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arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain. Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change. Social systems can survive a good deal of folly when circumstances are historically favorable, or when bungling is cushioned by large resources or absorbed by sheer size as in the United States during its period of expansion. Today, when there are no more cushions, folly is less affordable. Yet the Founders remain a phenomenon to keep in mind to encourage our estimate of human possibilities, even if their example is too rare to be a basis of normal expectations.
    In between flashes of good government, folly has its day. In the Bourbons of France, it burst into brilliant flower.
    Louis XIV is usually considered a master monarch, largely because people tend to accept a successfully dramatized self-estimation. In reality he exhausted France’s economic and human resources by his ceaseless wars and their cost in national debt, casualties, famine and disease, and he propelled France toward the collapse that could only result, as it did two reigns later, in the overturn of absolute monarchy, the Bourbon raison d’être. Seen in that light, Louis XIV is the prince of policy pursued contrary to ultimate self-interest. Not he, but the mistress of his successor, Mme de Pompadour, glimpsed the outcome: “After us the deluge.”
    By general agreement of historians, the most condemned act and worst error of Louis’ career was his Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, cancelling his grandfather’s decree of toleration and reopening persecution of the Huguenots. It lacks one qualification of complete folly in that, far from being reproved or admonished at the time, it was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm and still lauded thirty years later at the King’s funeral as one of his most praiseworthy acts. This very fact, however, reinforces another criterion—that the policy must be theproduct of a group rather than of an individual. Recognition as folly was not long delayed. Within decades, Voltaire called it “one of the greatest calamities of France,” with consequences “wholly contrary to the purpose in view.”
    Like all follies, it was conditioned by the attitudes and beliefs and politics of the time, and like some, if not all, it was unnecessary, an activist policy when doing nothing would have served as well. The force of the old religious schism and of Calvinist doctrinal ferocity was fading; the Huguenots, who numbered fewer than two million or about one-tenth of the population, were loyal hard-working citizens, too hard-working for Catholic comfort. That was the rub. Since Huguenots kept only the Sabbath as against more than a hundred saints’ days and holy days kept by the Catholics, they were more productive and more successful in commerce. Their stores and workshops took away business, a consideration that operated behind the Catholic demand for their suppression. The demand was justified on the higher ground that religious dissidence was treason to the King and that abolition of freedom of conscience—“this deadly freedom”—would serve the nation as well as serve God.
    The advice appealed to the King as he grew more autocratic after shedding the early tutelage of Cardinal Mazarin. The greater his autocracy, the more the existence of a dissident sect appeared to him an unacceptable rift in submission to the royal will. “One law, one King, one God” was his concept of the state, and after twenty-five years at its head, his political arteries had hardened and his capacity for tolerating differences atrophied. He had acquired the disease of divine mission so often disastrous to rulers, convincing himself that it was the Almighty’s will “that I should be His instrument in bringing back to His ways all those who are subject to me.” In addition, he had political motives.