Louis XiV, Revolution, Napoleon_a

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: History

Lesson: 16-23

Genre: Talk

Track: 16

Dictation Name: RR160E10a

Location/Venue:

Year:

Almighty God our Heavenly Father we thank thee that we can begin and end our days with Thee. And we thank Thee that at the beginning of a new year that our time is in Thy hands who doest all things well. We pray our Father for those who suffer behind the iron curtain for their faith. That Thou wouldst be with them to strengthen them and to deliver them. We thank Thee our Father that we have the assurance in this grim struggle against the powers of darkness that Thou art He who shall prevail. That greater is He that is within us then he that is in the world. And so our God in this confidence we study Thy workings in the past and base all our tomorrows in the confidence of Thy grace. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Since our study of World History is a survey inevitably we must skip over a great deal that is very pertinent and very interesting. It would be worthwhile, for example, to take time to deal with the continuing force of feudalism far beyond the middle ages into the modern era. As a matter of fact the world of feudalism is today the most virile part of the modern world. The two countries that are the most feudalistic in the modern world are the United States and Japan. Japan got a heavy dose of feudalism from the Portuguese missionaries, the samurai, the business world of Japan gains its vitality from a feudalistic structure. The whole nature of the American system is feudalistic; the county comes from the word count, the realm of a count, only without a count. It’s a law area. So the United States and Japan are the two most feudalistic areas in the world today and they have the greatest freedom and also the greatest ability to function. Local authority and civil governments prevail and local loyalties in feudalism were very powerful and people do develop loyal loyalties in this country, they will be from a particular part of the south, a particular county, they will be people from a particular part of the West, a particular county or community and this was characteristic of feudalism, there was no such thing as a national feeling in the time of feudalism.

As a result the world of feudalism was not conscious of national or racial lines but of religious lines and local loyalties. The world of feudalism thus is a very different world from ours. For one thing people traveled around a great deal in the feudalistic world, far, far more than we today realize. And when we look for example at the life of the man who in the era we shall be studying tonight, the late 17th and early part of the 18th century, was the most powerful figure of his day, regarded by many to this day as the greatest man of his century, we find a very surprising thing. The man in question was a Frenchman, Duke François-Eugène of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, margrave of Saluzzo. Incidentally he never fought for France in his life. He was rejected by Louis XIV when he applied for generalship of the armies as too presumptuous. For one thing he was too powerful in his background for Louis XIV to want to give an important figure so much power. Eugene, Prince Eugene was related to every royal family of Europe. On top of that to give you an idea of the feudal world which he was a part of and how in the feudal world you could just pick up and go anywhere and serve any monarch you felt and after you finished serving him you could go over to the person on the opposite side of the fence and you were not a traitor. You were just a feudal lord serving whoever bought your services. And of course, there was no feeling about intermarriage between peoples and so people like Prince Eugene represented a very varied kind of background as did almost every royal family of the day. To give you an idea of the ancestry of Prince Eugene, he was predominantly French but also German, Roman, Byzantine and Arminian. He also had Spanish, Portuguese, Scandinavian, English, Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian and Mongol bloods. He could trace his ancestry back to Thomas Aquinas, he could also trace it back to the Bourges family, his mother was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, there was nobody of any consequence throughout Europe, the Middle East and way back almost to China that he was not related to.

The reason of course is that this is the kind of ground where you don’t find good French Catholics, you see. Now, the work ethics was associated therefore with protestants and Jews, in particular, Calvinistic Protestants. This is why, incidentally, and there’s been a study made of this very recently, Jamestown was such a failure. The men who went to Jamestown were all of the gentry, they were anti-puritan, and they didn’t believe in work. Their idea was that they were going to go out there and round up the Indians and tell them, all right boys, you do the work. And the Indians had other ideas and the colony failed. It was only as settlement was made by those who had the puritan work ethics that America began to prosper. And this of course was the reason for the eminence of England and America, the puritan element there, and France when it kicked out the Huguenots, the French Calvinists, began thereafter to face economic problems because the work ethics had been effect abolished. This period to the 17th and 18th centuries was the period of the enlightenment, the triumph of humanism. Now the birth of the enlightenment was in England but France then carried it to its logical conclusion. And in a sense the era we are going to be considering tonight requires us to concentrate on France because France was the world leader in the latter part of the 17th century up until almost the French Revolution and again for a while through Napoleon. France was as it were the center of the world. And therefore France pioneered in so many things and to this day France is in a sense a step ahead of the world in carrying the logic of the modern era to its conclusion. Some of the things many people dislike in France are precisely the kind of thing that you find in every other country of the western world, only the French have logically gone a little ahead, a little further down the road with regard to it. During this era and far earlier well before the Reformation French had Gallicanism, now Gallicanism in a sense was the same thing as Anglicanism.

