Then, just as it seemed that Louis’s war machine could not be stopped, unexpected and worrying news arrived. John Sobieski, king of Poland, in alliance with Charles, duc de Lorraine,10 had driven away the Turks and liberated Vienna. Louis had hoped that the siege would last a long time and that it would eventually fail through lack of discipline among the Turks, as well as the inevitable disease that ravaged besieged cities. Louis and his advisors had also expected that the effects of the siege within the Holy Roman Empire would allow them to fulfill their ambitions in Germany. The Venetian ambassador had thought that Louis intended to ally with the Germans and force the Turks to draw back from Vienna, which would have made him the savior of Christendom. Louis would then have received the imperial crown upon the death of Leopold, an eventuality that had been considered, although not entirely seriously, in Louis’s youth.11 As it was, Louis’s decision not to come to Vienna’s aid left the way open for John Sobieski to win the laurels that might otherwise have gone to the Sun King.12
Vienna, therefore, was a missed opportunity for Louis, but his policy of aggrandizement, together with his manipulation of the chambres de réunions, alarmed the rest of Europe. Quite simply, Louis was too powerful, and other European leaders feared what he might do next. Under the mediation of the emperor Leopold, the truce of Ratisbon was signed in August 1684. An expedient in the face of French aggression, it recognized Louis’s acquisitions as confirmed by the réunions for a period of twenty years.
Louis decided to host a great fête at Marly that autumn, at which he intended to give presents to all the ladies. Unfortunately, news of it leaked out, and the court was awash with so many ladies of quality who wished to be included on the guest list that there was scarcely room to move. Many of them had besieged their favorite shops and had bought so much finery and at so great a cost that Louis grew angry. “They will persuade themselves that my presents are so very magnificent, that what I actually give them will appear nothing in comparison,” he said. The fête was duly cancelled, and Louis kept the items of jewelry for himself and made Liselotte and the other ladies play among themselves for the brocades, ribbons, and fans.13
Shortly after this, Louis went hunting. His first stop was at Chambord, where he stayed from the end of September until October 12, before moving on to Fontainebleau.14 There was, however, a very special event for which he was determined not to be late. The date was November 15, 1684, and the event was the opening of the Grande Galerie at Versailles. Nothing was allowed to go wrong; Louvois had been sent on in advance to ensure that the work was complete, and Louis was on his way.
Six years earlier, at the conclusion of the Treaty of Nijmegen, Louis’s bargaining power had been boosted by significant victories. A council had met to discuss the iconography for the ceiling of a new gallery at Versailles, the plans for which were being drawn up by Louis’s new architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Initially, Charles Le Brun had been commissioned to paint themes based upon the Labors of Hercules, but it was decided instead that the ceiling should depict the military glories of Louis’s reign.
Situated on the west side of the château and measuring seventy-three meters long by ten and a half wide, the Grande Galerie, better known as the Galerie des glaces, or Hall of Mirrors, lay before Louis in all its magnificent glory. Built not for the full light of day, its grandeur can only fully be appreciated in the evening. The setting sun casts its golden rays through seventeen high windows, to be reflected in the tall, arched mirrors that line the wall opposite. The soft, dying light of the day finds new life in the gilded statues within. Positioned up and down the length of the gallery, silver furniture shimmers in the glow of four thousand wax candles. The ceiling, soaring to a height of twelve and a half meters, portrays Louis’s martial victories. While gods, fauns, and lovers dance and gaze down at the courtiers below, the Sun King, a celestial warrior in Roman armor, acquires Dunkirk, orders an attack on Holland, takes the town and citadel of Gand in six days, and conquers the Franche-Comté for the second time. The greatest moments are there: The Passage of the Rhine and The Taking of Maastricht, rendered by Le Brun in spectacular detail. Perhaps the most poignant representation, however, is Le Roi gouverne par lui-même. The first to be painted, it depicts Louis taking power into his own hands, so that he is master not only in France but in all of Europe. He wears the blue coronation robes of France over classical armor. Above, a woman representing Glory holds out a crown of stars to the king, whose eyes are fixed only upon her, his hand reaching out to receive the crown, while the lovers, gods, goddesses, and nymphs that surround him are ignored. “Nothing can equal the beauty of this gallery of Versailles,” Mme de Sévigné wrote to her daughter, “this sort of royal beauty is unique in the world.”15
