The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Fénelon admitted the divine right of kings, but only as a power given them by Providence to make men happy, and as a right limited by laws:

  Absolute power degrades every subject to the condition of a slave. The tyrant is flattered, even to the point of adoration, and everyone trembles at the glance of his eye; but at the least breath of revolt this monstrous power perishes by its own excess. It drew no strength from the love of the people. 121

  In these bold lines Louis XIV saw himself described and his wars condemned. The friends of Fénelon hastily vanished from the court. The printer of Télémaque was arrested, and the police were told to confiscate all copies. But the book was reprinted in Holland, and soon it was being read throughout the French-reading world; for a century and a half it was the most widely read, and best loved, of all French books. 122 Fénelon protested that he had not had Louis in mind in these critical passages; no one believed him. Two years passed before the Duke of Burgundy dared to write to his former teacher; then the King relented, and allowed him to visit Fénelon at Cambrai. The Archbishop lived in hopes that his pupil would soon inherit the throne, and might then call upon him to be his Richelieu. But the grandson died three years before the King; and Fénelon himself (January 7, 1715) preceded Louis by nine months to the grave.

  Bossuet had gone long before them. He was unhappy in his later years; he had triumphed against Fénelon, the Ultramontanes, and the mystics, and he had seen the Church triumphant against the Huguenots; but all these victories could not enable him to pass the stones from his bladder. Pain so racked him that he could hardly bear to take the place he so loved to hold in the ceremonies of the court; and heartless cynics asked why he could not go and die privately at Meaux. He saw about him the rise of skepticism, of Biblical criticism, of Protestant polemics impiously aimed at his own head; here, for example, was Jurieu, the banished Huguenot, telling the world that he, Bossuet, the bishop of bishops and the very image of virtue and probity, was a ranting liar living with concubines. 123 He began some new books to rout these scurrilous foes, but life ran out on him as he wrote; and on April 12, 1704, his pains ceased.

  At first sight Bossuet seems to mark the zenith of Catholicism in modern France. The old faith appeared to have recovered all the ground that had been lost to Luther and Calvin. The clergy were reforming their morals, Racine was devoting his final dramas to religion, Pascal had turned skepticism upon the skeptics, the state had made itself an obedient agent of the Church, the King had become almost a Jesuit.

  And yet the situation was not perfect. The Jesuits were still under the cloud raised by the Lettres à un provincial; Jansenism was not destroyed; the Huguenot fugitives were stirring up half of Europe against the pious King; Montaigne was read more widely than Pascal; and Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle were striking terrible blows at the edifice of faith. According to St. Vincent de Paul (1648), “several pastors complain that they have fewer communicants than before; St.-Sulpice three thousand less; the pastor of St.-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet found that 1,500 of his parishioners had omitted Easter communion.” 124 Said Bayle in 1686: “The age we live in is full of freethinkers and deists; people are amazed at their number”; 125 “a prodigious indifference to religion reigns everywhere”; 126 and he attributed this to the wars and controversies of Christendom. “You must know,” said Nicole, “that the great heresy in the world is not Calvinism or Lutheranism, but atheism.” 127 Said the Princess Palatine in 1699: “One now rarely finds a young man who does not wish to be an atheist.” 128 In the Paris of 1703, Leibniz reported, the “so-called esprits forts are in the fashion, and piety is there turned to ridicule. . . . Under a King devout, severe, and absolute, the disorder of religion has gone beyond anything ever seen in the Christian world.” 129 Among these esprits forts—“minds strong” enough to doubt almost everything—were Saint-Évremond, Ninon de Lenclos, Gassendi’s epitomizer Bernier, the Ducs de Nevers and de Bouillon. The Temple, once the headquarters of the Knights Templar in Paris, became the center of a little group of freethinkers—Chaulieu, Sirvien, La Fare, etc.—who passed down their irreverence to the Regency. And Fontenelle, the indestructible near-centenarian destined to bandy quips with the Encyclopedists, was already in 1687 publishing his Histoire des oracles, slyly undermining the miraculous basis of Christianity. In the ecstasy of his piety Louis XIV had cleared the road for Voltaire.

