by Will Durant
Bute, now actively hostile to Frederick, asked Peter to let the twenty thousand Russians now in the Austrian army continue there; Peter sent a copy of this message to Frederick, and ordered the Russian troops to join and serve Frederick. Bute offered Austria a separate peace, promising to support the cession of Prussian territory to Austria; Kaunitz refused; Frederick denounced Bute as a scoundrel.65 He was pleased to learn that France had ended her subsidies to Austria, and that the Turks were attacking the Austrians in Hungary (May, 1762).
On June 28 Peter was deposed by a coup d’état that established Catherine II as “Empress of all the Russias”; on July 6 Peter was assassinated. Catherine ordered Czernichev, who commanded the Russians under Frederick, to bring them home at once. Frederick was just preparing an attack upon Daun. He asked Czernichev to conceal for three days the news of the Czarina’s instructions. Without using these Russian auxiliaries Frederick defeated Daun at Burkersdorf (July 21). Czernichev now withdrew his troops, and Russia took no further part in the war. Relieved of danger in the north, the King drove the Austrians before him, and recaptured Schweidnitz. On October 29 Prince Henry, with 24,000 men, defeated 39,000 Austrians and Imperials at Freiberg in Saxony; this was the only major action of the war in which the Prussians were victorious when not under Frederick’s command. It was also the last important battle of the Seven Years’ War.
VII. PEACE
All Western Europe was exhausted. Prussia most of all, where boys of fourteen had been conscripted, and farms had been devastated, and merchants had been ruined by the stifling of trade. Austria had more men than money, and had lost vital Russian aid. Spain had lost Havana and Manila to the English, and nearly all her navy had been destroyed. France was bankrupt, her colonies were gone, her commerce had almost disappeared from the sea. England needed peace to consolidate her gains.
On September 5, 1762, Bute sent the Duke of Bedford to Paris to negotiate a settlement with Choiseul. If France would yield Canada and India England would restore Guadeloupe and Martinique, and France might keep, with British consent, Frederick’s western provinces of Wesel and Gelderland.66 Pitt denounced these proposals with passionate eloquence, but public opinion supported Bute, and on November 5 England and Portugal signed with France and Spain the Peace of Fontainebleau. France gave up Canada, India, and Minorca; England restored to France and Spain her conquests in the Caribbean; France promised to maintain neutrality between Prussia and Austria, and to withdraw her armies from Prussian territory in western Germany. A further Peace of Paris (February 10, 1763) confirmed these arrangements, but left France her fishing rights near Newfoundland, and some trading posts in India. Spain ceded Florida to England, but received Louisiana from France. Technically these agreements violated Britain’s pledge against a separate peace; actually they were a boon to Frederick, for they left him with only two adversaries—Austria and the Reich; and he was now confident that he could hold his own against these disheartened enemies.
Maria Theresa resigned herself to peace with her most hated foe. All her major allies had abandoned her, and 100,000 Turks were marching into Hungary. She sent an envoy to Frederick, proposing truce. He accepted, and at Hubertusburg (near Leipzig), February 5—15, 1763, Prussia, Austria, Saxony, and the German princes signed the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War. After all the shedding of blood, ducats, rubles, thalers, kronen, francs, and pounds the status quo ante bellum was restored on the Continent: Frederick kept Silesia and Glatz, Wesel and Gelderland; he evacuated Saxony, and promised to support the candidacy of Maria Theresa’s son Joseph as King of the Romans and therefore emperor-to-be. At the final signing Frederick’s aides congratulated him on “the happiest day of your life”; he replied that the happiest day of his life would be the last one.67
What were the results of the war? To Austria, the permanent loss of Silesia, and a war debt of 100,000,000 écus. The prestige of the Austrian rulers as traditional holders of the Imperial title was ended; Frederick dealt with Maria Theresa as ruler of an Austro-Hungarian, rather than a Holy Roman, Empire. The German princes of the Empire were now left to their resources, and would soon submit to the Prussian hegemony in the Reich; the Hapsburg power declined, the Hohenzollern power rose; the road was open for Bismarck. Patriotism and nationalism began to think in terms of Germany instead of each proudly separate state; German literature was stimulated to Sturm und Drang, and mounted to Goethe and Schiller.