It was the French church separated to a very large degree from Rome, still nominally Catholic but really virtually independent of the pope. This ended with Napoleon. Work as I indicated was despised. Jews and Protestants were the working rich and therefore aliens. They were so much despised that one occasion when the Duke of Saint-Simon who was not a fool but a very intelligent man saw Louis XIV chatting in a friendly way with a wealthy French banker, Samuel Bernard, he was very shocked and thought it was disgraceful that the king of France should talk to a banker, a working man. This was a shameful thing in his eyes. You can see how this perspective which was characteristic of all of Europe and England, apart from the Puritan Huguenot tradition and the Reform tradition also in Switzerland and the Netherlands, but not quite to the same degree, why it created problems in these societies and why inescapably it led to the development of revolutionary trends against the aristocracy. Now Louis XIV whose dates are 1638 to 1715 had a long reign as a king. He was a small boy when he succeeded his father, Louis XIII. He was a king therefore for well over sixty five years, that’s a long reign. From the time he was a boy well into his seventies. He was a very intelligent monarch, he was a very physically strong and virile man, a man of tremendous abilities. It’s very, very easy with Louis XIV as many such strong people do to detest him thoroughly and also to have a tremendous admiration for him. It’s very nigh impossible to know much about Louis XIV without reacting very strongly one way or another to Louis XIV.

As a result he worked to nullify it. He brought the nobility to the court to prevent them from building up their power base in their particular realms so that if a lord was from Burgundy which had been an independent kingdom, or Aquitaine, which had been a powerful kingdom or Normandy a powerful kingdom, and so on. They came to the court; they stayed there unless the king gave them permission to leave. He gave them all kinds of ritual offices and he made everything in the court an elaborate semi-religious state ritual with himself the king as it were god on earth and these as the high priests. So that he in no time at all had the nobility fighting with each other to try to get important positions that would put them close to the king. To be Lord of the Chamber pot, for example, which meant that first thing in the morning you were there by the king’s bed with a chamber pot or Lord of the Wardrobe so that you handed him his bathrobe when he got up, and so on. You were there to say something to the king and to put into a word on this and that, you see. Everything was made into an elaborate ritual, it seems ridiculous to us, you know, that men who had ruled realms had been powerful, had armies, would be quarreling and struggling to get the honor from somebody else of handing him his chamber pot or a bathrobe. But Louis very shrewdly made this everything, made everything a ritual and then every night: gambling. So that the lords were hooked on this and they became gamblers who enjoyed doing nothing but sitting around and going through the ritual during the day and dreaming of some little job whereby they handed something to the king and then at night gambling. They had no desire for work to begin with, now they were tied to the court ritual and separated from their realms. This had great consequences for the future of France because they were now separated from the common people on whom they depended for their income.

They were courtiers whose life was governed by the court, who regarded it as the worst of punishment after a while to be abolished from the court for a while and set back to their own estates. Now as I said France was a collection of kingdoms with very different peoples, the Bretons, for example, were Celts, related to the Welsh. The Burgundians were a separate people, Germanic. In the south of France you had people of a very different character where Syrian influence in the early part of the Middle Ages and the so-called Dark Ages had been very strong, very powerful, so you had a different kind of person there. Now while these lords were apart of these realms and spoke the local language they had a closeness with these people, they understood their problems, they could rule them wisely. But once they became courtiers and spoke the language of the court they were strangers to these people. This paved the way for their ultimate downfall, because they had nothing in common any longer with the people on whom they depended. But Louis XIV broke the back of feudalism in France by tying the people to the court and to a court ritual. Then next Louis XIV had a middle class cabinet. He went to these working people of the middle class and made them the real powers in the government. Now these were people who however wealthy, however successful, were not important enough to take over the government. They were experts, they were a bureaucracy, the state was run by them but none of them were able to dominate it because none of them were powerful enough individually or national figures. It has been said that the first pentagon was Versailles and the court of Louis XIV, very rightly so. It was even to the military extent because he established there the first department of war in any modern sense, he had a core of engineers to do the military planning. From a few thousand peace time army he raised the army to a hundred thousand in peace time and four hundred thousand in war. And in peace time they were busy planning; the first inspector General of his army was General Martinet, from whence we get the word martinet.

