Chapter 18
Section 18 of A Short History of France by Mary Duclos. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Read by Pamela Nagami. Part 3, Chapter 2, The Wars of Religion, Part 2. Machiavelli maintains that cruelty is legitimate on the part of a prince
if it be employed in the interests of order and only once, in a single stroke by a coup d'etat intended to secure the direction of affairs. The blow must fall sudden and dreadful, must teach by terror, vanquish by victory, and never need to be repeated. And it must be succeeded by a long and mild sequence of public benefits
which follow after the thunder-stroke, like the gentle fertilizing rain. It is, as I say, the policy of the Germans in the invaded provinces of Belgium and France. In our father's time, it was the policy of Napoleon III, and a modern writer has been found to advocate this opération de police un peu rude. But no man, not even the Kaiser, ever applied it so thoroughly
as that trembling mother, that weak woman, Catherine de' Medici. Her utter devotion to her sons gave her a great influence over them, and her terror made her eloquent. She persuaded her half-mad poet of a son, the King Charles IX, that his friend Coligny had a plot against him, and indeed, who knows.
That may have been true, for had not Coligny plotted to kidnap the king's elder brother Francis II, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots? And then, out of fear and falsehood and a woman's mad impulsiveness, the appalling order was given to massacre the admiral and his six hundred gentlemen and their servants and followers, some two thousand people in all,
and as many more as might be, of the Protestant professors, doctors, tradespeople and mechanics, at that moment more than usually at their ease in Paris, on account of their prince's wedding and of the new friendship between Coligny and the young king. That unimaginable crime was ordered and executed, more or less, for, though some twenty thousand were slain in Paris and the other towns of France,
yet many escaped, and among them, Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV, the future idol of the French nation. The massacre was applauded by the king of Spain, the national enemy, and almost accepted by the Queen of England, who protested, it is true, yet stood godmother in the following year to a French royal babe,
and resumed her negotiations for a possible marriage with a French royal prince, who was to turn Protestant before his wedding, and bring with him, rested from Spain, the Low Countries as a dowry into England. The Inquisition struck a medal of the Saint Bartholomew to commemorate the great and glorious event, and the Huguenot, naturally seeing the construction to be placed on peace, broke out again in war.
And the king died within two years of sheer horror and nervous collapse, muttering to his old nurse, his old Huguenot nurse, blood, blood, que de sang. But on the whole, when we peruse the documents of the time, we are astonished rather at the slight effect of an event which has never since ceased to thrill the world with horror and loathing, which has injured so desperately the fair fame of France, and left so deep a mark in history.
I suppose if you were to ask the man in the street what he remembers of French history, he would reply, Joan of Arc, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, Versailles, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Yet this capital event brought about no great result, unless it were to sicken the country with civil war. No country can go mad for more than a certain time. A dozen years of battle had ruined France.
Thousands of villages were reduced to ashes, the grass grew over the rutted, disused roads, the two broken halves of the fractured bridges appeared to lift up their arms to heaven in protest, and the streets were full of the halt, the maimed, and the poor who begged their bread from door to door, and slept among the tombs in the cemeteries. The end was not yet, and not for many years, but already between the two extremes of public passion,
a new party grew and increased, the moderates, the politique. Did not the wise Montaigne affirm to the historian de tout that Henri of Navarre was no Protestant and Guise no Catholic? The time came at last when it was for France a question of peace or death, when both the king, Henry III, and his heir, the king of Navarre, were bent on peace, and yet the land distraught by too many rankers could not settle down in quiet,
but went maddeningly on in its insensate vendettas. And then a strange thing took place. The Catholic party, the party of absolute monarchy, forsook the king. Henry III had no direct heir. His successor-in-law would be Henri of Navarre, the murdering Protestant, as they would say in Ireland.
And in view of so dire a consequence, the ultra-Catholics formed themselves into a league. From 1586 to 1596, France was really governed, inasmuch as it was governed at all, in the north and in the big towns by this league, and in the federalist, home-ruler, south and west, by the organization of the Protestant cause. France seemed in danger of separating in Twain.
