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by
Will Durant
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August 26 - September 4, 2021
The most famous of French kings was only one-quarter French. He was half Spanish by his mother, Anne of Austria; he was one-quarter Italian by his grandmother Marie de Médicis.
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His mind was not as good as his manners. He almost matched Napoleon in his penetrating judgment of men, but he fell far short of Caesar’s philosophical intellect, or Augustus’ humane and farseeing statesmanship. “He had nothing more than good sense,” said Sainte-Beuve, “but he had a great deal of it,”
Until his love of glory ruined his character and his country, he had his share of estimable qualities. His court was impressed by his justice, lenience, generosity, and self-control.
Two successive crop failures could bring famine, for transportation was not developed to the point of effectively supplying the deficiencies of one region with the surplus of another. There was no year without famine somewhere in France.
It was an age of strict manners and loose morals. Dress was the sacrament of status. In the middle classes clothing was almost puritanically simple—a black coat modestly covering shirt and trousers and legs. But in the elite it was magnificent, and more so in men than in women.
The dress of courtly women was free and flowing to accord with their morals.
Manners were stately, though under the flourish of the saluting hat and trailing skirt many crudities remained. Men spat on floors, and urinated on the stairways of the Louvre.
Men were learning from women the graces of conduct and speech; they spoke clearly and correctly, avoided sententiousness and pedantry, and touched all topics, however profound, with a light gaiety of spirit and phrase.
The King ate with his fingers to the end of his life, but by that time forks were in general use. About 1660 napkins came into vogue, and guests were no longer expected to wipe their fingers on the tablecloth.
In law homosexuality was punishable with death; a nation preparing for war and paying for babies could not let the sexual instincts be diverted from reproduction; but it was difficult to pursue such deviates when the King’s own brother was a noted invert, beneath contempt but above the law.
Love between the sexes was accepted as a romantic relief from marriage, but not as a reason for marriage; the acquisition, protection, or transmission of property was judged more important in marriage than the attempt to fix for a lifetime the passions of a day.
a woman felt desolate if no man but her husband pursued her; and some faithless husbands winked at their wives’ infidelities.
“If a man needs a religion to conduct himself properly in this world,” said Ninon, “it is a sign that he has either a limited mind or a corrupt heart.”79 She might thence have concluded to the almost universal necessity of religion; instead she slipped into prostitution at the age of fifteen (1635).
In that society intelligent women were numerous beyond any precedent; and if they were also attractive in face or figure, or in the solicitude of kindliness, they became a pervasive civilizing force. The salons were training men to be sensitive to feminine refinement, and women to be responsive to masculine intellect.
every satire is a half-truth; in his philosophical moments Molière might have recognized the right of women to share in the intellectual life of their times. It is the women of France, even more than her writers and artists, who are the crown of her civilization, and the special glory of her history.
In the portraits that have come down to us these ladies seem a bit ponderous, overflowing their corsages; but apparently the men of that time liked an adipose warmth in their amours.
By and large, however, the mentality and morals of the Catholic clergy—perhaps under the stimulus of competition from Huguenot ministers—were better than for centuries before.
The Catholic Church had not explicitly repudiated the predestinarianism of St. Paul and St. Augustine, but she had let it sink into the background of her teaching as hard to reconcile with that freedom of the will which seemed logically indispensable to moral responsibility and the idea of sin.
We should listen to Pascal at some length, for he was not only the greatest writer of French prose, but the most brilliant defender of religion in all the Age of Reason.
Today we find it hard to understand why a nation should have been divided, and a king so excited, about abstruse problems of divine grace, predestination, and free will; we forget that religion was then as important as politics seem now.
The harmony of the arts under Louis was impressive, but it sounded too often the same chord, so that at last it became the expression not of an age and a nation, but only of an ego and a court.
Our passions may sometimes sleep, but our vanity never rests.
The art of life lies in concealing our self-love sufficiently to avoid antagonizing the self-love of others. We must pretend to some degree of altruism.
he concluded with the maligned Greek that sense pleasure is good but intellectual pleasure better, and that we need as little concern ourselves with the gods as they seem to do with us.
After making every discount, and regretting that so much beauty was tarnished with so much cruelty, we may join the French in acclaiming the age of Louis XIV as standing with Periclean Greece, Augustan Rome, Renaissance Italy, and Elizabethan-Jacobean England among the peaks in the faltering trajectory of mankind.
His private morals were impeccable, his public morals were no better than those of other rulers; he used deception or force when he thought them necessary to his major purposes. No one has yet reconciled Christianity with government.
