The Bourbon Kings of France

by Seward, Desmond

  Tirelessly the Controller-General encouraged the establishment of new industries and the expansion of existing ones. He bought technical secrets from abroad, imported skilled labour, and employed inspectors to enforce uniform standards of quality. State factories were set up. Steel, tin-plate, glass, pottery, mirrors, furniture, clocks, velvet, silk, lace and linen, all began to be manufactured in France on a large scale. It was now that the Gobelin tapestry looms came to Paris, that the carpets of Savonnerie became famous. Colbert was determined that nothing should be imported. He raised external customs duties, forbidding the export of corn to ensure a cheap supply. To aid the home market, he tried to abolish internal customs duties and began a nation-wide programme of canal-digging and road-building.

  Colbert admired the Dutch for making their little country a European power solely through trade. He therefore set up five great trading companies, sent new colonists to Canada, now known officially as New France, established trading posts at Pondicherry and other ports in India and even Madagascar, and bought a dozen islands in the Caribbean. A navy was needed, not only for war, but to protect French merchantmen. As Minister of Marine, he increased the French navy from twenty ships to over 250, based on depots at Brest and Toulon, and manned by over 60,000 sailors; and founded a school for naval officers.

  For all his good intentions, Colbert lacked human feeling. It was brutally evident in his otherwise admirable plans for New France. Sending out a cargo of ‘150 girls together with stallions, mares and ewes’, he ordered the garrison to marry the girls on their arrival, and get them with child by the end of the year.

  Modern research has shown that ‘Colbertism’ had many shortcomings. Though he attempted to moderate the ferocious exactions of the tax farmers, they were never properly restrained during bad harvests; it was this, not Louis’s wars, which reduced French peasants to the misery later depicted by Bruyère. Nor was there any machinery to regulate the grain, trade and wheat prices, despite Colbert’s belief in controls; so that both peasants and urban poor suffered unnecessarily. Colbert also failed to attract sufficient capital to his new trading companies. Undoubtedly his administration benefited the economy, and the royal finances in particular, but he was not quite the genius of popular legend.

  Louis worked beside Colbert for several hours each day, examining every project and helping to draft the edicts. In the early years of the reign, when the treasury was almost bankrupt, he made many self-sacrificing economies, and gave his Controller-General enthusiastic support.

  Louis’s reform of the law has been described as the greatest legal work between Justinian and Napoleon. In 1667 the Code Louis was promulgated, simplifying and unifying all French legal procedure. Five more codes followed; a new code of criminal law, which limited the use of torture; a commercial code; a marine code; a code for woods and waters; and even a code for negro slaves in the colonies. The King worked with his ministers—notably the Chancellor Seguier—on these revisions, acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of the realm’s two great legal traditions; the Loi Coutumier or Common Law of northern France, and the Loi Ecrit or Roman Law of France south of the Loire. From the former he derived his deep respect for his subjects’ privileges, from the latter reasoned justification for his Absolutism. Few attempts to understand Louis’s concept of kingship have paid attention to the impression which must have been made upon him by familiarity with the Roman Law and with the God-like rôle which it accords to the Emperor.

  The King was much concerned with the enforcement of his new laws. In 1667 he appointed a special magistrate to administer the Paris police. M de la Reynie, who was his Lieutenant of Police for thirty years, trebled the force and introduced night patrols. In addition, street lighting was introduced; every street in Paris was provided with a lamp at each end and in the middle. Generally admired for his honesty and humanity, La Reynie was none the less responsible for what was later called the cabinet noir—censorship of the post and supplying the government with a weekly report on public opinion—and for operating a widespread network of police spies. He also enforced the lettres de cachet or ‘sealed letters’; these were special warrants for arbitrary arrest without trial, which usually meant confinement in the Bastille, though surprisingly few were issued.

