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Peter Mauclerc, of Brittany, was the chief. The signi- CHAP. ficant bond of this league was a mutual promise to aid each other in defying Papal excommunication. The Pope thundered forth a reply, declaring that Rome showed eminent forbearance in not insisting on its right to be the only court of appeal in existence. King Louis and his legists, in presence of such pretensions, of course supported the barons in their opposition. But the crusade cut the quarrel short.

As far as judicial privileges were concerned, St. Louis negotiated with the Pope, but obtained little: the Pontiff would only give up to secular judges, those priests who had married. He merely admitted power of arrest in the first instance. But since the Church would make no concessions to the legists, the legists, who, in the person of the bailiffs, were the magistrates of France, would not help the clergy, and became indifferent and passive in enforcing the consequences of excommunication. The prelates accordingly assembled in the capital, and complained to St. Louis, that "he was allowing Christianity to perish in his hands." The king crossed himself in astonishment, and asked "How was that?" The bishop explained: "Because no one cared any more for excommunication, the king's baillis refusing to seize the goods of those obstinate when under interdict." The king replied that "he was ready to coerce and prosecute those who had really wronged the Church." "Surely," rejcined the bishop," the Church is the best judge of its own wrongs." "Ah," observed the king, "but the Church is sometimes mistaken; for instance, the Count of Brittany remained excommunicated for seven years by his prelates, and the Pope afterwards gave sentence that the prelates had been wrong." To this the bishop could make no answer. By thus refusing the sanction and support of his officers and functionaries to random excommunications, St. Louis condemned the tyranny of the local clergy. And the French legists, by afterwards

CHAP. establishing the right of appeal from ecclesiastical courts, completed the judicial emancipation of laymen.

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The Pragmatic Sanction makes no mention of excommunication or of ecclesiastical courts. Its first article establishes the right of the national prelates to confer benefices as handed down to them, and the right of chapters and cathedrals to elect their bishops. The clause put a stop to the encroachments of the Pope, who, applying to France the abusive power he had acquired in England, pretended to nominate reversionally to prelacies and benefices. The Sanction next abolished simony, and all ecclesiastical appointments for money. Rome, in its urgent need of funds to conquer Naples, had introduced simony on a large scale. All these ecclesiastical appointments and arrangements Louis declared to be under the protection of common right, that is, of his own royal courts. Lastly, the decree forbade the levy of any tax by the court of Rome, "by which the kingdom had been miserably impoverished," and prohibited such for the future, unless sanctioned by the king, and consented to by the national Church. Whilst thus depriving Rome of the power of taxing the French clergy, Louis passed a law facilitating the restoration to them of tithes, which, especially in Languedoc, had then been largely appropriated by the feudal owners of the land.

The police of his capital was a subject that attracted the care and attention of Louis. The prevot or chief magistrate, previously purchased his place, and, of course, recompensed himself by vending justice, as well as the right to exercise trades. Louis abolished such a custom he determined to choose a magistrate of rigid character, and give him a salary. This personage, named Stephen Boileau, made a collection of the usages of Paris. In the more lucrative trades the artizan was obliged to pay for the liberty to exercise it, either to the king or one of his officers. In return, they had the

advantage of being fewer than the supply demanded. It was necessary, however, at that time for trades to form corporations, in order to have their rights respected, and to find a special protector, in the king or some high functionary, for the same reason.

Another point on which St. Louis strove to establish his central and royal jurisdiction, was the coin of the country. Eighty princes or nobles had the right of coinage, and, of course, they made a profit of it. Louis obliged all to receive the coin stamped with his effigy in their domains, and fixed this coin in currency at its just value in exchanging. The livre, once a pound of silver, had at that time come to contain little more than two ounces and a half. Louis consulted three citizens of Paris, three of Rouen, two of Orleans, two of Tours, two of Laon, in his regulation of the coin. And French writers consider these as forming the first assembly of the Tiers Etat, or Deputies. Louis's system was to consult each province and each class apart, in every circumstance. This was, no doubt, better than acting solely by his individual will. But this separation and isolation by royalty of French provinces and classes, instead of laying the foundation of representation, was, on the contrary, most influential in inducing monarchs to dispense with it.

