TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW When Louis XIV died, in 1715, after a glorious fifty-five-year reign, all eyes focused on his great-grandson and ...
TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW When Louis XIV died, in 1715, after a glorious fifty-five-year reign, all eyes focused on his great-grandson and chosen successor, the future Louis Xv. Would the boy, only five at the time, prove as great a leader as the Sun King? Louis XIV had transformed a country on the verge of civil war into the preeminent power in Europe. The last years of his reign had been difficuIt-he had been old and tired-but it was hoped that the child would develop into the kind of strong mler who would reinvigorate the land and add to the firm foundation that Louis XIV had laid. To this end the child was given the best minds of France as his tutors, men who would instruct hirn in the arts of statecraft, in the methods that the Sun King had perfected. Nothing was neglected in his education. But when Louis XV came to the throne, in 1726,
a sudden change came over hirn: He no longer had to study or please others or prove hirnself. He stood alone at the top of a great country, with wealth and power at his command. He could do as he wished. In the first years of his reign, Louis gave hirns elf over to pleasure, leaving the government in the hands of a trusted minister, Andre-Hercule de Fleury. This caused little concern, for he was a young man who needed to sow his wild oats, and de Fleury was a good minister. But it slowly became clear that this was more than a passing phase. Louis had no interest in governing. His main worry was not France's finances, or a possible war with Spain, but boredom. He could not stand being bored, and when he was not hunting deer, or chasing young girls, he whiled away bis time at the gambling tables, losing huge sums in a single night. The court, as usual, reflected the tastes of the mler. Gambling and lavish parties became the obsession. The courtiers had no concern with the future of France-they poured their energies into charming the king, angling for tides that would bring them life pensions, and for cabinet positions demanding litde work but paying huge salaries. Parasites flocked to the court, and the state's debts swelled. In 1745 Louis fell in love with Madame de Pompadour, a woman of middle-class origin who had managed to rise through her charms, her intelligence, and a good marriage.
Madame de Pompadour became the official royal mistress; she also became France's arbiter of taste and fashion. But the Madame had political ambitions as weIl, and she eventually emerged as the country's unofficial prime minister-it was she, not Louis, who wielded hiring-and-firing power over France's most important ministers. As he grew older Louis only needed more diversion. On the grounds of Versailles he built a brothel, Parc aux Cerfs, which housed some of the prettiest young girls of France. Underground passages and hidden staircases gave Louis access at all hours. Mter Madame de Pompadour died, in 1764, she was succeeded as royal mistress by Madame du Barry, who soon came to dominate the court, and who, like de Pompadour before her, began to meddle in affairs of state. If a minister did not please her he would find himselffired. All ofEurope was aghast when du Barry, the daughter of a baker, managed to arrange the firing of Etienne de Choiseul,
the foreign minister and France's most able diplomat. He had shown her too litde respect. As time went by, swindlers and charlatans made their nests in Versailles, and enticed Louis's interest in astrology, the occult, and fraudulent business deals. The young and pampered teenager who had taken over France years before had only grown worse with age. The motto that became attached to Louis's reign was ''Apres moi, le deluge'!.-"After me the flood," or, Let France rot after I am gone. And indeed when Louis did go, in 1774, worn out by debauchery, his country and his own finances were in horrible disarray. His grandson Louis XVI inherited a realm in desperate need of reform and a strong leader. But Louis XVI was even weaker than his grandfather, and could only watch as the country descended into revolution. In 1792 the republic introduced by the French Revolution declared the end of the monarchy, and gave the king a new name, "Louis the Last." A few months later he kneeled on the guillotine, his about-to-be-severed head stripped of all the radiance and power that the Sun King had invested in the crown. Interpretation From a country that had descended into civil war in the late 1640s, Louis XIV forged the mightiest realm in Europe. Great generals would tremble in his presence. A cook once made a mistake in preparing a dish and committed suicide rather than face the king's wrath. Louis XIV had many