Review Article The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration
Beik, William, 1941Past & Present, Number 188, August 2005, pp. 195-224 (Article)
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REVIEW ARTICLE
THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV AS
SOCIAL COLLABORATION*
A generation ago a new view of French absolutism became the
accepted orthodoxy. According to this view, the king ruled by
collaborating with socially powerful elites — at court, in Paris
and in the provinces. Government was characterized by compromise, negotiation, and sharing of resources in a manner
which maintained and supported hierarchical differences. This
approach replaced an older formulation dating all the way back
to Alexis de Tocqueville, according to which the Bourbon
monarchs had laid the foundations for the modern state by
reducing the nobility to obedience and beginning a process of
national uniWcation. The dominant paradigm thus shifted from
a centralizing, modernizing monarch to a king maintaining and
defending a traditional society.
While the social, collaborative model still prevails, cracks are
appearing in this ediWce. Most recent studies are questioning
aspects of the interpretation, and one recent author, John Hurt,
even calls for a more drastic shift of focus: ‘Few historians
today believe that there was anything very “absolute” about
what was once reXexively called the absolute monarchy’, he
complains, and goes on to state, ‘I do think that we have
pushed the revisionist thesis beyond its appropriate limits,
possibly because we have given up looking for evidence that
contradicts it’.1 Clearly the time has come for a reassessment of
the evidence, and a number of important new studies provide
the occasion.
The traditional view was grounded in the authoritative
French works of Georges Pagès and Roland Mousnier, and in a
* This article is dedicated to the many colleagues through the years who have
participated in this ongoing discussion, only some of whom are cited here.
1
John J. Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority
(Manchester, 2002), p. ix. For other critiques, see the introductions to the works
cited below by Campbell, Chapman, Nachison, Potter, Rowlands or Swann.
Past and Present, no. 188 (Aug. 2005)
doi:10.1093/pastj/gti019
© The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2005
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PAST AND PRESENT
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variety of other studies in English and French.2 By contrast,
social collaboration has been a distinctively Anglophone preoccupation. There is no obvious explanation for this divergence
of approaches, in which the social consciousness of the 1960s
and 1970s was channelled by the French into studies of
regional societal systems following the lead of Fernand Braudel,
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the Annales School, while
English-speaking authors directed their social concerns towards
a deepening of political history instead of abandoning the
événementiel.3 It is only recently that the French have begun to
join the discussion and take account of works written in
English.4 One example is the alert, well-informed discussion by
Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon.5
Let me note at the outset that the present discussion
concerns the practice of governance, not the theory of absolutism,
for it was in practice that the king collaborated. There is little
dispute concerning the theory that the king had absolute
authority, that is, authority unchecked by any institutional
body. His reach was limited only by religion, conscience and
2
Georges Pagès, La Monarchie d’ancien régime en France (de Henri IV à Louis XIV),
4th edn (Paris, 1946); Roland Mousnier, La Vénalité des ofWces sous Henri IV et
Louis XIII (Paris, 1971); Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598–1789, trans. Brian Pearce, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1979–84); Ernest
Lavisse, Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la Révolution, 9 vols. (Paris,
1900–11), vii (pts 1–2); viii (pt 1); François Bluche, Louis XIV, trans. Mark Greengrass
(Oxford, 1990); Michel Antoine, ‘La Monarchie absolue’, in Keith Baker (ed.),
The Political Culture of the Old Régime (Oxford, 1987); John B. Wolf, Louis XIV
(New York, 1968); William F. Church, Louis XIV in Historical Thought (New York,
1976); Herbert H. Rowen, The King’s State: Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern
France (New Brunswick, 1980); Richard Bonney, Political Change in France under
Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661 (Oxford, 1978); Richard Bonney, The Limits of
Absolutism in Ancien Régime France (Aldershot, 1995).
3
On the Annales School, see Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The
Annales School, 1929–1989 (Stanford, 1990); François Dosse, New History in
France: The Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V. Conroy, Jr (Urbana, 1994).
4
Some recent surveys by French scholars are: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The
Ancien Régime: A History of France, 1610–1774, trans. Mark Greengrass (Oxford,
1996); Joël Cornette (ed.), La France de la monarchie absolue (Paris, 1997). Some
surveys in English are: James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France
(Cambridge, 1995); David J. Sturdy, Louis XIV (London, 1998); Peter Robert
Campbell, Louis XIV, 1661–1715 (London, 1993); Geoffrey Treasure, Louis XIV
(London, 2001).
5
Fanny Cosandey and Robert Descimon, L’Absolutisme en France: histoire et
historiographie (Paris, 2002). See Joël Cornette, Le Roi de guerre: essai sur la
souveraineté dans la France du Grand Siècle (Paris, 1993).
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
197
the fundamental laws of the realm.6 But what could he really do?
I propose to summarize the varieties of ‘collaborative’ positions
and then consider whether new research should cause us to
rethink this current orthodoxy.
I
THE PREVAILING VIEW OF COLLABORATION
Collaboration is not at all a precise concept, and different
authors give it a variety of meanings. There are essentially two
approaches. The Wrst stresses common interests between the
state and other groups in society. My own study of Languedoc
fell into this category.7 I suggested that Louis XIV placated
formerly rebellious provincial elites by providing them with
ideological support, by sharing privileged tax Xows with them,
by fulWlling certain of their principal aspirations, and by
consulting them about certain governmental projects which
reXected favourably on their reputation for magniWcence. I
Wtted these ideas into a loosely Marxist framework, arguing,
along with Perry Anderson, that the Crown and provincial
notables shared common class interests and that society took
the form of a late, recharged feudalism rather than a manifestation
of the rise of capitalism.8
Other authors produced similar arguments using different
frameworks. James Collins found that Breton society contained a
6
The pioneers in interpreting the theory of absolutism as limited monarchy were
Fritz Hartung and Roland Mousnier, ‘Quelques problèmes concernant la monarchie
absolue’, Comitato internazionale di scienze storiche, X Congresso internazionale de
scienze storiche (Roma, 1955), Relazione Vol. 5 (Storia moderna) (Florence, 1955).
Another pioneer was Andrew Lossky, who summed up his views in his ‘The
Absolutism of Louis XIV: Myth or Reality?’, Canadian Jl Hist., xix (1984). A Wne
examination of the history of the concept of absolutism is Richard Bonney,
L’Absolutisme (Paris, 1989). It was J. Russell Major who emphasized the concept of
the monarchy accommodating the nobility. However, his political view of consultation
led him to see Louis XIV’s absolutism as something different from the ‘renaissance’
or ‘consultative’ monarchy, thus he adopted the traditional, not the revisionistsocial, interpretation of Louis XIV: J. Russell Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to
Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates (Baltimore, 1994). A founder
of what might be called ‘French revisionism’ was François-Xavier Emmanuelli, Un
mythe de l’absolutisme bourbonien: l’intendance du milieu du XVII e siècle à la Wn du
XVIII e siècle (France, Espagne, Amérique) (Aix-en-Provence, 1981).
7
William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power
and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985).
8
Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974).
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PAST AND PRESENT
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combination of class interests and status distinctions.9 The king
believed in protecting the privileges of society’s many corporate
entities and he shared certain class interests with the great nobility
in the Breton Estates, but he was also pushing to extend his
universal authority even at the expense of these ties. David Parker
argued, in sophisticated Marxist terms, that the ruling class actually owned the state through venality of ofWce, and that as a result
royal institutions devoted much of their time to adjudicating intraclass conXicts over property and status. Thus the state was ‘as
much an arena for the regulation of conXicts inside the ruling class
as an instrument of class domination’.10 Other studies explored
particular connections. Albert Hamscher showed how Louis XIV
was working with the Parlement of Paris rather than silencing the
judges, and how the royal council supported the authority of the
various parlements by restoring their jurisdictional inXuence.11
Sharon Kettering described the patronage networks whose reciprocal exchange of power and inXuence forged effective but personal links between ministerial circles and provincial brokers.12
Sarah Hanley explored the gendered assumptions built into the
legal underpinnings of absolute monarchy, and the inXuence of
royal judges and jurists in helping to deWne legal practice.13 Daniel
9
James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern Brittany
(Cambridge, 1994).
