The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism | Page 2

times the heart of Europe. His hysteria has made
Europe hysterical, while his sober national sense at critical moments
has held the whole continent to good behaviour. For a half-dozen
centuries there was never a squabble at any remote part of Europe in

which France did not stand ready and willing to take a hand on the
slightest opportunity. That policy, as pursued particularly by Louis XIV
and the Bonapartes, made a heavy drain in brawn and brain on the
vitality of the race; but despite it all, the peaceful achievements of
France within her own borders continued to astonish mankind. It is this
astounding vigour, this inexhaustible stamina, this unexampled
recuperative power that has at all times made France a nation which,
whether men admire or condemn her policy, can never be treated with
indifference. It was these qualities which enabled her, throughout
exhausting foreign troubles, to retain her leadership in European
scholarship, in philosophy, art, and architecture; this is what has
enabled France to be the grim warrior of Europe without ceasing ever
to be the idealist of the nations.
It was during one of her proud and prosperous eras that France began
her task of creating an empire beyond the Atlantic. At no time, indeed,
was she better equipped for the work. No power of Western Europe
since the days of Roman glory had possessed such facilities for
conquering and governing new lands. If ever there was a land able and
ready to take up the white man's burden it was the France of the
seventeenth century. The nation had become the first military power of
Europe. Spain and Italy had ceased to be serious rivals. Even England,
under the Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of
France. Nor was this superiority of the French confined to the science
of war. It passed unquestioned in the arts of peace. Even Rome at the
height of her power could not dominate every field of human activity.
She could rule the people with authority and overcome the proud; but
even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms of art,
sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the aesthetic as well as the
military dictator of seventeenth- century Europe. Her authority was
supreme, as Macaulay says, on all matters from orthodoxy in
architecture to the proper cut of a courtier's clothes. Her monarchs were
the first gentlemen of Europe. Her nobility set the social standards of
the day. The rank and file of her people--and there were at least twenty
million of them in the days of Louis Quatorze--were making a fertile
land yield its full increase. The country was powerful, rich, prosperous,
and, for the time being, outwardly contented.

So far as her form and spirit of government went, France by the middle
of the seventeenth century was a despotism both in theory and in fact.
Men were still living who could recall the day when France had a real
parliament, the Estates-General as it was called. This body had at one
time all the essentials of a representative assembly. It might have
become, as the English House of Commons became, the grand inquest
of the nation. But it did not do so. The waxing personal strength of the
monarchy curbed its influence, its authority weakened, and throughout
the great century of French colonial expansion from 1650 to 1750 the
Estates-General was never convoked. The centralization of political
power was complete. 'The State! I am the State.' These famous words
imputed to Louis XIV expressed no vain boast of royal power.
Speaking politically, France was a pyramid. At the apex was the
Bourbon sovereign. In him all lines of authority converged.
Subordinate to him in authority, and dominated by him when he willed
it, were various appointive councils, among them the Council of State
and the so-called Parliament of Paris, which was not a parliament at all,
but a semi- judicial body entrusted with the function of registering the
royal decrees. Below these in the hierarchy of officialdom came the
intendants of the various provinces --forty or more of them. Loyal
agents of the crown were these intendants. They saw to it that no royal
mandate ever went unheeded in any part of the king's domain. These
forty intendants were the men who really bridged the great
administrative gulf which lay between the royal court and the people.
They were the most conspicuous, the most important, and the most
characteristic officials of the old regime. Without them the royal
authority would have tumbled over by its own sheer top-heaviness.
They were the eyes and ears of the monarchy; they provided the
monarch with fourscore eager hands to work his sovereign will. The
intendants, in turn, had their underlings, known as the sub-delegates,
who held the peasantry in leash.