Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France is a monumental national chronicle written across the nineteenth century by one of France’s most impassioned historians. This volume, drawn from the Nouvelle édition of 1877, covers the middle decades of the eighteenth century — the Regency’s aftermath, the ministry of Cardinal Fleury, the reign of Louis XV, and the wars and court intrigues that ran from the 1720s into the 1740s. Michelet writes not as a neutral archivist but as a moral witness, and the book is as much an argument about France’s destiny as it is a narrative of its kings.
The Core Argument
Michelet’s central claim is that the true history of this period was deliberately hidden. Passing from the Régence to Fleury and Louis XV, he writes, means passing from full daylight into the back-cabinets of Versailles. Under the Regency everything gravitated around the Système and nothing was veiled; under the priest and the king who followed, successive governments concealed the real story as a “mystery of State.” Only two men had opened the diplomatic archives before him, and the forty years between were known only through external events — battles, books, Paris anecdotes — while the actual center of action, the interior of Versailles, stayed closed.
His second argument concerns method. Michelet calls himself “the serf of time,” refusing the general tableaux that juxtapose different epochs for literary effect, because their brilliance obscures what he takes to be history’s true deep light: causality. He insists that even without new documents his volume gives an absolutely new history, and he cites his sources line by line — the Damiens trial, for instance. His witnesses are weighed with care: d’Argenson’s sincerity, Luynes’s day-by-day honesty, the limits of Barbier and Marais, the self-interest of Soulavie and Voltaire.
The third strand is political and moral. The clergy, having lost its bid to judge its own affairs, remains forever subject to lay justice; royalty keeps the shame. The government is ridiculous within and without, “the amusement of Europe,” and its mechanism is wound so tightly that only a violent shock — war — could break it. Behind the visible war with Austria, Michelet detects a “family conspiracy”: the royal family, Spanish at heart, secretly aligned with the enemy against France itself.
Inside the Book
The Hidden Cabinets of Versailles
Michelet opens this volume by insisting that the passage from the Régence to Fleury and Louis XV is a passage from full daylight into the concealed back-cabinets of Versailles. Under the Régence everything gravitated around the Système and nothing was veiled; under the priest and the king who followed, successive governments wrapped this history in the secrecy of a “mystery of State.” Only Lemontey and the historian of the Chute des Jésuites had opened the diplomatic archives, and the forty years between were known only through external, military and literary events and Parisian anecdotes. The real centre of action, the interior of Versailles, stayed closed to all.
His sources change everything. D’Argenson’s extract of 1825 revealed little beyond foreign policy, but the fuller editions published by his nephew in 1857 laid bare the conspiration de famille: the King was not floating but ruled by a fixed idea, and ministers and mistresses served family interest. D’Argenson’s testimony is grave because of his sincere royalist cult; truth escapes him against his will, and his credo, “l’espoir du salut par le Roi,” left him crushed when France was delivered to Austria in 1756. M. de Luynes’s immense Journal gives Versailles day by day, an honest and respectful witness whose respect is not approval. Michelet calls himself “the serf of time,” refusing general tableaux that juxtapose epochs for literary effect, since their brilliance obscures history’s true deep light, causality.
Saint-Simon still serves on Fleury’s profound ignorance, his silly confidence in the English, his connivance at the little King’s pitiful life, and his removal of honest men. Fleury was “le mannequin d’Issy,” of Saint-Sulpice, of the Rohan, of the Tencin; they kept him, even idiotic, and held France bound under that corpse. D’Argenson proves Fleury did not restore France but delivered it to the Fermiers généraux; M. d’Haussonville proved his two treasons for Austria, to whom he denounced French ministers and generals and immolated the army frozen in the return from Prague. Voltaire serves by his letters, little by his Louis XV; Soulavie, too decried, knows Versailles very well. Duclos becomes capital in 1756: Pompadour only influenced until then, then reigned by the grace of Marie-Thérèse, and the order of Rosbach came from Vienna. La Hausset is curious but makes a good-natured king and a sweet Pompadour, ignoring that her mistress filled the state prisons and that three times Pompadour nearly fell. Marais’s excellent journal leaves early; Barbier does not replace it, prolix for the Parlement, rich for Paris, profoundly ignorant of the Court. The capital witness is certainly d’Argenson.
