Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant

Author:Will Durant
Language: eng
Format: epub

IV. THE CARDINAL AND THE NOBLES

He proceeded with equal resolution, and less lenience, against the nobles who still held France to be many and not one. Feudalism was by no means dead. It had fought in the religious wars for control of the central government. The great nobles still had their fortified castles, their armed forces, their private wars, their private courts, their officers of law; they still had the peasantry at their mercy, and charged obstructive tolls on commerce traversing their domains. France, dismembered by feudalism and religion, was not yet a nation; it was an unstable and agitated assemblage of proud and semi-independent barons capable at any moment of disrupting the peace and the economy of the state. Most of the provinces were ruled by dukes or counts who claimed their governorships for life and handed them on to their sons.

It seemed to Richelieu that the only practicable alternative to this enfeebling chaos was to centralize authority and power in the king. Conceivably he might have labored to balance this by restoring some measure of municipal autonomy. But he could not restore the medieval commune, which had rested on the guilds and a protected local economy; the passage from a city to a national market had undermined the guilds and the communes, and required central rather than local legislation.I To minds frozen in the perspective of today, the royal absolutism desired by Richelieu seems but a reactionary despotism; in the view of history, and of the great majority of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century, it was a liberating progress from feudal tyranny to unified rule. France was not ripe for democracy; most of its population were ill-fed, ill-clothed, illiterate, darkened with superstitions and murderous with certainties. The towns were controlled by businessmen who could think in no other terms than their own profit or loss; and these men, hampered at every step by feudal privileges, were not disposed to unite with the lesser nobles, as in England, to establish a parliament checking the royal power. The French parlements were not representative and legislative parliaments; they were superior courts, nurtured and mortised in precedent; they were not chosen by the people, and they became citadels of conservatism. The middle classes, the artisans, and the peasants approved the absolutism of the king as the only protection they could see from the absolutism of the lords.

In 1626, in the name of the King, Richelieu issued an edict that struck at the very base of feudalism: he ordered the destruction of all fortresses except on the frontiers, and forbade, in future, the fortification of private dwellings. In the same year (his older brother having been killed in a duel) he made dueling a capital crime; and when Montmorency-Bouteville and the Count des Chapelles dueled nevertheless, he had them put to death. He confessed himself “much troubled in spirit” by this procedure, but he told his master, “It is a question of breaking the neck of duels or of your Majesty’s edicts.”21 The nobles vowed vengeance and plotted the minister’s fall.

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