That is, someone who is a drill master and makes you toe the mark, do everything with precision. That is why the armies of Louis XIV triumphed for a long time all over the face of Europe until they were defeated by the man that Louis XIV had turned down, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Prince Eugene of Savoy not only defeated Louis XIV, the Duke of Marlow was in association with Savoy, but he also drove the Turks back and had he lived he intended to take Constantinople. But what Louis XIV did with his pentagon concept was to turn government from a one man thing as it had been into a bureaucracy. So that after Louis XIV you had the development of the modern idea of the state, a group of bureaucrats and experts, a group of planners doing everything and one man at the top saying go ahead with this or with that, simply administrating the bureaucracy. Then another aspect of Louis XIV’s work, he built Versailles. Now a little later I’ll show you some pictures of Versailles as well as Prince Eugene of Savoy but Versailles was a very interesting concept, first it was built out in the country outside of Paris some miles. Now this was a very shrewd move on the part of Louis XIV. Louis recognized the power of a big city to dominate a government and to color its outlook. Any big city is likely to develop a large number of people, poor people, a rabble, that can be a mob, that can dominate a government. He recognized also that a big city can color the outlook of a government and so he felt, never in Paris, the government must not be there it must be at Versailles. He rarely ever in his life set foot in Paris which was a very interesting fact. The King of France who rarely went into Paris and then got out as quickly as he could, hated to stay overnight. If Paris wanted to see the king they had to go to Versailles. Thus Paris, a very powerful city, was never able to exercise any influence on his government. Moreover he built Versailles without any walls or without a moat to indicate his sense of security and power, to say I have a realm so powerful, so strong and my peace time is army is such that nobody, neither the lords nor any foreign power can trouble me.

Therefore I will make my capitol, Versailles, out in the country like a garden, like a park. He had a zoo there with animals from all lands, statues everywhere, fountains, gardens, making it look like a new Garden of Eden, a new paradise. It was both his residence and the seat of his government. Versailles was copied by virtually every other country. We have an imitation of Versailles that Jefferson copied in Washington D.C. Moreover, the architecture was humanistic. I pointed out last time how Philip II of Spain when he built the Escorial, his palace, again out in the country, made it with a chapel at the center and a monastery, also a mausoleum, so that the Catholic faith was at the center of his concept of rule. For Louis XIV the chapel was at one side, the center of the building was his bedroom and he ruled from his bedroom, he’d get up in the morning and after having eaten and bathed, he bathed daily, he would then receive a procession of his ministers, these middle class experts, make his decisions, this was the center. Moreover the fact that he reigned so long made his reign extremely important in that what he did could be made permanent, it could be made so much a part of the life of the nation because he ruled for so many years, it’s interesting to realize that Louis XV was not the son of Louis XIV, he was his great grandson who succeeded as a boy of five and Louis XV like his great grandfather reigned a long time, from 1715-1774 so that it was his grandson, Louis XVI who succeeded him. So that in three monarchs, three generations are passed over because their reigns were so long.

Thus Louis XIV made France the world power, there was a weakness in what Louis XIV did, great as it was and important as it was, he made French the language of international trade, of diplomacy, the world language, so that as a matter of fact French continued for a long time alongside as English as the international language and still does to a degree. But since the economic policy everywhere including France was mercantilist, that is, buy American, buy French, buy this, just your own country, develop colonies as the source of raw materials and as your market, it put France at a disadvantage because the French were simply not Navally oriented. They were a tremendous land power, their army was always their strong point, their navy they never did emphasize. This meant that with a powerful empire, because India was French, Canada, and much of America, was French, Louisiana and adjacent areas was French, the Mediterranean was the area of French power and influence, but not being a naval power England was able to cut them back and to destroy them ultimately. They lost their colonies in America in the French and Indian war and also India, simply because of their naval inadequacy. Now because of the mercantilist policy this created a crisis for the French. How could they import raw materials, not having the colonies now, or export to colonies when they didn’t have a colony. It created an economic crisis which ultimately led to the collapse with the revolution. If they had not lost the empire there would have been no revolution. This is why France was the great ally of the Americans in the war of Independence. They had lost just a few years early, in the French and Indian War, and their empire to the British, well America was the choicest part of the British Empire and they were going to do everything to help the Americans kick out the British.

