V. His Faults in Policy crystallized about one:  for, while he subdued the serf-mastering nobility, he struck no final blow at the serf-system itself.

Our running readers of French history need here a word of caution.  They follow De Tocqueville, and De Tocqueville follows Biot in speaking of the serf-system as abolished in most of France hundreds of years before this.  But Biot and De Tocqueville take for granted a knowledge in their readers that the essential vileness of the system, and even many of its most shocking outward features, remained.

Richelieu might have crushed the serf-system, really, as easily as Louis X. and Philip the Long had crushed it nominally.  This Richelieu did not.

And the consequences of this great man’s great fault were terrible.  Hardly was he in his grave, when the nobles perverted the effort of the Paris Parliament for advance in liberty, and took the lead in the fearful revolts and massacres of the Fronde.  Then came Richelieu’s pupil, Mazarin, who tricked the nobles into order, and Mazarin’s pupil, Louis XIV., who bribed them into order.  But a nobility borne on high by the labor of a servile class must despise labor; so there came those weary years of indolent gambling and debauchery and “serf-eating” at Versailles.

Then came Louis XV., who was too feeble to maintain even the poor decent restraints imposed by Louis XIV.; so the serf-mastering caste became active in a new way, and their leaders in vileness unutterable became at last Fronsac and De Sade.

Then came “the deluge.”  The spirit of the serf-mastering caste, as left by Richelieu, was a main cause of the miseries which brought on the French Revolution.  When the Third Estate brought up their “portfolio of grievances,” for one complaint against the exactions of the monarchy there were fifty complaints against the exactions of the nobility.[D]

[Footnote D:  See any Resume des Cahiers,—­even the meagre ones in Buchez and Roux, or Le Bas, or Cheruel.]

Then came the failure of the Revolution in its direct purpose; and of this failure the serf-mastering caste was a main cause.  For this caste, hardened by ages of domineering over a servile class, despite fourth of August renunciations, would not, could not, accept a position compatible with freedom and order:  so earnest men were maddened, and sought to tear out this cancerous mass, with all its burning roots.

But for Richelieu’s great fault there is an excuse.  His mind was saturated with ideas of the impossibility of inducing freed peasants to work,—­the impossibility of making them citizens,—­the impossibility, in short, of making them men.  To his view was not unrolled the rich newer world-history, to show that a working class is most dangerous when restricted,—­that oppression is more dangerous to the oppressor than to the oppressed,—­that, if man will hew out paths to liberty, God will hew out paths to prosperity.  But Richelieu’s fault teaches the world not less than his virtues.