10
David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity?
(London, 1996), 268.
11
Albert N. Hamscher, The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde, 1653–1673
(Pittsburgh, 1976); Albert N. Hamscher, The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the
Age of Louis XIV: A Study in French Absolutism (Philadelphia, 1987).
12
Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France
(Oxford, 1987). See also her essays in her Patronage in Sixteenth- and SeventeenthCentury France (Aldershot, 2002).
13
See four articles by Sarah Hanley: ‘Engendering the State: Family Formation
and State Building in Early Modern France’, French Hist. Studies, xvi (1989);
‘Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500–1800’, Amer. Hist. Rev.,
cii (1997); ‘The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime
Government and Male Right’, in Adrianna Bakos (ed.), Politics, Ideology and the
Law in Early Modern Europe (Rochester, NY, 1994); ‘The Jurisprudence of the
Arrêts: Marital Union, Civil Society and State Formation in France, 1550–1650’,
Law and History Rev., xxi (2003). On the law and absolutism, see also David
Parker, ‘Sovereignty, Absolutism and the Function of the Law in SeventeenthCentury France’, Past and Present, no. 122 (Feb. 1989). On gendered monarchy,
see Robert Descimon, ‘Les Fonctions de la métaphore du mariage politique du roi
et de la république en France, XVe–XVIIIe siècles’, Annales ESC, xlvii (1992);
Fanny Cosandey, La Reine de France: symbole et pouvoir, XV e–XVIII e siècle (Paris,
2000).
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
199
Dessert, seconded by Françoise Bayard and Claude Michaud,
demonstrated that there were close ties between the world of tax
farming and the court nobility, the church hierarchy and the
provincial estates.14
The second argument for collaboration is based on necessity
rather than social interests. According to Roger Mettam, cooperation with provincial elites was unavoidable because of the
government’s utter inability to inXuence local society very
deeply, along with the king’s lack of interest in doing so. The
government was weak and the royal expectations were entirely
traditional.15 Louis focused his attention narrowly on maintaining
authority, pursuing international glory and directing military
operations. He believed that provincial society could take care
of itself, except when disorder or the need for tax revenues
required intervention. Nicholas Henshall carried this view to its
logical conclusion in a book which attempted to demolish the
very concept of absolutism.16
These accounts differ in the way they connect the pieces of
the puzzle, but they are largely in agreement about the nature
of the pieces. They present a governmental system that had its
own rules and momentum. It was no longer medieval but not
yet modern. Some of its distinctive features were venality of
ofWce, patronage networks, a hierarchical social system which
put much stress on unequal rights (privileges), the continuing
importance of powerful grandees both at court and in the
provinces, and a traditional-minded king whose government
was based more on personal relationships than on bureaucratic
regularities.
Newer studies, however, raise doubts about elements of the
‘revisionist’ argument. Was the Sun King’s glory really just a
smokescreen? Were the pays d’états, where much of this collaboration has been found, typical? Did the harsher regime that
emerged after 1689 signal the death of ‘collaborative’ absolutism?
14
Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle (Paris, 1984);
Françoise Bayard, Le Monde des Wnanciers au XVII e siècle (Paris, 1988); Claude
Michaud, L’Église et l’argent sous l’ancien régime: les receveurs généraux du clergé de
France aux XVI e–XVII e siècles (Paris, 1991).
15
Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 1988). A
concise statement of Mettam’s position is Roger Mettam, ‘France’, in John Miller
(ed.), Absolutism in Seventeeenth-Century Europe (New York, 1990).
16
Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early
Modern European Monarchy (London, 1992).
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PAST AND PRESENT
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II
REGIONAL ELITES AND THE STATE
The place to start is with regional studies, because they have
traditionally been used to assess the exchange of revenues and
services between the Crown and provincial elites.17 We now
have three new contributions to this genre. Mark Potter
explores Wnancial relations of the king with two provinces,
Burgundy and Normandy, from 1688 to 1715; his study overlaps with that of Julian Swann, who studies the Estates of
Burgundy from 1661 to 1790; while Marie-Laure Legay studies the three small estates of Artois, ‘Walloon’ Flanders and
Cambrésis.18
Potter offers a tightly argued case concerning royal–provincial
Wscal relations in Burgundy.19 The elites in question were the
high royal ofWceholders, on the one hand, and the groups
represented in the Estates, on the other.20 Both enjoyed a
relationship by which provincial inXuence was secured in
return for large sums transferred to the royal coffers. Louis XIV
granted venal ofWceholders property rights which secured their
hold on their ofWces, thereby creating a kind of property which
could be pledged as collateral for loans to the Crown. Using
these ofWces as security, they could then borrow money at low
17
I should inform the reader that I have published elsewhere somewhat different
reviews of Wve of the books discussed (see below for complete citations of the
books). The reviews are: Marie-Laure Legay, Les États provinciaux, in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, l (2003), 206–9; John Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle,
in Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., xxx (1999), 122–3; David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army, in Jl
Interdisciplinary Hist., xxxiii (2003), 629–31; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and
Absolute Monarchy, on-line, H-France Review, iv (May 2004), no. 52; Guy
Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army, in Amer. Hist. Rev., cix (2004), 262.
18
Mark Potter, Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France,
1688–1715 (Aldershot, 2003); Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy:
The Estates-General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003); Marie-Laure
Legay, Les États provinciaux dans la construction de l’état moderne aux XVII e et XVIII e
siècles (Geneva, 2001).
19
Here Potter is working with arguments Wrst used by David D. Bien, ‘OfWces,
Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien
Régime’, in Baker (ed.), Political Culture of the Old Régime. See also Mark Potter
and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, ‘Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates of
Burgundy, 1660–1790’, Jl Interdisciplinary Hist., xxvii (1997); William Doyle,
Venality: The Sale of OfWces in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1996).
20
High ofWceholders included the judges of the Parlement and the Chambre des
Comptes, and possibly some other royal ofWcials who owned their ofWces. For the
membership of the Estates, see the discussion of Swann which follows.
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
201
interest rates on behalf of the king. This borrowing might be
done collectively as a company or individually. Similarly, the
provincial estates could borrow money for the king once he had
granted them the right to collect taxes, the revenues from
which were pledged for interest payments to secure the loan.21
The regularity of the sessions of the Estates and their reliable
administration created a climate of investor conWdence which
in turn led to lower interest rates. In both cases borrowing
required the king to guarantee the legal standing of the institution
which set up the loan.
Who was winning this tug of war between king and
province?22 In the war years from 1689 to 1715, the Estates of
Burgundy were subjected to a deluge of Wscal demands from
the king which they bought up or paid off, usually by borrowing
money. According to Potter, the Estates had real power to
protect provincial interests by facilitating a coming-together or
‘coalition’ of leading provincial Wgures. This coalition defended
the privileges of the province because it was in the interests of
their members as landholders to do so. The assembly protected
landholding revenues by keeping the king’s taille demands at
reasonable levels, by buying up newly created venal ofWces
which might erode the tax base or threaten their interests, and
by Wghting to disarm new taxes like the dixième and the capitation.
After 1689 they used the revenues from two excise taxes
granted by the king to underwrite the loans they took out to
buy off edicts and satisfy the king. They could tolerate this
concession because the taxes in question primarily threatened
merchants who were not represented in the ruling ‘coalition’
and did not burden landowners or their tenants.