  During Maria Theresa’s first pregnancy, Louis’s fancy was taken by a seventeen-year-old lady-in-waiting, Louise de la Baume le Blanc, Demoiselle de la Vallière. She was a country girl from Touraine, daughter of an impoverished captain of horse, who had taught her to shoot with a pistol and to use a boar spear. Her skill as a horsewoman and her fondness for hunting attracted Louis. She was an ash-blonde, thin and flat-chested, with a slight limp, rather shy and awkward but noted for her sweet nature. The early days together were spent in hunting expeditions during which the King conducted an idyllic courtship. Louise became his mistress in June 1661, at Fontainebleau, but her ascendancy was not finally established until the affair of Madame, Monsieur’s English wife in the following summer.

  The second man in the kingdom, and the one closest to Louis, was his brother, Philippe, whom he made Duc d’Orléans after the nnmourned Gaston’s death in 1660. Small, goodlooking, ‘Monsieur’ had features which recalled those of Louis XIII. From his father he inherited a curious sexual makeup, which in his own case became homosexual. Early leanings in this direction were unwittingly indulged by Anne of Austria, who—with Gaston’s unfortunate example in mind—kept the boy in petticoats for far longer than was customary, in the hope of making him more tractable (though tales of perverted practices being deliberately encouraged are nonsense). Like Louis XIII, Monsieur was a natural soldier who showed bravery on several occasions; unlike his father he was cheerful and garrulous—he was said to talk more than several women together. Although Louis loathed sodomites, the two brothers were devoted to each other. Unfortunately, while Louis was able to tolerate Philippe’s eccentricities—ribbons, jewelled bracelets, drenching himself in feminine scents, painting his face, dancing at balls in female costume—he could not approve of a circle of vicious favourites which included the beautiful and malicious Chevalier de Lorraine and the no less evil Comte de Guiche.

  To detach Monsieur from these unsavoury catamites, he was married in 1660 to Henrietta of England, Charles II’s favourite sister. Monsieur was not entirely satisfactory as a husband and ‘Madame’, a lively, flirtatious brunette, was unhappy. The King seems to have thought of consoling her himself. So did the insolent and bisexual M de Guiche, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce her in the summer of 1662. Madame remained entirely innocent, but the affair annoyed Louis.

  Mlle Louise knew something about the affair—she was a friend of one of Madame’s messengers—but, always loyal, refused to tell the King. He became so angry that she fled to the convent at Chaillot; it was rumoured that she had taken the veil. Louis, horrified, rode hastily to Chaillot where he found her in tears lying on the guest-room floor. She was taken home by a repentant King after an ecstatic reconciliation, and retained possession of his heart for the next five years, presenting him with three children. However, La Vallière was not recognized as mâitresse en titre until his mother’s death in 1666, for fear of shocking Anne of Austria. The King was also considerate enough to spend part of every night in Maria Theresa’s bed. The person who suffered most was Louise, whom Mme de Sevigné called ‘the little violet hiding beneath the grass, ashamed to be a mistress, a mother’.

  Louis joined with enthusiasm in Colbert’s encouragement of the arts. His patronage was on a massive scale and was not limited to a mere distribution of pensions. The Academie Française made good its position as supreme arbiter of the language and of letters. Other academies were established—Inscriptions and Belles Lettres in 1663, Science in 1666, Architecture in 1671. The Academy of Painting and Sculpture was reconstituted, to make a much-needed distinction between artists and house-painters, between sculptors and masons. Mazarin’s great library was opened to the public, the Jardin des Plantes extended.

 
; The King’s feeling for style is evident in the polished prose of his memoirs—even Voltaire admired his gift for graceful expression, and considered that his taste had been formed by reading Corneille. Certainly Louis loved the theatre and had the plays of Molière and Racine produced at court. It was the King who decided that the former’s true bent was comedy and not tragedy; Louis was personally responsible for the production of Les Précieuses Ridicules (a play which made startlingly unconventional fun of the period’s fashionable intellectuals); he also helped with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, arranging for Molière’s introduction to his First Musician, Lully. He had a genuine passion for the French language and undoubtedly enjoyed writers’ company. He was on close terms with Molière, whom he even asked to sit down, an honour rarely accorded to Princes of the Blood, and he was godfather to Molière’s first child. (When Molière died without the Sacraments, Louis saw that he was given Christian burial despite the opposition of the Archbishop of Paris.) He was often read to by Racine and Boileau—the Dr Johnson of the age—whom he made his historiographers. Hearing Boileau in an argument shout, ‘I know more about poetry than the King,’ he commented, ‘Boileau is right—he does know more.’

