To the Scaffold by Carolly Erickson

Author:Carolly Erickson [Erickson, Carolly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780312322052
Google: wHPT054L7AIC
Amazon: 0312322054
Goodreads: 214934
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

march to the defense of the Dutch, and many doubted whether France could defend herself if attacked. Once the most feared military power in Europe, France had been reduced to near help-, lessness.2

Count Alvensleben, an envoy of the new Prussian King Frederick William II (Frederick II had died the previous year), came to Versailles not long after the Dutch defeat and was profoundly dismayed by the situation he found there. The glittering surfaces of Versailles and the shallow narcissism of its occupants repelled him. "Everything here is in ceremony, in formal dress, in veneer, in phrases, in national gasconnades, in tinsel, in intrigue," he wrote in his report to the Prussian King. "Substance always gives way to form. Twenty-five million united egoists, and vain of their union, despising all other nations. . . . and everybody up in arms if any attempt is made to remedy the evil and destroy the abuses."^

Coming as he was from the rather austere Prussian court, the Count was bound to be startled by the surface opulence of Versailles. But in his report he emphasized more the prevailing attitude of the French than their materialism. "France is like a young man whom one cannot free of his debts, because the more money he has the more credit he gets, and the more credit he gets the more he squanders." Reform was unthinkable as long as the obsession with extravagance went unchecked. "It is as impossible for France to put order into her affairs and consequence into her plans as it is for water to go against the current," the Count wrote. "If credit were revived, the squandering, the disorder, the magnificence of attire, the abuses, and the arrogance of conceit will go on with head raised and the people will be more ground down than ever before."^

It was not only that the government needed reform, the entire nation needed to be regenerated, preferably by a king with the will, the power and the perseverance to sweep away the old abuses and to provide moral leadership. But Louis was not such a king. He spent as much of his time as possible away from the palace hunting, and when he was present, he was either "capricious, short-tempered and curmudgeonly," Alvensleben wrote, or else he was inmiature and foolish. The Count was not the only visitor to Versailles to remark on the King's childishness during Mass in the palace chapel, when he customarily sat next to his

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