  CHAPTER III

  The King and the Arts

  1643–1715

  I. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE ARTS

  NEVER before or after, excepting perhaps under Pericles, has a government so stimulated, nourished, or dominated art as under Louis XIV. Artes virumque cano.

  Richelieu’s fine taste and judicious purchases had helped the recovery of French art from the Religious Wars. During the regency of Anne of Austria private collectors—nobles and financiers—had begun to vie with one another in gathering works of art. Pierre Crozat, a banker, had a hundred paintings by Titian, a hundred by Veronese, two hundred by Rubens, over a hundred by Vandyck. Fouquet, as we have seen, amassed paintings, statues, and lesser objects of art at Vaux, with more discrimination than discretion. Louis, destroying him, inherited his acquisitions; and in time several other private collections were gathered into the Louvre or Versailles. Mazarin had put part of his hoard into art more likely than money to escape depreciation. His fine Italian taste shared in forming the classical bias of the King, and it was probably he who taught Louis XIV that it redounded to the glory of a ruler to accumulate, display, and foster art. These collections provided the stimulating exemplars and stabilizing norms for art education and development in France.

  The next step was to organize the artists. Here too Mazarin led the way. In 1648 he founded the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture; in 1655 this received a charter from the King, and became the first in a series of academies designed to train artists and direct them into the service and adornment of the state. Colbert took up where Mazarin left off, and brought to a head this centralization of French art. Though himself laying no claim to artistic judgment, he aspired “to make the arts flourish better in France than anywhere else.” 1 He began by buying for the King the tapestry works of the Gobelins (1662). In 1664 he acquired the post of superintendent of buildings, which gave him control of architecture and its ancillary arts. In that year he reorganized the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Henry IV had housed in the Louvre a guild of artisans to adorn the royal palaces; Colbert made these men the nucleus of the Manufacture Royale des Meubles de la Couronne—the Royal Manufactory of Furniture for the Crown (1667). In 1671 he established the Académie Royale de l’Architecture, where artists were induced to build and decorate in le bon goût approved by the King. In all these societies the artisans were brought under the direction of artists, and these under the guidance of one policy and style.

  To reinforce the classical bent that French art had received under Francis I, and cleanse it from Flemish influences, Colbert and Charles Le Brun set up in Rome the Académie Royale de France (1666). Students who had won the Prix de Rome in the Paris academies were sent to Italy, and were maintained there for five years at the expense of the French government. They were required to rise at five o’clock in the morning and to retire at ten o’clock at night; they were trained in copying and imitating classical and Renaissance models; they were expected to produce a “masterpiece” (in the guild sense) every three months; and when they returned to France the state had first option on their services.

  The result of this fostering and nationalization of art was an impressive, overwhelming production of palaces, churches, statues, pictures, tapestries, pottery, medallions, engravings, and coins, all stamped with the pride and taste—often with the features—of Le Roi Soleil. It was not a subjection of French art to Rome, as some complained; it was a subjection of Roman art to Louis XIV. The style aimed to be classical, for that style agreed with the majesty of states and kings. Colbert poured French money into Italy to buy
classical or Renaissance art. Everything was done to transport the glory of the Roman emperors to the King and capital of France. The result amazed the world.

