Parkman Vol. 4, Chapter 10

There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 9.

To comprehend his actions and motives, it is necessary to know his ideas in regard to the relations of church and state. They were those of the extreme ultramontanes, which a recent Jesuit preacher has expressed with tolerable distinctness. In a sermon uttered in the Church of Notre Dame, at Montreal, on the first of November, 1872, he thus announced them. “The supremacy and infallibility of the Pope; the independence and liberty of the church; the subordination and submission of the state to the church; in case of conflict between them, the church to decide, the state to submit: for whoever follows and defends these principles, life and a blessing; for whoever rejects and combats them, death and a curse.”

[This sermon was preached by Father Braun, S. J., on occasion of the “Golden Wedding,” or fiftieth anniversary, of Bishop Bourget of Montreal. A large body of the Canadian clergy were present, some of whom thought his expressions too emphatic. A translation by another Jesuit is published in the “Montreal Weekly Herald” of Nov. 2, 1872; and the above extract is copied verbatim.]

These were the principles which Laval and the Jesuits strove to make good. Christ was to rule in Canada through his deputy the bishop, and God’s law was to triumph over the laws of man. As in the halcyon days of Champlain and Montmagny, the governor was to be the right hand of the church, to wield the earthly sword at her bidding, and the council was to be the agent of her high behests.

France was drifting toward the triumph of the parti dévot, the sinister reign of petticoat and cassock, the era of Maintenon and Tellier, and the fatal atrocities of the dragonnades. Yet the advancing tide of priestly domination did not flow smoothly. The unparalleled prestige which surrounded the throne of the young king, joined to his quarrels with the Pope and divisions in the church itself, disturbed, though they could not check its progress. In Canada it was otherwise. The colony had been ruled by priests from the beginning, and it only remained to continue in her future the law of her past. She was the fold of Christ; the wolf of civil government was among the flock, and Laval and the Jesuits, watchful shepherds, were doing their best to chain and muzzle him.

According to Argenson, Laval had said, “A bishop can do what he likes;” and his action answered reasonably well to his words. He thought himself above human law. In vindicating the assumed rights of the church, he invaded the rights of others, and used means from which a healthy conscience would have shrunk. All his thoughts and sympathies had run from childhood in ecclesiastical channels, and he cared for nothing outside the church. Prayer, meditation, and asceticism had leavened and molded him. During four years he had been steeped in the mysticism of the Hermitage, which had for its aim the annihilation of self, and through self-annihilation the absorption into God. [1] He had passed from a life of visions to a life of action. Earnest to fanaticism, he saw but one great object, the glory of God on earth. He was penetrated by the poisonous casuistry of the Jesuits, based on the assumption that all means are permitted when the end is the service of God; and as Laval, in his own opinion, was always doing the service of God, while his opponents were always doing that of the devil, he enjoyed, in the use of means, a latitude of which we have seen him avail himself.

[1: See the maxims of Bernieres published by La Tour.]

Chapter 10

Leave Canada behind; cross the sea, and stand, on an evening in June, by the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. Beyond the broad gardens, above the long ranges of moonlit trees, rise the walls and pinnacles of the vast chateau; a shrine of history, the gorgeous monument of lines of vanished kings, haunted with memories of Capet, Valois, and Bourbon.

There was little thought of the past at Fontainebleau in June, 1661. The present was too dazzling and too intoxicating; the future, too radiant with hope and promise. It was the morning of a new reign; the sun of Louis XIV was rising in splendor and the rank and beauty of France were gathered to pay it homage. A youthful court, a youthful king; a pomp and magnificence such as Europe had never seen; a delirium of ambition, pleasure, and love, — wrought in many a young heart an enchantment destined to be cruelly broken. Even old courtiers felt the fascination of the scene, and tell us of the music at evening by the borders of the lake; of the gay groups that strolled under the shadowing trees, floated in gilded barges on the still water, or moved slowly in open carriages around its borders. Here was Anne of Austria, the king’s mother, and Marie Thérèse, his tender and jealous queen; his brother, the Duke of Orleans, with his bride of sixteen, Henriette of England; and his favorite, that vicious butterfly of the court, the Count de Guiche. Here, too, were the humbled chiefs of the civil war, Beaufort and Condé, obsequious before their triumphant master. Louis XIV., the centre of all eyes, in the flush of health and vigor, and the pride of new-fledged royalty, stood, as he still stands on the canvas of Philippe de Champagne, attired in a splendor which would have been effeminate but for the stately port of the youth who wore it.

[On the visit of the court at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1661, see Mémoires de Madame de Motteville, Mémoires de Madame de La Fayette, Mémoires de l’Abbé de Choisy, and Walckenaer, Mémoires sur Madame de Sevigné.]

Fortune had been strangely bountiful to him. The nations of Europe, exhausted by wars and dissensions, looked upon him with respect and fear. Among weak and weary neighbors, he alone was strong. The death of Mazarin had released him from tutelage; feudalism in the person of Condé was abject before him; he had reduced his parliaments to submission; and, in the arrest of the ambitious prodigal Fouquet, he was preparing a crashing blow to the financial corruption which had devoured France.

