One of the principal calamities laid to the charge of Madame de Pompadour, by her contemporaries and by posterity, is the Seven Years’ War. They have resolved to hold her responsible for all the bloodshed, all the disasters and humiliations, for Rossbach and Crevelt, for the loss of the colonies and the profound injury done to the military prestige and naval forces of France. There is some exaggeration in this, as we believe. It must not be forgotten that the origin of the Seven Years’ War was an unjustifiable aggression of the English, who were absolutely bent on complete mastery of the seas. Madame de Pompadour was certainly not responsible for British ambition. It is true that France was not ready for strife, and that its marine had been allowed to fall into decay. But if the favorite was deceived about the resources of the country, if she cherished illusions which ruined peoples as well as individuals, she was not the only one.
The Marquis d’Argenson accuses her of having been occupied with porcelains at a time when people should have been thinking of arms. “Madame de Pompadour,” he writes in 1754, “does nothing but preach up the great advantage it has been to the State to manufacture porcelain like that of Saxony, and even to have surpassed it. A royal warehouse for this porcelain is being established in the rue de la Monnaie. There may be seen a service which the King is about to send to the King of Saxony, as if to brave and provoke him, saying that he has surpassed even his manufactory. At the King’s suppers the Marquise says that it is uncitizenlike not to buy as much of this porcelain as one can pay for. Some one answered her: But while the King has been so liberal in encouraging this manufactory, those of Charleville and Saint-Étienne are abandoned, which are quite differently useful to us, since they concern the defence of the kingdom, and three-quarters of the workmen are passing into foreign countries.” The reflection is, doubtless, just; but a few Saxony or Sèvres porcelains, more or less, would not greatly have altered the situation of France. It was her misfortune to be slumbering in a fatal ease. Voltaire has said: “All Europe never saw happier days than followed the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, until toward the year 1755. Commerce flourished from St. Petersburg to Cadiz; the fine arts were everywhere in honor. A mutual confidence existed between all nations. Europe resembled a large family, reunited after its dissensions.” The French allowed themselves to be deceived by this universal lull. Military men and diplomatists felt an exaggerated confidence. In a few years people became so accustomed to peace that they no longer even thought of war. It was the same thing that happened about a century later, at the time of the Universal Exposition of 1867. Peoples who wish to preserve their greatness ought to beware of cosmopolitan theories. While the philosophers were weaving their humanitarian dreams, England was preparing her fleets and Frederick the Great his armies.
A trifling contest between France and England for some wild lands in Canada was the kindling spark of a fire that was to inflame the four quarters of the earth. But this quarrel, insignificant in itself, was not the true cause of the war: it was at most its pretext.
To avoid a struggle with England was well-nigh impossible; but what France might have done, and did not, was to remain faithful to the alliance with Prussia, instead of plunging into one absolutely contrary to every tradition of its foreign policy, the Austrian alliance. What the diplomacy of Louis XV. lacked was consecutiveness. The versatile monarch did not know what he wanted. Sometimes Prussian, sometimes Austrian, he fluctuated between two contradictory systems. The see-saw policy creates only a momentary illusion. It succeeds for a while, but it nearly always leads to ruin. The secret of strong diplomatists is to persevere in one idea, pursue one end, choose one good alliance, and stick to it. Feeble diplomatists, on the contrary, undo to-day what they did yesterday. It is like the web of Penelope. Whoever studies seriously the causes of our reverses, under Napoleonic France as well as under the France of the Bourbons, will easily convince himself that nearly all of them are due to incoherent principles and inconsistent ideas. To preserve a system and follow a tradition gives a real strength. The strength of Prince Bismarck is to have persevered in one idea, that of German unity, and in one alliance, that of Russia.
The policy of the Versailles treaty of 1756, which established an intimate accord between Louis XV. and Maria Theresa, was not in itself a more objectionable policy than another. But if it was desired to adopt it, it ought not to have been necessary to make war with Austria beforehand. Nothing is more dangerous than to place one’s self in a self-contradictory attitude. No confidence is inspired by such variable conduct; one is at the mercy of every incident.
In politics, as in religion and literature, the prime essential is unity. It is the same thing in diplomacy as in style.
What is required is a true spirit of method, a clear, precise, definite object, straight lines, an absence of tortuous proceedings.
The old maxim, “divide to reign,” the presence in the same ministry of men warring against each other, of secret agents who undo the work of official agents, underhand ways, countermines, politics by double entry,—all this is no sign of strength; it is the expedient of weakness. Occult diplomacy, like that of Louis XV., is suitable to none but governments in extremity. Woe to a sovereign who suspects his own ambassadors! If he has not full confidence in them, let him change them!