By 1650 religion had taken on a measure of social stratification: the poor favored the dissenting sects—Baptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc.—or the Catholics; the middle classes were predominantly Puritans; the aristocracy and most of the gentry (untitled landowners) adhered to the disestablished Anglican Church.
Intolerance was inverted rather than lessened. Instead of Anglicans persecuting Catholics, Dissenters, and Puritans, the triumphant Puritans, who formerly had clamored for toleration, now persecuted Catholics, Dissenters, and Anglicans.
The Old Testament was loved with a special devotion, because it offered the model of a society dominated by religion.
The Puritan attempt to legislate morality was probably the most thoroughgoing since the Mosaic Law. Civil marriage was recognized as valid and divorce was allowed, but adultery was made a capital crime; however, after two executions on this head no jury would convict.
The Puritan regimen narrowed the mind but stengthened the will and the character. It helped to prepare Englishmen for self-rule.
They addressed all persons by the singular thou or thee, instead of by the originally honorific plural you.
All the goals for which the Great Rebellion of 1642–49 had been fought had now been set aside. Taxation without representation or parliamentary approval, arrest without due process of law, trial without jury, were as flagrant as before; and rule by the army and naked force was made still more offensive by being coated with religious cant. “The rule of Cromwell became hated as no government has ever been hated in England before or since.”
The American Civil War renewed the English Civil War by pitting the descendants of English aristocrats in the South against the descendants of English Puritans in the North.
we should note that at the height of the Puritan ascendancy (1653) Sir Thomas Urquhart published his spirited translation of Rabelais,I preferring scatology to eschatology.
censorship increases with the insecurity of the government.
Today the subject is the poem’s greatest handicap, a fairy tale recited to adults in twelve cantos; and a sustained effort is now required to accompany from beginning to end so long an exposition of so harsh and antiquated a theology. But never has nonsense been made more sublime.
Like the French dramatists, Milton indulges a passion for oratory; everyone from God to Eve makes speeches, and Satan finds hellfire no impediment to rhetoric. It is disturbing to learn that even in hell we shall have to listen to lectures.
God, in this poem, is not the indescribable effulgence felt in Dante’s Paradiso; he is a Scholastic philosopher who gives long and unconvincing reasons why he, the omnipotent, allows Satan to exist, and allows him to tempt man, all the while foreseeing that man will succumb and bring all mankind to centuries of sin and misery. He argues that without freedom to sin there is no virtue, without trial there is no wisdom; he thinks it better that man should face temptation and resist it than not be tempted at all, quite unforeseeing that the Lord’s Prayer would beg God not to lead man into
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On the basis of Scripture he rejects orthodox Trinitarianism, and prefers the Arian heresy: Christ was literally the Son of God, but he was begotten by the Father in time; therefore he was not coeval with the Father, and never equal with Him.
What is hardest to accept in Milton is his capacity for hatred and his intemperate abuse of those who differed from him. He thought that we should pray for our enemies, but that we should also “call down curses publicly on the enemies of God and the Church, as also on false brethren, and on such as are guilty of any grievous offenses against God, or even against ourselves.”
Parliament wished for a wider vengeance, but Charles insisted that pardon should be offered to all except those who had signed the death sentence of his father.7 Of these a third were dead, a third had fled; twenty-eight were arrested and tried; fifteen were condemned to life imprisonment, thirteen were hanged, drawn, and quartered
when the London populace mistook Nell for her Catholic rival and jeered her, she put her pretty head out of the coach window and cried: “Be silent, good people; I am the Protestant whore.”
His life suggests the same attitude that we find in many contemporary Frenchmen, who lived as atheists and died as Catholics; this seemed to get the best of both worlds, and to be a great improvement on Pascal’s “wager.”
Charles accepted this harsh legislation because he was appealing to Parliament for funds, but he never forgave Clarendon, and lost respect for the bishops who, so soon after being restored, proved so hard in vengeance and poor in charity. Charles concluded that “Presbyterianism is no religion for a gentleman, and Anglicanism is no religion for a Christian.”
“We need not desire any better evidence that a man is in the wrong,” he said, “than to hear him declare against reason, and thereby to acknowledge that reason is against him.”
The Anglican Church, which under Charles I had dared to say an occasional word for the poor, now concluded, from the Puritan Rebellion, that its interests would be best assured by identifying them entirely with those of the possessing classes.
While the political effect of the revolutions of 1642–49 and 1688–89 was the conquest of the king by the Parliament, a simultaneous economic revolution brought the conquest of Parliament by commerce, industry, and finance.
some seventy thousand Londoners, a seventh of the population, died of the plague in 1665.
at three o’clock on the morning of Sunday, September 2, in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, a fire began which in three days burned down most of London north of the river.
