé declared it his opinion that if it pleased the King to go over to Protestantism, the French clergy would be the first to follow him. 8 In 1663 the Sorbonne—the faculty of theology at the University of Paris—issued Six Articles emphatically affirming the Gallican position. The French parlements took the same stand, and supported Louis in claiming the right to determine which papal bulls should be published and accepted in France. In 1678 Pope Innocent XI protested against Gallicanism, and excommunicated the archbishop of Toulouse for deposing an anti-Gallican bishop. The King convoked an assembly of the clergy, nearly all chosen by him. In March, 1682, it reaffirmed the Six Articles of the Sorbonne, and drew up for the assembly the famous Four Articles that almost divorced the French Church from Rome.
1. The pope has jurisdiction in spiritual concerns, and has no authority to depose princes or release their subjects from obedience.
2. Ecumenical councils are above the pope in authority.
3. The traditional liberties of the French Church are inviolable.
4. The pope is infallible only when in accord with the council of bishops.
Innocent declared the decisions of the assembly null and void, and refused canonical institution to all new bishops who approved the articles. Since Louis appointed only such candidates, some thirty-five dioceses were without canonical bishops in 1688. But by that time age and Mme. de Maintenon had mollified the King, and death had taken the resolute pope. In 1693 Louis allowed his nominees to disavow the articles; Pope Innocent XII recognized the royal right over episcopal nominations; and Louis was again Rex Christianissimus, the Most Christian King.
II. PORT-ROYAL: 1204–1626
The old war between Church and state was the least of the three religious dramas that inflamed this reign. Deeper by far was the conflict between the orthodox Catholicism of state and clergy and the almost Protestant Catholicism of the Jansenists and Port-Royal; and deepest and most tragical, the destruction of the Huguenots in France. But what was Port-Royal, and why so much ado about it in French histo
ry? It was a Cistercian nunnery situated some sixteen miles from Paris and six miles from Versailles, on a low and marshy site in what Mme. de Sévigné called “a dreadful valley, just the place in which to find salvation.” 9 Founded about 1204, it barely survived a hundred vicissitudes in the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion. Discipline and membership fell; and probably the convent would have disappeared from notice had it not fallen under the rule of Jacqueline Arnauld, and enlisted in its defense the pen of Blaise Pascal.
Antoine Arnauld I (1560–1619) made history by his eloquence and his fertility. In 1593, after Barrière’s attempt to assassinate Henry IV, Arnauld addressed the Paris Parlement in an indignant demand for the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. They never forgave him, and they looked with critical and ominous eye upon the operations of his family at Port-Royal. Of his twenty or more children at least four were involved in the story of that convent. Jacqueline Arnauld was made coadjutrix to the abbess of Port-Royal at the age of seven (1598), and a year later her sister Jeanne, aged six, became abbess of St.-Cyr. These nominations were made by Henry IV, and were confirmed by papal bulls obtained through falsifying the ages of the girls. 10 Presumably the father had sought these places for his daughters as an alternative to finding husbands and dowries for them.
