The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  Meanwhile the political wind was veering in England. In 1706 Queen Anne had written: “I have no ambition . . . but to see an honorable peace, that whenever it please God I shall die I may have the satisfaction of leaving my poor country and all my friends in peace and quiet.” 79 Anne had been kept to the war policy by Marlborough’s fiery Duchess; that influence now waned; in 1710 the Queen dismissed Sarah, and openly sided with the Tories. The merchants, manufacturers, and financiers had profited from the war, 80 and had supported the warmaking Whigs; the landowners had lost as war raised taxes and inflated the currency; they seconded the Queen’s longing for peace. On August 8 she dismissed Godolphin, Marlborough’s right-hand man; Harley headed a Tory ministry; England turned toward peace.

  In January, 1711, the English government secretly sent to Paris a French priest, the Abbé Gaulthier, who had long resided in London. Gaulthier went to Torcy at Versailles. “Do you want peace?” he asked. “I come to bring you the means of concluding it, independently of the Dutch.” 81 Negotiations proceeded slowly. Suddenly, at the surprisingly early age of thirty-two, Joseph I died (April 17, 1711); the Archduke became the Emperor Charles VI; the English and the Dutch, who had promised him all Spain, found that their costly victories were confronting them with a new Hapsburg Empire as vast as that of Charles V, and as dangerous to Protestant nations and liberties. The English government now offered Louis recognition of Philip V as King of Spain and the Spanish possessions in America on relatively moderate conditions: securities against the union of France and Spain under one crown; barrier fortresses to protect the United Provinces and Germany from any future French invasion; the restitution of French conquests; the recognition of the Protestant succession in England, and the expulsion of James III from France; the dismantling of Dunkirk; the confirmation of Gibraltar, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region as English property; and the transfer from France to England of the right to sell slaves to Spanish America. Louis assented with minor modifications; England notified The Hague that she favored making peace on these terms; the Dutch agreed to them as a basis for negotiation, and plans were made for a peace congress at Utrecht. Marlborough, who had found war profitable, was dismissed (December 31, 1711) and was replaced by James Butler, second Duke of Ormonde, with instructions not to hazard English troops in battle until further orders should be received.

  While the congress assembled at Utrecht (January 1, 1712), Eugene of Savoy, considering the English terms of peace to be a betrayal of the Imperial cause, continued the war. Day after day he pushed forward against the line of defenses built by the industrious Villars. On July 16 Ormonde was notified by London that England and France had signed an armistice, and that consequently his English regiments must be withdrawn to Dunkirk. These obeyed, but most of the Continental contingents under Ormonde’s command denounced the English as deserters, and placed themselves under Eugene’s command. The Prince had now some 130,000 men, Villars 90,000; but on July 24 the alert Maréchal pounced upon a detachment of 12,000 Dutch at Denain (near Lille), and annihilated it before Eugene could come to its aid. The Prince retired across the Scheldt to reorganize his unwieldy army; Villars advanced to capture Douai, Le Quesnoy, and Bouchain. Louis and France took heart. These were the only French victories of the war on the northern front, but with the successes of Vendôme in Spain they gave new strength to the French negotiators at Utrecht.

  After fifteen months of protocol, punctilio, and agrument, all parties to the war except the Emperor signed the Peace of Utrecht (April 11, 1713). France yielded to Britain all that she had promised in the preliminaries, including that precious asiento, or slave-trade monopoly, which lies like a badge of shame upon that age; and the ancient enemies made mutual concessions on import dues. The Dutch restored to France Lille, Aire, and Bethune, but kept control of all the Netherlands until peace should be made with the Empire; meanwhile the Elector of Bavaria was to hold Charleroi, Luxembourg, and Namur. Nice was returned to the Duke of Savoy. Philip V retained Spain and Spanish America; he refused, then (July 13) consented, to cede Gibraltar and Minorca to England. Eugene of Savoy fought on, bitter against the British for signing a separate peace; but the Imperial treasury was empty, his army was reduced to 40,000 troops, and Villars was advancing against him with 120,000 men. Finally he accepted the invitation of Louis XIV to meet Villars and work out terms of peace. By the Treaty of Rastatt (March 6, 1714) France retained Alsace and Strasbourg, but she restored to the Empire all French conquests on the right bank of the Rhine, and she recognized the replacement of Spanish by Austrian rule in Italy and Belgium.

