Montcalm and Wolfe | Page 8

himself a sturdy German, while he recognized
their fighting value, and knew well how to make the best of it,
sometimes complained that they were volatile, excitable, and difficult
to manage.
The weight of the Court, with its pomps, luxuries, and wars, bore on
the classes least able to support it. The poorest were taxed most; the
richest not at all. The nobles, in the main, were free from imposts. The
clergy, who had vast possessions, were wholly free, though they
consented to make voluntary gifts to the Crown; and when, in a time of
emergency, the minister Machault required them, in common with all
others hitherto exempt, to contribute a twentieth of their revenues to the
charges of government, they passionately refused, declaring that they
would obey God rather than the King. The cultivators of the soil were
ground to the earth by a threefold extortion,--the seigniorial dues, the
tithes of the Church, and the multiplied exactions of the Crown,
enforced with merciless rigor by the farmers of the revenue, who
enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and
cheating the King on the other. A few great cities shone with all that is
most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while the
country that paid the costs lay in ignorance and penury, crushed and
despairing. Of the inhabitants of towns, too, the demands of the
tax-gatherer were extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French
people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and
intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes;
while the clergy were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated
by luxury and ruined by extravagance, the middle class was growing in
thrift and strength. Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports
were alive with foreign trade. Wealth tended from all sides towards the
centre. The King did not love his capital; but he and his favorites
amused themselves with adorning it. Some of the chief embellishments
that make Paris what it is to-day--the Place de la Concorde, the Champs
Elysées, and many of the palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain--date
from this reign.
One of the vicious conditions of the time was the separation in

sympathies and interests of the four great classes of the nation,--clergy,
nobles, burghers, and peasants; and each of these, again, divided itself
into incoherent fragments. France was an aggregate of disjointed parts,
held together by a meshwork of arbitrary power, itself touched with
decay. A disastrous blow was struck at the national welfare when the
Government of Louis XV. revived the odious persecution of the
Huguenots. The attempt to scour heresy out of France cost her the most
industrious and virtuous part of her population, and robbed her of those
most fit to resist the mocking scepticism and turbid passions that burst
out like a deluge with the Revolution.
Her manifold ills were summed up in the King. Since the Valois, she
had had no monarch so worthless. He did not want understanding, still
less the graces of person. In his youth the people called him the
"Well-beloved;" but by the middle of the century they so detested him
that he dared not pass through Paris, lest the mob should execrate him.
He had not the vigor of the true tyrant; but his langour, his hatred of all
effort, his profound selfishness, his listless disregard of public duty,
and his effeminate libertinism, mixed with superstitious devotion, made
him no less a national curse. Louis XIII. was equally unfit to govern;
but he gave the reins to the Great Cardinal. Louis XV. abandoned them
to a frivolous mistress, content that she should rule on condition of
amusing him. It was a hard task; yet Madame de Pompadour
accomplished it by methods infamous to him and to her. She gained
and long kept the power that she coveted: filled the Bastille with her
enemies; made and unmade ministers; appointed and removed generals.
Great questions of policy were at the mercy of her caprices. Through
her frivolous vanity, her personal likes and dislikes, all the great
departments of government--army, navy, war, foreign affairs, justice,
finance--changed from hand to hand incessantly, and this at a time of
crisis when the kingdom needed the steadiest and surest guidance. Few
of the officers of state, except, perhaps, D'Argenson, could venture to
disregard her. She turned out Orry, the comptroller-general, put her
favorite, Machault, into his place, then made him keeper of the seals,
and at last minister of marine. The Marquis de Puysieux, in the ministry
of foreign affairs, and the Comte de St.-Florentin, charged with the
affairs of the clergy, took their cue from her. The King stinted her in

nothing. First and last, she is reckoned to have cost him thirty-six
million francs,--answering now to more than as many dollars.