Nature had formed him to act the part of king. Even his critics and enemies praise the grace and majesty of his presence, and he impressed his courtiers with an admiration which seems to have been to an astonishing degree genuine. He carried airs of royalty even into his pleasures; and, while his example corrupted all France, he proceeded to the apartments of Montespan or Fontanges with the majestic gravity of Olympian Jove. He was a devout observer of the forms of religion; and, as the buoyancy of youth passed away, his zeal was stimulated by a profound fear of the devil. Mazarin had reared him in ignorance; but his faculties were excellent in their way, and, in a private station, would have made him an efficient man of business. The vivacity of his passions, and his inordinate love of pleasure, were joined to a persistent will and a rare power of labor. The vigorous mediocrity of his understanding delighted in grappling with details. His astonished courtiers saw him take on himself the burden of administration, and work at it without relenting for more than half a century. Great as was his energy, his pride was far greater. As king by divine right, he felt himself raised immeasurably above the highest of his subjects; but, while vindicating with unparalleled haughtiness his claims to supreme authority, he was, at the outset, filled with a sense of the duties of his high place, and fired by an ambition to make his reign beneficent to France as well as glorious to himself.

Above all rulers of modern times, he was the embodiment of the monarchical idea. The famous words ascribed to him, “I am the state,” were probably never uttered; but they perfectly express his spirit. “It is God’s will,” he wrote in 1666, “that whoever is born a subject should not reason, but obey;” [2] and those around him were of his mind. “The state is in the king,” said Bossuet, the great mouthpiece of monarchy; “the will of the people is merged in his will. Oh kings, put forth your power boldly, for it is divine and salutary to human kind.” {3}

[2: Oeuvres de Louis XIV., II. 283]

[3: Bossuet, Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte, 70. (1843).]

For a few brief years, his reign was indeed salutary to France. His judgment of men, when not obscured by his pride and his passion for flattery, was good; and he had at his service the generals and statesmen formed in the freer and bolder epoch that had ended with his accession. Among them was Jean Baptiste Colbert, formerly the intendant of Mazarin’s household, a man whose energies matched his talents, and who had preserved his rectitude in the midst of corruption. It was a hard task that Colbert imposed on his proud and violent nature to serve the imperious king, morbidly jealous of his authority, and resolved to accept no initiative but his own. He must counsel while seeming to receive counsel, and lead while seeming to follow. The new minister bent himself to the task, and the nation reaped the profit. A vast system of reform was set in action amid the outcries of nobles, financiers, churchmen, and all who profited by abuses. The methods of this reform were trenchant and sometimes violent, and its principles were not always in accord with those of modern economic science; but the good that resulted was incalculable. The burdens of the laboring classes were lightened, the public revenues increased, and the wholesale plunder of the public money arrested with a strong hand. Laws were reformed and codified; feudal tyranny, which still subsisted in many quarters, was repressed; agriculture and productive industry of all kinds were encouraged, roads and canals opened; trade stimulated, a commercial marine created, and a powerful navy formed as if by magic.

[On Colbert, see Clement, Histoire de Colbert. Clément, Lettres et Mémoires de Colbert; Chéruel, Administration monarchique en France, II chap, vi Henri Martin, Histoire de France, XIII., etc.]

It is in his commercial, industrial, and colonial policy that the profound defects of the great minister’s system are most apparent. It was a system of authority, monopoly, and exclusion, in which the government, and not the individual, acted always the foremost part. Upright, incorruptible, ardent for the public good, inflexible, arrogant, and domineering, he sought to drive France into paths of prosperity, and create colonies by the energy of an imperial will. He feared, and with reason, that the want of enterprise and capital among the merchants would prevent the broad and immediate results at which he aimed; and, to secure these results, he established a series of great trading corporations, in which the principles of privilege and exclusion were pushed to their utmost limits. Prominent among them was the Company of the West. The king signed the edict creating it on the 24th of May, 1664. Any person in the kingdom or out of it might become a partner by subscribing, within a certain time, not less than three thousand francs. France was a mere patch on the map, compared to the vast domains of the new association. Western Africa from Cape Verd to the Cape of Good Hope, South America between the Amazon and the Orinoco, Cayenne, the Antilles, and all New France, from Hudson’s Bay to Virginia and Florida were bestowed on it for ever, to be held of the Crown on the simple condition of faith and homage. As, according to the edict, the glory of God was the chief object in view, the company was required to supply its possessions with a sufficient number of priests, and diligently to exclude all teachers of false doctrine. It was empowered to build forts and warships, cast cannon, wage war, make peace, establish courts, appoint judges, and otherwise to act as sovereign within its own domains. A monopoly of trade was granted it for forty years. [4] Sugar from the Antilles, and furs from Canada, were the chief source of expected profit; and Africa was to supply the slaves to raise the sugar.

[4: Arrêt du Conseil du Roy qui accorde a la Compagnie le quart des castors, le dixième des orignaux et la traite de Tadoussac: Instruction a Monseigneur de Tracy et a Messieurs le Gouverneur et L’Intendant.

This company prospered as little as the rest of Colbert’s trading companies. Within ten years it lost 3,523,000 livres, besides blighting the colonies placed under its control. Recherches sur les Finances, cited by Clement, Histoire de Colbert.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 10 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

MORE INFORMATION