The History of French Revolution. John Stevens Cabot Abbott
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and manufactures, wealth increased with this class, and the king, to raise money, would often sell, at an enormous price, a title of nobility to some enriched tradesman.
A numerous and powerful middle class, rich and highly educated, was thus gradually formed, who had emerged from the people, and whose sympathies were entirely with them. The nobles looked upon all these, however opulent, or cultivated in mind, or polished in manners, with contempt, as low-born. They refused all social intercourse with them, regarding them as a degraded caste. They looked with even peculiar contempt upon those who had purchased titles of nobility.
They drew a broad line of distinction between the nobles and the ennobled. The hereditary aristocracy, proud of a lineage which could be traced through a hundred generations, and which was lost in the haze of antiquity, exclaimed with pride, instinct to the human heart:
"You may give a lucky tradesman, in exchange for money, a title of nobility, but you can not thus make him a nobleman; you can not thus constitute him a lineal descendant of the old Frank barons; you can not thus constitute him a Lorraine, a Montmorency, a Rohan. God alone can create a nobleman."
Thus they regarded a man who had been ennobled by a royal decree, or who had descended from a father or a grandfather thus ennobled, as a new man, an upstart, one hardly redeemed from contempt. The doors of their saloons were closed against him, and he was every where exposed to mortifying neglect. A noble whose lineage could be traced for two or three centuries, but whose origin was still distinctly defined, was considered as perhaps belonging to the aristocratic calendar, though of low estate. The fact that the time once was, when his ancestors were known to be low-born, was a damaging fact, which no subsequent ages of nobility could entirely efface. He only was the true noble, the origin of whose nobility was lost in the depths of the past, the line of whose ancestry ran so far back into the obscurity of by-gone ages that no one could tell when it commenced.
It has generally been said that there were three estates in the realm; the clergy composing the first, the nobles the second, and the people the third. But the higher class of the clergy, luxuriating in the bishoprics and the abbacies, with their rich emoluments, were the sons of the nobility, and shared in all the privileges and popular odium pertaining to that class. The lower clergy, devoted to apostolic labors and poverty, belonged to the people, and were with them in all their sympathies. Thus there were in reality but two classes, the privileged and the unprivileged, the patrician and the plebeian, the tax payer and the tax receiver. The castle, whether baronial or monastic in its architecture, was the emblem of the one, the thatched cottage the symbol of the other. Louis XIV., as Madame de Maintenon testifies, was shocked to learn that Jesus Christ associated with the poor and the humble, and conversed freely with them.
Soon after the succession of Louis XIV. to the throne he became convinced that the maintenance of the Romish hierarchy was essential to the stability of his power. He consequently commenced a series of persecutions of the Protestants, with the determination of driving that faith entirely from France. In 1662 he issued a decree that no Protestant should be buried except after sunset or before sunrise. Protestant mechanics or shop-keepers were not allowed to have apprentices. Protestant teachers were permitted to instruct only in the first rudiments of letters, and not more than twelve Protestants were allowed to meet together for the purposes of worship. No Protestant woman could be a nurse in the chamber of infancy; no Catholic could embrace Protestantism or marry a Protestant woman under pain of exile. Catholic magistrates were empowered to enter the dying chambers of the Protestants to tease them, when gasping in death, to return to the Catholic faith. In four years, between 1680 and 1684, more than twenty royal edicts were issued against the Protestants, decreeing, among other things, that no Protestant should be a lawyer, doctor, apothecary, printer, or grocer. Children were often taken by violence from Protestant parents, that they might be trained in the Catholic faith.
Madame de Maintenon, the unacknowledged wife of Louis XIV., wished to bring back into the fold of Rome a young lady, Mademoiselle de Murgay. She consequently wrote to her brother:
"If you could send her to me you would do me a great pleasure. There are no other means than violence, for they will be much afflicted in the family by De Murgay's conversion. I will send you a lettre de cachet (secret warrant) in virtue of which you will take her into your own house until you find an opportunity of sending her off."8
Such outrages as these were of constant occurrence. Zeal for the conversion of the Protestants never rose to a higher pitch. At the same time Louis XIV. could bid defiance to God's commands, and insult the moral sense of the nation by traveling with his wife and his two guilty favorites, Madame de Montespan and Madame la Vallière, all in the same carriage. The profligacy of the ecclesiastics and the debauchery of the court and the nobles, though less disguised during the wild saturnalia of the succeeding regency, was never more universal than during this reign. This was the golden age of kings. Feudality had died, and democracy was not born. The monarchy was absolute. The nobles, deprived of all political power, existed merely as a luxurious appendage and embellishment to the throne, while the people, unconscious of either power or rights, made no movements to embarrass the sovereign.9
In the year 1681 Louis XIV. commenced his system of dragooning the Protestants into the Catholic faith. He sent regiments of cavalry into the provinces, quartered them in the houses of the Protestants, placing from four to ten in each family, and enjoined it upon these soldiers to do every thing they could to compel the Protestants to return to the Catholic faith. Scenes ensued too awful to be narrated. He who has nerves to endure the recital can find the atrocities minutely detailed in "L'Histoire de l'Édit de Nantes, par Elias Benoît."
The brutal soldiery, free from all restraint, committed every conceivable excess. They scourged little children in the presence of their parents, that the shrieks of agony of the child might induce the parents to abjure their faith. They violated the modesty of women and girls, and mangled their bodies with the lash. They tortured, mutilated, disfigured. And when human nature in its extreme of agony yielded, the exhausted victim was compelled to sign a recantation of his faith, declaring that he did it of his own free will, without compulsion or persuasion. In their terror the Protestants fled in all directions, into the fields, the forests, to caves, and made desperate endeavors to escape from the kingdom. Multitudes died of exhaustion and famine by the way-side and on the sea-shore. Large tracts of country were thus nearly depopulated. Madame de Maintenon wrote to her brother, sending him a present of a large sum of money:
"I beseech you employ usefully the money you are to have. The lands in Poitou are sold for nothing. The distresses of the Protestants will bring more into market. You can easily establish yourself splendidly in Poitou."
The Protestant countries, England, Switzerland, Holland, and Denmark, issued proclamations to these persecuted Christians offering them an asylum. The court was alarmed, and interdicted their leaving the kingdom under penalty of condemnation to the galleys, confiscation of their property, and the annulling of all contracts they should have made for a year before their emigration.10
The condition of the Protestants was now miserable in the extreme. It was the determination of the court utterly to exterminate the reformed faith. The Archbishop of Paris made out a list of the works of four hundred authors who were considered as assailing Catholicism, and all the libraries, public and private, of the kingdom were searched that the condemned books might be burned.
There were between two and three millions of Protestants in France.11 The dragoons were sent in every direction through the kingdom, enjoined by the court, to secure, at whatever expense of torture, a return to Catholicism. One of the tortures which these merciless fanatics were fond of applying was to deprive their victim of sleep. They kept the sufferer standing, and relieved each other in their cruel work of pinching, pricking, twitching, pulling with ropes, burning, suffocating with offensive fumes, until after successive days and nights of torture