France

Thus, the monarchy recovered much of the authority it had lost during the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Although its influence in Burgundy and Flanders (now united in a formidable dynastic association) had declined, its definitive recovery of Aquitaine consolidated a direct domain, again extensive enough to free the Valois royalty from anxiety about landed resources. It had exploited not only a widespread distaste for the destructive self-interest of barons and warlords but also an incipient nationalism, which, besides reviving the “religion of monarchy,” put new stresses on the foreignness of Englishmen. How renewed power and Gallicanism went together was demonstrated in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), by which papal benefices and revenues from France were severely curtailed and the royal influence in the French church strengthened. Nevertheless, the survival of powerful dynasts and provincial interests, as a legacy of the war and the fertility of the royal house, represented a counterpoise to the crown that Philip the Fair had never known. And, with the son of Charles VII, the monarchy was to be tested yet again.

Louis XI (reigned 1461–83) was shamelessly impatient for his father’s death. It must be said of this strange man that he had worthy policies to pursue: the securing of the royal domain against Burgundy, Orléans, and Brittany, among others, and the promotion of commerce and industry within national boundaries. His foreign policy was less consistent, ranging from the cautious in Italy to the chimerical in Spain; yet it was at the expense of Aragon that he regained title to Roussillon and Cerdagne. His methods rather than his ends were what made the reign of this ambitious, nervous, and capricious ruler so turbulent. No French king had ever imposed himself so totally and so tyrannically as did Louis XI. Forgetful of past loyalties, he was betrayed as often as he himself betrayed others. Toward the clergy as toward his officials, he could be brutal and vindictive. He antagonized the nobles by revoking the Valois pensions and some ceremonial trappings and by promoting the independence of seigneurial towns. As for the royal towns, Louis respected their constitutions only so far as was consistent with royal supervision and the payment of heavy taxes; he tolerated the resurgence of urban oligarchies. Fiscal pressures in support of the army, government, and diplomacy mounted fearfully.

Louis XI’s determined efforts to strengthen royal authority provoked the princes to establish the formidable League of the Public Weal, which in 1465 appealed to the people against misgovernment and proposed a regency of the princes supported by the three estates. Louis, in turn, as on later occasions, used assemblies and proclamations to divide the princes. But the settlement of October 1465 was a grave setback for the king, whose brother Charles gained title to Normandy while Charles the Bold, soon to inherit Burgundy, acquired strategic counties and towns in Artois. To the undoing of this treaty Louis devoted great energy. Fomenting strife between Brittany and Normandy, he soon recovered the latter and isolated the former. Deaths among his rivals in Gascony enabled him to secure successions that were more divided and less hostile—such as in Armagnac. Increasingly, Louis’s tortuous diplomacy fastened on Burgundy. The king succeeded in reconciling the Swiss cantons with Austria to form a coalition with France and the Rhenish cities; this coalition invaded Burgundy and defeated and killed Charles the Bold at Nancy (January 5, 1477). While the legal reversion of Burgundy to the crown could not be given practical effect, Louis prevented the emergence of a powerful state on France’s northern and eastern borders and did recover Artois. Moreover, even as he enjoyed this decisive triumph over his most dangerous rival, the entire Angevin inheritance (Anjou, Provence, and Mediterranean claims) devolved to the crown upon the death of René I of Anjou in 1480. Through accident and design and the inability of the princes to collaborate effectively, Louis had succeeded in countering the threat of a princely constitution and had considerably extended the royal domain. Economy, society, and culture in the 14th and 15th centuries

The long war against the English, fought almost entirely in France, benefited few but the captains and peculators; it injured almost everyone. Even the best-disciplined companies lived off the land, so that French peasants and defeated townsfolk in effect paid the expenses of both sides; and undisciplined mercenary bands were a wearisome scourge in times of truce after the middle of the 14th century. Economic distress

But the war alone did not cause economic distress. Even before it broke out, bad weather and commercial dislocations, together with overpopulation in some areas, resulted in worse and more frequent famines than in the past. However, what most terribly damaged life and security was sickness.

The Black Death, a pandemic of both bubonic and pneumonic plague that was carried on shipboard from the Levant, reached Provence in 1347, ravaged most of France in 1348, and faded out only in 1350. Nothing worked to check the disease in populations without immunity—neither bonfires to disinfect the air, nor collective demonstrations of penitence in northern towns, nor persecutions of Jews or friars. The mortality was staggering—the French chronicler Jean Froissart’s estimate that the first wave carried off one-third of the population was perhaps not far wrong; evidence shows that rural areas were no less afflicted than towns. And there were recurrent outbreaks of plague in later years. These afflictions and related factors were responsible for a general decline of population. Toulouse seems to have lost half of its population, which fell from 40,000 to 20,000; the population of Normandy is estimated to have declined by two-thirds between 1300 and 1450. The trend was not reversed until the middle of the 15th century.

The hard times affected classes and regions in different ways, degrees, and rhythms. Some places almost escaped the ravages that afflicted others repeatedly. In the countryside, especially—save for the greatest personages—those who had most to lose suffered most. Whether for landlords or rich peasants, surpluses became harder to obtain or preserve; to many lesser lords the dangerous fortunes of war probably seemed an attractive alternative to declining yields in money or produce. Standards of living, as measured in diets or furnishings, declined. Onerous obligations and services tended to disappear as shortages of rural labour made themselves felt; the transition from servile to rental tenures was largely completed in the 15th century. Peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie in the relatively prosperous Île-de-France and the Tuchins in Languedoc, both betrayed desperation born of recurrent taxation and were associated with the expression of egalitarian ideas; the Jacquerie coincided with a weakened grain market and may have been hastened by efforts of lords to enforce labour services and payments after the Black Death. The manor survived, but little remained of its human identity in the 15th century. Even minor lords lived away from their peasant tenants, protected them poorly if at all, and relied on salaried managers to collect payments that, in some cases, had lost all social justification; lordship had degenerated into an unsentimental economic practice. The cities

Urban society was also troubled. During the centuries of relative peace after 1000, towns had been able to neglect fortifications and surround themselves with growing suburbs; the threat of warfare required them to make heavy investments in new walls that broadened the separation between city and countryside. Royal taxation, often inequitably administered, exacerbated old tensions in the towns; fiscal policy or the regulation of wages or supplies was largely at issue in the uprisings of Flemish towns (1323–28), in Paris (1357–58, 1380–82), and in Rouen (1382). Communes continued to be revoked in the 14th century, although the kings as a rule were less interested in governing the towns than in securing their resources and fidelity. The concentration of trades and crafts in guilds became more complete and more exclusive.

Some leading commercial centres of the 13th century suffered as new trade routes developed in the empire and by sea and as textile manufactures and money markets—the latter suffering from unstable coinages—became more dispersed. The fairs of Champagne declined rapidly after 1310. Only a few capitals, such as Avignon, Bordeaux, and Paris, prospered; and even they were hard-hit by plague. Nor did the French merchant or manufacturer keep up with the new business techniques being developed in Italy and the Low Countries. His work often unspecialized, his bookkeeping old-fashioned, his tastes simple, he typically looked forward to securing his future by the purchase of land. The church

The organized church, despite losses from war and plague, continued to be better endowed economically than morally. The Avignon" class="md-crosslink">popes of Avignon were less distant and—save perhaps to their French relatives, merchants, and artists—less admirable than the reformer popes of the past; their authority was disputed by their rivals in Rome, and the French higher clergy were confirmed in their incipient Gallicanism (a movement advocating administrative independence from papal control). While organized heresy had almost disappeared, reforms intended to strengthen the parish priesthood languished. Jurisdictional disputes continued to rage between mendicants and seculars and between bishops and canons or archdeacons. Even more than in the past, Christian piety sought encouragement in mystical or individual devotions or readings and in collective observances of the Holy Spirit or the Virgin or the patron saints of the trades that promoted elementary solidarity and charity in the towns; such confraternities were not always welcome to ecclesiastical authorities, whose deportment or jurisdiction they sometimes challenged, whether directly or merely by example. The popular religion of saints—more particularly of the Virgin and the Pietà—and fear of demons worked more deeply into the collective imagination, becoming very evident in the 15th century. Associated with intensified anxieties about sin and damnation, these experiences thrived in times of recurrent and inscrutable disaster, such as the Black Death. Culture and art

Les Lignées des roys de France (“The Lines of French Kings”), c. 1450; the parchment roll contains an abbreviated version of Les Grandes Chroniques de France, the official history of the French realm that was maintained by the Benedictine monks of the royal abbey at Saint- Denis.The Newberry Library, Purchased with the assistance of T. Kimball Brooker, 1993 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