Samuel Bernard and the World of Finance
A footnote argues that the history of great financiers is more curious than that of kings but harder to recover. Bernard, son of a court painter and a “new convert” of 1685, treated the Revocation as a business affair: fleeing Protestants could not sell, so he acted as intermediary for powerful buyers, was acclaimed “Savior,” then used his front-men, the Pâris, to “save” armies while saving his own cash-box. Emerging richer from the 1710 shipwreck, he rested like a prince, acted only indirectly through the fiery Duverney, and made the Visa to avoid being “visé.” He understood opinion’s power, hosting bold thinkers at madame de Fontaine-Martel’s, the salon of Voltaire. Saint-Simon misdates the Pâris as Alpine innkeepers but is right on the substance.
Duverney kept a hot head from his adventurous life, never cured; his joy was pushing armies, and nearly octogenarian he resumed in the Seven Years’ War. He ran business militarily, warred against Law’s theories, but once victor over utopia became a utopian, even revolutionary. This stormy breath also changed madame de Prie, who supported and followed him with fury. Her terrible avidity came from famine; the contrast of misery and royal pride, and a high education her mother speculated on, embittered her. Produced by the skilful agioteuse madame de Verrue, she had Satan’s diabolical attraction, playful then tragic, timid and serpentine then bold, hair in the wind, something wild.
Madame de Prie and the Fall of M. le Duc
The woman agioteuse predates the Régence; madame de Verrue already agioted under Louis XIV, and her hôtel was a museum where she first dared admire and buy Rubens and Rembrandt. She felt de Prie, a charming César Borgia, unbridled, intrepid, without the cold falseness of real Italian scoundrels. This was needed to bite M. le Duc, worn, little loving women, already bored with madame de Nesle. Then was the fall; de Prie appears and the rise launches in July 1720, vertigo, fury, tornado. Once M. le Duc possesses this magic diamond, Fortune engulfs Chantilly. The Condés were all bizarre; madame de Prie became Condé: first avid like them, then ferocious, finally mortally libertine, all in Roman style, not bourgeois like Pompadour, not vulgar like Du Barry.
With a wave this fairy of the Bourse placed her at the centre of gold; she was not happier. Vanloo’s portrait shows terrible seriousness, an immense void gold did not fill. She passed like a sinister meteor, founding nothing, throwing gold out the window in combat, having failed her royalty. Fortune mocked her: long waiting, then suddenly gorged, put in power. “Go! march!”
Voltaire, Lecouvreur, and the Making of a Hero
Voltaire took little pleasure in his money. His life was all mind, hardly sensual, and he was not greedy; when the Régent granted him a pension he split it with Thieriot, and even in England, pinched for funds, he remembered the friend and sent him sums. Generous by turns and close-fisted, he fussed over his affairs like a man who had been poor and never forgot it. Back in Paris at last, he lodged in the remote rue de Vaugirard, near the Comédie française, and hoped to return to the stage through an old play of his own, the revival of OEdipe. For Jocaste he had Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, an actress of rare quality, admired and genuinely esteemed. As Monime, as Junie, as Pauline or Cornélie, she was not playing the heroine but was the heroine; one spectator left saying he had seen a queen among comedians. She had true genius, untouched by the monotonous chant Racine had taught La Champmeslé and free of the pompous emphasis that pleased Voltaire. She spoke from the heart, with real impulse and tragic accent, and at her debut, aged twenty-seven, she delighted and unsettled everyone; young men went mad with love.