What lay at the root of the character of Louis XV. was the habit of dissimulation, the vanity of being considered impenetrable. It was he, not Madame de Pompadour, who had created a government at constant war with the principal agents it made use of. Nor was the Austrian alliance a conception of the favorite’s. Louis XV. did not like Frederick the Great, and he was not less taken with the flatteries of the Empress Maria Theresa than Madame de Pompadour herself. If the adroit sovereign wrote the Marquise a letter in which she treated her as a dear friend, she was careful at the same time to display a passionate admiration, a sort of cult, for Louis XV. Moreover, there was an Austrian party at Versailles. The Marquis d’Argenson wrote in January, 1756: “There is a large party in our court for the court of Vienna. Austria has always had emissaries at our court. I hear these emissaries saying that the house of Austria is no longer what it was, that it has need of us, that we ought to march in close accord with it. I know these insinuations, and it was to opposing them that I owe my disgrace in 1747. They preach to us against the King of Prussia, they say he is all English, and they excite us against him in view of despoiling him, if we are able. Hence we sulk at Spain, we are irritated against Prussia, our veritable and sincere ally, and all this exasperates at court femineo ululatu.”
The partisans of the treaty of Versailles (May 1, 1756), by which France and Austria promised each other mutual aid against their enemies, have a right to extenuating circumstances. This passage from Duclos must not be forgotten: “As soon as the treaty was known, there was a sort of inebriation which was increased by the chagrin displayed by the English; every one imagined that the union of the two first powers would make all Europe respectful. Ideas have greatly changed since then.”
The Abbé de Bernis, who had quitted the Venetian embassy to take the portfolio of foreign affairs, and who was one of Madame de Pompadour’s favorites, was charged with drawing up the treaty. “Notwithstanding his first objections as a man of sense, he did not long resist the general movement which carried away all who surrounded him; he was dazzled, and thought he was contributing to the greatest political operation that had been attempted since Richelieu. At first everything seemed to succeed as well as could be desired, and the new alliance so highly vaunted at court seemed to be taken even better still by the public.”[50] The Marquise triumphed. She amused herself by engraving on an agate in onyx an allegory, which represented France and Austria joining hands above the altar of Fidelity, and trampling under foot the mask of Hypocrisy and the torch of Discord.
At the start, people were full of enthusiasm and confidence. The victor of Mahon was esteemed as successful in war as in love. Nothing was dreamed of but mighty feats and conquests. But presently all took on a gloomy look. The convention of Closter-Seven, so imprudently signed by Marshal de Richelieu on September 8, 1757, was the signal for unnumbered catastrophes. “One does not die of grief,” wrote Bernis to Choiseul, December 13 of the same year, “for I am still alive after September 8. Since that epoch, faults have been accumulated in a fashion one can hardly explain, without supposing bad intentions. I have spoken with the greatest force to God and His saints. I excite pulses a little, and then the lethargy recommences; people open big eyes, and that is all there is about it.... It seems to me as if I were minister of foreign affairs in Limbo. Try, my dear count, if you can excite more than I the spirit of life which is becoming extinct in us; for my part, I have dealt all my great blows, and have concluded to be in an apoplexy like the others over sentiment, without ceasing to do my duty like a good citizen and an honest man.” The former abbé of the court become a minister, the once superficial man whom Voltaire used to call “Babet, the-bouquet-holder,” was indignant at the general apathy and carelessness. “It is unexampled,” wrote this friend of Madame de Pompadour, “that so great a game should be played with the same indifference as a game of checkers.... Sensitive, and, if I dare say it, sensible as I am, I am dying on the wheel, and my martyrdom is useless to France.... May God send us some will or other, or some one who will have one for us! I would be his valet de chambre if they liked, and with all my heart.”
As soon as the struggle began, unfortunate France was amazed at the illusions she had cherished. The truth appeared to her. Bernis comprehended that the shortest follies are the best. January 6, 1758, he wrote to Choiseul, then Ambassador to Vienna: “My advice would be to make peace, and to begin by a truce on land and sea. When I shall know what the King thinks of this idea, which I have not found in my manner of thinking, but which has been presented to me by good sense, reason, and necessity, I will inform you. Meanwhile, try to make M. de Kaunitz certain of two things that are equally true; namely, that the King will never abandon the Empress, but that it will never do for him to be ruined with her. Our respective faults have made a hopeless wreck of a great project which was infallible in the first days of September. It is a beautiful dream which it would be dangerous to carry further, but which it might some day be possible to resume with better actors and better combined military plans. The more directly I have been charged with this grand alliance, the more ought people to credit me when I counsel peace.”
