The French Revolution | Page 5

mediaeval in that he belonged to a caste of military specialists and that his provincial
castle was both his residence and his stronghold. The struggle itself was maintained
largely by his efforts, by the military and political power of great nobles, Guises,
Montmorencys and others. But when the struggle closes, both religion, its cause, and the
great noble its supporter, sink somewhat into the background, while the king, the kingly
power, fills the eye. And {14} the new divine right monarchy, triumphant over the feudal
soldier and gladly accepted as the restorer of order by the middle class, sets to work to
consolidate this success; the result is Versailles.
The spectacular palace built by Louis XIV threw glamour and prestige about the

triumphant monarchy. It drew the great nobles from their castles and peasantry, and
converted them into courtiers, functionaries and office holders. To catch a ray of royal
favour was to secure the gilt edging of distinction, and so even the literature, the theology,
the intellect of France, quickly learned to revolve about the dazzling Sun King of
Versailles, Louis XIV.
Versailles could not, however, long retain such elements of vitality as it possessed. It
rapidly accomplished its work on the feudal aristocracy, but only at a great price. With
Louis XIV gone, it began to crumble from corruption within, from criticism without.
Louis XV converted the palace into the most gorgeous of brothels, and its inmates into
the most contemptible and degraded of harlots and pimps. The policy of France, still
royal under Louis XIV, was marked by the greed, lewdness and incapacity of Richelieu
and Dubois, of Pompadour and du Barry. When {15} the effluvious corpse of Louis XV
was hastily smuggled from Versailles to the Cathedral of St. Denis in 1774, that seemed
to mark the final dissolution into rottenness of the Bourbon-Versailles régime. That
régime already stank in the nostrils of public opinion, a new force which for half a
century past had been making rapid progress in France.
The great religious and military struggle of the 16th and 17th centuries had in one
direction resulted in enhancing the prestige and crystallizing the power of the French
monarchy. In another direction it had resulted in establishing even more firmly the new
intellectual position of Europe, the spirit of enquiry, of criticism, of freedom of thought.
The Roman or supreme doctrine of authority had been questioned, and questioned
successfully. It could not be long before the doctrine of Bourbon authority must also be
questioned. Even if French thought and literature did for a moment pay tribute at the
throne of Louis XIV the closing years of the century were marked by the names of
Leibnitz, Bayle and Newton; the mercurial intelligence of France could not long remain
stagnant with such forces as these casting their influence over European civilization. {16}
The new century was not long in, the Regent Philip of Orléans had not long been in
power, before France showed that Versailles had ceased to control her literature. A new
Rabelais with an 18th century lisp, Montesquieu, by seasoning his Lettres Persanes with
a sauce piquante compounded of indecency and style, succeeded in making the public
swallow some incendiary morsels. The King of France, he declared, drew his power from
the vanity of his subjects, while the Pope was "an old idol to whom incense is offered
from sheer habit"; nothing stronger has been said to this day. A few years later, in his
Esprit des Lois, he produced a work of European reputation which eventually proved one
of the main channels for the conveyance of English constitutional ideas to the thinking
classes of France.
An even greater influence than Montesquieu was Voltaire. He exercised an irresistible
fascination on the intellectual class by the unrivalled lucidity and logic of his powerful
yet witty prose. He carried common sense to the point of genius, threw the glamour of
intellect over the materialism of his century, and always seized his pen most eagerly
when a question of humanity and liberalism was at stake. He had weak sides, was
materialistic in living as {17} in thinking, and had nothing of the martyr in his
composition; yet, after his fashion, he battled against obscurantism with all the zeal of a
reformer. He was, in fact, the successor of Calvin. But since Calvin's day Protestantism

had been almost extirpated in France, so that the gradual growth of the spirit of enquiry,
still proceeding below the surface, had brought it to a point beyond Protestantism. It was
atheism that Voltaire stood for, and with the vast majority of the people of France from
that day to this the alternative lay between rigid Catholicism on one hand and rigid
atheism on the other. The innumerable shades of transition between these extremes, in
which English