The doctrines of the league out-Huguenot'd the Huguenot by their political audacity. The Ligurs wrote to the pope, We are jealous of the honor of God and of the antique glory of France. We are born Frenchmen, not slaves, Catholics, not Calvinists, and just as passionately as Agrippe de Bigné,
they argued that the king was only king en vertu du consentement de tous. They maintained that there exists a tacit contract between the sovereign and the nation, a pact which at any moment may be revised. And just as the Protestants struck a medal for Condé with the inscription, Roi des Fidèles, so the Ligurs offered the crown to another prince of the royal race, that duke of Guise,
who had organized the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, and after his assassination, proposed to seat in his stead on the throne of France, a daughter of the king of Spain. So deep in the mind of France abides the conception that kings only reign by virtue of the will of the people. What would have happened if France had then abandoned the principle of an hereditary monarchy?
Would France have become a dependence of Spain? The charm, the prestige, the natural authority and grace, the timely conversion of Henry of Navarre saved the situation. France may well idolize the memory of Henri IV. He brought into that bedlam of senseless strife
such a breath of good sense, gaiety, courage, stoical endurance, love of realities and happy moderation, as showed France in a vision her own true image, and chased the fanatics and the phantoms afar. It seems strange indeed that this most human and most humane of princes
should have been the cousin and the contemporary of those morbid, half-mad, ghastly sons of Catherine de' Medici, and great-great-grandsons of Valentina Visconti, the king of Navarre, gay, prudent, economical, brave, practical, alert, seems separated from them by a gulf of centuries,
seems in fact a Frenchman of today. His book of devotion was not Machiavelli's Prince, but a manual of country life and rural economy, the Theatre d'Agriculture of Olivier de Serres. Every day he listened to it for half an hour.
We know his wish, the wish of a poor man who had often gone hungry, that every farmer in France should have a fowl in his pot a Sunday's. He loved the land, and he loved the common people, and would have said as Sully, his friend and minister, said, the pastures and the plow land are the two breasts of the state.
No landscape in the world, said he again, is so fine a piece of scenery as a field of corn at harvest time, ripe for the cutting. Essentially realistic, Henry IV put the substantial facts of this world before whatever charter or map his fancy and his faith
had drawn of the invisible sphere beyond. When he found that as a Protestant he could not, despite his claims and titles and his right divine, make himself acceptable to the majority of his subjects, he did as Clovis had done long before.
He entered the Church of his people. Paris is worth a mass, he said. Paris vaut bien une messe. But he did not forget the old faith in adopting the new. He showed himself the grandson of the tolerant, gracious,
free-minded Margaret of Angoulême. By the Edict of Nantes, if he proclaimed the supremacy of the Catholic Church, he secured the liberties and rights of Protestants. Henceforth, the disabilities of dissenters were removed, and they were admitted to the charges of the state.
Was not Souly himself an Huguenot? There was a sort of home rule for Protestants. They had their seats in Parliament, their towns and castles governed by their own principles, and wearied out, ruined, devastated by thirty years of civil war,
the nation accepted peace. Henry IV had only now to conquer Spain. There, too, he was successful. The Spaniards, allied with the ultra-Catholics of France, the League, had sought to wrest the crown from Henry and to place on the throne of France
a Spanish princess. But just ten years after the defeat of the Armada and our own English triumph, and in the very year of the Edict of Nantes which established peace in France, the French king in 1598, victorious over all his enemies, forced the Spaniards to sign the Peace of Vervin,
and terminated, by a transaction in which France had distinctly the advantage, a rivalry that had lasted eighty years. In the age-long duel between France and the House of Austria, this is the end of the first act. The principle of absolute authority, the reign of Rome,
the domination of the Inquisition, restrained and controlled in France and England the like, seemed henceforth relegated to the Central Empire. In France, England, Holland, in Scandinavia, and in the Lutheran states of Germany, freedom should reign. Henri IV had the vision of a confederation of fortunate states, united in amity,
balancing Spain, Austria and the Empire, those great reservoirs of absolutism, by the prosperity of their trading democracy. He imagined the United States of Europe. And this perhaps was his most striking originality. Nations in those days were goods and chattels.
