There were other ways of celebrating him, too. In 1685, two new city squares were started in Paris. In April, “it became known that the King had bought M. de Vendôme’s house in the rue Saint Honoré in Paris, and that it was to be torn down and replaced by a square something like the Place Royale [today, Place des Vosges] in the middle of which there will be his statue in bronze; and that His Majesty would give the plots around the square to build houses of similar design.”210 Today we know that square as the Place Vendôme, and it is one of the most handsome in Paris.
Inspired by this plan, the maréchal de La Feuillade, a most assiduous courtier, decided to build a square of his own and adorn it with a statue of the king. As it turned out, La Feuillade was too cheap: The square, although it exists (it is the Place des Victoires) was never completed, but the statue was. On March 28, 1686, “a most extraordinary ceremony was seen before the face of God and man. The maréchal de La Feuillade carried out the consecration of the King’s statue in the Place des Victoires. The King is on foot and Fame holds a laurel wreath above his head … La Feuillade rode three times around the statue at the head of the Guards regiment, whose colonel he is, and indulged in all the prosternations that the pagans of old dedicated to the statues of their emperors.”211 More than ever, the king was coming to seem godlike.
That impression could only be reinforced by the arrival, in May 1685, of the Doge of Genoa. That maritime republic, once as strong as Venice herself, but now somewhat fallen, had shown itself unfriendly to a French expeditionary corps in Italy. Louis XIV demanded that its doge come in person to beg his pardon in spite of the city’s constitution, which forbade the Doge to leave it; so the constitution was changed and the Doge traveled to Versailles.
“The Court … was lined up in two rows from the second salon to the end of the Hall of Mirrors where the King was sitting on a thronelike silver chair, and that was on a platform covered with a Persian carpet. On this platform were Monseigneur, Monsieur, M. le duc de Chartres [Monsieur’s son], M. le duc de Bourbon, M. le duc du Maine, and M. le comte de Toulouse*; and behind the King were all the officers of the State and of his Household who were entitled to be present,”212 Sourches recorded. Dangeau goes on to describe the ceremony.
“At noon, the Doge came in with four senators and many other people who were part of his suite; he was dressed in red velvet with a hat of the same, the senators in black; he kept his hat on while speaking to the King, but often took it off and put it back on; he did not seem embarrassed … After the King answered him, each senator spoke in turn … In the afternoon the Doge visited Monseigneur, Madame la Duchesse, M. le duc de Bourgogne, M. le duc d’Anjou, M. le duc de Berry [the King’s three grandsons], Monsieur, Madame, M. le duc de Chartres [and all the other princes of the blood]. He did not see the King’s illegitimate children.”213 For the king, it was a real apotheosis.
This exaltation of himself and those who derived their status from him continued apace. On July 24, 1685, one of Mme de Montespan’s daughters, the thirteen-year-old Mlle de Nantes, at an age remarkable even for this century when women married young, was wed to the duc de Bourbon, the grandson of the great Condé. This union brought the king’s illegitimate children a step closer still to the throne, since the duc de Bourbon was higher in the line of succession than his cousin, the prince de Conti; it also made the bride the third lady in France, right after the dauphine and Madame.
The celebrations themselves underlined the royal character of the new duchesse. First, the king gave her a dowry of a million livres, a sum so huge that not many legitimate French princesses had received it, as well as 300,000 livres’ worth of jewels, and a yearly pension of 100,000 livres, while the groom received his own 100,000-livre pension, the governorship of Burgundy - a largely honorific position - and the reversal of the chief office in the king’s household, that of grand master. And as if that all was not clear enough, it was at the wedding banquet that, for the first time, the princes of the blood royal - as opposed to the immediate royal family - were allowed to eat with the king because that gave him an opening to spread the same promotion to his illegitimate children: From that moment on, although their official status was still that of peers, his illegitimate sons, the duc du Maine and the comte de Toulouse, were given the same precedence as princes of the blood. It seemed clear that, in time, the position would be granted them in full, and needless to say, Mme de Maintenon, their erstwhile governess, was delighted.
