Louis XIV. was essentially monarchical. That was the secret of his success; it was because he first gave the powers of unity to the monarchy, that he rendered France so brilliant and powerful. All his changes, and they were many, from the dress of soldiers to the instructions to ambassadors, breathed the same spirit. He first introduced a uniform in the army. Before his time, the soldiers merely wore a banderole over their steel breast-plates and ordinary dresses. That was a great and symptomatic improvement; it at once induced an esprit de corps and a sense of responsibility. He first made the troops march with a measured step, and caused large bodies of men to move with the precision of a single company. The artillery and engineer service, under his auspices, made astonishing progress. His discerning eye selected the genius of Vauban, which invented, as it were, the modern system of fortification, and wellnigh brought it to its greatest elevation – and raised to the highest command that of Turenne, which carried the military art to the most consummate perfection. Skilfully turning the martial and enterprising genius of the Franks into the career of conquest, he multiplied tenfold their power, by conferring on them the inestimable advantages of skilled discipline and unity of action. He gathered the feudal array around his banner; he roused the ancient barons from their chateaux, the old retainers from their villages; but he arranged them in disciplined battalions of regular troops, who received the pay and obeyed the orders of government, and never left their banners. When he summoned the array of France to undertake the conquest of the Low Countries, he appeared at the head of a hundred and twenty thousand men, all regular and disciplined troops, with a hundred pieces of cannon. Modern Europe had never seen such an array. It was irresistible, and speedily brought the monarch to the gates of Amsterdam.
The same unity which the genius of Louis and his ministers communicated to the military power of France, he gave also to its naval forces and internal strength. To such a pitch of greatness did he raise the marine of the monarchy, that it all but outnumbered that of England; and the battle of La Hogue in 1792 alone determined, as Trafalgar did a century after, to which of these rival powers the dominion of the seas was to belong. He reduced the government of the interior to that regular and methodical system of governors of provinces, mayors of cities, and other subordinate authorities, all receiving their instructions from the Tuileries, which, under no subsequent change of government, imperial or royal, has been abandoned, and which has, in every succeeding age, formed the main source of its strength. He concentrated around the monarchy the rays of genius from all parts of the country, and threw around its head a lustre of literary renown, which, more even than the exploits of his armies, dazzled and fascinated the minds of men. He arrayed the scholars, philosophers, and poets of his dominions like his soldiers and sailors; the whole academies of France, which have since become so famous, were of his institution; he sought to give discipline to thought, as he had done to his fleets and armies, and rewarded distinction in literary efforts, not less than warlike achievement. No monarch ever knew better the magical influence of intellectual strength on general thought, or felt more strongly the expedience of enlisting it on the side of authority. Not less than Hildebrand or Napoleon, he aimed at drawing, not over his own country alone, but the whole of Europe, the meshes of regulated and centralised opinion; and more durably than either he attained his object. The religious persecution, which constitutes the great blot on his reign, and caused its brilliant career to close in mourning, arose from the same cause. He was fain to give the same unity to the church which he had done to the army, navy, and civil strength of the monarchy. He saw no reason why the Huguenots should not, at the royal command, face about like one of Turenne's battalions. Schism in the church was viewed by him in exactly the same light as rebellion in the state. No efforts were spared by inducements, good deeds, and fair promises, to make proselytes; and when twelve hundred thousand Protestants resisted his seductions, the sword, the fagot, and the wheel were resorted to without mercy for their destruction.
Napoleon, it is well known, had the highest admiration of Louis XIV. Nor is this surprising: their principles of government and leading objects of ambition were the same. "L'état c'est moi," was the principle of this grandson of Henry IV.: "Your first duty is to me, your second to France," said the Emperor to his nephew Prince Louis Napoleon. In different words, the idea was the same. To concentrate Europe in France, France in Paris, Paris in the government, and the government in himself, was the ruling idea of each. But it was no concentration for selfish or unworthy purposes which was then desired; it was for great and lofty objects that this undivided power was desired. It was neither to gratify the desire of an Eastern seraglio, nor exercise the tyranny of a Roman emperor, that either coveted unbounded authority. It was to exalt the nation of which they formed the head, to augment its power, extend its dominion, enhance its fame, magnify its resources, that they both deemed themselves sent into the world. It was the general sense that this was the object of their administration which constituted the strength of both. Equally with the popular party in the present day, they regarded society as a pyramid, of which the multitude formed the base, and the monarch the head. Equally with the most ardent democrat, they desired the augmentation of the national resources, the increase of public felicity. But they both thought that these blessings must descend from the sovereign to his subject, not ascend from the subjects to their sovereign. "Every thing for the people, nothing by them," which Napoleon described as the secret of good government, was not less the maxim of the imperious despot of the Bourbon race.
The identity of their ideas, the similarity of their objects of ambition, appears in the monuments which both have left at Paris. Great as was the desire of the Emperor to add to its embellishment, magnificent as were his ideas in the attempt, he has yet been unable to equal the noble structures of the Bourbon dynasty. The splendid pile of Versailles, the glittering dome of the Invalides, still, after the lapse of a century and a half, overshadow all the other monuments in the metropolis; though the confiscations of the Revolution, and the victories of the Emperor, gave succeeding governments the resources of the half of Europe for their construction. The inscription on the arch of Louis, "Ludovico Magno," still seems to embody the gratitude of the citizens to the greatest benefactor of the capital; and it is not generally known that the two edifices which have added most since his time to the embellishment of the metropolis, and of which the revolution and the empire are fain to take the credit – the Pantheon and the Madeleine – were begun in 1764 by Louis XV., and owe their origin to the magnificent ideas which Louis XIV. transmitted to his, in other respects, unworthy descendant.1
Had one dark and atrocious transaction not taken place, the annalist might have stopped here, and painted the French monarch, with a few foibles and weaknesses, the common bequest of mortality, still as, upon the whole, a noble and magnanimous ruler. His ambition, great as it was, and desolating as it proved, both to the adjoining states, and in the end his own subjects, was the "last infirmity of noble minds." He shared it with Cæsar and Alexander, with Charlemagne and Napoleon. Even his cruel and unnecessary ravaging of the Palatinate, though attended with dreadful private suffering, has too many parallels in the annals of military cruelty. His personal vanities and weaknesses, his love of show, his passion for women, his extravagant expenses, were common to him with his grandfather Henry IV.; they seemed inherent in the Bourbon race, and are the frailties to which heroic minds in every age have been most subject. But, for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the heartrending cruelties with which it was carried into execution, no such apology can be found. It admits neither of palliation nor excuse. But for the massacre of St Bartholomew, and the expulsion of the Morescoes from Spain, it would stand foremost in the annals of the world for kingly perfidy and priestly cruelty. The expulsion of five hundred thousand innocent human beings from their country, for no other cause but difference