And this is why, it wasn’t altruism, they sent over troops, Lafayette and many others, they provided all kinds of foreign aid in the hopes that this would be the beginning of toppling the American power and if you recall a part of the American strategy encouraged by the French was an invasion of Canada.

[Lady speaks]

[Rushdoony] Toppling the English power, yes, excuse me. However this did not prevent the collapse. In fact it very nearly led to a collapse both in Britain and in France. If it had not been for the Wesleyan revival and the evangelical revival within the Church of England when the French Revolution occurred there would have also been a revolution in Britain. It was the religious aspect in Britain that prevented it from blowing up in a revolution. Now the French Revolution was the great opportunity for the radical humanists, the enlightenment thinkers who called themselves “philosophes”. I indicated earlier their sources were the English deists and thinkers and also the Dutch thinkers. There are several things that characterized these philosophes, very important for us to understand because what we have today and have in this century especially since World War Two is the ideas and the faith and the spirit of the philosophes on the march all over the world. They were urban, first of all. Therefore they had no sense of the reality of the soil, and a man being bound to the earth. They saw things from the standpoint of big city people who with a wave of a hand assume you can do this and that and as though, well, the food is always going to be supplied, those Slavs out there and the farms, the peasants, they are always provided, you see, they just assumed these things. They assumed production, they were planners pure and simple.

Second they were characterized by a total hatred of Christianity, anything was tolerable, any kind of paganism, any kind of primitive religion but not Christianity. Voltaire, for example, said every sensible man, every honorable man must hold the Christian sect in horror. The motto of these people was “wipe out the infamy”, the infamy being Christianity. Then they had a motto which they derived from Terrance in Silica, the Romans, “I am a man, I think nothing human alien to me”. And of course the meaning of this is you tolerate everything except Christianity, you tolerate every crime, you tolerate every pervert because nothing human is alien to me. Again you recognize the pure temper of our day. Then Detero [sp??] declared and I quote:

“The magistrate deals out justice, the philosophe teaches the magistrate what is just and unjust.” Unquote.

Now historically it has been Christianity that has established right and wrong and the law reflects what scripture teaches, but no, they said, we will be, we the intellectuals, the philosophes, will be the new priests of humanity. So that we will say what the law should be and what right and wrong are, we will define all these things. Now since the churches were politically controlled these philosophes very quickly provided for the takeover of the churches in all the countries and politically appointed bishops in England, in France, in Germany and elsewhere, who were unbelievers. And this is a point which very few scholars will touch on, you find it here and there in footnotes, but the great destruction of the churches, whether in England or France or elsewhere was by these political bishops! Men who hated the church. You had one, for example, Arch Bishop of Canterbury whose wife was very much a slut, he had an illegitimate son who he promoted to the church and so on, that sort of thing. These were men who hated the faith.

And an opportunity to pull down the church or to destroy it was all to the good for them. Then another aspect of these philosophes and again this is something that strikes at a very familiar note. Homosexuality was the mark of membership in the in group. It was virtually required; if it wasn’t to your touch you indulged in it. It was the mark of membership in the in group. Then they believed in the omnipotence of criticism, this was their phrase, the autonomy of the human mind, so that man like a god could pass everything in review before him and judge on men, on God, on the bible, man’s judgment is absolute. Then there was another thing that was very indicative, very revealing and when I say this I want you to do a little hard thinking about it, guess who their hero was? Cicero. Cicero. And when you examine what Cicero was and you can look up Cicero in my book The One and the Many, I have quite a bit about him, you realize why he was. It’s very interesting that Cicero is being foisted on conservatives now as though he were a great hero. It’s very interesting that the woman who claims to be a Christian and has written a gooey book on Cicero as though he were a great hero, Taylor Caldwell, was in Los Angeles just last week and on New Year’s Eve was indulging in an occultist meeting where she was being hypnotized by Jeff Stearns an occultist leader because she believes she has been reincarnated many times and she sat down with Cicero and conversed with him and later on had dinner one day with Nero.

Now, this is the kind of thing that is very interesting, Cicero, the hero then and Cicero being palmed off on us again by people knowingly or foolishly as a hero. Another thing, science was despised by these people, why? They regarded it as a puritan movement which it was. In England it was despised by the lords because the scientists were all puritans and that was true. Moreover they saw the intellectual as being the mind of the people, so that the revolutionary belief and spirit of the French Revolution could be summed up in the expression “the will of the people makes the laws and we are the will of the people”. In other words, you could tell them, you poor slobs don’t know what you really want, we know what in your heart want or should want.

[Tape ends]