As expected, the loss of the duc’s services made no difference to Louis’s armies. Though Turenne and Luxembourg and le Grand Condé had long since passed into legend, France could still boast some formidable military names: Vendôme; Villars; sixty-year-old Maréchal Boufflers, Françoise’s “nephew” who had once proposed marriage to Marthe-Marguerite; and, until his death in 1707, Sébastien Vauban, now in his seventies and still Europe’s master of military engineering. Leading the forces against them were Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy, two of Europe’s best military commanders, and working against them, too, was one of their own “commanders,” the twenty-six-year-old duc de Bourgogne.
The maréchal-duc de Vendôme, known as le Grand Vendôme, was among the very finest of all Louis’s generals, worshipped by his men, with an impressive string of military glories to his credit—though the duc de Saint-Simon wrote snidely that “if you count up all the men Vendôme says he’s killed and taken prisoner, you’ll find it’s the entire enemy army.” Sixteen years younger than the King—Louis liked to call him “my nephew,” though he was more properly a cousin of sorts—Vendôme was a quintessential soldier, a drinker, curser, and fornicator (though only with men) of the first water. Bourgogne, by contrast, Louis’s grandson and heir-but-one, was a priggish young man, devoted to his mass book and to his enchanting wife, Marie-Adélaïde, who did not reciprocate his passion—indeed, even his slow-witted father, the dauphin, found him dull.
Unwisely, in the spring of 1708, Louis had sent the two to command the French army in Flanders. While the young Bourgogne deferred to Vendôme’s far greater experience, all progressed well, but when the pair entered combat with both Marlborough and Prince Eugene together at Oudenarde in July, Bourgogne’s arrogance and cowardly incompetence cost France the battle, along with the lives of some 10,000 men—five times allied losses—and Louis’s cause was swept decisively backwards.
Vendôme and Bourgogne returned in disgrace to Versailles, to private audiences with their irate King. Louis had understood the nature of the case, but too late, and, putting pride ahead of policy, he opted to support his grandson. Vendôme was relieved of his command for two years, though so valuable a commander could not easily be spared. Louis tried to distract attention from Oudenarde with the public celebration of a lesser victory in Catalonia, but no one was deceived. New songs were heard in the streets of Paris, berating Bourgogne, who had at one point been relaxing behind the lines with a game of shuttlecock while his soldiers faced the enemy.
Vendôme had at least managed to capture Ghent and Bruges before his forced retirement, partly with the help of a population disaffected with their own goverment, but the French were no more welcome for all that. Liselotte relays the story of a local man in Ghent, who “dropped his pants and presented his behind [to one of our soldiers]. The soldier took offence and fired his musket right at the presented behind. The man dropped dead. One of his friends avenged him by killing the soldier, and that was the end of the war…”
For a time, it seemed that that might indeed be the end of the war. The disaster of Oudenarde in 1708 left France, in most eyes, finished. It had been preceded, in 1704 and 1706, by the two great battles of Blenheim in Germany and Ramillies in the Spanish Netherlands, both dazzling victories for the brilliant Duke of Marlborough over the French. Blenheim had cost France 40,000 of its 60,000 men fighting there; Ramillies had left the allies in command of the whole of the Spanish Netherlands, obliging Louis to transfer troops from Spain and Italy, leaving the French armies in the south undermanned and, soon, defeated. From Madrid, Madame des Ursins had written sarcastically to Françoise about “the loss of the Kingdom of Naples, though that’s no more than might have been expected, since they received no reinforcements.”
The friction between Vendôme and Bourgogne was in fact symptomatic of a continuing problem for France’s entire military enterprise on land. While Marlborough had enjoyed, at least until this point, unequivocal overall command of the allied armies and the general strategy of the war, France had suffered from too frequent changes and too little clarity in the army chain of command; this had muddied larger-scale plans and hampered tactics in the field. In addition, the French armies were inadequately supplied, leading to hesitant planning by the commanders and mass desertions among the rank and file.