  Louis was fond of all the arts. His agents bought so many statues in Rome that the Pope forbade any further export of works of art. From Lully the King commissioned marches and ballet music, operas and motets, tolerating his dirtiness and his drinking. On Lully’s death he appointed François Couperin as his new First Musician (the music of this virtuoso of the clavichord can still convey much of the atmosphere of Louis’s court). An Academy of Music was founded in 1666. The following year a school of painting for Frenchmen was established in Rome. Although the country’s greatest painter, Poussin, refused all invitations to come home, his most important follower, Charles Le Brun, became the King’s First Painter, in which capacity he advised him on almost every aspect of decoration. Besides employing portrait painters like Pierre Mignard and Hyacinthe Rigau, Louis was directly responsible for the rise of a new school of engraving; he ordered that France’s great buildings and treasures should be perpetuated in the Cabinet des Médailles, a national collection of engravings, while he himself posed for such engravers as Nanteuil. He also sat to sculptors, notably Antoine Coysevax.

  It was Voltaire who first observed that while the earlier part of Louis XIV’s reign abounded with men of literary genius, the end was a cultural desert, a verdict which has since been repeated ad nauseam. But the decline was hardly the King’s fault; if he could encourage great artists he could hardly be expected to create them. Although Voltaire was not aware of it, one of the greatest of all French writers was secretly at work throughout the later years of the reign; the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs rank with the novels of Proust and Balzac, a masterpiece encapsulating an entire world. And Montesquieu, Buffon and Voltaire himself emerged only just after the reign was over.

  Versailles was the supreme expression of Louis’s love of beauty. This palace is often seen as a monument to megalomania, something ‘un-French’. If it is a monument, it was meant as one to the Bourbon dynasty as a whole, intended to outshine the beautiful châteaux of the Valois; even the bluff Henri IV had had plans drawn up for a palace almost as large to be built at Blois. Nor was the choice of Versailles a ‘rejection of Paris’. The Valois had always lived away from the capital, in the Loire valley, and the move was quite in keeping with French tradition. Throughout his reign, Louis continued to beautify Paris; he built the Champs-Elysées, the first boulevards, the Observatory, the Place des Victoires, the Pont Royal, the Louvre Colonnade, the Invalides, the Place Vendôme, and the chapel of the Salpêtrière. He laid out the new street plan for the Faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré and extended the Tuileries. Even after he had moved out to Versailles, the King visited his capital regularly.

  Louis’s predilection for Versailles owed something to his father’s memory, and something to his visits there with La Vallière. He began to enlarge it in 1661, though until 1668 the little palace was merely extended. In 1664 he gave an open-air fête at Versailles for Louise, which lasted for seven days and far outshone the Carrousel; its theme was Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchanté (a tale taken from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). Amid the pageants and the tableaux, supper was served by 200 nymphs and shepherds at tables lit by 4,000 flaring torches. Another part of the entertainment was the first production of Molière’s greatest play, Tartuffe.

  Versailles in these early days was not yet sufficiently theatrical for the King’s taste. Bernini visited him in 1665 and while his bust of Louis conveys both his good looks and his majesty, the face is as much that of a great actor as of a great King. Louis XIV needed a stage.

  The second phase of rebuilding began in 1669. Louis had a complete new palace in mind, but would not allow his architects to demolish Louis XIII’s ‘house of cards’; he told them, ‘If you pull it down I will have it rebuilt brick by brick.’ It had to be included in the new building, enclosed on three sides by an ‘envelope’ of red brick and white stone designed by Le Vau. He soon decided that this second palace was not big enough for anything other than a holiday residence, and a third rebuilding began. Thousands of workmen toiled for years, and so many millions were spent that the sum was made a state secret, but the palace was not fully complete until 1710. It was basically a three-sided building, so big that the garden front had 375 windows. Louis himself, advised by Le Brun, approved every detail of its design and decoration—the gilding and the tiles, the chimneys and the terraces, the marble and the mirrors, the silver furniture and silken tapestries, the urns and sconces.

