Duvergier, Abbot of St. Cyran, who subsequently gave a new impetus to the movement. St. Cyran, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and their associates, who were called Port Royalists, from their relation to the cloister of that name, became the leaders of the party. If we glance at the Jesuit fraternity as it was in the middle of the seventeenth century, we find that its character had altered for the worse. Its professed members were no longer confined to spiritual duties, but shared with the coadjutors the management of colleges and the administration of secular affairs. The religious fervor that had existed earlier, was very much cooled. The obligation to renounce property, as a private possession, was evaded. A "mercantile spirit" crept even into the institutions of education which had been established by the order. In the room of defending the Papacy, it generally sided with France in the contests with the Holy See. By the policy adopted in its Asiatic missions, the Jesuit order at length came into conflict with the Capuchins and Franciscans, as it had offended the Dominicans by opposing the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. The Jesuits gradually ceased to be absorbed in a great object, the restoration of the Papal dominion and the extension of it over the globe, and directed their energies to the preservation of their own power. But it was their lax ethical maxims, which more than any other cause, undermined their reputation. The • Provincial Letters" of Pascal, in which their loose casuistry was chastised with the keenest satire, inflicted upon them a deadly wound. While the Jansenists, who were in favor of the independence of the Church, in opposition to ultramontane usurpations, supported the King in his conflict with the Pope, they enjoyed the royal favor; but when they set themselves against his effort to bring the Church under his feet, he turned against them and gave his ear to the inimical suggestions of the Jesuits. Finally, in

66

1 Ranke, iii. 131 seq.

PERSECUTION OF THE HUGUENOTS.

453 1710, he pulled down the cloister of Port Royal, and banished the Jansenist leaders. In 1708, Clement XI. had issued a bull, prohibiting the "Moral Reflections" of Quesnel, a work which had been approved by Bossuet and by Noailles, the Archbishop of Paris. This was followed by a heavier blow at the Jansenist party in 1713, in the form of the famous bull, Unigenitus, which explicitly condemned one hundred and one propositions of the same book. The Pope was forced into this action by the French Court, under the influence of Father Le Tellier, who had declared that there were more than a hundred censurable propositions in the book. Clement was obliged to make good the declaration by condemning one hundred and one. It was not the Jansenists alone, but all true Gallicans, who were attacked in these proceedings. This controversy was continued in the next reign, after the death of Louis XIV., between the Opposants or Appellants on the one hand, and the Acceptants or Constitutionaires, the adversaries of the Jansenists, on the other. The Papal authority was brought to bear against the Jansenist opinions, in subservience to the dictation of the Court, and this coercion had a demoralizing effect upon the French clergy, many of whom were forced into a denial of their real convictions. The Jansenists survived in the separatist archiepiscopal Church of Utrecht, and still more in combination with the tendencies to liberalism, out of which grew the political and religious revolutions that marked the close of the last century.1

The Huguenots, under Richelieu and Mazarin, had been protected in their religious freedom. It was only as a political organization that these statesmen had made war upon them. After the death of Mazarin, in 1661, a party that was hostile to the Protestants gained an increasing influence over the King, whose personal vices were attended with forebodings of remorse, and with su

1 Niedner, Kirchengeschichte, p. 751.

perstitious anxieties that sought relief in the persecution of heresy. He fell under the influence of his Jesuit Confessor, La Chaise, with whom were joined the war-minister, the Marquis de Louvois, and even Madam Maintenon, his wife, formerly a Protestant. Hence the great attempt to make proselytes by the use of all varieties of cruelty. "For many years," says Martin, the government of Louis XIV. "had been acting towards the Reformation as towards a victim entangled in a noose, which is drawn tighter and tighter till it strangles its prey." Declarations and edicts of the most oppressive character had followed one another in rapid succession. At length the atrocious scheme of the dragonade, or the billeting of soldiers in Huguenot families, was resorted to. Over the pretended conversions effected by such means, the profligate rulers of France sang praises to God. Louis XIV. endeavored to quiet his own fear of hell by making a hell for his unoffending subjects. The penalty of death was denounced against all converts who relapsed to the Huguenot faith. In the course of three years, fifty thousand families had fled from the country. In 1685, the Edict of Nantes, the great charter of Protestant rights, was revoked. The churches of the Huguenots were seized; and although emigration was forbidden to the laity, not far from a quarter of a million of refugees escaped, to enrich Protestant countries to which they removed, by their skill and industry. Many remained firm under the severest trials, and assembled in forests and byplaces to celebrate their worship. It was not until 1788 that their marriages, which had been treated as invalid, were pronounced legal; and they did not gain their rights in full, until the Revolution.