The fault was Louis’s. The death of the unloved marquis de Louvois had left the Ministry of War in the hands of his incompetent son, Barbezieux, and on Barbezieux’s death, early in 1701, Louis had appointed Michel Chamillart as his replacement. Chamillart was one of Françoise’s protégés, a former bursar at Saint-Cyr. In 1699 she had arranged his promotion to the post of Comptroller-General of the kingdom’s finances, once the fief of the great Colbert. He was still holding this office when Louis, pleased with Chamillart and seeking to favour him further, appointed him Minister of War as well, over his own protestations and against Françoise’s advice. “They say he owed his post to his talent for billards…[and his] honesty, modesty and strict piety…[but] these qualities aren’t enough when one…has to be a Colbert and a Louvois at the same time…” But Louis insisted, revealing, as many had noted, that in his years of assiduous attention to public affairs, fixed on counting individual trees, Louis had never really mastered the business of government, and too often failed to see the forest as a whole.
The misguided new experiment proved only that Chamillart and Françoise had been right: it was impossible to run the two vital ministries of finance and war effectively at the same time. Though Chamillart had devolved ever more of his work onto subordinates, nothing had been done well, as he himself was quick to admit. By the time of his resignation, in June 1709, the nation’s finances were in hopeless disarray; military supply lines were failing; and in the absence of firm direction from the War Ministry, commanders all over western Europe had taken to harassing Françoise in an attempt to secure the King’s support for their own, uncoordinated ideas, including the detailed plans for individual battles. Even when these were—always tardily—approved, there was no guarantee that a commander would have the necessary troops at his disposal. “There are deserters in all the armies,” as Liselotte noted. Though defeat on the field accounted for some desertions, the main problem was the lack of regular pay for the soldiers. In a time of “relentless increase in the financial demands of war,” setting strategy and battle plans and personal bravery aside, it was money that was making the difference. As the French were to realize only far into the future, the allied victories were in fact “a triumph for the new regime in England over the old regime typified in France.” England’s reformed political system had engendered a new capitalistic financial system, with money being raised in commercial markets and interest paid in stable currency; this in its turn was determining, ever more clearly, who would win and who would lose. Following the victory celebrations for the battle of Blenheim, for example, a loan to the government of almost a million pounds, “an impressive sum in those days,” was fully subscribed within two hours of its floating in the City of London, by “large numbers of persons eager to prove their confidence in the national cause at 62/3 percent.” After the battle of Oudenarde, a further City loan, this time guaranteed by the Whig government, itself comprising many City merchants, raised two and a quarter million pounds, and the confident British parliament itself voted the money to raise an extra 10,000 troops.
Louis, by contrast, was dependent on his creaking feudal system of taxation by royal decree, supplemented by loans to the crown (to be repaid, if at all, in devalued coin) and the sale of offices, with the national economy being gradually stifled as people did all they could to keep their money, often physically, in their own hands. As an absolute monarch, Louis was able, quite simply, to announce new taxes for any purpose he chose, and to impose them upon any particular group of his subjects: his nobles, for instance, were typically exempt, whereas the townsfolk and, especially, the peasants generally bore the heaviest tax burden. “I have found everywhere
an extreme poverty,” reported one tax-collecting intendant in southern France. “The great majority of the people have no seed to sow their land with,” reported another, from the west. “The nation’s finances are so exhausted that one can promise nothing for the future,” Chamillart had told Louis. “The revenue for 1708 has been eaten up in advance, and credit is exhausted.” Some areas of the country were in conditions of actual famine. In Paris, the hungry townsfolk took to rioting over the exorbitant price of bread—to which the Cardinal-Archbishop de Noailles responded by perversely calling for a general fast to placate the Lord into ending the shortage. A major rebellion of Huguenots in the south, urged on by the successes of the Protestant allied forces, swiftly developed into a full-scale peasant revolt against the impossibly heavy taxes which Louis had imposed to finance the war, now ongoing for more than seven years. And a bitter new prayer was heard in the streets of French towns:
Our Father which art at Versailles, thy name is no longer hallowed, thy kingdom is not so great, thy will is no longer done on earth or sea. Give us this day our bread which we lack on all sides. Yield not to the temptations of la Maintenon, and deliver us from Chamillart. Amen.