The Gould Hours, book of hours, illuminated by Marc Coussin, c. 1460.The Newberry Library, Joint gift of fourteen donors, 2003 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Cultural circles remained strongly oriented to aristocratic values and the past. With the accession of the house of Valois came a high nobility, distinguished by lavish and exclusive conceits. When John II formed the Order of the Star (1351), an institution imitated by the great lords for their clientages, chivalry stood incorporated as the most distinguished of religious confraternities. The dream of the Crusade remained strong, notably among princes of the fleur-de-lis, who dominated the public life of Valois France to the point of eclipsing the monarch; beneath them many noble families disappeared, while new ones emerged among the captains, lawyers, and patricians. Jean Froissart spun out chronicles of the war at once detailed and grand, full of the frivolous courtly protocol that marked the aristocratic life of his day. Tapestries created for courtly patrons idealized a life of enticing gardens, tournaments, and the hunt. Paintings as well as tapestries decorated the walls of chambers that were smaller and more elegant than the cavernous halls of earlier centuries. The delicate Gothic Rayonnant style of the Île-de-France remained in favour through the 14th century, inspiring the chapel built by Charles V at Vincennes, while the decorative arts of furnishings and manuscripts exploited the Gothic tendencies to articulation and grace. The evocation of the Classical past became less fantastic and more heroic in the humanist circles of Pierre Bersuire and Petrarch; their interests helped to attract copyists and artists to the papal court of Avignon. Books of hours (the most popular private devotional works of the later Middle Ages) could become “very rich,” as in the case of a sumptuous manuscript undertaken for Jean, duc de Berry (c. 1410); more typically they were pocket books for general use by the literate, whose numbers continued to increase.

Stimulated by the commissions of Charles V, the chasm between learned and vernacular cultures narrowed: Raoul de Presles translated St. Augustine; Nicolas Oresme translated Aristotle. Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430) challenged traditional assertions of women’s inferiority, incorporated in texts such as the Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose), the most popular literary work of the 13th century. Music resounded in old forms (ballad, virelay) even while becoming more articulate or flamboyant; Guillaume de Machaut (died 1377), the great musician-poet of the mid-14th century, composed the first polyphonic mass as well as many motets and secular lyrics. Time and space came to be better represented and measured, as evidenced by the first attempts to render perspective in art and by the erection of public clocks at Paris and Caen.

By 1400 Paris regained cultural leadership as a result of a new synthetic (or international) style in painting and of the initiatives of the university masters in ecclesiastical politics and theology. The efflorescence, however, was soon destroyed in the civil wars. Provincial universities (like parlements) proliferated at the expense of Paris, which became the preserve of an antiquated and pedantic theology. Painters, architects, and writers regrouped under princely patrons or even under bourgeois ones, flourishing in postwar trade (Jacques Coeur’s palace at Bourges exemplifies the flamboyantly decorated solidity of late medieval taste in France). A new style in painting, as in architecture, characterized by vigour and an enlarged scale, contrasted with the more traditional style in Burgundy, where the dukes were building on a grand and continuous past. Italianate humanism, together with the new philology, stirred in France only in the latter third of the 15th century. T.N. Bisson Jeremy David Popkin France, 1490–1715 France in the 16th century

When Charles VIII (reigned 1483–98) led the French invasion of Italy in 1494, he initiated a series of wars that were to last until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. These wars were not especially successful for the French, but they corresponded to the contemporary view of the obligations of kingship. They also had their effects upon the development of the French state; in particular, they threatened to alter not only the military and administrative structure of the monarchy but even its traditional role. Military and financial organization

The French kings of the early 16th century could look back with satisfaction at the virtual expulsion of the English from French soil in the course of the preceding century. This success offered a shining precedent for further military sallies, this time against the growing power of the Habsburgs. In 1445 the first steps had been taken to fashion a royal French army out of the ill-disciplined mercenary bands upon which French kings had traditionally relied. It was a small force—no more than 8,000 men—but it was a beginning. The role of the nobility in the army was strong, for the art of war was still considered a noble pursuit par excellence. The core of Charles’s army that marched into Italy, the compagnies d’ordonnance, known collectively as the gendarmerie, consisted of noble volunteers. The infantry, however, was made up of non-nobles, and by the middle of the 16th century there were more than 30,000 infantrymen to a mere 5,000 noble horsemen. As this infantry force grew in number, its organization changed. After a brief experiment in the 1530s with a system of legions organized on a provincial basis (the Breton Legion, the Norman Legion, etc.), a regimental system, based on large units under a single command, was adopted. This latter organization appeared during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century and survived until the time of Louis XIV. Of great significance, too, was the involvement of the provincial governors as commanders of the gendarmerie at the heart of the royal army. Yet such reorganization did not immediately reduce the army to a pliant tool of the crown. Not until late in the 17th century could the royal army be considered fairly under the king’s control. Until then, notably during the Wars of Religion and the outbreaks of the Fronde (1648–53), the loyalty of the commanders and the devotion of the troops were conspicuously inadequate. In the later part of the 17th century, the reforms of the army by Michel Le Tellier and his son the marquis de Louvois provided Louis XIV with a formidable weapon.

The growth of a large royal army, however, was only one effect of the increased level of military activity. The financial administration of the country also underwent a drastic reorganization, which had far-reaching economic and social consequences. The king, despite his ambitions, possessed neither the resources nor the administrative machinery to maintain a large army. The medieval idea that the king should live off the revenue of his own domain persisted into the 18th century and helps to explain the formal distinction made until the reign of Francis I (1515–47) between ordinary and extraordinary finance—i.e., between revenue emanating from the king’s patrimonial rights and taxes raised throughout the kingdom. By the reign of Francis I, the king, even in times of peace, was unable to make do with his ordinary revenue from rents and seigneurial dues. In 1523 Francis established a new central treasury, the Trésor de l’Épargne, into which all his revenues, ordinary and extraordinary, were to be deposited. In 1542 he set up 16 financial and administrative divisions, the généralités" class="md-crosslink">généralités, appointing in each a collector general responsible for the collection of all royal revenues within his area. In 1551 Henry II added a treasurer general; from 1577 the bureaux des finances, new supervisory bodies composed of a collector general and a number of treasurers, made their appearance in each généralité.

The actual collecting of taxes, moreover, was increasingly handed over to tax farmers. The more efficient methods of collection by tax farmers enabled the crown to gather a larger proportion of its revenue than previously but did not solve the problem of royal finance. Even the extraordinary taxes, now added to the crown’s ordinary revenue, notably the taille (a direct tax levied on all but the nobility and the clergy), customs duties, and the purchase tax on wine, fish, meat, and especially salt (the gabelle), were not adequate resources for Renaissance princes whose chief glory lay in the expensive art of war. The taille, the only direct tax, which weighed most heavily upon the underprivileged classes, went up from about 4.5 million livres under Louis XI (1461–83) to 55 million under Jules Cardinal Mazarin in the mid-17th century.

Successive monarchs were forced, therefore, to seek additional revenue. This was no simple matter, because French kings traditionally could not tax their subjects without their consent. Indeed, there were many areas of the country where the taille itself could not be collected and where the king was dependent upon local agreements. The early Valois kings had negotiated with the Estates-General or with the provincial Estates for their extra money; but in the middle of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War with England was reaching a successful conclusion, Charles VII was able to strike a bargain with the Estates. In return for a reduction in overall taxation, he began to raise money to support the army without having to seek the Estates’ approval. In some areas of central France, the pays d’élection, the provincial assemblies, ceded their right to approve taxation and disappeared altogether. But, in those provinces where the provincial Estates survived (the pays d’état), the right to vote the amount of royal taxation also survived. During the Italian wars, meetings of the Estates became more frequent as the king’s financial demands became more strident, and, though the Estates never felt themselves able to refuse to provide money, they retained the right to provide less than the monarch requested. The king continued to rely upon the support of the provincial assemblies to provide extra revenue long after 1614, when the cumbersome Estates-General ceased to play a role in opposing financial resources for the crown. The growth of a professional bureaucracy

But the king also found another means of filling his exchequer that had nothing to do with traditional methods: he began to sell offices on a large scale. Venality, or the sale of offices, was not novel in early 16th-century France; traces of the practice can be found in the 13th century. But it was Francis I who opened the floodgates. The number of judges proliferated. In the Parlement of Paris alone, the king created two new chambers, each containing 20 members, and a further score of judges. In 1552 Henry II established a new kind of court, the présidial, whose jurisdiction lay between the parlement and the bailiwick. Each of the 65 new courts had a complement of nine judges; this brought in a sizable revenue but appears to have made little difference to the efficiency of the judicial system. Nor were judicial offices the only ones put up for sale; it was also possible to purchase financial offices, such as those of treasurer general, treasurer, or the immediately inferior élu. It has been estimated that during the 16th century some 50,000 offices were sold by the crown.

