Stuart dynasty, tacitly admitted the military primacy of
France. Nor was this superiority of the French confined
to the science of war. It passed unquestioned in the arts
of peace. Even Rome at the height of her power could not
dominate every field of human activity. She could rule
the people with authority and overcome the proud; but
even her own poets rendered homage to Greece in the realms
of art, sculpture, and eloquence. But France was the
aesthetic as well as the military dictator of seventeenth-
century Europe. Her authority was supreme, as Macaulay
says, on all matters from orthodoxy in architecture to
the proper cut of a courtier's clothes. Her monarchs
were the first gentlemen of Europe. Her nobility set the
social standards of the day. The rank and file of her
people--and there were at least twenty million of them
in the days of Louis Quatorze--were making a fertile land
yield its full increase. The country was powerful, rich,
prosperous, and, for the time being, outwardly contented.

So far as her form and spirit of government went, France
by the middle of the seventeenth century was a despotism
both in theory and in fact. Men were still living who
could recall the day when France had a real parliament,
the Estates-General as it was called. This body had at
one time all the essentials of a representative assembly.
It might have become, as the English House of Commons
became, the grand inquest of the nation. But it did not
do so. The waxing personal strength of the monarchy curbed
its influence, its authority weakened, and throughout
the great century of French colonial expansion from 1650