  So the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt achieved little more than what diplomacy might have peacefully achieved in 1701. After thirteen years of slaughter, impoverishment, and devastation, these pacts settled for twenty-six years the map of Europe, as the Treaties of Westphalia had settled it for a generation after the Thirty Years’ War. In both cases the task was to establish a balance of power between Hapsburg and Bourbon; it was done. Between France and England in America a balance was established which would hold till the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).

  The chief losers in the sanguinary contest for the Spanish succession were Holland and France. The Dutch Republic had gained terrain on land and lost power on the sea; it could no longer match England in shipping, seamanship, resources, or war; its victory exhausted it and began its decline. France too was weakened, almost fatally. She had kept her nominee on the throne of Spain, but she had failed to preserve his empire intact; and for this tarnished triumph she paid with a million lives, the loss of her sea power, and the temporary collapse of her economic life. Not till Napoleon would France recover from Louis XIV, only to repeat his tragedy.

  The victors of the war were Austria on the Continent, and England everywhere else. Austria now held Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Belgium; she would be the strongest force in Europe until the accession of Frederick the Great (1740). England thought more of controlling the sea than of expanding on land; she acquired Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, but valued more her mastery in the avenues of trade. She compelled France to lower her tariffs, and to dismantle the fort and port of Dunkirk, which had been a threat to English shipping. With Gibraltar in Spain and Port Mahon in Minorca, England held the Mediterranean in fief. These gains made no spectacular show in 1713; their results would be written in the history of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile the Protestant faith and succession had been made secure in Britain against everything but the birth rate.

  A chief product of the war was the intensification of nationalism and international hate. Each nation forgot its gains and remembered its wounds. Germany would never forgive the double devastation of the Palatinate; France would not soon forget the unprecedented slaughter in Marlborough’s victories; Spain suffered every day the indignity of Gibraltar in alien hands. Each nation bided its time for revenge.

  Some gentle souls, thinking that Europe was a continent of Christians, dreamed of a substitute for war. Charles Castel, Abbé de Saint-Pierre, accompanied the French delegation to Utrecht. Returning, he published his Projet. . . pour rendre la paix perpetuelle (1713)—a plan for perpetuating the new-found peace. Let the nations of Europe confederate in a league of nations with a permanent congress of representatives, a senate for the arbitration of disputes, a code of international law, a combined military force for action against any rebellious state, the reduction of each national army to six thousand men, and the establishment of uniform measures and currency throughout Europe. 82 Saint-Pierre expounded his scheme to Leibniz, who, no longer so sure that this was the best of all possible worlds, sadly reminded the abbé that “some sinister fate was always interposing betwixt man and the attainment of his happiness.” 83 Man is a competitive animal, and his character is his fate.

  VI. TWILIGHT OF THE GOD: 1713–15

  Judged in terms of his time, Louis XIV was not the ogre that hostile historians have made him; he merely applied on a larger scale, and for a while with invidious success, the same
methods of absolute rule, territorial expansion, and martial conquest that characterized the conduct, or the aspirations, of his enemies. Even the cruelty of his armies in the Palatinate had a precedent in the sack of Magdeburg (1631), and an epilogue in the massacres of Marlborough. Louis had the distinction of living so long that the Furies could revenge upon him in person, rather than upon his children, the sins of his pride and power.

  History has not withheld from him some admiration for the courage and dignity that he showed in defeat, and it has allowed him some pity in the disasters that almost destroyed his children simultaneously with his armies and fleets. In 1711 his only legitimate son, “Le Grand Dauphin” Louis, died, leaving the King with two grandsons—Louis, Duke of Burgundy, and Charles, Duke of Berry. The younger Louis developed good qualities under Fénelon’s tutelage, and became the solace of the monarch’s old age. In 1697 he married Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, whose beauty, wit, and charm reminded the King of Madame Henrietta and his happy youth. But on February 12, 1712, this gay spirit succumbed to spotted fever at the age of twenty-six. Her devoted husband had refused to leave her sickbed; he contracted the disease, and died of it on February 18, aged twenty-nine, only a year after his father’s death. Their two sons caught the infection from them; one died on March 8, at the age of eight; the younger survived, but remained so weak that no one dreamed that he would live to rule France as Louis XV till 1774. If this frail lad should collapse, the heir to the throne would be Charles, Duke of Berry, but Charles died in 1714.