The festivities, too, were exactly those to be expected at a proper royal wedding, complete with illuminations, fireworks, a musical gondola ride on the grand canal, and a banquet in the gardens of Trianon. There had been no king like him before; no precedent could bind him.
When it came to diplomacy or finance, these feelings of exaltation did not impinge upon Louis’s common sense, but it is hard to believe that they did not play a major role in the first irreversible disaster of the reign. Ever since 1661, it had been accepted policy to try and convert as many Protestants as possible; the key word here being convert. To be sure, all kinds of enticements were held out if they did, while, if they did not, they could expect short and unsatisfactory careers; still, no force was ever used. Up to a point, this policy worked: There had, indeed, been a steady flow of conversions; at the same time, it was clear to those who were willing to look that there remained, and would remain, an irreducible Protestant presence concentrated mostly in the Southwest of France.
This relative tolerance - rare enough among seventeenth-century rulers - was noticed. In a pamphlet entitled Parallel of Louis the Great with the Other Princes Who Have Been Called Great, published early in 1685, the author praises him as follows: “He alone united all the qualities all the others have separately: an ardent and tireless zeal for the welfare of the Church, but a zeal without excess,* a justice without riguor, a clemency without weakness, a courage without temerity, an open mind, a clear memory, a well-controlled imagination, a serene watchfulness, and success without pride.”214 It is worth noticing here that the author praises not only the king’s great qualities but most of all his moderation, a quality then seen as essential to true greatness.
At the same time, the balance in the government had been destroyed: On September 6, 1683, Colbert died, largely of exhaustion. Seignelai, his son, was given most of his offices, but there was a very significant difference: A voice to which the king always listened attentively, and which invariably spoke for reason and moderation, was gone. Le Pelletier, Colbert’s successor as Contrôleur Général of Finances, was a mediocre minister and quite unable to make himself heard; Louvois was given the job of Superintendent of the king’s Buildings, thus coming much closer to Louis. Worse, in the Council, not even the close alliance of Seignelai and Croissy could oppose Louvois successfully: His was now the preponderant voice.
The king, of course, was aware of this situation, and he only trusted Louvois so far, but that very knowledge predisposed him to accept Louvois’s information, if not always his advice; in the middle eighties, there can be no doubt that the War Minister had become the most influential man in the Council. Unfortunately, that influence was used in one direction only: Highly authoritarian in his private and official lives, Louvois believed in force as a matter of policy. So long as he was only in charge of the War Department that did not matter: Indeed, there is much to be said for a forceful - and highly effective - leader as organizer of the armies; only Louvois tried to solve the far more complex issues of civilian politics as he would have those posed by a strong enemy.
This predilection for the use of force was especially dangerous because it was allied to a clear perception of the king’s deepest desires. In one case, in particular, Louvois found that Louis tended to believe what pleased him. Convinced as he was that the Protestants were wrong, resentful as he remained of the existence of a semi-independent minority (at least in theory) within his kingdom, he was quite ready to accept that, convinced at last by his efforts, they were massively converting to Cathol
icism. And thus, the usually suspicious monarch swallowed whole the many exaggerated reports submitted by Louvois. Had he not thought that only tiny Protestant minorities remained, he might well have shown more tolerance - thus removing the question from Louvois’s grasp - and the minister knew it.
As a result, exaggerations gave way to outright lies, and the king still believed. On October 9, 1685, for instance, he told the papal nuncio that, like Nîmes and Montpellier, the entire town of Uzès had just turned Catholic. On the thirteenth, he announced, at his lever, that the province of Poitou had followed suit along with the town of Grenoble. On the sixteenth, it was announced that Lyon, too, had given up the Reformation, so Louvois had informed the king. In fact, of course, none of this information was true; scattered conversions had taken place only in response to the strongest pressure and in expectation of worse to come.