Sweden lost 25,000 men, and gained nothing but debts. Russia lost 120,000 men to battle, hardship, and disease, but would soon reproduce them; she had opened a new era in her modern history by marching into the west; the partition of Poland was now inevitable. For France the result was enormous losses in colonies and commerce, and a near-bankruptcy that moved her another step toward collapse. For England the results were greater than even her leaders realized: control of the seas, control of the colonial world, the establishment of a great empire, the beginning of 182 years of ascendancy in the world. For Prussia the results were territorial devastation, thirteen thousand homes in ruins, a hundred towns and villages burned to the ground, thousands of families uprooted; 180,000 Prussians (by Frederick’s estimate68) had died in battle, camp, or captivity; even more had died through lack of medicine or food; in some districts only women and old men were left to till the fields. Out of a population of 4,500,000 in 1756, only 4,000,000 remained in 1763.
Frederick was now the hero of all Germany (except Saxony!). He entered Berlin in triumph after an absence of six years. The city, though destitute, with every family in mourning, blazed with illuminations to welcome him, and acclaimed him as its savior. The iron spirit of the old warrior was moved: “Long live my dear people!” he cried. “Long live my children!”69 He was capable of humility; in his hour of adulation he did not forget the many mistakes he had made as a general—he the greatest of modern generals excepting Napoleon; and he could still see the thousands of Prussian youths whose bloody deaths had paid for Silesia. He himself had paid. He was now prematurely old at fifty-one. His back was bent, his face and figure lean and drawn, his teeth lost, his hair white on one side of his head, his bowels racked with colic, diarrhea, and hemorrhoids.70 He remarked that now his proper place was in a home for elderly invalids.71 He lived twenty-three years more, and tried to redeem his sins with peaceful and orderly government.
Politically the main results of the Seven Years’ War were the rise of the British Empire, and the emergence of Prussia as a first-class power. Economically, the chief result was an advance toward industrial capitalism: those Gargantuan armies were glorious markets for the mass consumption of mass-produced goods; what client could be more desirable than one that promised to destroy the purchased goods at the earliest opportunity, and order more? Morally, the war made for pessimism, cynicism, and moral disorder. Life was cheap, death was imminent, suffering was the order of the day, pillage was permissible, pleasure was to be seized wherever it could for a moment be found. “But for this campaign,” said Grimm in Westphalia, 1757, “I should never have conceived how far the horrors of poverty and the injustice of man can be carried”;72 and they had only begun. The suffering helped, as well as hindered, religion: if a minority was turned to atheism by the stark reality of evil, the majority was moved to piety by the need to believe in the ultimate triumph of the good. A reaction to religion would soon come in France, England, and Germany. Protestantism in Germany was saved from destruction; probably, if Frederick had lost, Prussia would have experienced, like Bohemia after 1620, a compulsory restoration of Catholic faith and power. The triumph of imagination over reality is one of the humors of history.
BOOK II
FRANCE BEFORE THE DELUGE
1757-74
CHAPTER III
The Life of the State
I. THE MISTRESS DEPARTS
MME. DE POMPADOUR was among the casualties of the war. For some time the charm of her personality kept the King in thrall while the nation mourned; but after the attempt of Damiens to
assassinate him (January 5, 1757) Louis XV, suddenly conscious of God, sent word to her that she must leave at once. He made the humane mistake of coming to say goodbye; he found her quietly and sadly packing. Some surviving tenderness overcame him; he asked her to remain.1 Soon all her former privileges and powers were restored. She negotiated with diplomats and ambassadors; she raised and lowered ministers and generals. Marc-Pierre de Voyer, Comte d’Argenson, had opposed her at every step; she had sought to appease him and had been repulsed; she had him replaced by the Abbé de Bernis as minister for foreign affairs, and then by Choiseul (1758). Reserving her tenderness for her relatives and the King, she faced all others with a heart of steel within an ailing frame. She sent some enemies to the Bastille, and let them stay there for years.2 Meanwhile she feathered her nests, adorned her palaces, and ordered a stately mausoleum for herself beneath the Place Vendôme.