Potter goes an analytical step further by comparing this
‘community management’ in Burgundy with the situation in
Normandy, where there was no body to represent the province,
and so there was no ‘coalition’. The intendant and the tax
farmers were correspondingly more powerful. Possibly as a
21
If the annual interest, plus a fund to repay the capital, was covered by the
annual revenues of the tax, there would be no other cost to the province. This was
essentially the same tactic used by the English Parliament in the 1690s in Xoating
the national debt.
22
Louis XIV reportedly borrowed a total of 2,231 million livres from 1689 to
1715 without arousing the turbulence that had accompanied similar measures during the reign of Louis XIII: see Potter, Corps and Clienteles, 13–14.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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result, Normandy paid a much heavier taille. In Burgundy
collection by the Estates guaranteed the king lower but more
reliable taille revenues; whereas in Normandy he could set any
amount, but he could not count on receiving it because there
was no intermediate body to facilitate collection, and because
peasant recalcitrance and insolvency made the returns unreliable.
Furthermore, in Burgundy extraordinary demands were
Wnanced through the Estates and paid on time according to
well-managed loan contracts. In Normandy separate contracts
had to be negotiated with each corporate body by traitants (tax
farmers), with very mixed results.
All this suggests that Louis XIV got a good deal from the
Estates of Burgundy. By strengthening the owners’ property
rights over ofWces and perhaps slightly moderating his direct
demands, in return the king got a cost-free, efWcient tax administration that insured payments against immediate crises, along
with access to cheaper and more readily accessible credit than
he could otherwise enjoy. His greater control over Normandy
did not mean substantially higher revenues or more regular
procedures. Which then was the most ‘collaborative’? In theory
the Estates participated, but they could no longer protect themselves from the onslaught of state demands. They could only
control the way the demands were satisWed. They saw their
advantages maintained but at the expense of the general population and especially to the detriment of commercial interests.
This is not unlike what Collins found in Brittany. As Potter
notes, ‘Provincial estates, therefore, did not so much leave
privileged provinces open to exploitation as they created opportunities for the landed elite to advance their interests at the
expense of both commercial groups and peasant tenants’.23
Swann’s welcome study provides year-by-year information
on the activities of those same Estates General of Burgundy all
the way through the eighteenth century. This assembly consisted of some Wfty clerics, around a hundred nobles possessing
a Wef in the province, and twenty-Wve mayors of towns. They
met every third year and, given the exclusivity of their membership, it is questionable whether they formed, as Potter argued,
a ‘coalition’ of the provincial elites.
23
Ibid., 132.
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One notable feature of the local political climate was the
immense inXuence of the princes of Condé, governors of the
province. A marvellous study of this involvement between 1660
and 1730 by Beth Nachison shows in detail how the Condés
continued to be intimately immersed in the politics of
Burgundy even though they rarely visited the province.24
Another feature was the exclusion of the ofWcers of the Parlement
of Dijon from the Estates. This powerful company represented
a rival pole of authority that was often at loggerheads with the
Estates, again raising doubts about the viability of a political
‘coalition’ of the elite. A third feature was the chambre d’élus, a
permanent committee of seven that managed the affairs of the
Estates between sessions. Swann provides much evidence to
show that the élus operated effectively.
He also argues, like Potter, that the Estates had real bargaining
power to defend the province against the king’s demands. Like
the other provincial estates, they capitulated in 1674 to the
king’s insistence that they grant a large don gratuit without
discussion, and this laudatory procedure became ‘a piece of
political theatre’ that was repeated every session until the Revolution. Swann maintains, however, that this formal capitulation
was not an act of ‘blind deference’.25 The Estates continued to
send unpublished remonstrances to the king, and on occasion
they launched major lobbying efforts against some detested
policy. They did have a stellar record for managing their debt.
Despite the massive loans of the War of the Spanish Succession
they remained solvent, even though by 1715 the crues and
octrois, local taxes on which the loans were based, were committed
many years in advance. In this way they provided a service to
the friends, relatives and clients from whom they borrowed the
money by offering them ‘the happy prospect of a nineteen-year
investment with a guaranteed annual return of 5 per cent and
24
Nachison describes how the Condés controlled appointments, masterminded
the deliberations in the Estates and even collaborated with the intendants. She
delineates the intensely personal quality of patron–client relations, the effect of
personalities like Henri Jules, described by his chamberlain as ‘feared by everyone,
hated by his domestics and the horror of his family’. Beth Nachison, ‘Provincial
Government in the Ancien Régime: The Princes of Condé in Burgundy, 1660–1730’
(Univ. of Iowa Ph.D. thesis, 1992), 38–9; Beth Nachison, ‘Absentee Government
and Provincial Governors in Early Modern France: The Princes of Condé and
Burgundy, 1660–1720’, French Hist. Studies, xxi (1998).
25
Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy, 163–5.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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the comforting knowledge that their capital was secure’.26
Remarkably, the Estates may even have borrowed at rates higher
than necessary to shore up the portfolios of their elite creditors.
In the eighteenth century the Estates continued to be active
and important. Bargaining reduced the nobility’s share of the
capitation tax, and moderated other demands. Periodic assaults
on the assembly’s cosy provincial arrangements by ControllerGenerals Orry in 1745, Machault d’Arnouville in 1749,
L’Averdy in 1764, and abbé Terray in 1770 were fended off
with varying degrees of success. There were attempts from
within to redress inequities in the assessment of the taille, and
to root out the extensive corruption in the Estates’ administration,
but these were always blocked by members of the privileged
orders and by outcries from the Parlement, which claimed
jurisdiction.
Legay studies in detail the three small north-eastern provinces of Artois, ‘Walloon’ Flanders and Cambrésis, and adds
more general remarks about all the Estates in the eighteenth
century. The Estates of Artois were conWgured like a miniature
Estates of Burgundy, with three orders representing clerics,
nobles with Wefs, and a few town governments. Cambrésis had
a small assembly dominated by wealthy ecclesiastics; Flanders
had four orders of towns but no nobles or clergy. Traditional
accounts conclude that Louis XIV had robbed all the provincial
estates of their last measure of autonomy; but instead of withering away, says Legay, they increased in importance. Abandoning their futile role as defenders of provincial liberties, they
became the administrative allies of the Contrôle-Général and
gained in managerial inXuence what they had lost in independence.
Like the élus of Burgundy, these assemblies’ strength lay in
their permanent bureaux, which maintained representation in
Paris itself. Business was increasingly conducted in the capital,
through meetings between the provincial agents and the premier
commis of a minister, the intendants des Wnances, or the commissaires de guerre.27 The result was a growing collaboration between
the notables who ran the Estates and the commis who ran the
26
Ibid., 299.
We might note here the undeniable bureaucratic development of the central
state.
27
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
205
government. Starting in the 1760s these Estates underwrote
loans to the king, acquired jurisdiction over tax disputes, and
began to oversee roads and public works. By the last years of the
Ancien Régime they even had a larger staff than the intendant.
However, the price for this transfer of duties from the royal agents
to the Estates was letting the privileged and unrepresentative
deputies defend their own class interests, not those of the public.
Reading Potter, Swann and Legay, one might argue that the
collaborationist view is conWrmed, with qualiWcations. Regional
assemblies continued to be important not so much as defenders
of local liberties but as intermediaries who facilitated royal
government while defending the interests of provincial elites.
They were an effective alternative to the system of intendants,
who had trouble dealing with vested interests. One might
wonder then why the king did not simply create estates in every
province. (In the eighteenth century reforming ministers tried
this several times.) Perhaps the answer is that collaboration
with old-style elites was unavoidable where it already existed,
but extending it would disenfranchise desirable commercial
interests and ruin the peasants, and therefore agriculture.