They were given with a daughter's dowry, bequeathed to a son with his inheritance. It seemed quite just and fair that France should ask for Navarre in Milan. England make good her rights to Aquitaine. Spain rule in Belgium, Austria in Burgundy. Henri first saw the life of peoples with an unprejudiced eye.
This child of nature discerned the full iniquity of the claims of kings. His new project was to respect nationalities. He said, Let the Spanish-speaking countries belong to the Spaniards and the Germans to the Germans, but I want all the French.
And he cast the longing eye over Lorraine, Savoy, Franche-Comté, which ought to have been his, evidently. No hegemony, whether of Austria or of another. No universal tyrant. But a society of nations, such was the dream of Henri IV.
And had he lived, the thing might have come to pass. So great was the force of attraction that radiated from a king whose good sense was almost genius, whose cordial kindness was little less than charity. He hoped to force the Austrian to evacuate the Netherlands, forming in his stead a republic of the Low Countries.
He planned another commonwealth in Switzerland. A third in Venice. Genoa and Tuscany should fuse in a fourth. These four democracies should be balanced by five hereditary kingdoms, France, England, Spain, Sweden and Lombardy. And there should be six elective sovereignties.
The Empire, the Papacy, Denmark and the frontier states of Hungary, Poland, Bohemia. Europe's bulwark against the Turk. Meanwhile, in a few years, he restored the finances of France and her well-being. The roads were rebuilt and planted with trees. Even now, the fine old centenary elms are called des Sully, in memory of Henry's minister.
He established mills and works and furnaces for the manufacture of glass, carpets, cloth and especially silk. If the silk trade of France brings in today some 400 millions of francs in the year, it is a legacy of the brave, gay, practical monarch, so besotted with the welfare of his people, that he planted even his gardens of the Tuileries with mulberry trees for the silkworms and gave up a part of his palace of the Louvre as a permanent exhibition or palace of industry,
in which to show the latest inventions and machines, with lodgings for such artisans as should come from the provinces to show their models. He built the Place Royale, today the Place des Vosges, whose porticoes were originally destined to exhibit a permanent show of silk and manufactured goods. He built the tapestry mills of the Gobelins.
He built the Pont Neuf, where his statue still stands, and all the streets of the Marais and the Place Dauphine and how much else of the Paris we admire. He was scheming and building the foreign prosperity and peace of France, when the dagger of a mad fanatic, one Ravillac, crazed by the sermons of embittered priests, cut short the king's career.
Total eclipse of all the schemes and projects of that brilliant reign. The heir to the throne, Louis XIII, was eight years old. The queen regent, another Medici and without the brains of Catherine, her minister, a priest, him who we know as Cardinal de Richelieu. France turned her coat, left the paths of pleasantness and peace,
left off farming and spinning, began fighting again, and indeed to some extent renewed her civil wars. France was no longer democratic nor liberal. Yet so imperious are the needs of a political situation, which indeed is often the result of a geographical situation,
that her aim, no less in the 17th than in the 16th century, will be the abasement of the house of Habsburg, the limiting and lopping of the empire, and above all the struggle with Spain. Richelieu and Louis XIV, absolutists and ultracatholics,
will pursue this task no less perseveringly and no less arduously than Henri IV. If not by the same paths, they tend to the same goal. And that goal they attain. France will be covered with ruins, having paid in war loans and taxes
and indemnities over and over again more than she possessed. But France, ragged, mutilated, will at any rate rise from the struggle triumphant. Her foe breathes no more. Considered as a political entity,
Spain thenceforth is dead, and France the leader of the world. End of Section 18.
