These, as our more historically-minded readers may recall, were the dying words of Louis XV of France. And indeed they proved to be prohetic. Louis de Bourbon was hardly a seer, of course. The king had a relatively modest intellectual endowment, a relatively modest wit. However, as he lay on his deathbed, the king was not inclined to see only what he wished to see. He saw a reality which was so powerful and so unstoppable that it imposed itself even upon this most protected and most cocooned of kings. He knew what his dynasty had wrought-- the frightful economic conditions and the general bankruptcy created by its excessive warmongering, frivolous and massively wasteful spending, and showering of wealth upon the favored few. The dying king did not kid himself about the inevitable legacy his successor would, willy-nilly, reap. Do any contemporary analogies come to mind, we wonder? Before we leave this topic of the Bourbon kings of France, we would like to make a further observation. The founder of the dynasty, Henri de Navarre, was a smart and a pragmatic man. As leader of the Huguenot party, Henry was in a poor position to rule France effectively even after he had achieved decisive military victory over the royal House of Valois. Realizing this, the would-be-king confronted reality directly. He knew that to hold power he would have to jettison what, these days, is so charmingly referred to as "ideology." Of course, in 16th century France, religion was infinitely more important, and taken infinitely more seriously, than "ideology" or "principles" today. As Henry's army encamped outside of heavily Catholic Paris, the city shut its gates to him and prepared for a battle to the death. Henry, a man not only of pragmatism but of wisdom, yielded his ideology and bowed to reality. He converted to Catholicism. In his own, immortal words: "Paris is worth a mass." The capital opened its gates, and Henry became king. Henry then took a decisive step -- one which assured the future prosperity and security of his kingdom. He issued a royal decree establishing and assuring, for all time to come, an unprecedented thing: religious toleration. (The Edict of Nantes). In other words, Henry IV established his government on the soundest possible basis. This basis eroded over the course of time, as his successors displayed an arrogance, an imprudence, and a lack of judgment which caused France to squander its great wealth on the accoutrements of glory and the feeding of a parasitic favored class. They reversed Henry's course, setting the country, and the dynasty on the road to ruin. Does anyone see any similarities here with the current desperate straits reached by our country's financial system and economy, following the restoration of order and rationality by the New Deal? We doubt greatly that the avalanche which is gathering momentum as it rolls down the mountainside toward the valley which is our economy can be diverted successfully in the main or halted. It is, we think, is too late. Moneysage 2008 - copyright |
|||