and high positions,* when intolerant edicts came to ex- CHAP. tinguish their industry. As for the peasant, the XXXII. weight of the taille, which fell upon him exclusively, was so apportioned as to sweep away all his surplus, render economy useless, and, by consequence, capital unknown to agriculture. The cultivators of the soil, always in arrear, found their taxes enforced or remitted, as necessity or caprice arranged. And the French peasant thus resembled the Christian serf of Turkey, who can never aspire to more than the permission to live, and whose only security lies in possessing or in showing nothing to attract the robber or the taxman.‡ This poverty, this stagnation, these social fetters, which bound the arms of all-this impossibility of obeying any impulse, or pursuing any rational course of ambition, or of gain, or of knowledge-corrupted the morals as well as paralysed the energies of the race. The nobles, who could neither move nor marry, choose a calling or entertain an opinion, without the permission of the king, fell, from the lack of any other possible occupation, into those habits of promiscuous gallantry which are the extreme of social debasement. The king set the example of licentiousness, as frivolous as it was criminal, giving that time and interest to the squabbles of wretched women which might have been bestowed on the welfare of his people. Debasement of this kind * Weiss, Histoire des Réfugiés Protestants, t. i. p. 32. †The 18,000 silk-looms of Lyons were reduced to 4,000 in 1698. Ibid. The silk manufacture of Nismes exported to the value of two millions of livres. The Duc de Noailles' Memoirs recount how they were destroyed. Colbert proposed to open to the Protestants the trade to those countries, where, as in Japan, the Jesuits had rendered Catholicism suspected. But the king would not entertain the proposal. This is most fully exemplified in the book of Arthur Young, who says, that "the taille being apportioned to produce, the farmers all affect poverty; hence poor cattle, poor implements, poor everything, even with them that could afford better." See also Rousseau's account in his Confessions, of the farmer who hid his wine to escape the aides, his wheaten bread to avoid the taille, and who would be a lost man if suspected of not dying of hunger. CHAP. XXXII. is a correlative to superstition, one extreme of imbecility naturally producing and leading to the other. The sensual monarch, who made of his court a seraglio, had need of a religion and of religious direction which would allow and compound for such sins. And the priesthood of the day did so, by sanctioning the king's breach of every Christian principle, whether of morality, justice, or mercy, on the condition of his supporting the. pride, the monopoly, and authority of the Church.* It was Spinoza who said that Christianity itself contained the germ of every virtue, but when represented and interpreted by men who made a trade and an ambition of it, they introduced all the vices of those interests and passions which they represented. True as this is of the French Church of that day, nevertheless, amongst its prelates were to be found men of the greatest eloquence, piety, and genius: No Christian saints were purer or more disinterested than Bossuet and Fénelon; Bourdaloue and Massillon, themselves the fruit of a sincere, fervent, religious revival, which, provoked by the Reformation, equalled all that it had produced in spiritual piety. The principle and the tendency of these Roman Catholic regenerations were, however, to revive the past rather than develop the present; and their aim was less to soften, humanise, and christianise society, than to allow it to wallow in crime; whilst there were erected on its borders monastic houses of refuge, to which the invalids of the court and of luxury were enticed, in order to spend the remainder of a life of voluptuousness in the only excitement possible to them, that of monastic devotion. There was one priestly fraternity which saw plainly the error of seeking to drag back the 17th century to the fanaticism of the 14th. These were the Jesuits, "De tous les humains le plus intéressé, le plus orgueilleux, le plus dur, le plus attaché à la terre, un Louis XIV, par exemple, devoit trouver des prêtres pour lui persuader en dépit de l'Evangile, qu'il étoit chrétien." Ernst Rénan. who disseminated themselves through all classes and assemblages of men to live the current life, and direct without thwarting it. The laxity of morals, however, which they were thus obliged to permit, acted like a gangrene to corrupt themselves; and even their discipline and their learning resulted often in merely making accomplished assassins and dishonest confessors. Religion demands an atmosphere of pure and honest fervour to breathe in, which is not congenial or compatible with such laxity and dissimulation. The Jesuits, nevertheless, maintained their ground at court, where jealous and worldly statesmen ever dreaded and discouraged the enthusiasts of the opposite school, who proposed resuscitating the monkery of gone ages. The