Catherine de Medici | Page 6

1830, as it has since been answered by
Lafayette's best of all possible republics against the republican
insurrection at Saint-Merri and the rue Transnonnain. All power,
legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when attacked; but the
strange thing is that where the people are held heroic in their victory
over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel with the people.
If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is then called imbecile.
The present government is attempting to save itself by two laws from
the same evil Charles X. tried to escape by two ordinances; is it not a
bitter derision? Is craft permissible in the hands of power against craft?
may it kill those who seek to kill it? The massacres of the Revolution
have replied to the massacres of Saint-Bartholomew. The people,
become king, have done against the king and the nobility what the king
and the nobility did against the insurgents of the sixteenth century.
Therefore the popular historians, who know very well that in a like case
the people will do the same thing over again, have no excuse for
blaming Catherine de' Medici and Charles IX.
"All power," said Casimir Perier, on learning what power ought to be,
"is a permanent conspiracy." We admire the anti-social maxims put
forth by daring writers; why, then, this disapproval which, in France,
attaches to all social truths when boldly proclaimed? This question will
explain, in itself alone, historical errors. Apply the answer to the

destructive doctrines which flatter popular passions, and to the
conservative doctrines which repress the mad efforts of the people, and
you will find the reason of the unpopularity and also the popularity of
certain personages. Laubardemont and Laffemas were, like some men
of to-day, devoted to the defence of power in which they believed.
Soldiers or judges, they all obeyed royalty. In these days d'Orthez
would be dismissed for having misunderstood the orders of the ministry,
but Charles X. left him governor of a province. The power of the many
is accountable to no one; the power of one is compelled to render
account to its subjects, to the great as well as to the small.
Catherine, like Philip the Second and the Duke of Alba, like the Guises
and Cardinal Granvelle, saw plainly the future that the Reformation
was bringing upon Europe. She and they saw monarchies, religion,
authority shaken. Catherine wrote, from the cabinet of the kings of
France, a sentence of death to that spirit of inquiry which then began to
threaten modern society; a sentence which Louis XIV. ended by
executing. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an unfortunate
measure only so far as it caused the irritation of all Europe against
Louis XIV. At another period England, Holland, and the Holy Roman
Empire would not have welcomed banished Frenchmen and
encouraged revolt in France.
Why refuse, in these days, to the majestic adversary of the most barren
of heresies the grandeur she derived from the struggle itself? Calvinists
have written much against the "craftiness" of Charles IX.; but travel
through France, see the ruins of noble churches, estimate the fearful
wounds given by the religionists to the social body, learn what
vengeance they inflicted, and you will ask yourself, as you deplore the
evils of individualism (the disease of our present France, the germ of
which was in the questions of liberty of conscience then agitated),--you
will ask yourself, I say, on which side were the executioners. There are,
unfortunately, as Catherine herself says in the third division of this
Study of her career, "in all ages hypocritical writers always ready to
weep over the fate of two hundred scoundrels killed necessarily."
Caesar, who tried to move the senate to pity the attempt of Catiline,
might perhaps have got the better of Cicero could he have had an
Opposition and its newspapers at his command.
Another consideration explains the historical and popular disfavor in

which Catherine is held. The Opposition in France has always been
Protestant, because it has had no policy but that of /negation/; it inherits
the theories of Lutherans, Calvinists, and Protestants on the terrible
words "liberty," "tolerance," "progress," and "philosophy." Two
centuries have been employed by the opponents of power in
establishing the doubtful doctrine of the /libre arbitre/,--liberty of will.
Two other centuries were employed in developing the first corollary of
liberty of will, namely, liberty of conscience. Our century is
endeavoring to establish the second, namely, political liberty.
Placed between the ground already lost and the ground still to be
defended, Catherine and the Church proclaimed the salutary principle
of modern societies, /una fides, unus dominus/, using their power of life
and death upon the innovators. Though Catherine was vanquished,
succeeding centuries have proved her justification. The product of
liberty