The partial rationalization of the financial system produced an increasing number of professional advisers, who formed the embryo of a bureaucratic elite. In the course of the 16th century, as specialization grew apace, the king’s council became a much more complex institution. The Conseil d’État (Council of State), with its various subdivisions, formed the hub of royal government. Its members were drawn from a variety of backgrounds. The king’s immediate family expected to be consulted, as did great officers of the crown, such as the chancellor, the constable, and the admiral. Also included in the council were the great territorial magnates, members of powerful aristocratic families, and the country’s leading prelates. There were also masters of requests (maîtres de requêtes), lawyers whose expertise was invaluable when the council sat in a judicial capacity. But in the council the professional element that assumed the greatest significance in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries was the holders of the office of secretary of state. In the early years of the 14th century, royal secretaries had already acquired the right to sign documents on the king’s authority. From this stage, granted the stability of the crown, the development of the office from a position of subordinate but considerable importance to one of complete indispensability was predictable. Henry II gave four of his secretaries the official title of secrétaire d’état, and in 1561 they became full members of the royal council. Closely associated with them and destined to overshadow them in importance in the first half of the 17th century were the superintendents of finance, formally established in 1564, though exercising an already well-established function. Their responsibility was to control and safeguard royal finances and especially to prepare annual budgets containing estimates of revenue and expenditure for the following year. They also played a leading part in assessing the amount to be levied each year from the taille and in deciding upon the imposition of new taxes. Below the superintendents but also in the royal council in the 16th century were the intendants of finance. Originally masters of requests, they became a separate group specializing in the increasingly complex task of advising the sovereign in financial matters. In time, their role outstripped in prestige that of the other masters of requests who counseled the king.

There thus grew up close to the crown a more specialized class of administrators, whose expertise rather than birth was the key to their influence; the sale of office allowed wealthy families to establish a firm base for later political and social advancement. In addition, the needy crown was perfectly prepared to sell titles of nobility as well as offices and, in return for a cash payment, to allow both nobility and office to become hereditary. Although this advancement of new men within the government might suggest a social readjustment of considerable proportions, in fact the element of continuity was more important than it might at first appear. Even though it is true that some of the ancient noble families and the king’s own relatives found it increasingly difficult to fulfill their old advisory roles, the new men were not rejecting the established order but rather were being absorbed into it. The king’s counselors, whatever their background, became leading noblemen by virtue of their high office: service to the crown was what mattered, and elevation to the office depended on the king’s choice. It was not the first time that a new wave of royal servants had begun to overtake established advisers; in the 13th century the new magistri, or “masters,” had ousted the great barons and prelates from the Curia Regis without effecting a social revolution. What took place in the 16th and 17th centuries was another turn of the social wheel by which new men seized the opportunity to pursue those dignities and honours held by men who were themselves descendants of new men. The age of the Reformation

The professional class that grew up in the 16th century was different in one respect from those that had gone before: it represented a predominantly secular culture—the product of Renaissance humanism. The Italian wars had brought French elites into contact with the new art, literature, and learning; Charles VIII, Louis XII, and especially Francis I imported numerous Italian painters, sculptors, and architects. French scholars such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Budé devoted themselves to the study of Classical Greek and Latin and attempted to reform the French language. The establishment in 1530 of the Collège de France institutionalized humanist studies, in opposition to the University, where the legacy of medieval Scholasticism, satirized in François Rabelais’s bawdy prose works, Gargantua and Pantagruel, still dominated. Later in the century, the group of poets known as La Pléiade, of whom Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay are the best-known, created a new style of French verse inspired by Classical models.

François Rabelais.From Oeuvres de maitre François Rabelais: avec des remarques historiques et critiques de Mr. Le Duchat (A. Amsterdam: Chez Jean Frederic Bernard, 1741)

Many of the French humanists were initially receptive to ideas about returning to the original sources of the Christian religion that began to spread in France soon after Martin Luther publicized his famous Ninety-five Theses in 1517. Lutheran works first appeared in Paris in 1519; in 1521 Francis I, who was on the point of war with Emperor Charles V and King Henry VIII of England and who wanted to demonstrate his orthodoxy, forbade their publication. Yet interest in the new faith continued to grow, especially in the humanist circle of Lefèvre. Having published in 1512 an edition of the letters of St. Paul with a commentary that anticipated Martin Luther in its assertion of the doctrine of justification by faith, Lefèvre became the leader of a small group of moderate but orthodox Reformers in the tradition of the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus. This group included Guillaume Briçonnet, the bishop of Meaux; the mystic Gérard Roussel; and Margaret of Angoulême, the king’s own sister. Although this circle was dispersed in 1525, Lutheranism had already established itself, especially in such trading centres as Lyon, where it found support among the poorer classes. The progress of the Reformation in France depended on the crown’s attitude; although Francis for political reasons had initially shown hostility, his feelings were far from clear. He was favourably disposed toward Lefèvre and toward orthodox reform in general, though he naturally feared those extreme movements that threatened social upheaval. In addition, Francis I saw political advantages in establishing good relations with the Lutheran German princes. On the other hand, unlike them, he had no great incentive to assert his independence from Rome, because the Gallican church already enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. In 1516 the Concordat of Bologna had given the king effective control over the church in France.

In 1534, however, royal policy changed radically. The posting of anti-Catholic placards that began to appear in Paris and even at the royal court alarmed Francis I, who feared losing control of the religious movement. He responded with the first of a series of persecuting edicts. French Protestantism itself had changed, reinforced from the mid-1530s by the spread among the poorer classes of Languedoc and the seaboard towns of Normandy and Brittany of the ideas of John Calvin, a French exile in Geneva. Henry II (1547–59) pursued his father’s harsh policies, setting up a special court (the chambre ardente) to deal with heresy and issuing further repressive edicts, such as that of Écouen in 1559. His sudden death from a jousting accident in 1559 and the demise the following year of his eldest son, Francis II, left royal policy uncertain. Meanwhile, the infusion of Calvinism, or Huguenotism, into the French Reformation had stiffened the Protestant opposition. Protestant pastors, trained in Geneva, infiltrated the country; by 1562 there were some 2,000 highly organized Calvinist churches in France. Calvinism provided both a rallying point for a wide cross section of opposition and the organization necessary to make that opposition effective. Each Huguenot community created its own administrative structure to provide a tight disciplinary framework through which the community could ensure its spiritual and material independence. The new creed attracted several elements in French society: small artisans, shopkeepers, and the urban unemployed, who were suffering in particular from steeply rising prices; many rich townspeople and professional men who thought that material advancement would be easier to procure as Calvinists; and, after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, many nobles, especially the poorer ones who had lost with the peace their best hope of wealth and status.

The adherence of large numbers of the nobility had two important effects upon the movement in France: it caused many peasants to join the new creed in imitation of their noble seigneurs, thus swelling the overall number and widening its social composition, and it brought a new military element into the Calvinist communities. Under the leadership of the nobility, secret religious meetings were transformed into mass public demonstrations against which the king’s forces were impotent. Such demonstrations sometimes involved upward of 20,000 people. Similarly, the administrative structure that was so important in aiding the survival of the proscribed faith was transformed into a military organization. This organization was ultimately headed by Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, who assumed the title of protector general of the churches of France, thus putting all the prestige of the house of Bourbon behind the Huguenot cause. By doing so, he added a new dimension to the age-old opposition of the mighty feudal subject to the crown: that opposition was now backed by a tightly knit military organization based on the Huguenot communities, by the financial contributions of wealthy bankers and businessmen, and by the dedicated religious zeal of the faithful, inspired by the example of Geneva.

At a time when the threat to the crown had never been greater, the monarchy itself presented a sorry spectacle. The struggle between the families of Guise, Bourbon, and Montmorency for political power at the centre of government after Henry II’s death; the vacillating policy of Catherine de Médicis, widow of Henry II, who strongly influenced the three sons who successively became king; and, most important, the ineptitude of those rulers—Francis II (1559–60), Charles IX (1560–74), and Henry III (1574–89)—meant that local government officials were never confident of their authority in seeking to curb the growing threat of Huguenotism. After the death of Francis II, Catherine de Médicis, who was ruling in the name of her second son, Charles IX, abandoned the repressive religious policy of Francis I and Henry II and attempted to achieve religious reconciliation. Guided by the moderate chancellor Michel de L’Hospital, Catherine summoned the French clergy to the Colloquy of Poissy (1561), at which an unsuccessful attempt was made to effect a religious compromise with the Huguenots; in the following year she issued the Edict of January, which allowed the Calvinists a degree of toleration. These signs of favour to the Protestants brought a violent reaction from devout Catholics, who found leadership in the noble house of Guise, the champions of Roman Catholicism in France. The first civil war began with the massacre of a Huguenot congregation at Vassy (March 1562) by the partisans of François, 2^e duc de Guise. The Wars of Religion

Guise’s forces occupied Paris and took control of the royal family while the Huguenots rose in the provinces, and their two commanders—Louis I de Bourbon, prince de Condé, and Gaspard II de Coligny" class="md-crosslink">Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny—established headquarters at Orléans. The deaths of the opposing leaders—the Protestant Anthony of Bourbon, king consort of Navarra, and the Catholic marshal Jacques d’Albon, seigneur de Saint-André—and the capture of Condé caused both sides to seek peace. After the Battle of Dreux (December 1562) the war drew to a close, despite the assassination of the duc de Guise by a Protestant fanatic. A compromise was reached at the Peace of Amboise in March 1563: liberty of conscience was granted to the Huguenots, but the celebration of religious services was confined to the households of the nobility and to a limited number of towns.