She bore, among the people, in the Parlement, and at court, the chief blame for French reverses in the war, but she received no credit for the victories. She was held accountable for the unpopular alliance with Austria, though she had been only a minor factor in that mating. She was condemned for the disaster at Rossbach, where her man Soubise had commanded the French; her critics did not know—or considered it irrelevant—that Soubise had advised against giving battle, and had been forced into it by the precipitancy of the German general. If Soubise had had his way, if his plan of wearing out Frederick with marches and desertions had been followed, if Czarina Elizaveta had not died so inopportunely and left Russia to a young idolator of Frederick—perhaps the Prussian resistance would have collapsed, France would have received the Austrian Netherlands, and Pompadour would have been carried on a sea of blood to national acclaim. She had failed to placate the great god Chance.
The Parlement hated her for encouraging the King to ignore the Parlement. The clergy hated her as friend of Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes; Christophe de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris, said he would “like to see her burn.”3 When the Paris populace suffered from the high price of bread they cried out that “that prostitute who governs the kingdom is bringing it to ruin.” “If we had her here,” said a voice in the mob at the Pont de la Tour-rielle, “there would soon not be enough left of her to make relics.”4 She dared not show herself in the streets of Paris, and she was surrounded by enemies at Versailles. She wrote to the Marquise de Fontenailles: “I am quite alone in the midst of this crowd of petits seigneurs, who loathe me and whom I despise. As for most of the women, their conversation gives me a sick headache. Their vanity, their lofty airs, their meannesses, and their treacheries make them insupportable.”5
As the war dragged on, and France saw Canada and India snatched from her, and Ferdinand of Brunswick kept French armies at bay, and returning soldiers, wounded or maimed, appeared in the streets of Paris, it became clear to the King that he had made a tragic mistake in listening to Kaunitz and Pompadour. In 1761 he consoled himself with a new mistress, Mlle, de Romans, who bore him the future Abbé de Bourbon. Gossip said that Pompadour revenged herself by accepting Choiseul as her lover,6 but she was too weak, and Choiseul too clever, for such a liaison; to Choiseul she surrendered her power rather than her love. Now, it may be, she uttered the despondent prophecy, “Après moi le déluge” 7
She had always been frail. Even in her youth she had spit blood; and though we are not certain that she had tuberculosis, we know that her coughing increased painfully as she turned forty. The singing voice that had once thrilled King and court was now hoarse and] strained. Her friends were shocked by her emaciation. In February, 1764,/she took to her bed with high fever and bloody inflammation of the lungs. In April her condition became so serious that she summoned a notary to draw up her last testament. She left gifts to her relatives, friends, and servants, and added: “If I have forgotten any of my relatives in this will I beg my brother to provide for them.” To Louis XV she deeded her Paris mansion, which, as the Élysée Palace, is now occupied by the President of France. The King spent many hours at her bedside; during her last days he seldom left the room. The Dauphin, who had always been her foe, wrote to the bishop of Verdun: “She is dying with a courage rare for either sex. Her lungs are full of water or pus, her heart is congested or dilated. It is an unbelievably cruel and painful death.”8 Even for this last battle she kept herself richly attired, and her parched cheeks were rouged. She reigned almost to the end. Courtiers thronged around her couch; she distributed favors, and nominated persons to high office; and the King acted on many of her recommendations.
At last she admitted defeat. On April 14 she accepted gratefully the final sacraments that sought to solace death with hope. So long the friend of philosophers, she tried now to recapture the faith of her childhood. Like a child she prayed:
I commend my soul to God, imploring Him to have pity on it, to forgive my sins, to grant me the grace to repent of them and die worthy of His mercy, hoping to appease His justice through the glory of the precious blood of Jesus Christ my Saviour, and through the intercession of the Virgin Mary and all the saints in Paradise.9
To the priest who was departing as she entered her final agony, she whispered, “Wait a moment; we will leave the house together.”10 She died on April 15, 1764, choked by the congestion in her lungs. She was forty-two years old.
