For he was eager to win for France a foremost 126 place in the world-market, which he thought but the due accompaniment of her monarchical glory; and he knew that without it that glory would have died of starvation, since the taxes would not have yielded the necessary food. It is true that even in England growing commercialism was subordinate to constitutionalism, the English form of bureaucracy; but the idea was already afoot there that the former was rather an end than a means, whereas in France commercialism was completely subordinated to the glory of the autocratic monarchy—a mere feeder of it. This overshadowing of commerce by the sovereign, and the irritation it caused to the manufacturing bourgeoisie, was undoubtedly one of the causes of the revolution.
The religion of this period of the “Grand Monarque” shows little more than an ecclesiastical struggle between Gallicanism on the one hand, which claimed a feeble spark of independence as regards Rome for the French Church, and is represented by Fénélon and Bossuet, and Jesuitry on the other hand, 127 which was the exponent of Roman centralisation. The leading intelligence of the time was on the Gallican side; but the king in the long run favoured the Jesuits, as being the readier instruments of his bureaucratic rule. Outside this ecclesiastical quarrel there was no life whatever in religion, except what was shown by the existence of a few erratic sects of mystics, like the Quietists and Jansenists. The former of these may be said to have put forward the complete abnegation of humanity in the presence of God, while the latter attempted a revivification of the pietism of the Catholic Church, accompanied by a galvanism of the mediæval faith in miracle-working. Finally the advent of the revolutionary writers, heralded by Helvetius, Condillac, and others, and culminating in the influence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopædists, destroyed the last vestiges of religious belief among the educated classes of France.
Two struggles, we may mention, were going on during the early reign of Louis XV.,—that with the Jesuits, with 128 their bull Unigenitus, which