No name in modern history has been the object of more profound reverence and more enthusiastic praise than that of St. Louis. Royalists regarded him, and with justice, as the true founder of the monarchy, and liberals still laud him for having undermined feudalism, and shorn the aristocracy of those privileges which rendered them princes in the land. Here too, their gratitude is not misplaced; if equality rather than liberty be the first of political boons, St. Louis certainly contributed to it. It was indeed the monarch's singular fate, in an age so early, to anticipate the predilections and tendencies of his countrymen, at least those developed in the

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CHAP. middle of the nineteenth century, by largely contributing to found a monarchy after the Byzantine model.

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What St. Louis accomplished in this respect was far from being to the advantage of the classes who laud him. His efforts in destroying some of the worst privileges of feudalism, obliterated also some of its best and noblest principles, those which contained the germs of modern freedom and representative government. No laws had greater influence than those of St. Louis in excluding the French of all ranks from any participation in either judicial or political rights. He drew everything to the crown, to its administration and its courts, and commenced that centralisation which is the true machinery of despotism. When he curtailed seignorial privileges, he by no means extended popular or municipal rights. To govern for the people, not by them, and on the paternal rather than on the popular principle, was his view of the duties of a monarch: and he thus introduced the political doctrine of treating subjects as children, and converting a great country into an overgrown nursery, which has prevailed in France with such brief interruptions ever since his time. The feudal system which this replaced, supposed, on the contrary, manhood and mature intellect to exist in every class with reciprocal rights, and, within certain limits, mutual independence. If the modern world of Europe was to be other than the ancient empire of Rome, this was destined to be its distinguishing feature, with a rustic organisation embracing all classes, and not sacrificing the peasant to the citizen. This system, which became developed in England, St. Louis, his grandsire, and his grandson destroyed, or laboured to destroy, in France. The attempts to accomplish this may have been, in their age, premature. For after the death of Philip the Fair there took place a strong reaction towards freedom and local rights, to a resuscitation of aristocracy, and a decentralisation of the powers of government. Still it

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was but the turbulent and anarchic portion of feudalism, CHAP. its barren and unproductive elements, which survived, or were then resuscitated, to perish later at the hands of monarchs and ministers, who revived the original and interrupted task of Philip Augustus and St. Louis.

In March, 1270, St. Louis repaired once more to St. Denis, to take the oriflamme and at the same time his pilgrim's staff. He walked the next day with his son Peter, both barefooted, to Notre Dame; Philip, the future monarch, declining this act of humility. The king took leave of his queen at Vincennes, and proceeded by easy journeys to Aigues Mortes. Owing to the retard of the Genoese galleys, he did not sail till the 1st of July. His brother the Count of Poitou, his sonin-law the King of Navarre, and his other barons, joined him at Cagliari. There was held a council, whither the expedition should proceed. It was at first intended for Egypt. But St. Louis had been privately urged by his brother Charles of Anjou to land at Tunis, on the representation that the king of that country would easily be persuaded to turn Christian, and aid in the prosecution of the crusades. The truth was that some of the Mahommedan princes of the coast had become tributary to Aragon. Peter of Aragon had deposed a king of Tunis for refusing this tribute, and placed his brother on the throne. This ejected prince had probably recourse to Charles of Anjou, who, by the French expedition, flung the first provocation to his future rival, the King of Aragon. The French barons who accompanied St. Louis infinitely preferred landing in Africa, which was comparatively near, to a lengthened voyage to the Holy Land. The fleet therefore sailed for the Bay of Tunis, and the king landed on an island separated from the shore by a narrow strait. Here he awaited tidings of the answer of the Sultan of Tunis, who, for a reply, decapitated all the Christians he could lay his hands on. The French therefore proceeded to the main land, and

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