However, a new thesis on Franche-Comté provides an interesting counterpoint to this conclusion.28 Darryl Dee’s account,
which supplies some evidence for the older, more intrusive
view of royal absolutism, examines the integration of that
province into France after its conquest from the Spanish in
1674. Here, where the king and his ministers had more or less a
free hand, did they choose to collaborate or did they take over
and dominate? Dee suggests that they followed a policy of
‘pragmatic opportunism’ rather than a master plan to extend
absolutism. The king was constrained by existing social forces
and he worked through traditional means, which he pushed to
their limits. He developed close ties with a small circle of elite
provincial collaborators, most notably the family of Claude
Boisot who had supported the French during the Wrst occupation.
He also favoured a group of loyal families from the former
Parlement of Dôle, which he revived and transferred to Besançon.
28
Darryl Dee, ‘The Practice of Absolutism: Franche-Comté in the Kingdom of
France, 1674–1715’ (Emory Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2004). See also Darryl Dee,
‘Judicial Politics, War Finance and Absolutism: The Parlement of Besançon and
the Venality of OfWce, 1699–1705’, forthcoming in French History. I was Dee’s
dissertation adviser.
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But in caressing some prominent families, he also narrowed the
focus of his local support to a tighter group. The king’s most
telling innovation was the abolition of the Estates of FrancheComté and the transfer of responsibility for tax collection to the
intendant. Apparently he did not always value the participation
of provincial estates over the uses of royal commissioners.
Dee’s close examination of the correspondence between
Versailles and the province during the War of the Spanish Succession brings home the skill and enterprise of the king’s later generation of ministers, who are often undervalued when compared
with the famous Wgures of the Wrst thirty years. These men held
the system together and made it work under extreme pressure.
Normally, tax money Xowed from local sources in the province,
through the hands of Wnancier-receivers, into the trésor de
l’extraordinaire des guerres, and from there back to the province
in the form of payments for military expenses. By 1704 this
system of tax Xows had crashed. Desperate for new funds, the
intendant Louis de Bernage and the controller-general Michel
de Chamillart worked out a plan to arrange a provincial abonnement général. For a ‘subsidy’ of 350,000 livres per year the king
would absolve the province of future ‘edicts’. Like the abonnements in other provinces, this arrangement shifted much of the
burden of the subsidy from the undertaxed ofWcers and urban
elites to the overburdened rural taxpayers. Remarkably, this
deal was negotiated without any representative body to ratify it.
Instead of the Estates taking over administrative functions formerly exercised by the intendant, as in Burgundy and Artois,
the intendant was taking over the traditional role of the Estates
by unilaterally striking a deal on behalf of the province!
III
THE STATE AT THE CENTRE: POLICIES AND SYSTEMS
Recent studies of the central government offer both insights
into particular branches and broad interpretations. One
triumphalist account of the ruling successes of Louis XIV is
Anette Smedley-Weill’s comprehensive study of the provincial
intendants.29 It is a useful summary of the system of agents,
29
Anette Smedley-Weill, Les Intendants de Louis XIV (Paris, 1995).
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
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their multiple functions and their increasingly rationalized
administration. But the author gives no hint of the practical
realities, ideological ambiguities, social accommodations or
traditional practices that have been the focus of most of the
scholarship of the past twenty years.
On the royal court, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s examination,
with Jean-François Fitou, of the duke of Saint-Simon’s memoirs
stands out as an analytical tour de force which wonderfully
captures the system of political relationships at Versailles
around the year 1709.30 In a densely argued narrative, Le Roy
Ladurie identiWes three ‘cabals’ at the court, two of which (plus
a ‘bastard subgroup’) formed what might be called the ‘dominant
party at Versailles’.31 This approach demonstrates the complexity of the way political relations were tied to personal relationships. People organized themselves according to personal
rivalries, to be sure, but also according to family loyalties,
religious predilections, social status, friendship, ideological
viewpoints and professional status. Their connections were
multilateral and came in varying degrees of intensity. They
evolved over time. There was no simple ‘royal faction’. This
picture is a considerable improvement upon Norbert Elias’s
more mechanical account of courtly circles ranging themselves
around the king.32 The book also explores the demography of
marriage relationships among the 2,616 French personages
discussed by Saint-Simon, analyses the ‘dropouts’ who withdrew
from court society, usually for moral or religious reasons, and
traces the political reconWgurations of the court after 1715.
A new book by Sara Chapman explores this milieu from the
point of view of the Pontchartrain dynasty.33 It is a detailed
study of the family ties and patron–client relations of Louis de
30
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon and the
Court of Louis XIV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 2001); originally
published as Saint-Simon, ou le système de la cour (Paris, 1997).
31
Le Roy Ladurie, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, 139.
32
Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford, 1983). On
the royal court, an important new contribution is Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and
Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003).
See also Jean-François Solnon, La Cour de France (Paris, 1987); Sophie de
Laverny, Les Domestiques commensaux du roi de France au XVII e siècle (Paris, 2002).
33
Sara E. Chapman, Private Ambition and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de
Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV’s Government, 1650–1715 (Rochester, NY,
2004).
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 188
Pontchartrain, who was controller-general and secretary of
state for the navy (1689/90–1699) and chancellor (1699–1714),
and of those of his son Jérôme, who succeeded his father as
naval secretary (1699–1715). The Pontchartrains functioned
through family ties and personal allies. Through close scrutiny
of correspondence, Chapman illuminates their implementation
of the 1695 capitation tax and the controller-general’s ties with
intendants in the provinces and with the clergy. We learn about
the naval secretary’s contacts with the count of Toulouse, who was
amiral de France, and with the West Indies. We also hear of the
chancellor’s personal ties to the judges of selected sovereign
courts. In all these areas Chapman focuses on the personal relations, not the business conducted. She Wnds that professional
loyalties were gaining on client loyalties, but that personal relationships remained central to the system even after 1715.
By presenting a parade of personal bonds, Chapman
highlights the world of patronage from the perspective of a
major governmental Wgure. It is only by contemplating the
multilateral contacts of men like Pontchartrain as a group that
we begin to see them as a political class with multiple ties to
one another. His many correspondents moved in and out of
royal commissions, judicial ofWces, church positions and military
posts. They shared many experiences. A given ofWcial, say a
royal councillor, could beneWt from experience undergone in
earlier posts, and he might Wnd himself working with people he
had worked with before, who in turn might bring their experience to bear on the matter under discussion.
A major problem in studies of Louis XIV is precisely how to
weigh such traditional, personal modes of functioning against
what we know about the undeniable signs of state development:
the growth in the size of government agencies, the increasing
sophistication of information-collection, or the extension of
royal reach into new areas of governance. For example, David
Kammerling Smith’s study of Louis XIV’s conseil de commerce,
which was established in 1700, points to just such an innovation.34 Here was a new institution created by the king to
34
David Kammerling Smith, ‘ “Au Bien du Commerce”: Economic Discourse
and Visions of Society in France’ (Univ. of Pennsylvania Ph.D. thesis, 1995); see
also David Kammerling Smith, ‘Structuring Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century
France: The Political Innovations of the French Council of Commerce’, Jl Mod.
Hist., lxxiv (2002).
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
209
monitor merchant opinion and improve co-ordination of state
economic policies, an extension of the activities of the Pontchartrains discussed by Chapman.35 Composed of a mixture of
high government administrators and deputies from mercantile
cities, its structure went through various permutations. On the
one hand it developed a channel of communication with
hundreds of merchants, guilds and individuals all over France —
people who were learning how to dialogue with the government —
and on the other it established a system of organized informationgathering involving the provincial intendants, the inspectors of
manufactures, and the commissioners or intendants of commerce in the Council of Commerce. The Sun King had clearly
inaugurated something new and forward-looking, but it
entailed a certain contradiction of goals and rhetoric. As Smith
argues, there was an implicit conXict between the ministerial
objective of managing the economy in the tradition of Colbert
and the discordant appeals coming in from private parties
wanting more freedom to innovate.36 There was also a clash
between the ofWcial client network which was built on privileged contacts and personal favouritism and the communication
network which was built on openness of exchange. ‘On the one
hand, the language of privilege permeated the economic discourse used in the Council of Commerce. On the other hand,
the activities and goals of the Council of Commerce challenged
the practices of privilege’.37 Unlike the provincial estates, this
was a direct link with the rising world of proWt-making.
