The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization, Volume VIII

by Will Durant

The result is an unpleasant mixture of styles, but Wren redeemed it by crowning the transept with a dome rivaling Brunelleschi’s at Florence and Michelangelo’s in Rome. St. Paul’s remains the finest church ever built by Protestants.

The morals of the unrecorded commoners were probably better than under Elizabeth, for economic routine kept them steady, they did not have the means to be wicked, and they still felt the stimulus and surveillance of their Puritan faiths.

Religion had literally lost caste; it belonged to tradesmen and peasants; most preachers were put down as long-faced, long-eared, long-winded hypocrites and bores. The only religion fit for a gentleman was a polite Anglicanism wherein the master attended Sunday services to lend support to a chaplain who kept the villagers in fear of hell, and who said grace with due brevity from the foot of the master’s board.

It became more fashionable to be a materialist with Hobbes than a Christian with Milton, a blind old fool who took Genesis as history. Hell, overdone for the past twenty years, had lost its terrors for the possessing classes; heaven, for them, was here and now, in a society freed from social rebellion and moral inhibitions, under a court and King that gave the example and set the pace in lechery, gambling, and merriment.

There were doubtless others, lost to history because virtue makes no news. The higher the rank, the lower the morals.

In all classes the husband’s will was law. In the lower classes he used his legal rights to beat his wife, but the law forbade him to use any stick thicker than his thumb.

The law struggled to discourage crime with what seems to us barbarous punishments; but perhaps sharp measures had to be used to penetrate dull minds. For treason the penalty was torture and death; for murder, felony, or counterfeiting the currency, hanging; the wife who killed her husband was to be burned alive.

Corruption was above normal in all classes. Pepys’s Diary smells with corruption in business, in politics, in the navy, and in Pepys.

In 1675 it was estimated that two thirds of the Commons were in the pay of Charles II, and the other third in the pay of Louis XIV.

The French King found it quite feasible to bribe members to vote against Charles whenever Charles deviated troublesomely from Bourbon policies. As for Charles, he repeatedly accepted large sums from Louis to play the French game in politics, religion, or war. It was the gayest and most rotten society in history.

Louise de Kéroualle had Lely paint her with one breast naked, and Nell Gwyn went her one better.

Woman was already so intricate an artifact that a Restoration play pictured her in hyperbole: Her teeth were made in the Blackfriars, her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair on Silver Street. . . . She takes herself asunder, when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes, and about noon the next day is put together again like a great German clock.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages was no merely social function. Water was scarcely ever drunk, even by children;132 beer was easier to find than water fit to drink. So everybody, of any age, drank beer, and the well-to-do added whiskey or imported wine. Most people visited a tavern once a day, and all classes got drunk now and then.

Tea came to England from China about 1650, but it was so expensive that a century passed before it displaced coffee in the English ritual. Pepys thought it quite an adventure when he had his first cup of tea.

an unwritten agreement: the merchants would let the landowners rule England, but the ruling aristocracy would direct foreign policy to commercial interests, and would leave merchants and manufacturers increasingly free from official regulation.

he discovered Montaigne’s Essays, and became a philosopher; if, later, he graduated from politics to statesmanship, it was because the difference between politics and statesmanship is philosophy—the ability to see the moment and the part in the light of the lasting and the whole.

Politics had sometimes to deal with crowds, which frightened Halifax. “There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured . . . The angry buzz of a multitude is one of the bloodiest noises in the world.”

It was another of history’s humors that the Anglican Church, which for a century had been persecuting Calvinists (Presbyterians, Puritans, and other Dissenters), should now accept a Dutch Calvinist as its head.

Anne’s freedom from intellect allowed her ministers to appropriate much of the authority and initiative that Parliament had left to the Crown; the political battles hereafter (except under George III) were to be between Parliament and ministers rather than between Parliament and sovereign.

Gradually the power of the periodical press overtook the influence of the pulpit in forming the public mind to private purposes, and a new secularizing force entered into history.

Rarely, in these plays, does love rise above its physical basis of mutual itching for mutual titillation. We hunger, as we read them, for some ray of nobility, but we are offered, as an ideal, the ethics of the stews.

He condemned so many dramatists, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Congreve and Dryden, that all the indicted might feel acquitted by their company.

Pepys then drew up for the Duke of York two papers exposing the incompetence of navy personnel, and these papers played a part in the reform of the fleet. He worked hard, usually rising at 4 A.M.,52 but he saw to it that his salary of £ 350 a year was aided by presents, commissions, and other perquisites, some of which might now be called bribes, but which in those amiable days were considered legitimate amplifications. His own superior, Lord Montagu, had explained to him that “it was not the salary of any place that did make a man rich, but the opportunity of getting money while he is in the place.”

Many things in the man were likable. We have noted his love of music. He pursued science too, experimented in physics, became a member of the Royal Society, was elected its president in 1684. He was as vain as a man, he took bribes, he beat his servant till his arm hurt,65 he was cruel to his wife, and he was an arrant rake. But what royal and ducal exemplars he had, more shameless far than he! And which of us would have a spotless fame if he left so honest a diary?

though the Church had long since spoken of Christianity as the once “seamless robe of Christ” torn to pieces by the Reformation, no one—least of all the Carlyle of Sartor Resartus—has impugned the unprecedented force with which Swift here reduced all philosophies and religions to diverse garments used to clothe our shivering ignorance or conceal our naked desires.

he opposed free thought, on the ground that “the bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.”