"France was impoverished," writes Martin, "not only in Frenchmen who exiled themselves, but in those much more numerous, who remained in spite of themselves, discouraged, ruined, whether they openly resisted perse

H

TRIUMPHS AND DEFEAT OF LOUIS XIV.

455 cution, or suffered some external observances of Catholicism to be wrung from them, all having neither energy in work, or security in life; it was really the activity of more than a million of men that France lost, and of the million that produced most." It is a significant fact, in the light of recent events, that many of the refugees were received by the Elector Frederic, and helped to build up Berlin, then a small city of twelve thousand inhabitants.

After the close of the war of the Spanish Succession (1713), at the instigation of Le Tellier, who had succeeded La Chaise as a kind of minister of ecclesiastical affairs, the persecution against the Protestants was renewed, in forms of aggravated and ingenious cruelty.

In his foreign policy, Louis XIV. succeeded brilliantly for a time, but was doomed to terrible disappointment and defeat. He made himself as formidable by his power and ambition as Philip II. had been in the latter part of the preceding century; and like him he was destined to experience a mortifying failure, as well as to lay the foundation of untold calamities for his nation. His attack on the Spanish Netherlands, which were regarded by Holland as a bulwark against his inroads and aggression, led to the triple alliance of Holland, England, and Sweden, in 1668, the object of which was to compel him to conclude a peace with Spain. The same year he concluded with Spain the Peace of Aix la Chapelle. The resentment of Louis against Holland, led him to form, in 1670, the secret treaty with Charles II., in behalf of Catholicism and absolutism. But the unpopularity of the war against Holland among the English, and the necessity under which Charles was placed, of making peace with the Dutch, together with a like course on the part of other allies of Louis, led to the Treaty of Nimeguen in 1678-9, by which he gained a number of towns and fortresses in the Netherlands, besides cer

tain German places.

as before the war.

Holland was left in the same state The continued aggressions of Louis

occasioned the grand alliance of the European powers against him, and the war of ten years, in which William of Orange was the foremost leader among the allies. In the early part of the previous war, when Holland was overrun by the French armies and reduced almost to despair, the Republican magistrates were overthrown and the government placed in the hands of William. By him the courage of the nation had been roused, and, as the only means of defense, they had cut through the dikes and inundated the country. Thenceforward William was the most determined and dangerous antagonist of Louis, and the moving spirit of the coalitions formed against him. In the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, Louis renounced his support of the Stuarts, and admitted William III. to be the rightful king of Great Britain and Ireland. The war of the Spanish succession, in which Louis sought to supplant the Austrian House in Spain and to combine Spain with France, by placing his grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou, on the Spanish throne, was closed in 1713, by the Peace of Utrecht. It was provided that France and Spain should never be united under one sovereign; the Spanish Netherlands were transferred to Austria; and the Bourbon Prince was left on the throne of Spain, and his title was acknowledged by the allies, in 1714. The "grand monarch" came out of the wars which had been kindled by his ambition, thwarted and reduced to distress. A significant feature of the Peace of Utrecht was the recognition of the Elector of Brandenburg as king of Prussia. As Sweden sank down from the eminence which it held for a time, as the leading Protestant power in the North, Prussia was rising to take her place.

The reign of Louis XIV. effected the utter paralysis and prostration of the Catholic Reaction. The Popes