Louis XIV’s imposition of the capitation and dixième taxes
has also been considered a forward-looking step which began to
encroach on the tax exemptions of the privileged. The recent
study by Michael Kwass explores this paradox.38 The capitation
35
The conseil had been the creation of Louis de Pontchartrain, but after he
became chancellor in 1699 Michel de Chamillart took over as its head.
36
A study of the impact of Colbertism in the eighteenth century is Philippe
Minard, La Fortune du colbertisme: état et industrie dans la France des Lumières (Paris,
1998).
37
Smith, ‘ “Au Bien du Commerce” ’, 567.
38
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century
France (Cambridge, 2000). Two other works analyse the capitation of 1695: Alain
Guéry, ‘État, classiWcation sociale et compromis sous Louis XIV: la capitation de
1695’, Annales ESC, xli (1986); François Bluche and Jean-François Solnon, La
Véritable Hiérarchie sociale de l’ancienne France: le tarif de la première capitation, 1695
(Geneva, 1983).
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 188
tax (1695–8, 1701–90) and the dixième tax (1710–17, 1733–7,
1741–9) did indeed challenge privileged groups’ exemptions.
The Wrst was a head tax based on a schedule of social ranks.
The second was an income tax based on 10 per cent of net
revenue (later 5 per cent as the vingtième tax, 1749–90).
Through these ‘universal’ taxes Louis XIV attacked the very
privileges which he otherwise had supported and even created.
Kwass notes that as a percentage of direct taxes (excluding
indirect taxes), the two new impositions grew relative to the
traditional taille until by 1789 they made up 58.2 per cent of
direct taxation. Meanwhile the vingtième was assessed with
increasing accuracy by the intendants, and by the 1780s nobles
and other privileged parties were paying a sizeable portion of
direct taxes. Even the clergy had to cough up more ‘free gift’
money, and the provincial estates had to increase their regular
grants accordingly. Still, over half the vingtième fell on the nonprivileged as an addition to the taille.39 Thus the privileged
were being signiWcantly taxed but the burden on the nonprivileged was not reduced.
Another example of aggressive intervention appears in Peter
Sahlins’s new book on citizenship, which discusses Louis XIV’s
transformation of the droit d’aubaine.40 This medieval right of
seigneurs to seize the property of aliens who died within their
territory had gradually been extended by jurists to include a
variety of restrictions on foreigners living in France. From time
to time previous monarchs had issued dispensations to individuals
or groups. In 1697 Louis XIV stepped in with a blanket royal
ordinance that rescinded all previous rights, redeWned the restrictions covered by the droit d’aubaine, and imposed a naturalization tax on all foreigners and their descendants who had settled
in France since 1600, the payment of which would supposedly
exempt them from the newly deWned restrictions. This was
obviously another Wscal expedient. But by universalizing a
speciWc right formerly held separately by diverse parties while
nullifying the many historical and regional differences, the king
was steamrollering over privileges in the name of absolute
authority — a perfect example of absolutist uniWcation. This
39
Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation, 95.
Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After
(Ithaca, 2004).
40
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
211
process illustrates again the mixed motivation inherent in absolute monarchy, or as Sahlins describes it, an ‘essential contradiction of French absolutism’.41
These examples recall that Louis XIV’s regime has traditionally
been characterized as ‘classical’, ‘rational’, even ‘Cartesian’.42
Jay Smith’s study of noble attitudes towards the monarch puts
a different spin on this phenomenon.43 He explores the tendency to regulate, standardize and classify that characterized
the Sun King’s regime, as seen in the rules of etiquette imposed
at court, in Colbert’s general surveys of the state of the kingdom,
and in the investigations of the nobility, the legal codes and the
royal academies. Smith invokes Michel Foucault in viewing
these cultural innovations as a form of ‘discipline’. But instead
of seeing them as steps towards the imposition of internalized
personal discipline on the population, Smith sees them as a way
of re-educating the nobility. The king was teaching the nobles
that their merit would now include new values and skills, and
he was expanding their concept of service from a face-to-face
loyalty in the presence (the ‘gaze’) of the king to service to a
king not-present but embodied in the administration. This
extension of the impact of a face-to-face encounter with the
‘king’s gaze’ to the more impersonal contacts between eighteenthcentury nobles and royal institutions is perhaps stretched
beyond credence, but Smith provides a good way of thinking
about the process of the nobles redeWning themselves, and yet
remaining nobles.44
Peter Campbell’s study attempts to pull all these disparate
aspects of the governmental system into one model which he
41
Ibid., 55.
The Cartesian aspect is stressed in James E. King, Science and Rationalism in
the Government of Louis XIV (Baltimore, 1949); see also Albert Guérard, The Life
and Death of an Ideal: France in the Classical Age (New York, 1928).
43
Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of
Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor, 1996): see ch. 4.
44
A good example of contrasting readings of noble mentality is provided by
Smith, who sees noble attitudes as extensions of age-old habits, and Jonathan
Dewald, who sees the same court nobles as displaying elements of modern individualism: Smith, Culture of Merit, 3 n. 3; Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and
the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, 1993). In a middle
position, Mark Motley sees the nobles modifying their educational strategies to
adapt old roles to new circumstances: Mark Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat:
The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–1715 (Princeton, 1990).
42
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 188
calls the ‘baroque state’.45 This ‘was a socio-political entity,
whose structures were interwoven with society, which it tried to
rise above but with which it inevitably had to compromise. It
endowed itself with grandiose schemes’.46 Campbell sees no
modern bureaucracy in 1715, because there was no civil service
ethic and no effective chain of command. Family and client ties
remained stronger than bureaucratic loyalties. Once again
court politics were central. Factions mattered because personal
relations were not separated from political relations.47 Campbell
even goes as far as to claim that the court was France’s only
national institution and that the only political actors were the
people who inhabited it. Within courtly society the two spheres
of aristocratic sociability and ministerial decision-making
remained distinct because courtiers could not openly discuss
the ‘secret’ of the king’s councils. But the two were interlocked
because the ministers were dependent on their client systems to
reinforce the administrative networks throughout the country,
and because factional shifts at court had implications for the
rise and fall of particular ministers and their policies. Most of
Campbell’s book is a discussion of how the characteristics of
this ‘baroque state’ continued to operate through much of the
eighteenth century.
IV
A NEW DIMENSION OF THE STATE — THE ARMY
The most striking addition to our knowledge of French absolutism
concerns that ‘Giant of the Grand Siècle’, the army.48 According
to traditional historiography, standing armies were one of the
pillars of royal power. As the size of armies mushroomed, so
the argument goes, battleWeld methods were transformed and
training was intensiWed. This ‘military revolution’ then induced
state reorganization, laid unprecedented Wscal demands on the
population and promoted bureaucratic rationalization. Yet,
45
Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745
(London, 1996).
46
Ibid., 4.
47
See esp. ibid., 177–90.
48
The classic studies on the army are: André Corvisier, Louvois (Paris, 1983);
André Corvisier, L’Armée française de la Wn du XVII e siècle au ministère de Choiseul:
le soldat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964).
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213
until recently, relatively little has been known about the speciWcs
of the relationship between the army and the state. Three
massive studies totalling 1,531 pages of text have now changed
this picture.49 Each conWrms the army’s colossal importance,
but all three dispute the standard tale of state-building and
criticize existing models of collaboration.