Unfortunately, Madame de Pompadour was headstrong, which is one of the attributes of mediocrity of mind. Confounding heroism with obstinacy, she thought that to struggle indefinitely against ill fortune, was to display greatness of soul. The more faults a general of her choice committed, the more inveterately did she uphold him. She was like those gamesters who are checked by no ill luck, and who never give up playing until they are ruined. Public opinion condemned such obstinacy. The French do not know how to support reverses. They overwhelmed Soubise, defeated at Rossbach, with sarcasms, and appeared to be infatuated with the victor. People took the fashion of exalting Frederick the Great and of cursing his enemy, Madame de Pompadour, Cotillion IV., as she was called. Soubise was the scape-goat on whom rained all the jests, chansons, and satires:—
It is not by means of chansons that France can retrieve herself. She plays into the enemy’s hand by showing herself more Prussian than Prussia. Bernis finds himself submerged by this deluge of criticisms and assaults. “I am threatened by anonymous letters,” he wrote again to Choiseul in 1758, “with being presently torn to pieces by the people, and though I do not greatly fear such menaces, it is certain that approaching misfortunes which cannot be foreseen, could easily realize them. Our friend runs at least as much risk.” Ill in body and mind, Bernis could hold out no longer; he handed in his resignation. Louis XV accepted it in a letter dated October 9, 1758, which opened thus: “I am sorry, Monsieur the Abbé-Count, that the affairs you are charged with affect your health to such a point that you can no longer support the burden of the work.... I consent with regret to your turning over the foreign affairs to the hands of the Duke de Choiseul, whom I think to be at present the only suitable person, as I am disinclined to make an absolute change in the system I have adopted, or even to be spoken to about it.”
The three women in coalition against Frederick,—Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, Elisabeth, Empress of Russia, and Madame, the Marquise de Pompadour—carried the war as far as possible. France experienced nothing but reverses in every quarter of the globe. As Voltaire remarked, it seemed more exhausted of men and money by its union with Austria than it had been by two centuries of war against that country.[52] It must be admitted, however, that Madame de Pompadour’s obstinacy was very near succeeding. It is incredible that the King of Prussia, who stood alone on the continent against the forces of Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and half of the Empire, could long have maintained so gigantic a struggle. An unforeseen event, the death of the Empress Elisabeth of Russia, January 6, 1762, saved him. Madame de Pompadour felt that her vengeance was eluding her. It was necessary to renounce all ideas of glory and conquest, and to sign the disastrous treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg (February 10 and 15, 1763). Louis XV. gave up the cities he still possessed in Germany. He restored Minorca to England, and ceded to it Acadia, Canada, Cape Breton, the gulf and river of Saint Lawrence, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominique, Tobago, and the Senegal River with its factories. He only regained his Indian colonies on condition of not fortifying or garrisoning them. Finally he undertook to demolish anew the harbor of Dunkirk. The ruin of military prestige, commerce, the navy, and public credit, the loss of two hundred thousand men, several millions of money, and nearly all the colonies,—such is the balance sheet of the fatal war so ardently desired by the Marquise.
Voltaire had good reason to exclaim: “What was the result of this innumerable multitude of combats the tale of which now wearies even those conspicuous in them? What remains from all these efforts? Nothing but blood shed vainly in waste and desolate lands, villages in ruins, families reduced to beggary, and rarely does even a dull rumor of these calamities reach as far as Paris, always profoundly occupied with pleasures or equally frivolous disputes.” Then, returning to the cause or rather to the pretext of the strife, the author of the Siècle de Louis XV. says again: “It has been thought that it would have been very easy to prevent such misfortunes by coming to terms with the English concerning a small contested ground near Canada. But certain ambitious persons, to maintain their dignity and render themselves necessary, precipitated France into this fatal war. The same thing had occurred in 1741. The self-love of two or three persons was enough to lay all Europe waste. France needed peace so greatly that she regarded those who concluded it as benefactors of the country.” The Duke de Choiseul remained popular because he had been able to palliate somewhat the impression caused by such reverses by concluding, in August, 1761, the family pact between the Bourbons of France, Spain, and Italy, and had also had tact enough to win the support of the fashionable literary men, the arbiters of renown. But his friend, Madame de Pompadour, was the object of public vindictiveness. Wounded in her ambition, her vanity, and her pride, she could not be consoled.