Among the first foreigners to witness this royal beauty was Francesco Mario Lercaro, the doge of Genoa, who arrived at Versailles on May 15, 1685 with four senators. Their mission was to grovel at Louis’s feet and plead for his forgiveness for having given refuge to the Spanish.16 Louis received them in the awe-inspiring surroundings of the Galerie des glaces. He had his throne placed at one end of the gallery, which was filled with curious courtiers waiting to see the king’s guests. Lercaro and the senators made their way through the château, their route lined with silver furniture, which had been deliberately placed in order to impress them still further. Two days later, Lercaro was due to return to Versailles early enough to attend Louis’s lever, but one of his senators was so ill that morning that the ceremony was finished by the time the party arrived. Nevertheless, the doge was compensated for his disappointment with a tour of the château. He simply could not believe his eyes. “A year ago we were in hell,” he remarked, referring to the bombardment of Genoa by Louis’s ships, “and today we descend from paradise.”17 He was served a magnificent dinner in Mademoiselle’s apartments, after which he walked in the gardens towards the canal. Louis also received two ambassadors from Moscow, who arrived on May 21 with a small entourage. They were bored by the games favored by the French, but they played chess very well.18 After their visit, Louis went for a long walk in the gardens before taking a meal with the dauphin and dauphine.
Louis was particularly pleased with his gardens. Like his father before him, he was a keen gardener, and André Le Nôtre, his chief landscape gardener, was more than a servant; he was a friend whom Louis would greet with a bear hug. No garden could function without water, however, and that May, Louis was thrilled to see the reservoir of Versailles filling for the first time. The all-important court entertainments were not forgotten, and although it was still early summer, preparations were already being made for that winter’s diversions. The playwright Philippe Quinault presented three works to Louis so he could make his selection. Louis was pleased with all of them, but he selected Armide et Renaud, an opera set during the First Crusade and written by Quinault, with music by Lully.19
Aware of their propaganda value, Louis was always careful to ensure that his portraits and statues conveyed the right image. One day in November 1685, he was walking in the orangery at Versailles, one of his favorite parts of the garden, when he suddenly came across an equestrian statue of himself. He had commissioned it from Bernini several years ago, and now it had finally been delivered.20 The Italian had depicted Louis as one of his favorite historical characters, Alexander the Great, but the human figure and the horse had, in Louis’s opinion, been very badly formed. Louis “resolved not only to remove it from there, but even to have it smashed up,” noted Dangeau.21 In the end, Louis did not order the work to be destroyed; instead, he commissioned the sculptor François Girardon to transform it into a statue of Marcus Curtius, the mythical Roman hero who saved Rome by sacrificing himself.22
TWENTY-THREE
The Edict of Fontainebleau
From early childhood, Louis had been taught—by his mother, by Mazarin, and a succession of Jesuit tutors and confessors—that heresy was nothing less than the road to hell. Louis believed that corruption in the church led to
“schism and heresy,” which in its turn gravely wounded the church.1 The schism Louis spoke about here was Huguenotism. The Huguenots promised “an easy and short road to salvation,” wrote Louis;2 he was certain that their doctrine was Satanic.
As Louis understood it, where there was schism in the church, there must also be disunity in the realm as a whole, for religion and politics were inseparable. In the previous century, clashes between Huguenots and Catholics had culminated in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 24, 1572. At the siege of Amiens in 1597, Huguenots had come close to betraying Louis’s grandfather, Henri IV, to Spain. The following year, Henri signed the Edict of Nantes, which granted freedom of conscience to Huguenots, their rights supported by political and military guarantees. Huguenots had rebelled in the 1620s, most famously at the siege of La Rochelle in 1626, and it could not fail to escape Louis’s notice that many of the regions that sided with Condé during the Fronde had large Huguenot populations. Heresy was, therefore, a form of treason. It was Louis’s duty, as the king who had been given to France by God, to fulfill the promise he had made in his coronation oath to suppress heresy, to save his people, and unite his kingdom.