  There was another possible successor—Philip V of Spain, younger son of Le Grand Dauphin; but half of Europe was pledged to keep him from uniting the two crowns. Next in line was Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, grandson of Louis XIII, and nephew and son-in-law of the King. But this Philippe had a laboratory, carried on experiments in chemistry, and was therefore accused, in public gossip, of having poisoned the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy and their eldest son. The physicians who performed the three autopsies were divided on the question whether poison had been used. Philippe, furious under these suspicions, asked the King to give him a public trial; Louis believed him innocent, and refused to lay upon him the burden and stigma of such an ordeal.

  Should these lines of succession fail, a last resort remained. The King had legitimized his illegitimate sons, the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse. Now (July, 1714) he issued an edict—which the Parlement of Paris registered without protest—that, in default of princes of the blood royal, these quondam bastards should inherit his throne; and a year later, to the horror of Saint-Simon and other nobles, he decreed that their rank should be equal in law to that of the legitimate princes. 84 Their mother, Mme. de Montespan, was dead, but their foster mother, the wife of the King, loved them as her own, and used her influence to promote them in honors and power.

  It was amid these problems and bereavements that Louis faced the final crisis of the war. When he bade farewell to Villars, who was leaving to meet the advance of Eugene on the Belgian front, the King, now seventy-four years old, for a moment broke down. “You see my condition, Maréchal,” he said. “There have been few examples of what has happened to me—to lose in the same month my grandson, my granddaughter, and their son, all of great promise, and all most tenderly loved. God is punishing me. I have well deserved it; I shall suffer less in the next world.” Then, recovering himself, he continued: “Let us leave my domestic misfortunes, and see how to avert those of the kingdom. I confide to you the forces and salvation of the state. Fortune may be adverse to you. If this misfortune should happen to the army you command, what would be your feeling as to the course which I should take in person?” Villars did not reply. “I am not surprised,” said the King, “that you do not answer me at once. While waiting for you to tell your idea I will tell you mine. I know the reasonings of the courtiers; almost all wish me to retire to Blois if my army should be defeated. For my part, I know that armies of such size are never so much defeated that the greater part could not fall back upon the Somme, a river very difficult to cross. I should go to Péronne or St.-Quentin, gather there all the troops I might have, make a last effort with you, and we would perish together or save the state.” 85

  Villars’ victory at Denain cheated the King of such a heroic death. He survived that battle by three years, and the peace by two. Excepting the anal fistula, long since cured, his health had maintained itself reasonably well for seventy years. He ate immoderately, but never grew fat; he drank moderately; he let few days pass without some active exercise in the open air, even in the severe winter of 1708–9. It is difficult to know if he might have lived longer with fewer physicians, and whether the purges, bleedings, and sweats to which they treated him were a greater curse than the ills they were intended to relieve. One doctor in 1688 gave him so strong a laxative that it acted on him eleven times in eight hours; after which, we are told, he felt somewhat fatigued. 86 When Rigaud in 1701 made the painting that stands so prominently in the Louvre, he pictured Louis as still insolent with strength and victory and robes of state, black wig concealing white hairs, and swollen cheeks attesting appetite. Seven years later Coysevox, in the splendid statue in Notre Dame, showed him kneeling in prayer, but still more conscious of royalty than of death. Perhaps the artists clothed him in prouder pride than he felt, for in those failing years and mounting trials he had learned to accept reproof humbly, at least from Maintenon. 87 He became as a child in the hands of the fanatic Jesuit Le Tellier, who had succeeded Père La Chaise as the King’s confessor in 1709; “the inheritor of Charlemagne asked pardon for his sins from the son of a peasant.” 88 The strong infusion of Catholic faith and piety that he had received from his mother rose to the surface now that passion ebbed and glory lost its glow. Rumor said that the King, in the surge of his devotion, had become a Jesuit affiliate in 1705; and in his final illness it added that he took the fourth vow as a full member of the Society of Jesus. 89