mistresses, but their power ended in the bedroom. He filled his court with the most brilliant minds of the age. The symbol of his power was Versailles: Refusing to accept the palace of his forefathers, the Louvre, he built his own palace in what was then the middle of nowhere, symbolizing that this was a new order he had founded, one without precedent. He made Versailles the centerpiece of his reign, a place that all the powernd of Europe envied and visited with a sense of awe. In essence, Louis took a great void-the decaying monarchy of France-and filled it with his own symbols and radiant power. Louis XV, on the other hand, symbolizes the fate of all those who inherit something large or who follow in a great man's footsteps. It would seem easy for a son or successor to build on the grand foundation left for them, but in the realm of power the opposite is true. The pampered, indulged son almost always squanders the inheritance, for he does not start with the father's need to fill a void. As Machiavelli states, necessity is what impels men to take action, and once the necessity is gone, only rot and decay are left. Having no need to increase his store of power, Louis XV inevitably succumbed to inertia. Under him, Versailles, the symbol of the Sun King's authority, became a pleasure palace of incomparable banality,
a kind of Las Vegas of the Bourbon monarchy. It came to represent all that the oppressed peasantry of France hated about their king, and during the Revolution they looted it with glee. Louis XV had only one way out of the trap awaiting the son or successor of a man like the Sun King: to psychologically begin from nothing, to LIFE OF PERICLES As a young man Perieies was ineiined to shrink from facing the people. One reason for this was that he was considered to bear a distinct resemblance to the tyrant Pisistratus, and when men who were weil on in years remarked on the charm of Perieies ' voice and the smoothness and fluency of his speech,
they were astonished at the resemblance between the two. The fact that he was rich and that he came of a distinguished family and possessed exceedingly powerful friends made the fear of ostracism very real to him, and at the beginning of his career he took no part in politics but devoted himself to soldiering, in wh ich he showed great daring and enterprise. However, the time came when Aristides was dead, Themistoeies in exile, and Cimon frequently absent on distant campaigns. Then at last Pericles decided to at/ach himselfto the people 's party and to take up the cause of the poor and the many instead ofthat ofthe rich and the few, in spite of the fact that this was quite contrary to his own temperament, wh ich was thoroughly aristocratic. He was afraid, apparently, of being suspected of aiming at a dictatorship; so that when he saw that LAW 41 349 Cimon 's sympathie.l' were strongly wilh the nobles and that Cimon was the idol ofthe aristocratic party, Pericle,l' began to ingratiate himself with the people, partly for selrpreservation and partly by way ofsecuring power against his rival. He now entered upon a new mode of Iife. He was never to be seen walking in any street except the one wh ich led to the market-plaee and the council chamber. THE L1FE OE PERICLES, PUJTARCII, c. A.D. 46�120 TIII': LI!'F O!' 1'1 1<:'1'110 PEIU :CII\O. I'\I \TI':H (', l -l.')()- l
:i:n How beneficial poverty may sometimes be to those wilh talent, and how it may serve as a powerful goad to make them perfeet or exeellent in whatever occupation they might choose, can be seen very clearly in the actions of Pietro Perugino. Wishing by means of his ability to attain some respectable rank, after leaving disastrous calamilies behind in Perugia and coming to Florenee, he remained there many months in poverty, sleeping in a ehesI, since he had no olher bed; he turned nighl into day, and wilh the greatest zeal continually applied himsel!, to 350 LAW 41 denigrate the past and his inheritance, and to move in a totally new direction, creating his own world. Assuming you have the choice, it would be better to avoid the situation altogether, to place yourself where there is a vacuum of power, where you can be the one to bring order out of chaos without having to compete with another star in the sky. Power depends on appearing larger than other people, and when you are lost in the shadow of the father, the king, the great predecessor, you cannot possibly project such a presence. But when they began to make sovereignty hereditary, the children quickly degenerated from their fathers; and, so far Jrom trying to equal their father's virtues, they considered that a prince had nothing else to do than to excel alt the rest in idleness, indulgence, and every other variety of pleasure. Niccolo Machiavelli, J 46 9�152 7
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