For the first few years of his reign, however, Louis did very little other than to appoint ministers to maintain the Edict of Nantes. He also withheld from the Huguenot population certain “graces,” although he did this “out of kindness rather than bitterness”3 so that they might not wonder “if it was with good reason that they willingly deprived themselves of the advantages which they could share with all” his subjects.”4 Louis described his desire to
attract, and even to reward, those who might be amenable; to do all I could to inspire the bishops to work at their instruction, and to clear away their scandals, which sometimes separated them from us; finally, to put in the highest places and in all those of which I have the appointment for whatever reason, only persons of piety, application, learning, capable of repairing by an entirely different conduit, the disorders that their predecessors had primarily produced in the church.5
Between 1659 and 1664, Louis closed several Huguenot temples. Those who converted received financial rewards, the money coming from monastic revenues and those of the régale. Huguenots were forbidden to emigrate, which many in Europe viewed as a particularly harsh measure.6 Bibles translated for the benefit of Huguenots were read by some and ignored by others, while catechisms and other texts were designed for indoctrination purposes. These measures did nothing to persuade the most unswerving Huguenots to convert; others, less committed, embraced Catholicism, willingly or otherwise.7
Had the matter been allowed to run its course, the Huguenots of France would have died out within two or three generations. However, Louis wanted to be remembered as the king who united France under one religion. It was to be the highest accomplishment of his reign.
Although no longer a state within a state, if indeed they ever had been, Huguenots maintained a sense of particularism that Louis saw as a threat to national identity. Moreover, during the Dutch War, significant numbers of Huguenots had secretly supported William of Orange.8 As Calvinists, they were believed to be republicans and democrats. In 1679, Louis determined to destroy the Huguenots.
Over the next six years, measures against the Huguenot population became increasingly severe as the guarantees of the Edict of Nantes were systematically eroded away.9 In the professions, it became illegal for Huguenot women to practice midwifery. Sailors and artisans were forced to remain in France, while certain posts in law and the military were closed to them. Eventually, all legal posts as well as medicine would be closed. In areas of faith and its practice, more Huguenot temples were demolished. It was forbidden for anyone to convert to Huguenotism.
Private worship was banned, while Huguenot ministers were required to move to a new ministry after a maximum of three years. In addition, services could be held only in communities of ten or more families. Any Huguenot minister who accepted a Catholic convert into his flock was forced to make a public apology before being banished from the kingdom. Each temple was required to host a royal agent, who attended the services, studied the congregation, and kept a watchful eye on the pastor.
In private life, mixed marriages were forbidden. Magistrates were sent to the homes of sick Huguenots in a bid to convert them. Louvois, acting on a suggestion by the intendant René de Marillac, authorized the deployment of dragonnades in Poitiers. Soldiers who had previously been billeted on tax evaders now moved into Huguenot homes to bully, threaten, and coerce them to convert. However, Huguenots newly converted to Catholicism were spared this horror for two years, presumably to encourage them not to apostatize. In time, the number of dragonnades would increase, and their use would spread into other areas of France.
Huguenot children were encouraged to abandon the faith of their parents. From the age of seven, they were granted the right to convert to Catholicism without their parents’ consent. Their parents, meanwhile, were required to respect their children’s decision and to educate them as Catholics in France. Children were compelled to be taught by Catholic tutors, whether they chose to convert or not. Illegitimate children born to Huguenots were to be forcibly brought up as Catholics.
Lastly, it remained illegal for Huguenots to emigrate, although a great many did. In view of this, a new and sinister law was introduced that awarded half the goods of Huguenots who had emigrated to those who denounced them.