Louvois, in fact, had needed no new permission to use force. It was the custom, in France as in most of Europe, to quarter regiments with private people, and it was obviously a hardship for those who were chosen as hosts. In 1681, Louis XIV had signed an ordinance excepting recent converts from this obligation, so all Louvois had to do was give the Protestants a choice: Either they converted and were safe; or they would be forced to take in dragoons whose brutality was notorious.
When the king heard about this blackmail, he was horrified and ordered it stopped, so the persecutions now took the forms of interminable lawsuits that ruined those who refused to convert. No overt force was used, of course, so the king failed to discover what was actually happening. Then, too, in June 1681, a royal declaration had been published giving seven-year-old Protestant children the right to convert despite their parents’ objections: The king had simply meant to make it easier to save souls, as he saw salvation, but the declaration was now used literally to tear the children away from their parents under the wholly fallacious pretext that they wanted to convert.
It must also be said that mass conversions, besides pleasing the king, also suited him very well: With Colbert gone, the deficit was growing; as Protestant religious houses and churches closed for lack of congregations, the government appropriated their endowments. Finally, God seemed to be on his side: Across the Channel, the avowedly Catholic James II had succeeded Charles II on the throne of England without even a ripple of opposition.
Once all this evidence has been presented, however, and a fair share of blame apportioned to Louvois, the fact remains that Louis XIV knew that, in the end, Protestantism could only be eradicated by force. The Council at which the situation was discussed recognized it so well that it split right down the middle, with Louvois leading the anti-Protestant party. The decision, therefore, was the king’s alone: Indeed, he had always pointed out that he would listen to all sides with an open mind, but that he alone would set the government’s policy.
On October 19, 1685, he did just that: On that day was abrogated the Edict of Nantes, given out by Henri IV in 1598 as the close to the Wars of Religion, and guaranteeing the Protestants’ right of worshiping as they pleased within certain numerical limits. All Protestant churches were to be razed; all ministers were to leave France within two weeks; all newborn children were to be baptized as Catholics.
At Court, and in the Catholic Church, the reaction was one of unalloyed delight. The old and failing chancellor, Le Tellier, Louvois’s father, who had spent his life serving the king, exclaimed “sincerely and from the bottom of his heart that he was no longer sorry to die since he was so happy as to seal the revocation of the Edict of Nantes”215; and, indeed, eleven days later, he was dead. As for the person now closest to the king, Mme de Maintenon, although she remained as discreet as ever, her known positions were such that she could only have approved of the Revocation.
Because, no doubt, he had been so readily obeyed in everything else, it simply did not occur to Louis XIV that this order was one that might not be followed; still, he took the precaution of sending out missions in which the priests’ eloquence was backed up by platoons of soldiers, and the most appalling persecutions were unleashed on the southwest provinces where, in spite of everything, Protestantism had remained strong. There were tortures and murders, as has invariably been the case when a Church tries to impose itself on a reluctant population. All Protestants caught in the act of holding a service were sent to row, and die, on the king’s galleys; although they had been forbidden to leave the kingdom, over 300,000 Protestants fled, many of them to Brandenburg, where the elector was only too glad to take them in.
The magnitude of this disaster can scarcely be overestimated. Although, in this century, we are all too familiar with religious persecutions, there can be no excuse for Louis XIV’s decision to force his own brand of Christianity on his unwilling subjects: All rulers make mistakes, but this one is an ineradicable moral stain. In this case, furthermore, it was bad policy, a mistake as well as a crime: The 300,000 who left - a huge number out of a population of slightly under 20 million - were among the most valuable of the French, hardworking artisans, skilled craftsmen, busy merchants. This blow was almost crippling to the French economy and one from which it took decades to recover. Vast regions in the Southwest became virtual deserts, and abroad, strong, proselytizing minorities were formed whose main desire was for revenge: That, too, had a devastating effect within just a few years. With all that adversity, however, and despite a few exceptions among whom we can count Saint-Simon, there is no doubt that the Revocation was an immensely popular act among the vast majority of the people. Louis XIV was reproached for much during his lifetime, but for the Revocation, almost never.