It is not true that Louis took her death with indifference; he merely concealed his grief.11 “The King,” said the Dauphin, “is in great affliction, though he controls himself with us and with everybody.”12 When, on April 17, the woman who had been half of his life for twenty years was carried from Versailles Palace in a cold and driving rain, he went out on the balcony to see her depart. “The Marquise will have very bad weather,” he said to his valet Champlost. It was not a frivolous remark, for Champlost reported that there were tears in the royal eyes, and that Louis added sadly, “This is the only tribute I can pay her.”13 By her own wishes she was buried by the side of her child Alexandrine, in the now vanished church of the Capucines in the Place Vendôme.
The court rejoiced to be freed from her power; the populace, which had not felt her charm, cursed her costly extravagance, and soon forgot her; the artists and writers whom she had helped lamented the loss of a gracious and understanding friend. Diderot was harsh: “So what remains of this woman who cost us so much in men and money, who left us without honor and without energy, and who overthrew the whole political system of Europe? A handful of dust.” But Voltaire, from Ferney, wrote:
I am very sad at the death of Mme. de Pompadour. I was indebted to her, and I mourn out of gratitude. It seems absurd that while an ancient pen-pusher, hardly able to walk, should still be alive, a beautiful woman, in the midst of a splendid career, should die at the age of forty. Perhaps, if she had been able to live quietly, as I do, she would be alive today. … She had justice in her mind and heart.... It is the end of a dream.14
II. THE RECOVERY OF FRANCE
Not until Napoleon did France fully recover from the Seven Years’ War. High taxes had discouraged agriculture under Louis XIV; they continued to the same effect under Louis XV; thousands of acres farmed in the seventeenth century were left uncultivated in 1760, and were reverting to wilderness.15 Livestock was depleted, fertilizer was lacking, the soil was starved. Peasants kept to old clumsy metnods of tillage, for taxes rose with every improvement that increased the peasants’ wealth. Many peasants had no heat in their houses in winter except from the cattle that lived with them. Abnormal frosts in 1760 and 1767 ruined crops and vineyards in their growth. One bad harvest could condemn a village to near-starvation, and to terror of the famished wolves that lurked about.
Nevertheless economic recovery began as soon as peace was signed. The government was inefficient and corrupt, but many measures were taken to help the peasantry. Royal intendants distributed seed and built roads; agronomic societies published agricultural information, established competitions, awarded prizes; some tax collectors distinguished themselves by their humane moderation.16
Stimulated by the physiocrats, many seigneurs interested themselves in improving agricultural methods and products. Peasant proprietors grew in number. By 1774 only six per cent of the French population still labored under serfdom.17 But every increment of production brought a rise in population; the land was rich, yet the average peasant holding was small; poverty remained.
Out of peasant loins came the human surplus that went to man the industries in the growing towns. With a few exceptions industry was still in the domestic and handicraft stage. Large-scale capitalistic organizations dominated metallurgy, mining, soap-making, and textiles. Marseilles in 1760 had thirty-five soap factories, employing a thousand workers.18 Lyons was already dependent for its prosperity upon the shifting market for the product of its looms. English carding machines were introduced about 1750, and to-ward 1770 the jenny, working forty-eight spindles at once, began to replace the spinning wheel in France. The French were quicker to invent than to apply, for they lacked the capital that England, enriched by commerce, could use to finance mechanical improvements in industry. The steam engine had been known in France since 1681.19 Joseph Cugnot used it in 1769 to operate the first known automobile; a year later this was employed to transport heavy loads at four miles an hour; however, the machine got out of hand and demolished a wall, and it had to stop every fifteen minutes to replenish its water.20
With such bizarre exceptions, transport was by horse, cart, coach, or boat. Roads and canals were much better than in England, but inns were worse. A regular postal service was established in 1760; it was not quite private, for Louis XV ordered postmasters to open letters and report any suspicious content to the government.21 Internal trade was hampered by tolls, external trade by war and loss of colonies. The Compagnie des Indes went bankrupt, and was dissolved (1770). Trade with European states, however, increased substantially during the century, from 176,600,000 livres in 1716 to 804,300,000 livres in 1787; but some of the increase merely reflected inflation. Trade with the French West Indies flourished in sugar and slaves.