In 1724, already thirty, she met the strange fate, rare for an actress, of becoming the Minerva and mentor of a Télémaque, of having to shape a hero. From the North came Maurice, bastard of Saxe, son of the King of Poland, Auguste. He had already made war and had the luck to look the terrible Swede Charles XII in the face, taking from that blue eye the flash of war that stayed with him, an aureole that deceived people about his real genius. This rough child little resembled the marquises of Paris. Swedish through his mother, Polish by habit, he was far less spontaneous than he seemed, above all a German reître, born in the land of romances amid upheavals where Charles and Peter rolled scepters and crowns like bears, where everything was possible. Among King Auguste’s three hundred bastards, this one aimed at everything, thrones and women, valiant, brutal, greedy. For the great imperial marriages he needed a polished exterior, the graces of France, and poor Lecouvreur served for that: tutor, mother, and mistress at once. She gained little in substance, but she worked on the outside, trying to give his coarse nature a little of her nobility and the royal forms that were natural to her. Recently published documents have made Maurice known in the last detail, and M. Saint-René Taillandier drew from them a fine, learned biography, though he seems to the author too favorable to this second-rate hero whom fortune so favored and overrated; his Rêveries, pedantic and eccentric, are a mediocre book.
He believed for a moment he would succeed and marry the one of Courlande. There was no money to leave. Mademoiselle Lecouvreur sold what she had, silverware and diamonds, and gave him the price. For a moment he thought himself master of Courlande; his father opposed it, and Russia too. Thence a thousand adventures and dangers, from which he escaped, and there he was famous—the Roland, the Renaud, the hero of chimeras, a new Charles XII before having done anything. Madrid thought of him for its mad Armada, to put the Stuart in London; the court of Stanislas, and perhaps the Queen of France, thought of him for Poland, to renew Charles XII and Gustave and drive out the German. Maurice was angry at his father for making him miss his fortune and for blaming him for going like a galopin to offer himself to queens and be refused. The people here who launched him and wanted to use him had taken three means: he was praised to the ladies as equal to his father in indefatigable strength; Paris was kept occupied with him by a certain boat he had invented, said to go and come on the river, which the idlers watched; and though very little lettered, he was made an author, his Rêveries being prepared for 1731, in which he seems to offer himself to dethrone his father, claiming he would take Poland in two campaigns at most without its costing a sou. He would be king or czar. What joy, and what worry, for Mademoiselle Lecouvreur: he was hers, her work, she had made him a Frenchman. But she was only a comedienne, and worse, she was thirty-nine, with a beauty dolorous and—
Monastic Liberties and the Cadière Affair
A footnote argues that monastic liberties were evident in the inquiries of the austere, pious bishop Scipion Ricci, and existed even in France in high and noble abbeys: the venerable M. Lasteyrie had seen with astonishment that of the abbey of Panthémont in Paris. It was worse far off, especially in the Midi, where everything happened publicly. The noble chapter of canons of Pignans, represented at the Estates of Provence, insisted on public possession of the country’s nuns; there were sixteen canons, and the provostry in a single year received from nuns sixteen declarations of pregnancy. This publicity had the good effect that monastic crime—infanticide—was less common. The nuns, regarding this as a charge of their state, were humane and good mothers at least in saving their children; those of Pignans put them out to nurse with peasants who adopted, used, and raised them with their own, so that many farmers are known even today as children of the ecclesiastical nobility of Provence.
If the King forbids the Parlements to concern themselves at all with ecclesiastical affairs, one understands the clergy’s interest.
The Dauphin and the Family Conspiracy
M. de Luynes, an intimate of Marie Leczinska, judged the Dauphin harshly, and his verdict undercuts the flattering portraits others drew. At twenty the prince still seemed a child, restless and variable, flitting from one thing to the next, singing Ténèbres beside his second wife in the very room where the first lay dead. Michelet reads in this not a healthy mind but the dark manias of the half-mad king of Madrid. Honest but strange, this sad Caliban might have refused great responsibilities had not others pushed him forward; believing himself necessary and called by God, he schemed and strove, a subtle fool who in the hands of the deceitful might have gone far. His father loved him little, seeing a being apart, displeasing in good as in evil.
Around this hard core gathered the royal family, the clergy, Spanish and Austrian intrigue, and every retrograde force. The queen, seated between her chair and her commode, seems only to suffer, yet her infirmity sharpens her; when her dear Spain is at stake she writes advice to Madrid that the ministers never gave. Lorrain intriguers and Polish Jesuits thrust her at the king’s feet with the cry “Sire, save Religion,” meaning proscribe Voltaire and the Encyclopédie. For her intimate chancellor she takes Saint-Florentin, the minister of prisons, jailer of Protestants, Jansenists, and philosophers.