St. Dunstans und St. Bernards were folk that neither Richelieu nor Mazarin desired to see revived. St. Cyran, who promised to become one of those middle-age saints, was sent to prison by Richelieu. But his preaching had left disciples, who erected their cloister within a short distance of the domain wall of Versailles; who revived in their own favour, as Calvin had done, St. Augustine's theory of peculiar grace, and of individual election, and reproclaimed that monasticity was the only Christianity. This was Protestantism under another name. It was a reformation, at least of the monastic ordersspringing too from a few individuals and an humble cloister, without the necessary stamp of Government initiation or high authority. As soon as the fame and aims of Port Royal became known, the Jesuits, supported by all the old monks and nuns, set up the same scream which the Churchmen had uttered against Luther and against Calvin; and the Arnauds were denounced as heretics, for repudiating the fashionable and indulgent practices of devotion and confession. Could the inmates of Port Royal have kept clear of dogma, it would have been difficult to crush them. But their theory of grace made salvation so CHAP. XXXII. XXXII. CHAP. independent of the Church, that it was easy for the Jesuits to alarm it, as well as the Pope, and to obtain the condemnation of the Jansenists. If Louis the Fourteenth set his face against a few monks and nuns, who merely strove to be more moral and spiritual than the traditional monkery of the time, it may be supposed that he looked upon the Huguenots with a more unfavorable eye. His mother, who showed more of the Spaniard in her later years, made it part of her religion to denounce heretics; and the young king, already jealous of the glory which Richelieu had acquired in crushing them, was quite prepared to emulate his act. But Mazarin had the fear of Cromwell before his eyes. And, in 1652, he caused the young king to issue an Edict confirmatory of that of Nantes. The Protestants committed a great fault in the previous century, that of accepting payment from the State. The first public anxieties of Louis the Fourteenth were for his revenues. When, therefore, the Catholic clergy always assembled to make him grants, and the Protestant clergy to demand and receive them, he could not but give preference to the former. In 1657, Colloquies were forbidden to the Protestants; and, two years later, the king, using the plea of economy, told the assembled pastors that this should be their last synod, and that they should henceforth be contented with provincial ones. * The defeat and humiliation of the parliament and the princes in the Fronde had left the power of the Roman Catholic clergy paramount. They alone preserved the form of representative government, and of voting taxes; and their assemblies, in fixing the don gratuit, or contribution to the king, followed the constitutional habit of tacking to it certain demands. These were prayers that the king would diminish and check what they called the encroachments of the Protestants. * Haag, France Protestante. XXXII. These outstepped, it was alleged, the limits of the Edict CHAP. of Nantes.* Commissions were appointed to inquire, Huguenot as well as Catholic, but the latter were men of weight and note, whilst the Protestants were obscure individuals. The Council of State was the authority and tribunal with which rested decision, and it seized the opportunity of interdicting numbers of Protestant churches. Every severity that had cover of law was enforced against them. They were expelled from La Rochelle under the terms of the old capitulation,† and they were driven from Privas, where they had dwelt undisturbed for thirty years. At Cabrières, Merindol, and places dear to them from the martyrdom of their ancestors, their temples were destroyed.‡ Soon after, an Edict, borrowed from the Koran, was issued against those who relapsed. A fund having been provided for paying conversions, the unprincipled and the destitute took advantage of it to earn the price of conversion more than once. Exile, confiscation, and exposure after death, were decreed against relaps. Orders were given not only to exclude Protestants from all places of emolument, but even to prevent artisans from earning their bread, by denying them access to corporations or trades. If they engaged in trials, their adversaries could always object to them the crime of blasphemy-their very rite being considered such and thus put them out of court. No Protestant notaries were allowed, and even no Protestant midwives.§ The Catholic clergy and magistrates were empowered to intrude upon the death-bed of any Huguenot, whose children might declare themselves Catholics at the age of fourteen, and claim sustenance without yielding obedience to their parents. *The Jesuit Meynier (De l'Exécution de l'Edit) asserts that the Protestants had 200 more churches in Lower Languedoc and the Cevennes than they had in 1594. † Ordonnance of Colbert de Terron, Oct. 1661. Bénoit, Hist. de la Révocation de l'Edit de Nantes. Ibid. Claude, Plaintes. |