Of course, the king could not attend to everything in person.
He was obliged to surround himself with a few helpers
and councillors. One or two generals, some experts upon foreign
politics, a few clever financiers and economists would do
for this purpose. But these dignitaries could act only through
their Sovereign. They had no individual existence. To the
mass of the people, the Sovereign actually represented in his
own sacred person the government of their country. The
glory of the common fatherland became the glory of a single
dynasty. It meant the exact opposite of our own American
ideal. France was ruled of and by and for the House of Bourbon.
The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The King
grew to be everything. Everybody else grew to be nothing at
all. The old and useful nobility was gradually forced to give
up its former shares in the government of the provinces. A little
Royal bureaucrat, his fingers splashed with ink, sitting behind
the greenish windows of a government building in faraway
Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years
before had been the duty of the feudal Lord. The feudal Lord,
deprived of all work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as best
he could at the court. Soon his estates began to suffer from
that very dangerous economic sickness, known as ``Absentee
Landlordism.'' Within a single generation, the industrious
and useful feudal administrators had become the well-mannered
but quite useless loafers of the court of Versailles.
Pages:
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325