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

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. Thus it was that the administration, like a pyramid, broadened towards its base, and the whole structure rested upon the third estate, or rank and file of the people. Such was the