David Parrott lays the foundations for this re-evaluation by
exploring army–state relations in the time of Louis XIII. His
Wndings deXate the traditional view of Cardinal Richelieu as a
master state-builder and reinforce more recent assessments of
Richelieu’s administration as a set of makeshift solutions.
Parrott Wnds that the effective size of the royal armies was
smaller than had previously been thought, and he looks in vain
for awareness of a ‘military revolution’ on the part of writers
and commanders.50 France’s large, but old-fashioned, army
was severely limited by practices which reXected the inefWcient
social arrangements of the day. For historical reasons involving
a long tradition of noble rebellions, the Crown was insistent
upon retaining ultimate control over the commissioning and
decommissioning of ofWcers and companies. At the same time
aspiring nobles were eager to obtain military commands in
order to consolidate their social reputations. They had to lobby
the king for positions. He, in turn, was able to require aspiring
captains or lieutenants to defray a sizeable share of the costs of
recruiting and equipping their men. Once assembled, the
common soldiers were so scandalously and irregularly paid that
the commander would have to draw on his credit or his private
49
John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610–1715
(Cambridge, 1997); David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society
in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge, 2001); Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and
the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701
(Cambridge, 2002). Although these three books were published in succession by
Cambridge University Press, this was not a collaborative project. However, the
books are connected in that Lynn refers extensively to Parrott’s doctoral thesis.
Parrott was the thesis superviser of Rowlands, who is critical of some of Lynn’s
conclusions.
50
On the military revolution debate, see Michael Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution,
1560–1660’, in his Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967); Jeremy Black, A
Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (New York,
1996); Geoffrey Parker, ‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660: A Myth?’, Jl Mod.
Hist., xlviii (1976); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation
and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1988); Parrott, Richelieu’s Army,
19–83, 547–52. Lynn’s discussion stresses gradual reform since the religious wars,
rather than a military revolution.
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PAST AND PRESENT
NUMBER 188
fortune to provide them with wages and food rations, or else
risk having his unit disbanded and his reputation tarnished.
Having little to gain and everything to lose, he would be cautious
on the battleWeld. Parrott calls this a ‘peculiarly French’ problem.
Nobles eager only to establish their credentials often dropped
out after a campaign or two. The government distributed
favours and viable payroll vouchers only to the ofWcers best
placed in the patronage system, not to the most needy or the
most talented.51
Parrott’s rich account at the very least illustrates the weaknesses in a monarchy which was undoubtedly very powerful but
which was still dominated by the interests of prominent nobles
and Wnanciers. The Wnancial infrastructure was too backward
to raise the 20–30 million livres per year needed to operate the
army at the height of the Thirty Years War, although this
amount should have been well within the means of a large,
productive kingdom. Revenues were committed years in
advance to Wnanciers at costly rates, and taxes were collected
by private consortiums of Wnanciers who siphoned off a sizeable
share. The secretaries of state, the chancellor, the royal Wnancial hierarchy, the tax farmers and the private munitioneers all had
overlapping and conXicting functions. Supply of heavy munitions, powder and shot had to be farmed out to entrepreneurs
whose bankruptcy was always a looming threat. France was
large enough to prevail despite these weaknesses, but we might
well wonder where the successes of Louis XIV came from.
John Lynn and Guy Rowlands attempt to answer this question.
Their two studies, published in 1997 and 2002 respectively,
provide contrasting but not incompatible views of the army of
Louis XIV. Lynn uses a broader brush and offers a comprehensive picture of the whole seventeenth-century army in the
context of the longer history of European warfare. His many
chapters provide an encyclopedic array of information on army
administration, supply, ranks, morale, militias, discipline,
weapons, logistics, tactics, strategy, fortiWcations, and those
elusive but precious topics, the living conditions of the rank
and Wle, and the role of women in the army.52 Rowlands’s
51
Lynn discusses Parrott’s argument: see Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle, 223.
Note also his short military history of the reign: John A. Lynn, The Wars of
Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (London, 1999).
52
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
215
study, also extensive, is analytically more interesting, perhaps
because it covers the shorter period from 1661 to 1701 and
deals only with the social elite.
Lynn’s multidimensional view of absolutism is refreshing.
The monarchy, he claims, cannot be thought of as merely a set
of central tax-gathering and distributing institutions because it
had three other dimensions. First were the regional actors —
provincial estates, receivers and Wnanciers — who collected and
distributed funds semi-autonomously. Second was the army
itself, a kind of state within the state. Instead of troops supporting
themselves through pillage and requisitions, army units now set
up provisional governments in occupied zones, selling passports and exemptions from local taxes and collecting taxes
which now went into state coffers instead of being siphoned off
by the soldiers. Lynn claims that in the 1690s a quarter of the
cost of land warfare came from these contributions — but Rowlands challenges this Wgure as far too high.53 Third was the
money extracted from the army ofWcers’ private fortunes as
they continued to sink whole inheritances into maintaining
their personal companies — the process underlined by Parrott.
Rowlands says they provided up to 14 per cent of the total cost
of war but Lynn reckons that it was as much as 25–30 per cent
of the cost — a veritable tax on the nobility.54 This phenomenon should be noted, as it was in effect a hidden tax on nobles
who were traditionally exempt. It parallels the exactions from
similarly privileged venal ofWceholders.55
Lynn and Rowlands both conWrm that the army saw signiWcant
expansion in size and organization after 1675, when the
persons afWliated with Louvois and Vauban took over control
from the circle led by Condé and Turenne. Both authors urge
caution about the regularity of this growth, but the trend is
unmistakable. The number of units rose from 88 regiments of
infantry and 72 of cavalry in 1691 to 238 regiments of infantry
and 94 of cavalry in 1714. Such a massive growth, which
supports the traditional view of the rise of the state, inevitably
led to changes in organization. More roturiers (commoners)
53
Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle, 208–11; Rowlands, Dynastic State and the Army
under Louis XIV, 365–6.
54
Rowlands, Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV, 265–6.
55
See the discussion of Hurt below.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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were necessarily commissioned alongside nobles to Wll the
ofWcer corps. The king assumed direct command through his
war cabinet and established the ordre du tableau in 1675 to
regulate precedence among ofWcers. A largely unsuccessful
effort was made to provide training for ofWcers through the
creation of companies of musketeers and cadets. Provincial
militias were raised and sent to war, serving as auxiliaries
between 1688 and 1697, and as regular troops between 1701
and 1708. Networks of magazines to store grain and munitions
were organized. Strategists added thinner, more linear formations
in battle and adopted the necessary drilling, copied from the
Dutch. Discipline was greatly improved and desertion rates
declined. The Hôtel des Invalides, ‘the most extensive social
welfare program maintained by the state’, was built in Paris to
house disabled veterans.56
But neither of the authors sees these impressive signs of
progress as the advent of modernity in the state. Lynn portrays
the military machine as taking on a life of its own, becoming in
effect the real absolutist entity in terms of royal control and
dragging a more backward royal administration in its wake.
Rowlands stresses the personal aspects by extending the idea of
collaboration. ‘This book is an explicit rejection of modernization
theories of the early modern state’, he writes, and goes on to
argue that, far from representing an attempt to ‘state-build’, the
French state was shaped by ‘Bourbon dynasticism, a term
which can and should include tensions within the ruling house;
by family interests; by personal rivalry; by highly traditional
senses of obligation and chivalry; and, at the end of the day, by
the need to Wnd money to Wght wars’.57
This concept of dynasticism lies at the heart of Rowlands’s
argument. In a detailed analysis of the operation of the war ministry and the war treasury, he emphasizes their non-bureaucratic
basis. The ministries were strongholds of the allies and relatives
of the Le Telliers, all pursuing personal and Wnancial advancement. Novel moves towards bureaucratic control, such as the
creation of civilian commissaires de guerre, were indecisive because
56
Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle, 430. On Louis XIV and hospitals, see Daniel
Hickey, Local Hospitals in Ancien Régime France: Rationalization, Resistance,
Renewal, 1530–1789 (Montreal, 1997).