Throughout this period, intendants such as Marillac presented Louis with exaggerated lists of converts. The king, who liked what he saw, did not question the accuracy of the numbers but took them at face value. He concluded that the measures, although harsh, were producing the desired effect. “If God preserves the King,” wrote Mme de Maintenon, “there will not be one Huguenot in twenty years.”10
Encouraged by the apparent success of his policy, Louis continued to apply pressure, so that at the end of six years, few of the rights and guarantees promised by the Edict of Nantes remained. Louis sent missionaries into the newly converted regions. “The courtiers will hear perhaps mediocre sermons,” Louis said, “but the Languedociens will learn a good doctrine and a fine moral.”11
Louis believed that there were so few Huguenots left in the kingdom that the Edict of Nantes became obsolete. It remained only to rescind it, and this is what he now did. The new Edict of Fontainebleau was announced on October 18, 1685, and registered in parlement four days later. Upon the implementation of the new edict, the religion prétendue réformée, the ‘so-called reformed religion,’ was legally no more in France. Pastors were given two weeks to convert or leave the country on pain of being condemned to the galleys.12 The laity was made to conform or be forced to endure the dragonnades. Those Huguenots who had emigrated were granted four months’ grace to reclaim their confiscated property.13 Those who still remained in France were forbidden to emigrate or send goods abroad. Men who broke this law were condemned to the galleys, while women had their worldly goods confiscated.14 In the end, 1,450 men ended up as galley slaves and some 200,000 people took their wealth and their skills to other countries, including England, Holland, Switzerland, and the New World.15 “I admire the conduct of the King in destroying the Huguenots,” wrote Mme de Sévigné. “The wars they have waged in the past and the Saint-Bartholomew [massacre] have multiplied and given strength to that sect. His Majesty has undermined them little by little, and the edict [of Fontainebleau] that he had just passed, supported by Dragoons and Bourdaloue,16 was a coup de grace.”17 However, the Edict of Fontainebleau is now understood as one of the most criminal and least enlightened acts in the entire reign of the Sun King.
Louis’s war on the Huguenots should be seen in the context of his failure to respond to Pope Innocent’s call for a Crusade to save Vienna from Turkish aggressors. He felt the need to defend his credentials as a Christian and show that he deserved his title of Most Christian King. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was also a response to what Louis saw as a fissure in
the integrity of the kingdom, which challenged his perception of absolute monarchy and defied his initiative to unite his kingdom under one king, one law, and one faith. He had already begun with Jansenism, and it was inevitable that he would turn his attention to the Huguenots, whose eradication he viewed as necessary to ensure the well-being of the realm.
While the Huguenots were mercilessly persecuted, elsewhere Louis was supporting acts of charity. In March 1684, he authorized the establishment of a new Versailles charity to be directed by the duchesse de Richelieu. It was dedicated to the care of the poor, the crippled, and young girls who were forced to sell themselves on the streets in order to survive.
Françoise, meanwhile, who had often been looked down upon by members of the aristocracy, decided she needed something worthy of her status as the wife of Louis XIV. Since 1681, she had dedicated much of her time to a school she had founded for poor children, particularly girls. Established in Montmorency, it had quickly outgrown its premises and moved first to Rueil and then to Noisy. The school was successful, but Françoise had come to feel that she needed something grander than a charity school for beggar girls. Inspiration came when she contemplated the lot of the sons of nobles whose fathers had been detailed to the frontier to man and maintain the defenses. The education of these boys had been seriously disrupted as a result, and Françoise, encouraged by some caring ministers, established a military academy for them.
Her next step was to found a college for the daughters of impoverished noble families, girls who would otherwise be denied the opportunity to fulfill the expectations of their class. The location selected for the college, which was to be called the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis, was Saint-Cyr, west of Versailles. Mansart was commissioned to design the buildings, while the garden was landscaped by La Nôtre. In May 1686, Louis awarded the new establishment 150 thousand livres in rents and benefices,18 and on June 6, he “signed the letters patent for the establishment of the community of Saint-Cyr,” which he also endowed with a further 50 thousand écus of rentes. Françoise was given the general direction of the school, and her friend Mme de Brinon was appointed superior of the community, with Abbé Gobelin as the ecclesiastic superior.
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