The second war was precipitated by Huguenot fears of an international Catholic plot. Condé and Coligny were persuaded to attempt a coup to capture Catherine and Charles IX at Meaux in September 1567 and to seek military aid from the Protestant Palatinate. In the following brief war, the Catholic constable Anne, duc de Montmorency, was killed at the Battle of Saint-Denis (November 1567). The Peace of Longjumeau (March 1568) signaled another effort at compromise. This peace, however, proved little more than a truce; a third war soon broke out in September 1568. In an attempt to restore their authority, Catherine and King Charles dismissed L’Hospital in September and restored the Guise faction to favour. The edicts of pacification were rescinded; Calvinist preachers faced expulsion from France, and plans were made to seize Condé and Coligny. The former was killed at the Battle of Jarnac (1569), and the Huguenots were again defeated in that year at Moncontour. But the Catholic side failed to consolidate its successes, and yet another compromise was arranged at the Peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570.

Coligny subsequently regained the king’s favour but not the queen mother’s, and he remained an object of hatred with the Guises. In 1572 he was murdered. At the same time, some 3,000 Huguenots who gathered in Paris to celebrate the marriage of Margaret of Valois (later Margaret of France) to Condé’s nephew, Henry IV of Navarra, were massacred on the eve of the feast day of St. Bartholomew, and several thousand more perished in massacres in provincial cities. This notorious episode was the signal for the fifth civil war, which ended in 1576 with the Peace of Monsieur, allowing the Huguenots freedom of worship outside Paris. Opposition to these concessions inspired the creation of the Holy League, or Catholic League. Local Catholic unions or leagues had begun to appear in the 1560s, headed by nobles and prelates. In 1576, after the Peace of Monsieur with its concessions to the Huguenots, these local leagues were fused into a national organization. The league was headed by the Guise family and looked to Philip II of Spain for material aid. It sought, like the Protestants, to attract mass support; its clandestine organization was built around the house of Guise rather than the monarchy, from which it was increasingly alienated. In 1577 King Henry III (reigned 1574–89) tried to nullify the league’s influence, first by putting himself at its head and then by dissolving it altogether. This maneuver met with some success.

Renewed fighting broke out in 1577 between Catholic and Protestant noblemen, who defied Henry III in his attempt to assert royal authority. The Huguenots were defeated and forced by the Peace of Bergerac (1577) to accept further limitations upon their freedom. An uneasy peace followed until 1584, when, upon the death of François, duc d’Anjou, the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarra became the heir to the throne. This new situation produced the War of the Three Henrys (1585–89), during which the Guise faction—led by duc de Guise" class="md-crosslink">Henri I de Lorraine, 3^e duc de Guise—sought to have Navarra excluded from the succession. The threat of a Protestant king led to the revival of the Catholic League, which now took on a more radical form. This movement was centred in Paris among middle-class professional men and members of the clergy and soon spread among the Parisian artisans, guilds, and public officials. Henry III, who was considered far too tolerant toward the Huguenots, was an object of attack. In town after town, royalist officials were replaced by members of the league. In Paris the mob was systematically aroused; in 1588, on the famous Day of the Barricades (May 12), Henry III was driven from his own capital. In a welter of intrigue and murder, first the duc de Guise (December 1588) and his brother cardinal de Guise" class="md-crosslink">Louis II de Lorraine, 2^e cardinal de Guise (December 1588), and then Henry III himself (August 1589) were assassinated, allowing the Protestant Henry of Navarra (Henry IV) to ascend to the throne. After the murder of the Guises, the league came out in open revolt against the crown. Towns renounced their royal allegiances and set up revolutionary governments. In Paris, however, where the league was most highly organized, a central committee called the Sixteen set up a Committee of Public Safety and conducted a reign of terror in a manner similar to the much more famous one that occurred during the revolution 200 years later. Paradoxically, this genuinely populist and revolutionary element in the Holy League paved the way for the triumph of Henry IV (1589–1610), the first king of France from the house of Bourbon (a branch of the house of Capet). The aristocratic members of the league took fright at the direction in which the extreme elements in the movement were proceeding. Their fears reached a climax in 1591, when the Sixteen arrested and executed three magistrates of the Parlement of Paris. The growing split in the ranks of the members of the league, combined with Henry’s well-timed conversion to Roman Catholicism, enabled Henry to seize the initiative and enter Paris, almost unopposed, in 1594. In its final stages, the war became a struggle against Spanish forces intervening on behalf of Isabella Clara Eugenia, the daughter of Philip II of Spain and Elizabeth of Valois, who also laid claim to the French throne. The Peace of Vervins (1598), by which Spain recognized Henry IV’s title as king, and the Edict of Nantes of the same year, which granted substantial religious toleration to the Huguenots, ended the Wars of Religion. Political ideology

The religious wars had posed a new and fundamental threat to the monarchy and therefore to the whole French state, which makes the strong position that Henry IV achieved by the time of his death that much more remarkable. Part of his success lay in the unwillingness of his great (noble) subjects to contemplate a social and political upheaval that would displace them as well as the king from their positions of power and prestige. The religious wars also engendered a luxuriant growth of political ideas that in the end provided a strong theoretical basis for the reassertion of royal authority.

A strong element in Calvin’s teaching was the importance of passive obedience to secular authority—an idea that became impossible for the Huguenots to support after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. They began instead to advocate the right to attack the king if he would not guarantee them toleration. The most important Huguenot contribution in this change was the anonymous pamphlet Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579; "A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants"), which raised fundamental questions about the prince’s power and the rights of his subjects. The pamphlet advanced the idea of a twofold contract: the first contract, between God and ruler on the one hand and the ruler and his subjects on the other, recognized the belief that the king ruled under the aegis of Divine Providence; the second contract, between the king and the people, obliged the king to govern justly and the people to obey him so long as he did so. It followed from the argument in the Vindiciae that subjects had the right to rebel if the prince disobeyed the laws of God or refused to govern his people justly. This twofold contract was not intended to be a license for private and personal rebellion but was interpreted as justifying the corporate opposition of whole towns and provinces.

A second element in the realm of political ideas, deeply opposed to the contractual theory of the Huguenots, was that of the Jesuit supporters of Ultramontanism. The Ultramontanists feared that a strong national monarchy would mean the subordination of the church to its authority and the diminution of papal authority. They feared the triumph of both Huguenotism and Gallicanism in France. Their most effective controversialist was the Italian prelate Robert Bellarmine, whose Disputationes, 3 vol. (1586–93), and De potestate summi pontificis in rebus temporalibus (1610; "Concerning the Power of the Supreme Pontiff in Temporal Matters") gave definite form to the theory of papal supremacy. By no means were all members of the league supporters of Bellarmine, though their extreme Catholicism made many of them sympathetic to his ideas. The definitive Gallican reply came in 1594 with Pierre Pithou’s Les Libertés de l’église gallicane ("Liberties of the Gallican Church"), which reiterated the basic tenets of Gallican doctrine: that the pope had no temporal authority in France and no more spiritual power than that bestowed on him by such conciliar decisions as the monarchy chose to recognize.

The growing support for Gallican opinion was a reflection of the emergence of the Politique Party after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. In the opinion of this moderate Catholic group, toleration should be granted to the Huguenots for the sake of peace and national unity. The Politiques were the spiritual heirs of the chancellor L’Hospital and represented an attitude of mind rather than an organized movement. Under the pressure of political events, this group became convinced of the need to support a strong monarchy that could resist both Ultramontane and Huguenot excesses and the divisive influence of noble factions. They therefore increasingly identified themselves with the Gallican position. The Huguenots, too, were not slow to see the advantages for themselves of this new attitude, and the ideas of the Vindiciae gave way to the theory of passive obedience. The wheel had turned full circle.

With this emphasis upon passive obedience emerged the theory of the divine right of kings. The first written statement of the theory in France is contained in the works of Pierre de Belloy, especially his De l’autorité du roi (1588; “Of the Authority of the King”). He asserted that the monarchy was created by God and that the king was responsible to God alone. Any rebellion against the ruler, therefore, was a rebellion against the Almighty. The essential premise of the divine-right idea is that the right to command obedience cannot be bestowed by man; only God can grant such authority. God therefore chooses the king, and there can be no contractual relationship between the king and his people; to rebel even against an unjust ruler is to challenge God’s choice. If the king breaks his contract with God, then he is answerable to God alone. On the wave of such ideas, Henry of Navarra became king of a united France, supported by Huguenots and moderate Politique Catholics alike. The universalist doctrine of Bellarmine gave way to the national one of Pithou as the country closed ranks against Spain, the common enemy.