57
Rowlands, Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV, 361.
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
217
the new commissioners did not have enough prestige to make
military ofWcers obey them, and the king eventually opposed
giving them additional power. Provincial and army intendants,
the supposed modernizers according to traditional accounts,
were more loyal to personal patrons than to administrative
efWciency or even to the king and were largely ‘motivated by
Wnancial proWt, political power, and personal and family
ambition’.58 The war treasury, directed by the trésorier-général
de l’extraordinaire des guerres, was built upon personal ties within
a network of Wnanciers whose shaky fortunes were based on a
parasitic and usurious hold on royal revenues.
How then was the army able to surmount the earlier difWculties
laid out in Parrott’s account? The difference lay in the king’s
effective handling of the ofWcer corps, within the context of his
patrimonial objectives. He knew that a standing army required
relatively contented leaders and better conditions. He applied
his genius for personal relations to assuring that success in the
Weld was rewarded and to creating multiple channels of patronage
so that ‘everyone’ could be heard. Aristocratic ofWcers were still
required to invest fortunes in their troops, but they could
expect consistent, loyal service to be rewarded with recognition
and honour, so the investment was worth making. Louis
milked them for revenues, but he also helped out those in
Wnancial need. He gave a boost to families that were supporting
military ofWcers by arranging favourable marriages for their kin
and showering them with church posts. The king was caught in
a paradox: ‘he was anxious to achieve control over his leading
subjects but he also wished to use them as highly autonomous
military leaders’ and ‘he was prepared to play ruthlessly upon
the ambitions of his subjects in order to secure the best possible
services from them’.59
These studies of the army all stress the traditional nature of
the king’s objectives and his lack of interest in modernizing
institutions. They turn the ‘state’ into a vast patronage machine
in which meritorious service, innovation and better control did
indeed exist, but were driven by family interest, personal
advancement and issues of honour. Far from being a trap for
the aristocracy, or a place of senseless posturing, the court at
58
59
Ibid., 108.
Ibid., 335.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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Versailles, in this view, was the central bargaining place for the
stafWng of a ‘sustainable standing force’. Rowlands’s analysis
seconds that of Mettam in stressing these traditional elements.
But he departs from Mettam in denying the theory of rule
through a single ‘royal faction’. And he adds more substance to
the view that the army was built upon the idiosyncrasies of the
society.
V
CONTRARY EVIDENCE? THE FATE OF THE PARLEMENTAIRES
As I indicated at the outset, Hurt’s new study challenges the
whole revisionist tendency of the past twenty years. Calling
Hamscher and myself the ‘founders’ of this tendency, he concludes that ‘little or nothing in the pages to come supports the
optimistic view of revisionists, notably that of William Beik,
who portrayed the ruling class of Languedoc as allied with
Louis XIV, nurtured, protected and “basking in the sun” of his
benign rule’.60
Hurt provides a well-argued, excellently documented case. It
consists of three narratives. The Wrst traces Louis XIV’s
crackdown on the parlements’ traditional constitutionalist
claim to verify and register edicts. This is a well-known story,
but Hurt presents it with clarity and great legal precision. The
second narrative traces the way the Crown pressured the venal
ofWceholders into paying up large sums of money, Wrst as the
price for renewal of the droit annuel,61 then through forced
loans (augmentations de gages) and creations of new ofWces, and
Wnally by putting ceilings on the value of the ofWces themselves,
which constituted a major component of their family fortunes.
After 1709, when the Crown started lowering the rate of return on
these loans, delayed interest payments, and ultimately translated
the debt into useless shares in John Law’s company, many
magistrates were ruined. The third narrative focuses on the
60
Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements, pp. ix, 12. I have never claimed that Louis
XIV’s rule was benign or nurturing!
61
The droit annuel, or paulette tax, was an annual payment by a venal ofWceholder
which guaranteed that the ofWce would remain the property of the family should
the holder die, and that the heirs could dispose of it as private property. This tax
was granted for a period of years, so there was opportunity for bargaining at
renewal time.
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
219
years 1718 to 1720, when the sovereign courts fought back.
The Paris Parlement, supported by the Parlement of Rennes,
tried to regain the constitutional prerogatives they had lost in
1674. There was an exchange of belligerent challenges, but the
royal council ultimately quashed the Parlement’s pretensions.
Hurt’s scenarios admirably serve his stated purpose of
refocusing attention on the authoritarian side of Louis XIV’s
rule. But his story is extremely one-sided. He is highlighting
one theme — the king’s arbitrary action. In the early years,
Colbert, who emerges as the evil genius behind the repression
of the parlementaires, successfully browbeats the Parlement
back into submission after the excesses of the Fronde. By 1674 the
judges are relegated ‘to the margins of political life’.62 Losing
their initiative, they fall into passivity, hardly protesting when
the king rains edicts on them, ruining their fortunes. Under the
regency after 1715 they make a brief comeback. But when they
Wght back, the regent turns to Marc-René de Voyer, marquis
d’Argenson, his Keeper of the Seals who had been brought up
in the school of Colbertian rigour. Under d’Argenson’s direction
the royal council strikes back. Through lits de justice, conWscation
of publications, arrests, and exile of the Parlement to Pontoise,
Louis XIV’s legacy of repressive coercion is perpetuated and
continues right up to the session of 1766 when Louis XV
‘Xagellated’ the Parlement, echoing d’Argenson’s similar Xagellation in 1718. The parlementaires have become ‘a weakened,
almost endangered group’.63
A look at the studies reviewed above should quickly reveal
the narrowness of this account. Without denying Louis XIV’s
repressive record, the so-called ‘revisionists’ are actually
pushing beyond the issue of authoritarian tendencies by asking
how absolute rule affected the well-being of elite groups and
why the latter tolerated the resulting loss of independence. The
answer to this question must reach further than just an examination of the Parlement’s political inXuence and the Wnancial
impact of venality on its members. The judges were surely
concerned about these issues, but their posts meant much more
to them than that. They meant authority to participate in decisions concerning property and inheritance, power to intervene
62
63
Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements, 195.
Ibid., 196–8.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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in the policing of one’s city or land, precedence in church and
public processions, sometimes hereditary nobility. As Hamscher
and others have pointed out, the parlementaires accepted their
apparent subordination because they were receiving beneWts in
terms of smoother operation, fewer evocations of cases out of
their jurisdiction, participation in the rising glory of the king
they served, and a pervasive atmosphere of social order through
reinforcement of the society of orders. No doubt some were
ruined.64 But Hurt has not demonstrated that the majority of
them were in such dire straits, nor do we know how damaging
these developments were to their overall family wealth and
social position.
Another problem is that Hurt does not address the mutual
interdependence of property in ofWce and borrowing on behalf
of the Crown. Potter’s book chronicles the measures taken by
Louis XIV to solidify the legal status of ofWces, and more generally to conWrm corporate and individual privileges.65 David
Bien and others see this arrangement as a central pillar of the
absolutist system.66 They argue that the king could not abolish
privileges because they were the basis for the credit needed to
run the monarchy. It would be useful to know how Hurt’s data
about impoverishment relates to this broader phenomenon.
The period from 1709 to 1720 was a Wscal nightmare, but it
was not the norm and people lived through it. The parlements
survived and remained at the centre of the political stage. Their
professional world was dominated by important cases, clashes
with legal adversaries, and other concerns like the rising controversy over Jansenism and their growing consciousness that
there was a public forum to which they could speak.67 They
remained powerful and wealthy Wgures.
64
Potter addresses this point by noting that Hurt fails to deal with the widespread
tendency for corps to borrow collectively: see Potter, Corps and Clienteles, 47.
