[Illustration: Louis XI. at his Devotions----255]
Whatever may have been, in the middle ages, the taste and the custom in
respect of such practices, they were regarded with less respect in the
fifteenth than in the twelfth century, and many people scoffed at the
trust that Louis XI. placed in them, or doubted his sincerity.
Whether they were sincere or assumed, the superstitions of Louis XI. did
not prevent him from appreciating and promoting the progress of
civilization, towards which the fifteenth century saw the first real
general impulse. He favored the free development of industry and trade;
he protected printing, in its infancy, and scientific studies, especially
the study of medicine; by his authorization, it is said, the operation
for the stone was tried, for the first time in France, upon a criminal
under sentence of death, who recovered, and was pardoned; and he welcomed
the philological scholars who were at this time laboring to diffuse
through Western Europe the works of Greek and Roman antiquity. He
instituted, at first for his own and before long for the public service,
post-horses and the letter-post within his kingdom. Towards intellectual
and social movement he had not the mistrust and antipathy of an old,
one-grooved, worn-out, unproductive despotism; his kingly despotism was
new, and, one might almost say, innovational, for it sprang and was
growing up from the ruins of feudal rights and liberties which had
inevitably ended in monarchy. But despotism's good services are
short-lived; it has no need to last long before it generates iniquity and
tyranny; and that of Louis XI., in the latter part of his reign, bore its
natural, unavoidable fruits. "His mistrust," says M. de Barante, "became
horrible, and almost insane; every year he had surrounded his castle of
Plessis with more walls, ditches, and rails. On the towers were iron
sheds, a shelter from arrows, and even artillery. More than eighteen
hundred of those planks bristling with nails, called caltrops, were
distributed over the yonder side of the ditch. There were every day four
hundred crossbow-men on duty, with orders to fire on whosoever
approached. Every suspected passer-by was seized, and carried off to
Tristan l'Hermite, the provost-marshal. No great proofs were required
for a swing on the gibbet, or for the inside of a sack and a plunge in
the Loire. . . . Men who, like Sire de Commynes, had been the king's
servants, and who had lived in his confidence, had no doubt but that he
had committed cruelties and perpetrated the blackest treachery; still
they asked themselves whether there had not been a necessity, and whether
he had not, in the first instance, been the object of criminal
machinations against which he had to defend himself. . . . But,
throughout the kingdom, the multitude of his subjects who had not
received kindnesses from him, nor lived in familiarity with him, nor
known of the ability displayed in his plans, nor enjoyed the wit of his
conversation, judged only by that which came out before their eyes; the
imposts had been made much heavier, without any consent on the part of
the states-general; the talliages, which under Charles VII. brought in
only eighteen hundred thousand livres, rose, under Louis XI., to
thirty-seven hundred thousand; the kingdom was ruined, and the people
were at the last extremity of misery; the prisons were full; none was
secure of life or property; the greatest in the land, and even the
princes of the blood, were not safe in their own houses.
|