One other concept emerged about this time that helped to set the seal on Henry’s authority: the idea of sovereignty, as expounded by Jean Bodin. In his Six Livres de la république (1576; The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, 1606) Bodin argued that the political bond that made every man subject to one sovereign power overrode religious differences. Bodin provided the link divine right did not allow between the king and his people; divine right was concerned with the source of the ruler’s power, sovereignty with its exercise. The needs of the political situation forced Bodin to give his sovereign virtually unlimited authority, though he insisted—as was traditionally the case in France—that the ruler should respect the sanctity of the natural law, of the fundamental laws of the kingdom, of property, and of the family. In 1614, on the occasion of the last meeting of the Estates-General before the Revolution, the Third Estate sought to have it made a fundamental law of the realm that under no pretext whatever was it permissible to disobey the king. This effort gives some indication of the extent to which the ideas of divine right and sovereignty had provided a firm theoretical base for the reestablishment of monarchical power after the dangerous years of civil war. France in the early 17th century Henry IV

The restoration of royal authority was not, of course, simply a matter of adjusting theories of kingship; there was a clear practical reason for Henry’s success. The country had tottered on the brink of disintegration for three decades. By the time of Henry’s succession, it was generally recognized that only a strong personality, independent of faction, could guarantee the unity of the state, even though unity meant religious toleration for the Protestant minority. In the Edict of Nantes (April 13, 1598) Henry guaranteed the Huguenots freedom of conscience and the right to practice their religion publicly in certain prescribed areas of the country. As a surety against attack, the Huguenots were granted a number of fortresses, some of them, such as La Rochelle and Montpellier, extremely formidable. Huguenots were made eligible to hold the same offices as Roman Catholics and to attend the same schools and universities. Finally, to ensure impartial justice for them, the Edict established in the Parlement of Paris—the supreme judicial court under the king—a new chamber, the Chambre de l’Édit, containing a number of Protestant magistrates who would judge all cases involving Huguenots. Although the problem of religion was not finally settled by the Edict of Nantes, Henry did succeed in effecting an extended truce during which he could apply himself to the task of restoring the royal position.

The chief need of the monarchy was to improve the financial situation, parlous since the days of Henry II’s wars and aggravated by the subsequent internecine conflict. Henry was fortunate in this connection to have the services of Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, who was admitted to the king’s financial council in 1596. Sully at once embarked upon a series of provincial tours, enforcing the repayment of royal debts, thereby increasing the king’s revenues. He also provided the first real statements of government finances in many years; by 1598 he had become the effective head of the royal financial machine as well as a trusted member of the king’s inner cabinet. He held a variety of offices: superintendent of finances, grand master of artillery, superintendent of buildings, governor of the Bastille, and others. But it was in the field of finance that he made his greatest contribution to the welfare of the state. Sully was not an original financial thinker. He undertook no sweeping changes, contenting himself with making the existing system work, for example, by shifting the emphasis from direct to indirect taxation. He succeeded in building both an annual surplus and substantial reserves.

The only measure Sully championed that might be described as novel and far-reaching was the introduction in 1604 of a new tax, the paulette, named after the financier Charles Paulet, which enabled officiers (officeholders) to assure the heritability of their offices by paying one-sixtieth of the purchase price each year. The paulette was intended to increase royal revenues, though it had considerable political implications too, in effect making government offices practically hereditary. Politically, the paulette was to increase the independence of a wide range of royal officials; it did, however, give these officiers a stake in the strengthening of the royal government. In addition, Sully did much to reorganize fortifications and to rebuild roads and bridges after the devastation of the religious wars. In transportation his greatest work was the Briare Canal project to join the Seine and Loire rivers—the first such scheme in France—completed under Louis XIII.

Sully, however, favoured a much more cautious domestic policy overall than did his sovereign; because Sully disliked merchants and manufacturers, he opposed many of the king’s economic ventures. Henry IV believed in direct state intervention, and he took steps to fix wages and to prohibit strikes and illegal combinations of workmen. Henry’s policies bore fruit especially in the textile industries, where the production of luxury silk goods and woolen and linen cloth greatly increased. Henry also took the initiative in making commercial treaties with Spain and England, thereby increasing the volume of French trade and stimulating the export of grain, cattle, and wine. Yet his efforts were not entirely successful, not least because merchants remained more concerned with buying land and office (and thereby status) than with plowing back their profits into further industrial development. Though the country did assume a more prosperous air under Henry IV, that change was chiefly because of the domestic and foreign calm that followed the Peace of Vervins.

Even after Spain’s agreement in 1598 to the restoration of the territorial position as it had existed in 1559, Henry was not free of international complications. But he was able to prevent them from once more dividing his kingdom. He did have to counter a conspiracy led by one of his own marshals, Charles de Gontaut, baron et duc de Biron, who plotted with the king of Spain and almost succeeded in raising southwestern France in revolt. Henry, however, had Biron arrested and executed in 1602; this strong action against an old friend and powerful enemy had the effect of subduing the political rising and strengthening Henry’s own authority. In central government Henry gave increasing power to Sully at the expense of the rest of his council, while in the provinces the responsibilities of the intendant, an official first regularly employed during the reign of Henry III, were widened to include the supervision of potentially dissident groups. The intendants also represented the crown at meetings of provincial estates, enforced royal laws, and advised the king on a variety of local problems—fiscal, administrative, and military. When Henry IV was assassinated by François Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic, in May 1610, he had gone a long way toward restoring the monarchy to a position of authority similar to that held by Francis I and Henry II and had reunified a state greatly threatened at his accession from both within and without. Louis XIII

From 1610 to 1617, Henry’s widow, Marie de Médicis, ruled on behalf of their young son Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43). Once more the security of the country was threatened as factions disputed around the throne. The work of Henry IV seemed likely to be undone. Crown and country, however, were rescued by probably the greatest minister of the whole Bourbon dynasty—Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal et duc de Richelieu. Richelieu first came to the attention of the government in 1614, when he was chosen to present the final address of the clergy at the meeting of the Estates-General. His eloquence and political expertise on this occasion won him the notice of Marie de Médicis, who later appointed him her secretary. By 1616 Richelieu was secretary of state for war and foreign affairs. His career, however, received a check in the following year when a palace revolution overthrew the regency of the queen mother, exiling her to Blois. Richelieu was banished first to Luçon and subsequently to Avignon (1618). He began the climb back to power by negotiating the Treaty of Angoulême (1619), which reconciled Louis XIII to his mother. After the death in 1621 of Louis’s favourite, Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes, Richelieu regained effective power; he became a cardinal in 1622 and in April 1624 gained access to Louis XIII’s council. On the disgrace in 1624 of the superintendent of finance, Charles de La Vieuville, Richelieu became Louis’s principal minister—a position that he maintained until his death some 18 years later.

Richelieu proved an indefatigable servant of the French crown, intent on securing absolute obedience to the monarchy and on raising its international prestige. The first objective required him to crush a number of revolts of the nobles, the first of which, in 1626, involved the king’s younger brother and heir, Gaston, duc d’Orléans. Louis acted ruthlessly, and one of the conspirators, Henri de Talleyrand, comte de Chalais, was executed. Then, in 1630, came the notorious Day of Dupes (November 10), when the queen mother, now allied with Gaston and the keeper of the seals, Michel de Marillac, prepared to move against Richelieu. After initially agreeing to the cardinal’s dismissal, the king recovered and chose to support Richelieu against the wishes of his mother, his wife, and his confessor. Finally, at the very end of his life, the cardinal had to overcome another conspiracy headed by the young royal favourite, Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, marquis de Cinq-Mars, in which Gaston was once more implicated. Through all these crises, Richelieu retained the king’s support, for it was in Louis’s interests, too, that such intrigues be firmly dealt with.

In the course of strengthening royal absolutism, Richelieu also came into conflict with the Huguenots. He believed that their right under the Edict of Nantes to maintain armed fortresses weakened the king’s position at home and abroad. Protestant rebellions in 1625 and 1627 persuaded the cardinal of the need for a direct confrontation. The major Huguenot citadel of La Rochelle was attacked by royal troops in 1627 and, despite attempts by the English to assist the Protestants, fell in the following year. Another royal army marched into Languedoc, where the Huguenot forces were concentrated, and quickly overcame them. The Peace of Alais (1629) left the Huguenots free to enjoy religious and civil liberties, but they lost the military power that had made them a threat to the government. They were never to pose that sort of threat again, and little more would be heard of them until Louis XIV decided to repeal Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes.

Richelieu also took a great interest in economic matters. To promote economic self-sufficiency, he encouraged the manufacture of tapestry, glass, silk, linen, and woolen cloth. He gave privileges to companies that established colonies in the Americas, Africa, and the West Indies. To protect trading and colonial interests, he created a navy, which by 1642 had 63 oceangoing vessels.