The two eldest daughters, the Infanta and Henriette, sixteen in 1743, are one with their mother. The Infanta, tall and beautiful, much loved by her father, wants not only a kingdom of Milan but, after Fleury’s death, to make a prime minister here. Henriette, gentle and sickly, has suffered much: promised to the Bavarian, then to the duc de Chartres whom she loved and who loved her, then refused and broken. Her father fears the Orléans and is jealous of his daughters, so she keeps silent. A ten-year-old, the vehement Adélaïde, will wield far greater power; alone among the king’s daughters she obtains to stay near him rather than undergo the convent, and she will take the King and make him do what the Dauphin wants.
All are Spaniards at heart, wanting Milan for the infant and infanta, all dreaming of the Austrian marriage that would give the little Joseph II a Spanish infanta. This Farnese, in her ugly soul, always held two ideas: take from Austria what she can, and marry it through her children and grandchildren. From her garret in Parma she had for the Emperor that valet’s admiration the Germans have kept even on the throne of the world. In 1741, Joseph barely out of the maternal breast, the sixteen-year-old infanta quickly makes him a wife. The disease of Austrian marriages spreads from Madrid to Versailles through this infanta, caressing and intriguing, who corrupted the family. Fatal marriages, first of Joseph II, later of Marie-Antoinette, for which a million men perished. Bourbon, Austria, Spain—a holy trinity ardently desired by the clergy, since the blood of the Très-chrétien can best ally only with the Apostolic Austrian.
The war is only external; they remain friends, relatives, and the heart is for Marie-Thérèse. Old Fleury, by hindering the war, directly serves the thought of the whole royal family, which weeps at Prussia’s victories and at France’s successes. From that day is organized, against us and against the fatherland, the family conspiracy. It became clear only later, as the Dauphin grew, but already it acts secretly, seizing the king all the more surely because it wants hardly anything but what he himself would have wanted. By background, nature, and education he was, save for escapes, a man of the clergy and the past, a good Spaniard, a good Austrian. The natural opposition were the mistresses, mediocre as yet; la Nesle had the instinct of the great, la Mailly had heart, but their efforts failed.
Dettingen and the Failure of the French Army
Michelet condemns the hideous invasion to which foolish George and brutal England shamefully allied themselves, comparing the English to a bull with lowered horns; Comines’s ridiculous portrait of them still fits four hundred years later, bravery mixed with awkwardness and stupid faith in physical force. At Dettingen, George meant to cut Noailles off from Broglie, but landed in a dead end, unable to feed, advance, or retreat. The stroke belonged less to Noailles than to the able de Vallière, who placed his batteries so the exposed English mass would have to file backward and swallow the full fire.
Who saved George? The thoughtlessness of France’s brilliant Versailles courtiers. Noailles’s nephew Grammont and the Maison du Roi refused to let the artillery have the honor; this gilded cavalry charged in front of the French cannons and prevented them from firing. The vanguard followed without orders, the young militias held little, and—what astonished everyone—so did the proud French Guards. Losses were equal, but George was saved, and the Austrians were about to join him. Noailles had to recross the Rhine, a sad necessity made ridiculous. The King declared that since our Emperor, the Bavarian, was treating with Marie-Thérèse, he would not hinder them, and recalled the armies of the Empire. This pacific declaration emboldened France’s enemies and helped decide the treaty of Piedmont with Marie-Thérèse, who felt France was too Spanish, working in Italy only for our daughter the Infanta.
The Family Pact and the Prussian Alliance
A great blow against Madrid and Versailles, precisely the sensitive spot of both courts. The Infanta, pushed by the Farnese, must have soaked her paper with tears.
The Death of Coffin and the Clergy’s Counterattack
The good rector Coffin died, a man the people called a true saint—he had wrung from the Régent the principle that instruction be free, and his hymns had passed into the Church itself. Indignation at his death ran through Paris. Here was a plain case of public peace disturbed, and the Parlement summoned the curés who had refused the sacraments. One of them, disdaining even to answer, was clapped under arrest. The king did not blame the priest; he blamed his judges, savoring the affront done to them and taking it as license to press the persecution harder.
