which adorn his reign, we shall find that during the last five-and-twenty years of his life, when his patronage had been the longest in operation, it was entirely barren of results; in other words, that when the French had been most habituated to his protection, they were least able to effect great things. Louis XIV. died in 1715. Racine produced Phedre in 1677; Andromaque in 1667; Athelie in 1691.506 Molière published the Misanthrope in 1666; Tartuffe in 1667; the Avare in 1668.507 The Lutrin of Boileau was written in 1674; his best Satires in 1666.508 The last Fables of La Fontaine appeared in 1678, and his last Tales in 1671.509 The Inquiry respecting Truth, by Malebranche, was published in 1674;510 the Caractères of La Bruyère in 1687;511 the Maximes of Rochefoucauld in 1665.512 The Provincial Letters of Pascal were written 1656, and he himself died in 1662.513 As to Corneille, his great Tragedies were composed, some while Louis was still a boy, and the others before the king was born.514 Such were the dates of the masterpieces of the age of Louis XIV. The authors of these immortal works all ceased to write, and nearly all ceased to live, before the close of the seventeenth century; and we may fairly ask the admirers of Louis XIV. who those men were that succeeded them. Where have their names been registered? Where are their works to be found? Who is there that now reads the books of those obscure hirelings, who for so many years thronged the court of the great king? Who has heard anything of Campistron, La Chapelle, Genest, Ducerceau, Dancourt, Danchet, Vergier, Catrou, Chaulieu, Legendre, Valincour, Lamotte, and the other ignoble compilers, who long remained the brightest ornaments of France? Was this, then, the consequence of the royal bounty? Was this the fruit of the royal patronage? If the system of reward and protection is really advantageous to literature and to art, how is it that it should have produced the meanest results when it had been the longest in operation? If the favour of kings is, as their flatterers tell us, of such importance, how comes it that the more the favour was displayed, the more the effects were contemptible?
Nor was this almost inconceivable penury compensated by superiority in any other department. The simple fact is that Louis XIV. survived the entire intellect of the French nation, except that small part of it which grew up in opposition to his principles, and afterwards shook the throne of his successor.515 Several years before his death, and when his protective system had been in full force for nearly half a century, there was not to be found in the whole of France a statesman who could develop the resources of the country, or a general who could defend it against its enemies. Both in the civil service and in the military service, every thing had fallen into disorder. At home there was nothing but confusion; abroad there was nothing but disaster. The spirit of France succumbed, and was laid prostrate. The men of letters, pensioned and decorated by the court, had degenerated into a fawning and hypocritical race, who, to meet the wishes of their masters, opposed all improvement, and exerted themselves in support of every old abuse. The end of all this was, a corruption, a servility, and a loss of power more complete than has ever been witnessed in any of the great countries of Europe. There was no popular liberty; there were no great men; there was no science; there was no literature; there were no arts. Within, there was a discontented people, a rapacious government, and a beggared exchequer. Without, there were foreign armies, which pressed upon all the frontiers, and which nothing but their mutual jealousies, and a change in the English cabinet, prevented from dismembering the monarchy of France.516
Such was the forlorn position of that noble country towards the close of the reign of Louis XIV.517 The misfortunes which embittered the declining years of the king were, indeed, so serious, that they could not fail to excite our sympathy, if we did not know that they were the result of his own turbulent ambition, of his insufferable arrogance, but, above all, of a grasping and restless vanity, which, making him eager to concentrate on his single person all the glory of France, gave rise to that insidious policy, which, with gifts, with honours, and with honied words, began by gaining the admiration of the intellectual classes, then made them courtly and time-serving, and ended by destroying all their boldness, stifling every effort of original thought, and thus postponing for an indefinite period the progress of national civilization.
CHAPTER V
DEATH OF LOUIS XIV. REACTION AGAINST THE PROTECTIVE SPIRIT, AND PREPARATIONS FOR THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
At length Louis XIV. died. When it was positively known that the old king had ceased to breathe, the people went almost mad with joy.518 The tyranny which had weighed them down was removed; and there at once followed a reaction which, for sudden violence, has no parallel in modern history.519 The great majority indemnified themselves for their forced hypocrisy by indulging in the grossest licentiousness. But among the generation then forming, there were some high-spirited youths, who had far higher views, and whose notions of liberty were not confined to the license of the gaming-house and the brothel. Devoted to the great idea of restoring to France that freedom of utterance which it had lost, they naturally turned their eyes towards the only country where the freedom was practised. Their determination to search for liberty in the place where alone it could be found, gave rise to that junction of the French and English intellects, which, looking at the immense chain of its effects, is by far the most important fact in the history of the eighteenth century.