On the basis of these policies, Richelieu was able to pursue an increasingly ambitious foreign policy. His first aim was the security of France, which he hoped to achieve through the occupation of key points on the country’s frontiers lying along imperial and Spanish territories. He thus involved France in the War of the Mantuan Succession (1628–31) in northern Italy. Through diplomatic means he worked for the dismissal of Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein, the brilliant general fighting on the side of Emperor Ferdinand II, whose forces were threatening to destroy the Protestant princes of Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. To undermine the power of the Habsburgs, he prolonged this conflict, negotiating with the United Provinces; with Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, with whom he concluded the subsidy Treaty of Bärwalde in 1631, agreeing to pay the Swedish king one million livres per year to continue the war; with Gustav’s successor, Greve (count) Axel Oxenstierna; and with Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar. Eventually, in 1635, Richelieu committed France to direct conflict with the Habsburgs; and before his death he had savoured the triumph of having French arms in the Spanish Netherlands, Lorraine, Alsace, and Roussillon.

Richelieu’s foreign policy was not only ambitious but extremely expensive. Annual government expenditure tripled from 1620 to 1640, two-thirds of the money going to the military. The drastic increase in taxes needed to pay for the war sparked a series of provincial rebellions in the 1630s. The population’s resentment of the monarchy’s rising demands was exacerbated by the fact that these years marked the end of a long cycle of prosperity, encompassing most of the 16th century and the beginning of a period of economic difficulties that would extend through the reign of Louis XIV. Crop failures, great fluctuations in prices, and outbreaks of famine further accentuated the misery. Although most participants in the revolts of the 1630s came from the lower classes, municipal authorities such as those of Lyon in 1632, provincial nobles in Périgord in 1636, and even princes of the blood such as Louis de Bourbon, comte de Soissons, in 1641, took advantage of the discontent to incite protests against the increasing centralization of royal power and Richelieu’s efforts to abrogate local privileges. Indeed, peasants often turned to local nobles to lead their movements.

Although these revolts were unwelcome distractions from the minister’s efforts to project French power abroad, they did not pose a revolutionary threat. Dispersed and uncoordinated, they were put down by a combination of temporary concessions, such as the suspension of efforts to collect unpopular taxes, and the exemplary execution of a few ringleaders. There was little sign of the revolutionary attitude that had characterized aspects of the 16th-century Wars of Religion and that would surface again in 1789. On the contrary, there were positive signs of continuing loyalty to the crown, with such rebel slogans as "Vive le roi sans la gabelle" (“Long live the king, but not the salt tax”) or "Vive le roi sans la taille" (“Long live the king, but not the direct tax”) indicating that the resistance was focused on the taxes themselves. Nor was the other great bastion of the establishment, the church, attacked. The substantial tax of the dîme (the tithe, or tenth) continued to be paid to the church without complaint. The first half of the 17th century was a period of revival for French Catholicism, as the church reforms called for by the Council of Trent began to show their effects. Improved seminary training produced more educated and devout priests, who worked to inspire stricter observance among their flocks. New religious orders, inspired by such figures as Francis of Sales, Vincent de Paul, Jane Frances of Chantal, and Louise de Marillac (all later canonized), emphasized practical activities such as teaching and the provision of medical care. These orders—such as the Oratorians and the Vincentians (Lazarists), for men, and the Ursulines and Sisters of Charity, for women—rooted the church more strongly in French society.

The career of Richelieu bears something of a contradictory aspect. He undoubtedly added to the earlier success of Henry IV and Sully in overcoming the threat of anarchy and disorder that was the legacy of the late 16th century. Indeed, his contemporary reputation was one of supreme ruthlessness and arbitrariness in the application of power. Yet he was never more than the king’s creature, incapable of pursuing a course of action of which Louis disapproved, always vulnerable to the loss of royal favour and support. He was ambitious, but he recognized that his desire for power could be satisfied best within the confines of dutiful royal service. Richelieu was no innovator: he devised neither new administrative procedures nor novel methods of taxation to secure the king’s authority. Indeed, the power of the great financiers grew with the government’s need for additional war revenue, posing a different threat to royal absolutism. Richelieu’s unique contribution lay in the single-minded devotion he gave to the task of increasing royal authority at home and abroad. He also succeeded in accumulating a vast personal fortune as a result of his years in power. Richelieu died in 1642, and Louis XIII died the following year. France was once again ruled by a regent, the queen mother, Anne of Austria. But the task of governing the country fell increasingly into the hands of another cardinal, Jules Mazarin. The Fronde

The years of Louis XIV’s minority were dominated by the Fronde, a series of civil disturbances that lasted from 1648 to 1653. The government’s financial difficulties were once more at the root of the trouble. In the first few years of the regency a variety of expedients were tried to raise additional revenue for the war with Spain. There was about these expedients an air of arbitrariness and compulsion that antagonized a wide cross section of Parisian society, notably the Parlement of Paris, and the animosity was heightened by Mazarin’s use of intendants in the localities to cut across traditional legal hierarchies. Although most of the disputes were superficially concerned with financial exactions, below the surface an older constitutional argument was developing, as Mazarin followed Richelieu in attempting to dictate from the centre in the interests of the state. The climax came when the government failed to renew the paulette for the members of the provincial parlements and for some of the chief legal officiers in the capital, in the Cour des Aides, the Chambre des Comptes, and the Great Council. This decision was not a gratuitous rebuff to these magistrates but yet another attempt to gain additional revenue, this time by offering a renewal of the paulette in lieu of four years’ salary.

At this point, the first phase of the disturbances (the Fronde of the Parlement) began with the outraged magistrates of the three courts concerned joining with the Parlement of Paris to demand redress. Their demands included the abolition of the office of intendant, a reduction in the level of the taille, and the restoration of normal judicial procedure in registering financial edicts in the Parlement. The regent and Mazarin at first took a conciliatory attitude, but each side gradually moved to more committed and extreme positions, and civil disturbances in Paris exacerbated an already delicate situation. The magistrates increasingly aimed their fire at Mazarin, for he, like Richelieu before him, seemed to be taking over the king’s authority and using it in uncharted and illegal areas. The magistrates, however, were not revolutionaries, and the state of disorder in the capital frightened them. That fact, allied with fears of a Spanish invasion (for the war was continuing with Spain despite the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), persuaded them in 1649 to make the Peace of Rueil with the government, the terms of which were for the most part favourable to the magistrates’ original demands. At this stage the second civil war broke out, the Fronde of the Princes, headed by the Great Condé. The second phase was a pale reflection of the aristocratic resistance during the Wars of Religion; and, although Condé succeeded in gaining control of Paris, he did not acquire the support of the Parlement except briefly and under duress. In October 1652 Condé fled to Spain, and Louis XIV reentered his capital in triumph.

Neither phase of the Fronde posed the grievous threat to the very basis of the state that had existed in the previous century. Mazarin was the chief object of enmity, and that fact itself helps to explain the less serious nature of the threat. What was at issue was not the king’s authority per se but the manner in which it had been exercised since Richelieu’s time.

After the Fronde, Mazarin continued to play a key role in government as chief adviser to the young king, whose respect and affection he had long possessed. His career ended on a high note with a successful conclusion of the war with Spain negotiated by the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659). According to its terms, France gained Roussillon and Cerdagne in the south and Artois and a number of border towns in the north; and the Rhine became France’s frontier in the east. By the treaty, too, Louis XIV was betrothed to the infanta Marie-Thérèse, the elder daughter of Philip IV of Spain. It was by any reckoning a triumphant peace, though it sowed the seeds of future European conflict over the issue of the Spanish succession. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis was confident enough to take up the reins of government without recourse to another first minister. The age of Louis XIV

Throughout his long reign Louis XIV (1643–1715) never lost the hold over his people he had assumed at the beginning. He worked hard to project his authority in the splendid setting of Versailles and to depict it in his arrogant motto “Nec pluribus impar” (“None his equal”) and in his sun emblem. He buttressed his authority with the divine-right doctrines elaborated by Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and proclaimed it across Europe by force of arms. Yet he made surprisingly few institutional or administrative changes in the structure of government. Like Richelieu, Louis used the system that he had inherited and adapted it to suit his own personality and outlook. This practice may be seen first in his attitude to the machinery of central government.

Louis XIV, detail of a portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York The development of central government

Louis’s inner council was based on the model of the royal council in Richelieu’s days, a High Council (Conseil d’en Haut) consisting of only three or four members and excluding the king’s own relatives. Members of this council were known as ministers, but they held no formal right to the title and ceased to be a minister if the king chose not to summon them. The first of these great men were Michel Le Tellier, Hugues de Lionne, and Nicolas Fouquet; but the last was disgraced within a year, and by 1665 his place had been taken by Mazarin’s former secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. These three men dominated the government in the early years of Louis’s personal reign, but always, as with Richelieu and Louis XIII, under the watchful and jealous eye of the king. Le Tellier had been secretary of state for military affairs under Mazarin’s regime, and his greatest contribution under Louis was to reorganize the army along lines that were hardly changed until after 1789. He created a royal army that wore the king’s uniform; it was commanded by his officers and was ultimately responsible to the sovereign. It was a standing army of hitherto undreamed-of size, reaching 400,000 men in times of war and requiring close regulation in matters of discipline, training, recruitment, supply, and overall organization. The success of Le Tellier and of his son Louvois, who succeeded him, goes far to explain the dominance of French arms in Europe during Louis’s reign.