The great levy on church property collapsed. The Déclaration des biens d’Église would not be rendered to the king at all, but only “du Clergé au Clergé”—an affair kept inside the family, assessed by its own agents, valued as they pleased. The decree of 1750 left the clergy laughing: it had escaped by a hair and would now conquer without effort. The king who hunted it in September had become its man by May, handing over to it the magistrates’ ancient right over the charity of Paris. Under that gentle Christian word “Charité” lay not only alms and hospices but penitence and correction—Saint-Lazare and the whip, girls disciplined at the Salpêtrière, children flogged, seven thousand of them at the Salpêtrière alone. For a century the magistrate’s eye had watched that abyss of arbitrariness; now the eye was put out, and the king remitted everything to the priests. Even the festival dowries no longer passed through the municipal magistrates: six hundred girls were married, the dowries handed to the curés to distribute in parcels according to their satisfaction with husband or wife—a rejoicing turned into an instrument of chicanery and inquisition.
Madame Adélaïde and the Devout Party
The king marched so far along the clergy’s road that the Dauphin became admirable in his pliancy, making himself small, so disciplined that his known austerity covered certain things. When the king went to his solitary parties at la Muette, Choisy, Compiègne, he made the Dauphin mount the carriage; but after a day the Dauphin discreetly felt he might hinder and returned alone. The cabal’s comedy was to efface him. Mesdames advised the king, posing as statesmen; their monkey, little Louise, a ten-year-old sister, took on a minister’s gravity. Extracts were made for the elder ones from Père Barre’s nauseating history. Henriette succumbed to it. Adélaïde took what pleased her father—genealogies, ceremonial, etiquette—and became its oracle, first in this and all things. She was the favorite. To declare her was to announce the dominant action of the devout party, and the bold step was taken on 17 February 1751. The whole court was on ice or gliding. She mounted the royal sleigh, where the eldest had always sat with the king; she made herself eldest, sat near her father, and Henriette took the second sleigh.
In this bizarre state the king nevertheless communicated, and several were astonished. Mesdames communicated and performed the Jubilee devotions with the queen. The queen was absorbed, often alone, enclosed, she said, with her favorite, the Mignonne, a skull believed to be that of Ninon de l’Enclos. These funereal impressions troubled the sick Henriette and Adélaïde, so imaginative, little reassured in her triumph. The clergy used and abused so violent a state of conscience. It had to be paid, and for a monstrous indulgence it wanted a monstrous price, something excessive and imprudent, where Mesdames risked shocking the king. The clergy demanded that its Droit divin of exemption be declared, raising its avaricious egoism to a dogma: divine immunity—a symbol exactly opposed to the king’s, to the faith of Louis XIV and Louis XV, that everything belongs to the King of France.
The Carmelite Ultimatum
Such a thesis would embroil all. They were at Compiègne, in July’s heat, which on 2 August burst into a terrible storm. Adélaïde had another. She told her father: “I shall be a Carmelite. I want to enter the convent of Compiègne.” Was it devotion or menace? Was she posing an ultimatum to force the king to yield to the clergy? He told her dryly: “Not before twenty-five, or if you become a widow.” The struggle turned violent. The piqued king went to Crécy chez la Pompadour and had a touch of gout. They saw they had taken a false route by excess of zeal. At Fontainebleau, place of pleasure, they retook him, knew how to win him back. So that at Versailles in November, Adélaïde’s soul—choleric, intrepid—appeared in him, a provoking demon. He wanted decisively to hasten the great affair delivering Paris to the clergy. But that was not enough. In stripping the Parlement, he must insult it. Order went to the President to bring the Registers, the Company’s internal deliberations. This venerable collection is triple: Arrêts, registered Édits, and finally the Conseil secret.
The King’s Apartment and the Mistress
Blondel’s plans and Soulié’s catalogues map the palace in all its ages; Soulié is the man who best knows it. Blondel in 1755 was cautious, pretending there were two apartments though visibly there was only one, with no separation, and he did not say what room J was. Soulié identifies it as Madame’s cabinet, opening directly into the king’s secret cabinet.