During the reign of Louis XIV., the French, puffed up by national vanity, despised the barbarism of a people who were so uncivilized as to be always turning on their rulers, and who, within the space of forty years, had executed one king, and deposed another.520 They could not believe that such a restless horde possessed anything worthy the attention of enlightened men. Our laws, our literature, and our manners, were perfectly unknown to them; and I doubt if at the end of the seventeenth century there were, either in literature or in science, five persons in France acquainted with the English language.521 But a long experience of the reign of Louis XIV. induced the French to reconsider many of their opinions. It induced them to suspect that despotism may have its disadvantages, and that a government composed of princes and bishops is not necessarily the best for a civilized country. They began to look, first with complacency, and then with respect, upon that strange and outlandish people, who, though only separated from themselves by a narrow sea, appeared to be of an altogether different kind; and who, having punished their oppressors, had carried their liberties and their prosperity to a height of which the world had seen no example. These feelings, which before the Revolution broke out, were entertained by the whole of the educated classes in France, were in the beginning, confined to those men whose intellects placed them at the head of their age. During the two generations which elapsed between the death of Louis XIV. and the outbreak of the Revolution, there was hardly a Frenchman of eminence who did not either visit England or learn English; while many of them did both. Buffon, Brissot, Broussonnet, Condamine, Delisle, Elie de Beaumont, Gournay, Helvétius, Jussieu, Lalande, Lafayette, Larcher, L'Héritier, Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Morellet, Mirabeau, Nollet, Raynal, the celebrated Roland, and his still more celebrated wife, Rousseau, Ségur, Suard, Voltaire – all these remarkable persons flocked to London, as also did others of inferior ability, but of considerable influence, such as Brequiny, Bordes, Calonne, Coyer, Cormatin, Dufay, Dumarest, Dezallier, Favier, Girod, Grosley, Godin, D'Hancarville, Hunauld, Jars, Le Blanc, Ledru, Lescallier, Linguet, Lesuire, Lemonnier, Levesque de Pouilly, Montgolfier, Morand, Patu, Poissonier, Reveillon, Septchènes, Silhouette, Siret, Soulavie, Soulès, and Valmont de Brienne.
Nearly all of these carefully studied our language, and most of them seized
Voltaire (
Oppressed by defeats abroad, and by famine and misery at home, Louis was laid at the mercy of his enemies; and ‘was only saved by a party revolution in the English ministry.’
For evidence of the depression and, indeed, utter exhaustion of France during the latter years of Louis XIV., compare
In regard to the people generally, the French writers supply us with little information, because in that age they were too much occupied with their great king and their showy literature, to pay attention to mere popular interests. But I have collected from other sources some information which I will now put together, and which I recommend to the notice of the next French author who undertakes to compose a history of Louis XIV.
Locke, who was travelling in France in 1676 and 1677, writes in his journal, ‘The rent of land in France fallen one–half in these few years, by reason of the poverty of the people.’
‘L'annonce de la mort du grand roi ne produisit chez le peuple français qu'une explosion de joie.’
‘Kaum hatte er aber die Augen geschlossen, als alles umschlug. Der reprimirte Geist warf sich in eine zügellose Bewegung.’
The shock which these events gave to the delicacy of the French mind was very serious. The learned Saumaise declared that the English are ‘more savage than their own mastiffs.’
I will only give two more illustrations of the wide diffusion of such feelings. In 1679, an attempt was made to bring bark into discredit as a ‘remède anglais’ (
‘Au temps de Boileau, personne en France n'apprenait l'anglais.’
The French, during the reign of Louis XIV., principally knew us from the accounts given by two of their countrymen, Monconys and Sorbière; both of whom published their travels in England, but neither of whom were acquainted with the English language. For proof of this, see
When Prior arrived at the court of Louis XIV. as plenipotentiary, no one in Paris was aware that he had written poetry (