  In January 1715 he lost his famous appetite, and ailed so visibly that in Holland and England wagers were laid that he would not survive the year. 90 Reading news dispatches to this effect, he laughed them off, and continued his routine of conferences, reception of ambassadors, reviewing of troops, hunting, and ending the day with his seventy-nine-year-old wife, the faithful, weary Maintenon. On August 2 he drew up a will naming the Duke of Maine guardian to Louis XV, and appointing the Duke to a Council of Regency that should rule France till the boy should come of age. On August 12 sores broke out on his leg. They became gangrenous and malodorous; fever set in, and he took to his bed. On August 25 he wrote a codicil to his will, naming Philippe d’Orléans chief of the Council of Regency, with a deciding vote in a division. To two magistrates who received this document, he said, “I have made a testament; they”—presumably Mme. de Maintenon, the Duke and Duchess of Maine, and their supporters—“insisted that I should make it; I had to purchase my repose; but as soon as I am dead it will be of no account. I know too well what became of my father’s testament.” 91 That confused will was destined to write a chapter in French history.

  He died like a king. After receiving the sacraments he addressed to the ecclesiastics at his bedside a supplementary and unwelcome confession:

  I am sorry to leave the affairs of the Church in their present state. I am perfectly ignorant in the matter, as you know; and I call you to witness that I have done nothing therein but what you wanted, and have done all that you wanted; it is you who will answer before God for all that has been done. I charge you with it before him, and I have a clear conscience. I am but a know-nothing who have left myself to your guidance. 92

  To his courtiers he said:

  Gentlemen, I ask your pardon for the bad example I have set you. I have to thank you sincerely for the manner in which you have served me, and the fidelity you have always shown to me. I ask you to give the same zeal and devotion to my grandson which you have given me. He is a child who may have to suffer much. I hope you will all work for union, and that should anyone fail in
this, you will seek to call him back to his duty. I perceive that I am allowing my feelings to overcome me, and am causing you to do the same. I ask your pardon for all this. Farewell, gentlemen; I trust that you will sometimes remember me. 93

  He asked the Duchess of Ventadour to bring in his grandson, now five years old. To him (according to the Duchess) he said:

  My child, you are going to be a great king. Do not imitate me in the taste that I have had for building or for war; try, on the contrary, to be at peace with your neighbors. Render to God what you owe Him; recognize the obligations you are under to Him; make Him honored by your subjects. Try to comfort your people, which unhappily I have not done. . . . My dear child, I give you my benediction with all my heart. 94

  To two servants whom he saw in tears: “Why do you weep? Did you think me immortal?” 95 And reassuringly to Mme. de Maintenon: “I thought it would be harder to die than this. I assure you it is not a very terrible business; it does not seem to me difficult at all.” 96 He asked her to leave him, as if he were aware that after his death she would be a lost soul in a class-conscious court. She retired to her apartment, divided its furniture among her attendants, and departed for St.-Cyr, which she would never leave till her death (1719).

  The King had spoken too confidently; he suffered a long night of agony before he died, September 1, 1715. Of his seventy-seven years he had spent seventy-two on the throne—the longest reign in European history. Even before his last hour the courtiers, anxious for their berths, had deserted him to pay homage to Philippe d’Orléans and the Duke of Maine. Some Jesuits gathered around the corpse and performed the ceremonies customary for one who had died in their order. 97 News of the King’s death was received by the people of Paris as a blessed deliverance from a reign that had lasted too long and had seen its glory tarnished with misery and defeat. Very little pomp was wasted on the funeral that bore to St.-Denis, on September 9, the corpse of the most famous king in the history of France. “Along the route,” said Voltaire, “I saw small tents set up where people drank and sang and laughed.” 98 Duclos, then eleven, later recalled that “many persons were unworthy enough to pour forth insults on seeing the hearse pass by.” 99