The Judgment of Posterity: Napoleon on Frederick
Michelet opens by weighing Napoleon’s verdict on Frederick the Great, delivered from the repose of Saint Helena, and finds it too harsh for a man in so terrible a situation. Napoleon calls Frederick imprudent and precipitate, a reckless gambler who struck place, time, and every rule from his calculations. But there was no more time, Michelet answers; such things must be judged by the crisis of the Revolution. Frederick stood exactly where the first generals of the Revolution stood, and the extraordinary, the absurd, the impossible entered into his means and sometimes succeeded for him.
The logic was brutal and simple. The Russians moved slowly, granting him a few months; of the three colossi—Russia, France, Austria—only two were on his hands at once. He must either perish without remedy or, in a single year, disarm two empires. He did it to the letter. Victor and vanquished across three horribly bloody battles, he bled Austria so badly she did not stir for a long time. At Rosbach, by an affair of immortal ridicule, he struck France so great a moral blow that she despised herself, wished against herself, and admired only her conqueror. What greater thing was ever done? “Yes, but against the rules.” To besiege Prague with its garrison of fifty thousand was madness; to attack Daun’s army besides was madder still. He should first have drawn double lines of circumvallation and contravallation—three months’ work—but meanwhile the Russians would enter and the French reach Berlin to meet the Swedes. Daun, ten leagues off, received torrents of barbarians hourly; stifle him today or tomorrow he becomes a deluge of arms. Frederick ran at him, found him perched high and entrenched, sixty thousand against thirty thousand. No matter: the revolutionary force is contempt for the enemy. Daun resisted and riddled Frederick—yet Daun remained so weak he could not move for seven months, which was more than having conquered.
Massacre and the War of Women
These battles were immense massacres: at Prague twenty-eight thousand men stayed on the ground, at Kollin twenty thousand. Nothing was prepared for such events, no hospital relief; in such abandonment the wounded simply died. It was a horrible war of women, Michelet writes—with what giddy, savage passion the three ladies prepared it, with what fury of anger and relentlessness they executed it, in their mortal envy to kill the great man of the time.
The Chain of Misfortunes
Misfortunes followed and chained together, public and private, overwhelming Frederick. He lost his mother, the adored support of his youth in cruel trials. He lost his brother, heir to the kingdom, who would have preferred to treat; he had to be removed. To the reverse of Kollin succeeded news that Sweden had seized Pomerania while the Russian mass, with its Tatar cloud, entered from the East and ate everything. Meanwhile the French occupied all the West, cheaply victorious, meeting no one.
His only ally was the little Hanoverian army, miserable and unseasoned under Cumberland, son of George, beaten at Hastembeck and sure to be beaten again, retreating always, pushed by Richelieu. He reached the sea. Would he jump in, or would despair make him give battle? Richelieu, who held of his own army the sad opinion Cumberland held of his, granted his thirty-eight thousand men the convention of Kloster-Seven: they remained armed but neutral. The French kept Hanover, essential to Richelieu, who wanted nothing but to pillage and could at leisure eat the whole country.
The Arm of God and the Instruments of Vienna
Thus on 8 September Frederick lost his only ally. Though he still defended Silesia, so little account was made of him that Austrian cavalry rode insolently to ransom Berlin. This was the point where Vienna had wanted to see Frederick; there tended the whole effort of twelve years. It was not in vain that pious Marie-Thérèse spent four or five hours daily in prayer: she was answered. The unbeliever felt the arm of God. In his extreme fatigues, marches, and stubborn combats, it was a safe bet he would perish. But that did not suit her hatred; she would have wanted to see him prisoner, dragged to Vienna, declaring himself vanquished, crying against heaven like Julian the Apostate: “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!”