Even as scenes of horror were being enacted against the Protestants, however, the Court itself was more splendid and more peaceful than ever. On September 1, 1686, the fame earned throughout the world by the king was confirmed in the manner most pleasing to him: For the first time ever, a Siamese embassy arrived in France. Naturally, it was received at Versailles with the greatest pomp: Louis XIV, dressed in a suit of gold cloth covered with huge diamonds, sat on his silver throne; silver tables and candelabra lined the platform on which it had been set. All watched admiringly, Sourches commenting characteristically that the diamonds were worth more than the entire kingdom of Siam.216
Even Mme de Montespan contributed to the new order. Reconciled, at least outwardly, to her new position, she swallowed her pride and asked for her former rival’s protection. In December 1685, “she told Mme de Maintenon that she would very much like to see M. d’Antin, her son,* given the office of menin [Gentleman of the Bedchamber] to Monseigneur, and that evening, the King went in to Mme de Montespan’s and told her he was happy to grant her that wish.”217 From then on, although she not infrequently retreated to Clagny, the once possessive marquise enjoyed a place at the same time close to the king and distant from him: Without power or influence, she remained as a familiar figure in the first rank of the Court. On January 4, 1686, for instance, “the King and Monseigneur went to Marly for dinner. Mme la princesse de Conti [Montespan’s daughter], Mme de Montespan, and Mme de Thianges [Montespan’s sister] were with them … Monsieur and Madame arrived around five with many ladies and courtiers; the house was brightly lit; and in the salon, there were four shops, one for each of the seasons of the year.
“Monseigneur and Mme de Montespan kept that of autumn; M. du Maine and Mme de Maintenon that of winter; M. le duc de Bourbon and Mme de Thianges that of summer; Mme la duchesse de Bourbon and Mme de Chevreuse [Colbert’s daughter] that of spring. There were splendid fabrics, silver, and what is proper to each season, and the courtiers played cards for them and were given whatever they won. It is thought that there was at least 150,000 livres’ worth of clothes; playing went on until supper and after that the King and Monseigneur gave away whatever was left in the shops … Those who won took their winnings, those who lost were forgiven their debt.”218
In this perfectly ordered world, however, the principal actor was soon reminded that he was just a man after all. The king�
�s unvarying good health had long been noticed: In 1685, he was already forty-seven, an age at which most of his contemporaries suffered from a variety of infirmities. And, indeed, in October, illness struck in the form of a sharp pain in the foot caused, most probably, by gout; for the first time, he was forced to remain indoors for several days. That had followed a disastrous piece of dentistry: The botched extraction of a tooth had caused an abscess, upon which d’Aquin, the king’s First Physician and a man of startling incompetence, decided to remove all his patient’s upper teeth. This major - and exceedingly painful - operation proved catastrophic: While he was at it, d’Aquin accidentally removed part of the king’s palate, and, of course, new abscesses formed, which were then cauterized with a red-hot iron.
All this treatment, of course, was done without any anesthesia; throughout, Louis XIV kept his routine unaltered, much to the Court’s admiration. Still, neither gout nor extractions were life-threatening. In February 1686, however, that changed as well. “At the beginning of the month the King fell ill with a tumor [probably a large abscess] which came out where the thigh meets the buttock, and since it was so painful as to prevent him from riding, he had it examined by Félix, his First Surgeon, and began to think seriously of having it treated.
“Since he was unaccustomed to pain, he decided against an incision and his physicians and surgeons obeyed him, perhaps too readily. They tried to treat the tumor by inducing sweating, which all those who knew about this disease thought both ridiculous and dangerous.”219
That, of course, was right, but physicians, in the seventeenth century, had reached a nadir of ignorance: Medical treatment killed frequently and almost never cured. There was no antisepsis, so most surgery was followed by gangrene; the king’s dilemma was a very real one: If the tumor were opened, it might drain, but the incision might also become infected, and eventually, deadly.
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