65
Ibid., ch. 6.
66
Bien, ‘OfWces, Corps, and a System of State Credit’; Gail Bossenga, The
Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge, 1991); Hilton L.
Root, The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France
and England (Berkeley, 1994).
67
To be fair, Hurt does not claim to be covering all these dimensions of the
problem, nor does he reject all ‘revisionism’. But his assertion that the oppression
of the parlements undermines the collaboration thesis calls for a discussion of these
broader dimensions of the issue. On the monarchy and Jansenism, the authoritative
work is Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to
the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996).
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
221
VI
CONCLUSION
French absolute monarchy is still best conceptualized as a
social compromise with the sword and robe nobility and other
inXuential persons, but recent studies suggest corrections and
additions. It is legitimate to ask, as many of these authors do,
whether conclusions based on the provinces with provincial
estates and focused on the Wrst thirty years of the Sun King’s
personal reign can be applied to other regions and to the eventful
last thirty years of the reign. These are genuine problems.
There have been few studies of governance in the provinces
which were directly administered by royal agents (the pays
d’élection) because they did not readily produce documentation
presenting the provincial side of the relationship. The ministerial
correspondence, mostly with provincial intendants, projects an
optimistic, managerial tone which can be misleading. It does
appear that those provinces, which constituted the majority of
the territory, were handled in a more authoritarian manner,
although the results were not necessarily less favourable to local
elites. Potter’s study, which is one of the few to attempt a direct
comparison, Wnds subtle differences but suggests that to some
extent the same processes were simply applied in different
ways.
It is also valid to point to important innovations in the period
from 1590 to 1715, and to question whether they involved
collaboration or merely centralization. The results show both
advances and limits. Military expansion was colossal. It entailed
a vastly improved patronage system for the commissioning of
ofWcers and commanders, centred on the king himself, the
inXux of more roturier ofWcers and the beginnings of a coherent
system of military ranks. Civilian oversight of units in the Weld
advanced, but was held in check by the royal preference for
ofWcer initiative. Munitions and funding services developed,
but they did not outgrow their roots in ministerial client
systems or their underwriting by private Wnanciers, nor did the
credit system escape its grounding in the peddling of ofWces
and privileges. The provincial estates were transformed into
administrators of royal programmes, not without some concessions due to their ability to bargain and decide issues of implementation. In the midst of Wnancial desperation, novel practices
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PAST AND PRESENT
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were initiated that would have an active future: the so-called
‘universal’ taxes, the conseil de commerce and its network of
commercial correspondents and petitioners, the naval links
with the Caribbean world, and the attempts to impose uniform
procedures with respect to hospitals, citizenship, property law
and colonial slavery.
While acknowledging these developments, I still believe that
social collaboration on the basis of common class interests
continued to characterize the system of rule and that these
arrangements continued to prevail in the eighteenth century, to
the point of seriously hindering the transformations needed to
adapt French society to new circumstances. In piecing together
this picture of advances and survivals, we must keep in mind
the two sides of class interest. An assessment of collaboration
cannot be based solely on the degree of independence or political
initiative of this or that institution. We need to know the social
impact of the measures taken, the identity of the beneWciaries
as well as the victims, and not just who made the decision.
Most government activities which disadvantaged someone also
aided someone else. Money borrowed was also money lent.
Tax collections Xowed away from one group, but towards
another. The grandeur of the king’s regime and its belligerently
hierarchical message were welcome reinforcement for those
who relied on a titled position or personal status and for those
who beneWted from landed property, venal ofWce or state
Wnance.
Signs of the socially conservative implications behind seemingly
innovative measures can be seen in most of the studies above.
A mammoth army was organized around favours doled out by a
pompous king in a dazzling court, supported by bureaux that
were becoming more efWcient, but at the same time were dominated by personal interest and favouritism. Novel taxes
redressed some of the imbalances of the past while perpetuating
others. Economic councils wavered between promoting a free
economy and regulating it. Desperately overreaching military
objectives were supported by badly co-ordinated lines of
authority built upon contradictory channels of patronage.
These studies thus reveal a basic contradiction between the
king’s primary efforts to maintain a traditional system by reinforcing hierarchical differences and defending property, and the
same king’s impulse to universalize and standardize procedures,
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THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV
223
which implied limiting the rights and privileges of those he
wanted to defend. All the studies discussed here are saying, at
least indirectly, that Louis XIV was a king with a traditional
view of his power, not an avid state-builder. But to meet large
objectives he stretched the old system to its limits, more so than
any previous monarch had done, even introducing innovations
which had the potential to undermine property and hierarchy.
Absolute monarchy was not the centralizing leveller of intermediate bodies that Tocqueville imagined. It was a backward-looking
force that rebuilt an old system by adapting old practices to new
uses. Louis pushed the marketing of privilege to its limits, raised
government through personal ties to a high art, redeWned the
relationship between the ofWcer corps and the state, brought
about a makeover of the provincial estates, and found ways to
tax the privileged without abandoning the system of privileges.
The result was that old practices became deeply entrenched
and the well-being of the state became increasingly tied to
defending them. The most serious entrenchment was a social
alliance between the king and traditional privileged groups. It
transferred the tax burden of new loans onto the peasantry, won
reductions from new special taxes, defended old-guard notables
holed up in provincial estates, and protected the legal status of
ofWcers and corporations just when Louis might have wanted to
get rid of them. This collaboration was jeopardizing the future by
making irreversible a set of vested interests and established procedures which would turn into obstacles in the new century.
These studies suggest an agenda. The concept of social
collaboration is still meaningful, but it calls for more intensive
examination of the functioning of Louis XIV’s government
after 1690, especially the civilian government. There is more to
learn about the changing role of parlementaires and other robe
ofWcers, with respect to both their Wnancial state and their role
in provincial governance, once the lines had hardened at
Versailles. Other issues of interest are beyond the scope of this
review. The work of Dale Van Kley reminds us that we need to
know more about the role of religious beliefs, and their impact
on politics. Joseph Bergin reminds us of the importance of
the episcopacy.68 The gendered monarchy is a fresh concept
68
Joseph Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV (New Haven,
2004). This study appeared too late for review here.
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PAST AND PRESENT
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outlined by Hanley, and in fact the role of women in the higher
echelons of government is still unknown despite the popularity
of various court ladies.69 There are a growing number of cultural studies of the symbolic uses of the king’s person.70 But
apart from expanding the picture of the system in the later
reign, the most important task will be to explore the ways in
which Louis XIV’s conservative innovations dominated the
reigns of the eighteenth century, and the degree to which they
impeded or furthered necessary reforms.71 When this
governmental system built on privilege, dynastic inXuence and
secrecy confronted new ideas, new public audiences, and new
economic and diplomatic challenges, would it Wnd itself able to
adapt? We should take a fresh look at the eighteenth century
from the perspective of these venerable habits and not just
concentrate on the rise of new forces.
Emory University
William Beik
69
For Hanley’s work, see n. 13. On women at court, see, for example, Vincent
J. Pitts, La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France, 1627–1693 (Baltimore, 2000);
A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King: Letters of Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth
Charlotte, Duchesse d’Orléans, 1652–1722, ed. and trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore,
1984).
70
For example Louis Marin, Le Portrait du roi (Paris, 1981); Jean-Marie
Apostolidès, Le Roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris,
1981); Abbey E. Zanger, Scenes from the Marriage of Louis XIV: Nuptial Fictions and
the Making of Absolutist Power (Stanford, 1997); Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn
Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body (Berkeley, 1998).
71
A new study which aims to look at the eighteenth century from the perspective
of the reign of Louis XIV is Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XIV to
Napoleon (1715–1799) (London, 2002): see the points in his introduction. Another
new study is Gwynne Lewis, France, 1715–1814: Power and the People (London,
2004).