  Louis XIV became the greatest patron of art that history has known. He “gave greater encouragement to the arts” (in the judgment of Voltaire) “than all his fellow kings together.” 2 He was, of course, the most openhanded collector. He enlarged the number of paintings in his galleries from two hundred to twenty-five hundred; and many of these pictures were the product of royal commissions to French artists. He bought so many pieces of classical or Renaissance sculpture that Italy feared artistic denudation, and the Pope forbade the further export of art. Louis engaged men of talent like Girardon or Coysevox to make copies of statues that he could not buy; and seldom have copies so rivaled their originals. The palaces, gardens, and parks of Paris, Versailles, and Marly were peopled with statuary. The surest way to the King’s favor was to present him with a work of unquestioned beauty or established repute; so the city of Aries gave him its famous Venus in 1683. Louis was not stingy; each year, in Voltaire’s estimate, he bought French art products to the value of 800,000 livres, and made gifts of them to cities, institutions, and friends, 3 aiming at once to support the artists and to disseminate a sense of beauty and a feeling for art. The taste of the King was good, and immensely benefited French art, but it was narrowly classical. When he was shown some paintings by the younger Teniers he commanded, “Enlevez-moi ces grotesques! Take away these crudities!” 4 Under his favor artists rose considerably in earnings and social status. He gave the cue by personally honoring them; and when someone complained of the patents of nobility that he conferred on the painter Le Brun and the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansard, he replied, with some warmth, “I can make twenty dukes or peers in a quarter of an hour, but it takes centuries to make a Mansard.” 5 Mansard was paid eighty thousand livres per year; Le Brun reveled in the opulence of his mansions at Paris, Versailles, and Montmorency; Largillière and Rigaud received six hundred livres per portrait. “No artist of worth was left in poverty.” 6

  In honoring and rewarding art the provinces emulated the capital, and nobles followed the lead of the King. The cities developed art schools of their own—at Rouen, Beauvais, Blois, Orléans, Tours, Lyons, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Bordeaux. The role of the nobles as patrons diminished as the state absorbed the available talent, but it continued; and the trained taste of the most developed aristocracy in Europe contributed to establish the exquisite style of art productions under Louis XIV. Men and women born to privilege and wealth, and reared in good manners amid handsome surroundings and objects of beauty, acquired standards and tastes from their elders and their environment; and the artists had to meet those standards and satisfy those tastes. As moderation, self-restraint, elegant expression, graceful movement, and polished form were ideals of the French aristocracy in this age, it demanded these qualities in art; the social structure favored the classic style. Art profited from these influences and controls, but it paid a price. It lost touch with the people, it could not express them as Dutch and Flemish art expressed the Netherlands; it became the voice not of the nation but of a class, the state, and the King. We shall not find in the art of this period much warmth or depth of feeling, not the rich tints and abundant flesh of Rubens, nor the profound shadows enveloping Rembrandt’s rabbis, saints, and financiers; we shall see no peasants, no workers, no beggars, but only the pretty happiness of the top of the world.

  To the joy of Colbert and his master, they found in Charles Le Brun a man who could be at once a zealous servant of the government and a dominating magistrate of this classic style. In 1666, on Colbert’s recommendation, Le Brun was made chief painter to the King, and director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts; a year later he was put in charge of the Gobelin factory. He was commissioned to superintend the education and operation of artists, with a view to developing in their products a harmony of style distinctive and representative of the reign. With the help of likeminded subordinates Le Brun established in the Academy (1667) the conférences, or lectures, by which the principles of the classic style were inculcated with precepts, examples, and authority. Raphael among the Italians, Poussin among the French, were the favored models; every painting was judged by the canons derived from their art. Le Brun and Sébastien Bourdon formulated these rules; they exalted line above color, discipline above originality, order above freedom; the task of the artist was not to copy Nature but to make her beautiful, not to mirror her disorder, imperfections, and monstrosities as well as her incidental loveliness, but to select those features of her that would enable the soul of man to express its deepest feelings and highest ideals. The architects, the painters, the sculptors, the potters, the woodworkers, the metalworkers, the glassworkers, the engravers were to utter with one harmonious voice the aspirations of France and the grandeur of the King.

  II. ARCHITECTURE

  However, these French artists Italianate had returned from Rome unconsciously coated with baroque. That now pervasive style has been previously described; it may be summarized as replacing the calm simplicity of classic forms with an exuberance of feeling and ornament. While the classic—more specifically the Hellenistic—ideal was approximated in the sculpture, painting, and literature of this grand siècle, the architecture and decoration borrowed from the elegant and ornate styles that had triumphed in Italy after the death of Michelangelo (1564). The King’s builders aimed at the classical and achieved the baroque—at Versailles the full baroque, in the façades of the Louvre a successful synthesis of baroque and classical.