Pious work—and it was worked by Voltairians. From Vienna, Kaunitz directed everything. His active instrument, full of wit and audacity, was Choiseul, who until August followed the great Austrian plan: “Peace in France, and war in Europe.” The Parlement calmed, the exiles returned, justice resumed its course. All the more keenly could the King push the war and overwhelm Frederick. Since August, Choiseul was in Vienna, stimulating Richelieu and Soubise far better than Paris could. He had the ardent zeal of a man rising to the ministry, burning to be Marie-Thérèse’s lieutenant. In his letters he did not hide the motive pressing him: he was poor, he lived by his wife, delicate and fragile; if he lost her, he would be in the most frightful indigence. The poor man was capable of anything. At his beginnings he had posed as wicked through gallant perfidies, compromised women, biting words; fools feared him. He then called himself the chevalier de Maurepas—another Maurepas, younger, reproducing the other’s wit and malice. He surpassed his model.
Vauvenargues
From the machinery of war the narrative turns to a gentler figure. Michelet praises a great moral in which the sovereign soul can both launch and restrain the chariot, creating for repressed action the limitless field of inner activity, able to tell the world “I am a world too.” Vauvenargues was struck by many blows: the disastrous retreat of Prague cost him a beloved young pupil created from his own thought.
Key Ideas
The hidden center of power. Versailles under Fleury and Louis XV is a closed room. The real decisions — the fall of ministers, the turn toward Austria, the fate of armies — happen in antechambers and bedrooms, not on the battlefield. Michelet’s whole project is to force that door open.
The family conspiracy. The Dauphin becomes the hard core around which the queen, the clergy, Spanish and Austrian intrigue, and every retrograde force gathers. The royal family weeps at Prussia’s victories and at France’s successes alike. The Austrian marriage — Joseph II to a Bourbon, later Marie-Antoinette — is the fatal fruit of this alignment, and Michelet counts a million dead for it.
Finance as hidden government. The financiers are a shadow power. Samuel Bernard treats the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes as a business affair, buying from fleeing Protestants through front-men. Duverney’s fixed idea is accountability — light in figures — and when he exposes the state’s accounts alphabetically so every pension and gift can be seen, the court recoils. He is sealed in the Bastille for eighteen months, and nothing is found against him.
The two faces of religious conflict. The Jansenist cause, for all its harshness, is the essay of new liberties, an appeal to conscience; the deacon Pâris dies young of self-imposed misery in a plank lodge, and the sick drag themselves to his tomb. Against this, the ultramontane terror is tried first in a corner of France at the Brigandage d’Embrun, where an eighty-year-old bishop is condemned without a hearing.
The lost moment. The awakening of 1733, when France rose warlike and laughing, is aborted by the secret understanding of the two Walpoles, who reign in Versailles and watch over Brest and Toulon. England keeps the sword of the North in two pieces and delivers the Poles to the Germans and Russians.
Themes
The book’s deepest theme is the gap between a nation’s vitality and its government’s nullity. The French soldiers at Parma and Guastalla, never having seen war, hold firm against Hungarian charges; the people of Paris sing mocking songs that are true Marseillaises in rhythm and dash. Yet the state they serve is a mechanism wound to run on regardless, and its masters are busy with mistresses, confessors, and family marriages.
A second theme is the cost of secrecy. What is hidden cannot be judged, and what cannot be judged cannot be reformed. Michelet returns again and again to the archives, the journals, the letters — not out of antiquarian zeal but because publicity is, for him, the precondition of justice. The Bastille, the lettres de cachet, the prisoners found so forgotten that no one knows why they are there: these are the wages of the mystery of State.
A third theme is the tragedy of women used and discarded by power. Madame de Prie, the “fairy of the Bourse,” passes like a sinister meteor, founding nothing, dying in a Norman desert by her own Roman poison. Mademoiselle Lecouvreur, the actress who polished Maurice de Saxe into a Frenchman, is only a comedienne, and that is enough to ruin her. La Nesle predicts her own death and dies. The mistresses are the only natural opposition to the family conspiracy, and they lose.
Why It Matters
Michelet wrote this history to make his countrymen see what had been done to them in the dark. The book endures because that anger is still legible on every page, and because the questions it raises — who governs, in whose interest, and by what right — have not stopped being asked. It is a partisan book, and it knows it. But its partisanship is the partisanship of the archive: the conviction that if the documents are read honestly, the verdict will take care of itself.
