Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/212

 FRANCE

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FRANCE

Richelieu and Mazariii had the support of the Lu- tlieran princes of Germany and of Protestant countries such as tlie .Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus. In fact it may be laitl down tliat during the Thirty Years War, France uplield Protestantism. Louis XIV, on the contrary, who for many years was arbiter of the des- tinies of Europe, was actuated by purely religious motives in some of his wars. Thus the war against Holland, that against the League of Augsburg, and his intervention in the affairsof England were in some respects the result of a religious policy and of a desire to uphold Catholicism in Europe. The expeditions in the Mediterranean against the pirates of Barbary have all the halo of the old ideals of Christendom — ideals which in the days of Louis XIII had haunted the mind of Father Joseph, the famous confidant of Riche- lieu, and had inspired liim with the dream of crusades led by France, once the House of Austria should have been defeated.

The long and complex reign of Louis XIV, in spite of the disasters which mark its close, gained for France possession of Flanders and of Franche-Comte, and saw a Bourbon, Philip V, grandson of Louis XIV, seated on the throne of Spain. The seventeenth century in France was par excellence a century of Catholic awak- ening. A number of bishops set about reforming their dioceses according to the rules laid down by the C^ouncil of Trent, though its decrees did not run oflfi- cially in France. The example of Italy bore fruit all over the country. Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, Bishop of Clermont and afterwards of Senlis, had made the acquaintance of St. Charles Borromeo. Francis Taurugi, a companion of St. Phihp Neri, was Archbishop of Avignon. St. Francis de Sales Chris- tianized lay society by his "Introduction to the Devout Life", which he wrote at the request of Henry IV. Cardinal de B^ruUe and his disciple de Condren founded the Oratory. St. Vincent de Paul, in founding the Priests of the Mission, and M. Olier, in founding the Sulpicians, prepared the upUfting of the secular clergy and the development of the grands scyninaires. It was the period, too, when France began to build up her colonial empire, when Samuel de Champlain was founding prosperous settle- ments in Acadia and Canada. At the suggestion of Pere Coton, confessor to Henry IV, the Jesuits fol- lowed in the wake of the colonists; they made Quebec the capital of all that country, and gave it a French- man, Mgr. de Montmorency-Laval, as its first bishop. The first apostles of the Iroquois were the French Jesuit.-', Lallemant and de Brebeuf; and it was the French missionaries, as much as the traders who opened postal communication over 500 leagues of country between the French colonies of Louisiana and Canada. In China the French Jesuits, by their scientific labours, gained a real influence at Court and converted at least one Chinese prince. Lastly, from the beginning of this same seventeenth cen- tury, under the protection of Gontaut-Biron, Mar- quis de Sahgnac, Ambassador of France, dates the es- tabhshment of the Jesuits at Smyrna, in the Archi- pelago, in Syria, and at Cairo. A Capuchin, Pere Joseph du Tremblay, Richelieu's confessor, established many Capuchin foundations in the East. , A pious Parisian lady, Madame Ricouard, gave a sum of money for the erection of a bishopric at Babylon, and its first bishop was a French Carmelite, Jean Duval. St. Vincent de Paul sent the Lazarists into the galleys and prisons of Barbary, and among the islands of Madagascar, Bourbon, Mauritius, and the Mascarenes, to take possession of them in the name of France. On the advice of the Jesuit Father de Rhodes, Propa- ganda and France decided to erect bishoprics in Annam, and in HilJO and in 1661 three French bish- ops, Frani,-ois Pallu. Pierre Lambert de Lamothe, and (Jotolendi, set out for the East. It was the activity of the French missionaries that paved the way for the

visit of the Siamese envoys to the court of Louis XIV. In 1663 the Seminary for Foreign Missions was founded, and in 1700 the Socidte des Missions Etran- gcres received its approved constitution, which has never been altered.

To repeat a saying of Ferdinand Brunetiere, the eigliteenth century was the least Christian and the least French century in the history of France. Reli- giously speaking, the alliance of parliamentary Galli- canism with Jansenism weakened the idea of religion in an atmosphere already threatened by the philoso- phers, and although the monarchy continued to keep the style and title of " Most Christian ", unbelief and libertinage were harboured, and at times defended, at the court of Louis XV (1715-74), in the salons, and among the aristocracy. Politically, the traditional strife between France and the House of Austria ended, about the middle of the eighteenth century, with the famous Renversement des Alliances (see Choiseul, ExiENNE-FRANfOLS, Duc DE; Fleuky, Andre-Her- CULE de). This century is filled with that struggle be- tween France and England which may be called the second Hundred Years War, during which England had for an ally Frederick II, King of Prussia, a country which was then rapidly rising in importance. The command of the sea was at stake. In spite of men like Dupleix, Lally-ToUendal, and Montcalm, France lightly abandoned its colonies by successive treaties, the most important of which was the Treaty of Paris (1763). The acquisition of Lorraine (1766) and the purchase of Corsica from the Genoese (1768) were poor compensations for these losses; and when, under Louis XVI, the French navy once more lifted its head, it helped in the revolt of the English colonies in Amer- ica, and thus seconded the emancipation of the United States (1778-83).

The movement of thought of which Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, each in his own fashion, had been protagonists, an impatience pro- voked by the abuses incident to a too centralized monarchy, and the yearning for equality which was deeply agitating the French people, all prepared the explosion of the French Revolution. That upheaval has too long been regarded as a break in the history of France. The researches of Albert Sorel have proved that the diplomatic traditions of the old regime were perpetuated under the Revolution; the idea of the State's ascendanc}' over the Church, which had actu- ated the ministers of Louis XIV and the adherents of the Parliament— the parlcmentaires — in the days of Louis XV, reappears with the authors of the "Civil Constitution of the Clergy", even as the centralizing spirit of the old monarchy reappears with the adminis- trative officials and the commissaries of the Convention. It is easier to cut off a king's head than to change the mental constitution of a people.

The Constituent Assembly (5 May, 1789-30 Sep- tember, 1791) rejected the motion of the Abb6 d'Eymar declaring the Catholic religion to be the religion of the State, but it did not thereby mean to place the Catho- lic religion on the same level as other religions. Voul- land, addressing tlie Assembly on the seemliness of having one dominant religion, declared that the Cath- olic religion w-as founded on too pure a moral basis not to be given the first place. Article 10 of the " Declara- tion of the Rights of Man" (.August, 1789) proclaimed toleration, stipulating " that no one ought to be inter- fered with because of his opinions, even religious, provided that their manifestation does not disturb public order" (pourvu que leur manifestation no trouble pas I'ordre public ^tabli par Ih). It was by virtue of the suppression of feudal privileges, and in accordance with the ideas professed by the lawyers of the old regime where church property was in (i\ies- tion that the Constituent Assembly aliolislicd tithes and confiscated the po.ssessions of the (luu'ch, replac- ing them by an annual grant from the treasury. The