Lionne, the expert in foreign affairs, had been the chief French negotiator at the Peace of the Pyrenees. His effective influence on Louis is difficult to gauge; he certainly was not the sole source of advice in foreign affairs. Lionne remains a more elusive personality than his colleagues, though there can be no doubt of his importance. It should be remembered that all important matters of state were reviewed at the High Council; and the king’s ministers were expected to give advice and opinions on all that was discussed, not simply on matters in the area of their particular expertise.

Colbert, however, remains the best-known of these intimate counselors. Of the 17 ministers summoned by Louis XIV to the High Council during his reign, 5 were members of the Colbert family. In 1664, Colbert was appointed superintendent of the king’s buildings; in 1665, controller general of finances; in 1669, secretary of state for the navy. His capacity for work and his grasp of detail were remarkable; but he was not an original, much less a revolutionary, thinker. His chief contribution to the king’s finances, like Sully’s, was to make the machinery more efficient, not to substitute any new mechanisms. Colbert’s first achievement was to present the king with a monthly statement of the financial situation, though his annual estimates for the following year never persuaded Louis of the need for economies if his mind was set in other directions. Yet, within 10 years of taking office, Colbert, mainly by tightening up on the tax-collecting administration and by rationalizing the gathering of indirect taxes, did succeed in producing a surplus. He turned a large part of central and northern France into a free-trade area and gave the responsibility for collecting all indirect taxes there to a new syndicate of tax farmers called the Farmers-General. Under Colbert, the total sum levied from indirect taxation rose from 36 million livres to 62 million.

In his industrial policy Colbert believed that France needed to produce for itself those manufactured goods that it was importing. To achieve this mercantilist goal, derived from, among other sources, the ideas of Richelieu, Colbert was willing to invoke a variety of improvisations: direct subsidies, exemptions from the taille, monopoly grants, and controls exercised through town guilds. Skilled foreign workmen were persuaded to settle in France and to pass on their skills to native artisans; protective tariffs were imposed. The famous tapestry works of the Gobelin family was made a state enterprise, and France became largely self-sufficient in the production of woolen cloth. Colbert also had some success in other industries, such as sugar refining, plate-glass making, and the production of silk, naval stores, and armaments. The overall results of his hard work, however, were disappointing. French economic growth lagged behind that of England and the Netherlands, where governments permitted greater entrepreneurial initiative.

Much more successful were Colbert’s efforts at fostering the growth of the navy. He reorganized the recruitment system on a rotating basis, whereby seamen served in the royal navy for six months every three years. He refurbished the hospitals in each of the major ports; rebuilt the arsenals at Toulon and Rochefort; and increased the size of the navy from about 25 ships in 1661 to 144 in 1677. He also established schools of marine engineering, hydrography, and cartography. His interest in reestablishing French sea power was, in part, to challenge the commercial supremacy of the Dutch. He encouraged the building of the French mercantile marine and established a number of overseas trading companies, in particular the East India and Levant companies, neither of which had much success. He also attempted to protect French colonial interests in the West Indies and Canada. The Code Noir of 1685, imposed after Colbert’s death, legalized slavery in the French colonies, even though it was banned in France itself.

Besides the High Council, the king’s council also met for somewhat less vital matters under a variety of different guises. The Council for Dispatches (Conseil des Dépêches), or, more loosely, the Council for the Interior, had particular responsibility for home affairs, including the activities of the intendants; the Royal Council for Finances (Conseil Royal des Finances) supervised important matters affecting financial aspects of the king’s domain lands. These two councils, like the High Council, were presided over by the king in person. But the royal council also met without the king under three further titles to deal with judicial and administrative matters. The Privy Council (Conseil Privé) judged disputes between individuals or bodies and dispensed the king’s supreme and final judgments. The State Council for Finances (Conseil d’État et Finances) expedited financial matters of secondary importance, while the Financial Arbitration Court (Grande Direction des Finances) was an administrative tribunal that settled disputes between the state and individuals or corporations. Each of these subdivisions of the king’s council contained more members than the exclusive High Council, made up of the secretaries of state and of financial and judicial experts.

The initial group composing the High Council contributed a great deal to the basic pattern of Louis’s reign, particularly in military, fiscal, naval, and commercial attitudes, partly because many of those who followed as ministers came from the same tightly knit group of royal servants. In addition to the five members of the Colbert family, there were also three Le Telliers; and, while only one member of the Phélypeaux family, Louis II, comte de Pontchartrain, was a minister, four served as important secretaries of state. All these counselors reflected the attitude of the king himself: they worked extremely hard; they proffered advice but were under no illusions about the danger of arguing once Louis had made up his mind; and they favoured a protectionist, paternalist policy, whether in the organization of industry, the administration of the colonies, or the building up of the navy. Only toward the end of the reign, with the establishment of the Council of Commerce in 1700, did a less regulatory policy show signs of emerging.

To carry out the decisions reached in his intimate and secret High Council, Louis relied chiefly on his provincial intendants. Stationed in the capital cities of France’s 30-odd généralités, or administrative districts, the intendants were, like the ministers, appointed by the king. In the provinces they could exercise powers of police; raise military forces; regulate industrial, commercial, and agricultural matters; enforce censorship; administer the financial affairs of various communities; assign and collect taxes; and wield considerable judicial authority in civil and criminal affairs. Inevitably, these agents of the central government created considerable friction and hostility. These new men, with no local roots, answerable only to the king and acting almost invariably in an authoritarian context, were deeply resented by older royal officials, by municipal authorities and guilds, and by local parlements and estates—all of whom operated through well-established channels and according to traditional local privileges. The use of intendants, who held neither venal nor hereditary office, was one way in which the limiting effect of the sale of office on royal policies could be circumvented. The authoritarian element of Louis XIV’s reign is undeniable: he was determined that no institution or social class would escape the supervision of the crown and its ministers. Thus, the power of patronage, which had been exercised for generations in provincial noble households, began to lose its political significance as the king’s ministers built up their own alternative administrative clienteles.

In particular, because the Fronde had remained a painful memory from his childhood, the king never allowed the great nobles a similar opportunity for revolt. Versailles became a place of surveillance for pensioned noblemen and their families whose only serious occupation was the traditional one of arms, and Louis provided ample opportunities for this pursuit. Provincial nobles were drawn into cooperation with the royal administration and shared in the profits made from exploiting the system. The second rebellious group in the Fronde, the members of the Parlement of Paris, were likewise subjected to stringent controls. In 1673 Louis produced regulations stipulating that the court’s remonstrances against royal enactments sent to it could in future be made only after the laws concerned had been registered. By this device the king effectively muzzled the magistrates’ criticisms of royal policy. It was equally his intention to overcome the delaying tactics of the provincial courts, especially those situated close to vulnerable frontiers. Louis’s religious policy

Louis was also on his guard against religious dissent. Like most of his contemporaries, he believed that toleration was no virtue and that unity in the state was extremely difficult to maintain where two or more churches were tolerated. The same fervour that had contributed to the revival of Catholic devotion after 1600 led church spokesmen to urge the king to promote conversions and to end the scandal of legal protection for heretics. By 1678 Louis, persuaded that most Protestants had already returned to the true faith, intensified the persecution of Protestants; churches were destroyed, certain professions were put out of reach of the Huguenots, and Protestant children were taken away from their parents and brought up as Roman Catholics. The notorious practice of dragonnades, the billeting of soldiers in Protestant homes with permission to behave as brutally as they wished, was introduced. Finally, in 1685, the Edict of Nantes was revoked so that Louis could claim that he had succeeded where Emperor Leopold I had failed—that is, in extirpating Protestantism from his realm.

French Catholics welcomed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, but the decision angered Protestant Europe at a time when Louis’s European designs were beginning to meet serious resistance. The revocation deprived France of a number of gifted craftsmen, sailors, and soldiers. At least 600 officers, including Marshal Frederick, Herzog (duke) von Schomberg, and Henri de Massue, marquis de Ruvigny (later the earl of Galway), joined William of Orange, the leader of the Grand Alliance against Louis. Research, however, has reversed the earlier view that the decay of French industry at the end of Louis’s reign was the direct result of the expulsion of Huguenot mercantile talent.