“The maréchal de Villars has told me,” wrote Françoise to Madame des Ursins, “that four days ago, he requisitioned eight or ten thousand sacks of wheat from people who had great need of it themselves. He was not happy about doing so, but he said he had no other way of putting his army in the field: the soldiers had no food…The people are dying of hunger. And there’s everything to fear from them. They’re saying that the King is taking all the grain and enriching himself by selling it to them at the highest prices.”
Chamillart, impossibly overworked, had abandoned his office of Comptroller-General in June 1708. It passed it to Nicolas Desmarets, a nephew of Colbert promoted by Françoise at Chamillart’s own request. Desmarets was quickly overwhelmed by the enormity of the nation’s financial difficulties. He fell back on the old ruses of devaluing the currency, postponing repayment of crown loans, and selling offices. “Rents, new offices, tax exemptions were…created, sold, suppressed, recreated, resold.” It was even considered that recent ennoblements might be revoked, “so forcing the new nobles to pay for their titles a second time.” Where possible, the wealthy moved money abroad, some of it ending up in the hands of bankers in enemy Amsterdam—seldom filtering down, however, to the poorer Dutch folk living in “penuriousness.”
As for loans, as Chamillart had reported before his resignation, credit was exhausted. Among the bourgeoisie and some of the nobles there was in fact still plenty of money in the country, but Louis, and consequently his armies, now had no access to it. From Madrid, itself in a state of destitution, Madame des Ursins sent fuming letters to Françoise, insisting that France was full of “sleeping wealth,” and berating the lack of patriotism among the French: “I’m so angry, my blood boils when I think of…all the money the business people have, and they won’t release it for the good of the state.” From her quiet room at Saint-Cyr, Françoise replied, “As for the money here, that’s still hidden. Everyone agrees there’s more in the kingdom than before the war, but it’s not circulating, and you know, Madame, when the blood stops circulating, it means death.”
Instead of circulating, particularly in the form of loans to the crown, the hidden wealth of France was “sleeping” in the form of ever more valuable objects in the households of the rich—fabulous silverware, table services made of gold, even high-quality furniture—in short, anything that was less likely to lose its value than the actual coin of the realm. Even the Church kept most of its money hidden: the parish of Saint-Eustache in Paris had had made a gigantic silver candelabra, weighing two hundred pounds instead of the usual twenty. In a hopeless measure to combat the problem, the Comptroller-General introduced new restrictions on the utilization of precious metals: they could no longer be used for soufflés or cooking pots or grills, but lest the gently bred be too incommoded, gold and silver might still be used for “chamber pots, soap basins, chocolate, tea, and coffee pots, pocket candlesticks, and the tops of walking sticks.” The Saint-Eustache candelabra, however, was confiscated and melted down for the purchase of food for the poor, and the fasting Cardinal-Archbishop de Noailles added a large sum of money from his own personal resources.
“This question of wheat makes me dizzy,” complained Françoise. “In every market you see more than you’ve ever seen, and yet the cost of it rises and rises.” Profiteering was rampant, and there was hoarding, but genuine dearth was recurrent, too. In the summer of 1709, the relics of Sainte Geneviève were exposed in Paris in supplication for divine assistance in the city’s terrible need. And in Madrid, as Madame des Ursins relayed, “they’re holding a big procession carrying the relics of Saint Isidore and his beatified wife. Saint Isidore was a labourer and the people here are very confident that he’ll protect their crops. That’s all very admirable, but I’m more concerned about this plague of grasshoppers that’s descended on the fields…”
In this year of processions and plague, the year of 1709, France reached its nadir. “A great many of the poor have died,” wrote Françoise at the end of January, “in Paris and in the countryside. Entertainments have stopped, the colleges are closed, the craftsmen do no work. The result of all this is great hardship.” The city’s hôpital-général was besieged by 14,000 destitute people seeking food and shelter; 4,000 of the sick were crammed into the hôtel-Dieu. At a single Paris orphanage, 2,500 babies had been left—only one in ten would survive. “Madame de Maintenon redoubled her alms that year,” her secretary recorded. “She sent out bread, broth, blankets and clothes, and often she went out herself to distribute the things…In that same year she took sixteen poor Versailles families into her particular care, going to see them and taking medicines when they were sick and so on…But in general she concealed her identity wherever possible. She said to me, I don’t like it at all that everyone knows how little good I do. Yet every year she gave away 54,000 or 60,000 livres in charity. She never thought of piling up money…I often saw her weeping over the wretchedness of the poor, especially if they were nobles…”—an empathy no doubt born of Françoise’s own humiliations as an impoverished girl of modestly noble birth.