Peter’s almost personal massacre of the Streltsi suggests a sadistic pleasure in cruelty, an orgasm of blood; and no need of the state required to have two conspirators sliced to death inch by inch.8 Peter was immune to pity or sentiment, and lacked the sense of justice that checked the whims of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great.

He was swamped with ideas, thereby amazing Leibniz, who had a swamp of his own; but Peter’s ideas were frankly utilitarian. He had an open mind for anything that could make his country catch up to the West.

when the prostitutes who served him bemoaned their modest honorariums he replied that he paid them as much as he paid a grenadier, whose services were far more valuable.

The women were likewise urged to adopt Western costume; they resisted less than the men, for in dress women are annual revolutionists.

There were now some two hundred “temporal” principalities enjoying such independence; sixty-three ecclesiastical states ruled by Roman Catholic archbishops, bishops, or abbots; and fifty-one “free cities,” subject only to the emperor, and only formally to him. France rejoiced to see so many Germanies rather than one.

Frederick William began with a plan and a will, which are the first principle of statesmanship; then, by taxes and French subsidies, he raised money, which is the second principle of statesmanship; then, with money, he organized an Army, which is the third principle of statesmanship. By 1656 he had the first standing army in Europe—eighteen thousand trained men permanently in arms.

He recognized that religious intolerance was an obstacle to economic and political development; he distinguished himself in Germany by allowing his people to remain Lutheran while he himself remained Calvinist; and he gave religious freedom to Catholics, Unitarians, and Jews.

Largely through Jesuit persuasion some Protestant princes went over to the Roman Church in this period. Calvinism gained on Lutheranism, which tended to a stiff Scholastic dogmatism. Chiefly in reaction to this formalism the Pietist movement spread, seeking to replace outward observances with an inner spirit of union with God.

Pietism, like Puritanism, injured itself by making its piety public and professional, sometimes falling into affectation and cant. In the eighteenth century it was swamped by the rationalist flood that poured in from France.

The German aristocracy now spoke German chiefly to servants. German authors wrote in French for the upper classes or in Latin for the learned world.

History is a race between art and war.

The Bach family was now entering upon the musical scene in bewildering profusion. We know of some four hundred Bachs between 1550 and 1850: all musicians, sixty of them holding important posts in the musical world of their time.

Mohammed Kuprili, who at the age of seventy inaugurated half a century of rule by his Albanian family. His own vizierate lasted only five years, but in that quinquennium he had 36,000 persons executed for crimes ranging from theft to treason; his chief executioner averaged three stranglings per day.

Kara Mustafa felt that the feuds between Hapsburg and Bourbon, between Catholicism and Protestantism, offered him an opportunity to take Vienna, perhaps all Europe.

War, which had strengthened the Ottoman state when the sultans led their armies in person, exhausted the state when they preferred the easy triumphs of the harem to the ordeal of battle. Domination of life and thought by a fatalistic and unprogressive religion stifled Islamic science, which in the Middle Ages had been pre-eminent; knowledge grew in the West and lagged in the East.

For the West the repulse of the Turks was an invitation to internecine war. Freed from the pressure of Islam, Austria and Germany turned to face the ambitions of Louis XIV, who was stretching his arms into the Netherlands, the Rhineland, the Palatinate, Italy, and Spain. These blows from the West completed the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire; nothing remained of it but the form.

The poor were abused by the rich, who naturally controlled the governments and made the laws. The rich explained that if the poor were better paid they would become disorderly and insolent. The women, except in the flowering of their beauty, were exploited by the men and the race.

The intensification of nationalism involved the weakening of the papacy, and shared with the growth of science in promoting secularism and lessening the role of religion in European life.

“Stradivarius.” He worked incessantly, ate frugally, lived ninety-three years, and amassed such a fortune by the superior beauty, construction, tone, and finish of his instruments that ricco come Stradivari became Cremonese for opulence. He is known to have made 1,116 violins, violas, and violoncellos; 540 of his violins exist today;

The Thirty Years’ War left the Jews of Germany relatively unharmed. Protestants and Catholics were so engrossed in mutual murder that they almost forgot to kill Jews, even when these had lent them money.

The rabbis, who in the Middle Ages had been men of courage and wisdom, became in this age devotees of a mysticism that fled from the hell of persecution and penury into a heaven of compensatory dreams. The Talmud in the Middle Ages had replaced the Bible as the soul of Judaism; now the Cabala replaced the Talmud.

Not till Lessing (1729–81) did German schools and literature regain the stature they had reached with Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, and Melanchthon two centuries before.

Elementary education was made universal and compulsory for both sexes in the duchy of Württemberg in 1565, in the Dutch Republic in 1618, in the duchy of Weimar in 1619, in Scotland in 1696, in France in 1698, in England in 1876. The delay in England was due to the wide extension of voluntary education through private religious agencies, and to the feeling in the ruling classes that in the prevailing economic system the education of the poor was unnecessary and probably undesirable.

Except in the Dutch Republic, universities were now in decline, purged by victorious sects, disordered by riotous students, and dominated by barren theological disputes. In France and Germany university degrees were sold for cash.