  Although Le Vau designed the original plan, the architect who built Versailles was Jules Hardouin-Mansart—‘a tall, well-built, handsome man of very humble origin but possessing a great deal of natural intelligence’, says Saint-Simon. Louis was not concerned with ‘the vulgarity of his origin’ and became very fond of Mansart, whom he ennobled. On one occasion the King told his courtiers, in the architect’s presence, ‘I can make a score of dukes and peers in a quarter of an hour, but it would take centuries to make a Mansart.’

  Of all the mistresses of the French Kings, Françoise-Athénaïs de Montespan was the most formidable. Born in 1640, a daughter of the Duc de Mortemart—his family, the Rochechouart, was one of the oldest and grandest in Poitou—she had married an impoverished rake, the Marquis de Montespan. Like her mother in the previous reign, she became a lady-in-waiting, pleasing the Queen by her apparent piety. She soon endeared herself to Louise de la Vallière as a reassuring confidante. However, as early as 1666 she was having diabolical prayers said by witches to help her seduce the King. At first Louis did not seem interested—perhaps he realized that she was dangerous. While Athénais was very beautiful, dark and sensuous, with violet eyes, scarlet lips and an adorable figure (despite a tendency to plumpness), she was also both wild and arrogant, a compulsive gambler who was heavily in debt; and she combined a savage wit with a vile temper. In any case, she had two children and her proud and fiery husband would not be a willing cuckold. Athénais hid her ambition, biding her time, confident not only of her prayers but also of her charms. For Athénais was not only beautiful, she was interesting. Sophisticated, with a discerning taste in luxury, she dressed delightfully; even more important, she was extremely well-read and spoke exquisite French with a turn of phrase which was admired by Saint-Simon.

  In the summer of 1667, during the invasion of Flanders, the King finally became her lover. La Vallière, who had recently been made a Duchess, and who was always trustful, suspected nothing. M de Montespan was furious and beat his wife; dressed in mourning, he drove to court with two great cuckold’s horns waving from the roof of his carriage. The King banished him. Louise was deserted, but to preserve the proprieties was forced to stay at court and retain the title of maitresse en titre—she still travelled in Louis’s carriage with the Queen and Athénais. (These could be dreadful journeys for the ladies-in-waiting, as the King would not let them
stop the carriage when they wished to relieve themselves.) Louise was allowed to depart in 1674, whereupon she entered a notoriously strict Carmelite convent where she remained—as Soeur Marie de la Miséricorde—until her death in 1710. When told that her son, the Duc de Vermandois, had died, she commented, ‘I mourn his birth even more than his death.’

  Athénais held the King for twelve years. She worked hard to do so, dyeing her hair blonde because he liked it better than brown; dieting (Mme de Sévigné once noted that she came back after an absence from court half her size) and having herself rubbed down with scent; patriotically, she dressed in French silks and velvets. To begin with, her life with Louis was an exuberant idyll. Voracious in bed, she satisfied his once insatiable sexual appetite. She accompanied him when he inspected the frontiers in 1678, even though she was pregnant. He adored children, so she presented him with seven (who were put in the care of her dear friend, Mme Scarron). He rewarded her richly, making her father Governor of Paris, paying her gambling debts and buying her wonderful jewels. He built her a fabulous château, Clagny (specially designed by Mansart) where to please him she made a garden filled with jonquils and jasmine, his favourite flowers. (The King was so fond of jasmine that sometimes the entire floor of his bedroom was covered with it.) Everybody else loathed her. Success made her intolerably haughty and unbridled her vicious tongue. Not even the King was spared, and he almost abandoned her in 1672 and again in 1674. To keep him, so it was later alleged, she commissioned blasphemous spells and gave him toad excrement as an aphrodisiac; she was even accused of having a Black Mass, during which a baby was sacrificed, said over her naked body. By the mid-1670s the King was tiring of her. Totally unsubmissive, she reacted violently to his many infidelities. He ceased to sleep with her in 1678, though the final breach did not come till later.