  The first architectural chef-d’oeuvre of the reign was the Church of Val-de-Grâce in Paris. Anne of Austria had registered a vow to build a handsome shrine if God and Louis XIII would give her a son. When her regency provided her with funds, she engaged François Mansart to draw up plans. The first stone was laid by Louis XIV, then seven years old, in 1645. Mansart’s design was carried out by Lemercier in Italian classic style, with a dome that is still the admiration of architects. Libéral Bruant built the Church of St.-Louis-des-Invalides (1670) for the veterans housed in the Hôtel des Invalides; and in 1676 Louvois commissioned Jules Hardouin-Mansard (grandnephew of François Mansart) to finish the church with a choir and a dome. In elegant beauty that dome is the architectural masterpiece of the reign. Hardouin-Mansard triumphed again in designing the chapel at Versailles (1699). Here and at the Invalides his work was completed with luxurious ornament by his brother-in-law Robert de Cotte, who raised also the Hàtel de Ville at Lyons, the Abbey of St.-Denis, and the façade of St.-Rochc.

  Royal replaced ecclesiastical architecture as the state surpassed the Church in wealth and prestige. The problem now was to express not devotion but power. In meeting this requirement the Louvre had the advantage of tradition; many generations had seen it grow, and many kings had marked its history. Lemercier, working for Mazarin, raised the western front of the main wing, and began the north wing along the present Rue de Rivoli. Le Vau, who succeeded him, finished that wing, reconstructed the façade of the south wing (facing the Seine), and laid the foundations of the east wing. At this juncture Colbert became superintendent of buildings. Rejecting Le Vau’s plans for the east wing, he conceived the project of continuing the Louvre westward until it should join the Tuileries in a single palace. He announced to the architects of France and Italy a competition to design a new façade. To make sure to get the best, he persuaded the King to send a special invitation to Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1665), then the acknowledged prince of European artists, to come to Paris at the royal expense and submit a design. Bernini came with great pomp, angered the French artists with his scorn of their work, and drew up a massive, costly plan that required the demolition of nearly all the existing Louvre. Colbert found the plan deficient in plumbing and other facilities for living; Bernini fumed that “M. Colbert treats me like a little boy, with all his idle talk about privies and underground conduits.” 7 A compromise was reached: the King laid the foundation
stone of Bernini’s design; then the artist, after six months in Paris, was sent back to Italy with honors and livres, which he tried to repay with the bust of Louis XIV now at Versailles, and the equestrian statue of Louis in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. His design for the Louvre was abandoned; the existing structure was retained, and Charles Perrault was awarded the commission to build the eastern front. Now rose the famous Colonnade du Louvre, whose palpable defects let loose a flood of criticism, 8 but which is now accepted as one of the most magnificent façades on earth.

  Colbert had hoped that the King would move from the cramped quarters at St.-Germain into the renovated Louvre. But Louis still remembered that he and his mother had had to flee from the Paris populace during the Fronde; he thought that the voice of the people was the voice of violence; and he did not care to subject himself to such checks on his absolute rule. To the dismay of Colbert he decided to build Versailles.

  Louis XIII had erected there a modest hunting lodge in 1624. André Le Nôtre saw in the gently rising slope of the site, and its rich forestation, a tempting chance for garden artistry. In 1662 he presented to Louis XIV a general plan for the grounds; and if today the buildings are inferior to the lawns and the lake, the flowers and shrubs and varied trees, that may be as Le Nôtre conceived it. It was to be not so much a masterpiece of architecture as an invitation to live outdoors, amid a nature tamed and improved by art: to breathe the fragrance of flowers and trees, to feast the eyes and fancied touch on classically sculptured forms, to hunt prey and women in the woods, to dance and picnic on the grass, to boat on the canal and the lake, to hear Lully and Molière under the open sky. Here was a garden of the gods, built with the pennies of twenty million Frenchmen who would rarely see it, but who gloried in the glory of their King. It is pleasant to learn that except on royal occasions the park at Versailles was open to the public.