At Versailles, Françoise’s Mignon and his brother, the comte de Toulouse, led the younger nobility in donating their gold and silver possessions to be melted down for the sustenance of the army. The King gave his gold services, too, and even promised the crown jewels as security for further loans, should they be forthcoming. Marie-Adélaïde, the young duchesse de Bourgogne, agreed “quite willingly to dress more simply,” but most ladies at court preferred to keep up appearances. “The women here are very well turned out, given the degree of poverty there is,” wrote Françoise to her niece Marthe-Marguerite in Paris. “They all complain, and they go on ruining themselves. No one has any money, and no one has a single skirt the less.”
But by the middle of the year, with France in a desperate financial situation and threatened with invasion, Louis had been forced to sue for peace. The allies responded positively, but the terms for France were harsh: Louis was to recognize the Emperor Karl as the rightful King of Spain and, if need be, turn France’s armies against his grandson to force him from the Spanish throne. Louis was to abandon his support for the young James Stuart and recognize Queen Anne as the legitimate sovereign of Britain. France was to be barred from trading in the vast Spanish colonies, and was to admit British commerce within its own territories on especially advantageous terms. The French were to relinquish the seven barrier fortresses in Holland which they had captured at the beginning of the war, and a large part of the Spanish Netherlands was to be handed over as well, to provide a further buffer for the Dutch against any future French incursion. Such were the demands of the British and Dutch. The German princes were to present their own terms at a later peace conference. “You’ll have heard the news of our present situation, Madame, and of the insolence of our enemies,
” Françoise wrote to Madame des Ursins in the first week of June. “The French are no longer French if they’re not offended by such indignities. It’s made me ill…I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
Madame des Ursins, by contrast, was only too eager to “talk about it,” and she replied with a series of spirited accusations: “How can anyone buy peace at such a price? How can the King’s subjects not be ready to sacrifice everything they have to avoid such a disgrace for France?…I leave you to imagine the situation of Their Catholic Majesties…The King is completely occupied with plans for his own defence, in case the King his grandfather should withdraw the support he has been giving him, and without which it will be exceedingly difficult to hold the kingdom.”
Before her letter had even crossed the Spanish border, Madame des Ursins had received the response, half-heroic, half-tragic, which came in urgent dispatches from France. The King’s subjects were indeed ready to sacrifice everything they had; there would not be any bargaining for peace. But continuing the war on the western and eastern fronts meant abandoning the south, abandoning Spain and Louis’s grandson and his claim to the Spanish throne. Madame des Ursins’s reply to Françoise, her friend of forty years’ standing, was a model of politesse, shot through with the bitterest irony: “The King of Spain has received a letter from the King, Madame, informing him that he is no longer able to avoid abandoning him, and that all French troops are to be withdrawn: the matter is settled as has long been expected. It is my hope that His Majesty draws all that he desires from this abandonment and that since, through the sacrifice of Their Catholic Majesties, he is now at liberty to conclude a peace, his enemies will prove more tractable and that France will once again find the money and the wheat which have been so sorely lacking. Your own anxieties, Madame, so well founded, will no longer be so great, and you will begin to enjoy the repose that has been so troubled for so many years, and of which you are in so great need…I expect your enemies will require the King to exhibit joy if his grandson is dethroned…”
The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: Françoise d'Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon Page 45