The same zeal for uniformity made Louis attack the Jansenists. The theological position of the Jansenists is difficult to define; but Louis, who was no theologian, was content with the simple fact that these zealous Catholics had taken up an unorthodox position that threatened the unity of the state. The movement had begun over the perennial issue of grace and free will as it was propounded in the Augustinus of Bishop Cornelius Otto Jansen, published in 1640. In 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned five propositions from Jansen’s doctrine, but the movement grew in strength with notable adherents, including Jean-François-Paul de Gondi, cardinal de Retz, and the great mathematician Blaise Pascal. In 1705 Clement XI" class="md-crosslink">Pope Clement XI published the bull Vineam Domini (“Vineyard of the Lord”), which further condemned the writings of Jansen; but the archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine, cardinal de Noailles, appeared ready to lead the Jansenist forces in opposition to the pope. Under the influence of his confessor, Père Michel Le Tellier, Louis decided to ask the pope for another formal condemnation of the creed. Finally, in 1713, the famous bull Unigenitus" class="md-crosslink">Unigenitus (“Only Begotten Son”) was promulgated but, far from ending Jansenism, drove it into a disruptive alliance with Gallicanism during the following reign. Louis’s real attitude in this situation is not entirely clear: certainly his policy was in keeping with his authoritarian insistence upon unity. He was suspicious of religious innovation, and his action was consistent with the increasingly orthodox and rigid mood of his last years. Yet, in seeking the pope’s support in this matter, he was reversing years of bitter hostility toward Rome—years when, like many of his predecessors, including Francis I and Henry IV, he had leaned heavily upon the traditional Gallican doctrine.

According to that doctrine, the French king possessed the right of temporal and spiritual régale—that is, the right to nominate new bishops and to administer and draw the revenue from bishoprics while they remained vacant. In 1673, despite papal opposition, Louis extended this right to the whole of the French kingdom, which had been enlarged in the recent War of Devolution (1667–68). Eventually, in 1682, the Four Gallican Articles were published as a law of the French state, asserting that the king was in no way subject to the pope in temporal matters and could not be excommunicated and reaffirming the independence of the French church from Rome. The mutual animosity of king and pope ended only in 1693, when Louis agreed to suspend the edict of 1682; but it was a suspension only, not a recantation. The tradition of Gallican independence remained. Absolutism of Louis

Thus, in religious matters (except where Jansenism was concerned), in his dealings with the nobility and the Parlement, in his attitude toward the economy, and in his manner of governing the country, Louis revealed a desire to exercise a paternal control of affairs that might suggest a modern dictator rather than a 17th-century king. Though such a comparison has been made, it is most misleading; neither in theoretical nor in practical terms could Louis XIV be thought of as all-powerful. First of all, the legitimacy of his position under the law—the ancient fundamental law of succession—made him the interpreter of the law and the fount of justice in the state, not a capricious autocrat. Similarly, his kingship bestowed upon him a quasi-spiritual role, symbolized by his consecration with holy oil at his coronation, which obliged him to govern justly in accordance with the laws of God and Christian morality. He was also bound by the need to take counsel; and, though he always made up his own mind, he insisted on receiving advice on all important matters of state, which further restricted any arbitrary instincts. Next, there was the essentially federal nature of the country, with its collection of such peripheral provinces as Brittany, Normandy, and Provence, all retaining their own Estates and customs. Within both these pays d’état and pays d’élection (where the Estates no longer met) there was a variety of groups and corporations, not to mention individuals, with their own legally held rights, privileges, and exemptions, such as the nobility, the clergy, the towns, and the king’s officers. To impose rigid uniformity in such a situation was both impossible and undreamed of by contemporaries. On the contrary, one of the king’s prime obligations was to uphold and respect the myriad different rights to which his subjects laid claim.

Perhaps most of all, the king was limited by financial stringency. Louis could and often did try to persuade the cities and provincial Estates to raise their contributions and the clergy to increase the size of their don gratuit (“free gift”); he also created more offices and annuities. But these were mere palliatives, and the king was forced on two occasions to introduce novel measures: in 1695 he levied a capitation, or head tax, applicable to all French laymen, even to the princes of the blood, and in 1710 a dixième (the tithe, or tenth) that similarly went against the interests of the privileged classes, including the clergy, by requiring one-tenth to be paid to the state from all incomes. Significantly, however, Louis made it perfectly clear on both occasions that he recognized the extraordinary and temporary nature of these impositions, made necessary by the pressures of war. It was impossible to be a despot while financial resources were so precarious, while no nationwide police force existed, and while the state of communications remained so poor. All these factors make it clear that a situation simply did not exist in which totalitarian government, at least by 20th-century standards, could have had any meaning.

The financial difficulties that limited Louis XIV’s ambitions were due in part to the problems plaguing France’s economy. Unfavourable climatic conditions—the so-called Little Ice Age of the 17th century—resulted in frequent crop failures; in 1693–94 and 1709–10, much of the country suffered food shortages that left the population vulnerable to epidemics. The heavy taxes required to pay for the king’s wars were an additional hindrance to economic growth, and frequent warring kept France from gaining a larger share of the lucrative overseas trade that was enriching its rivals, England and the Netherlands.

Finally, Louis XIV remained the prisoner of France’s social structure. It is sometimes alleged that the king ruled through the bourgeoisie, but, while a number of the most distinguished families of the reign were not of ancient nobility, their faithful and effective service to the king was rewarded in an entirely traditional way—by social elevation. Colbert’s father was an unsuccessful merchant; however, all his granddaughters married dukes. In other words, the opportunity to enter the highest ranks of the nobility, which had long been available in France, was simply emphasized by Louis XIV. As the greatest nobleman in France, he had no doubt that he must retain the prestige and privileges of the nobility; but he knew equally well that the nobility should not become a caste closed to ambitious and able men. He thus maintained the tradition of royal patronage, which helped to defuse social conflict. Foreign affairs

From the beginning of his reign, Louis pursued a vigorous foreign policy. Historical opinion has traditionally held that Louis sought to dominate Europe, only to meet his just deserts at the end of his reign. (For the traditional interpretation, see Germany: The age of Louis XIV.) More recently another interpretation has emerged that argues that Louis pursued consistent and for the most part moderate aims and pursued them successfully up to and including the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). The starting point for the more recent interpretation is the ambiguous Peace of Münster (1648), forming part of the great European settlement of Westphalia, the terms of which subsequently became a bone of contention between Bourbon and Habsburg rulers. One of the critical issues of the treaty was the fate of the three bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun on the northeast frontier of France. These bishoprics, occupied by the French since 1552, were formally acquired in 1648 together with a number of towns in nearby Alsace. One of the main Habsburg aims both in the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97; also called the War of the Grand Alliance) and in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) was the restoration of the three bishoprics and the province of Franche-Comté, also on the eastern frontier of France, connecting Burgundy with Alsace, which Louis had acquired through the Treaties of Nijmegen (1678–79) that concluded the Dutch War (1672–78). Louis, however, was determined to hold onto the gains in Alsace, however ambiguously acquired; he also hoped to add Lorraine, to the north of Franche-Comté, to consolidate further this least-secure French frontier area.

French expansion, 1600–1766.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Louis’s policy in the northeast was constant and understandable. Franche-Comté was one entry into France previously exploited by its enemies that Louis succeeded in closing in 1678. He had already closed another, the port of Dunkirk, by purchasing it from Charles II of England in 1662; a third gateway, from the southern Netherlands, was effectively barred by the military fortifications erected by his great military engineer, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, in the 1680s. The capture of Lorraine would have bolted yet one more dangerous entry. Of course, the situation looked quite different from the Habsburg point of view, especially after Louis’s seizure of the key city of Strassburg (French Strasbourg) in 1681, an episode that goes to the heart of the controversial matter of his reunion policy. Following the successful Treaties of Nijmegen, Louis began to employ his own judicial courts to claim sovereignty over all the dependencies of territories that he already possessed in Alsace, Franche-Comté, Metz, Toul, and Verdun. The maneuver enabled him to consolidate his control, especially over Alsace and Franche-Comté, though the legality of the claims to some of the alleged “dependencies” was extremely dubious. There was no legal justification whatever for Louis’s greatest coup in the area—the seizure in September 1681 of the independent city of Strassburg. To Louis this key city, the door through which imperial armies could pass (and three times in the recently concluded war had passed) into Alsace, represented a serious threat, for Strassburg was within easy reach of the Danube valley and Vienna. His fears about French vulnerability in this region may best be illustrated by his offer during the War of the League of Augsburg to waive his claim to the Spanish succession on condition that Nijmegen be respected, that Lorraine be absorbed into France (with proper compensations elsewhere), and that the Spanish and Austrian lands not be united under one ruler. The Holy Roman emperor Leopold I immediately rejected these proposals. When the final climactic conflict of his reign, the War of the Spanish Succession, was proceeding badly, Louis offered to relinquish all the gains he had made from the Spanish inheritance; but he desperately hoped to hold on to Metz, Toul, Verdun, Alsace, and Franche-Comté.

Louis’s attitude toward the Dutch was less moderate and more bullying. His invasion of the Spanish Netherlands in 1667 and the ensuing War of Devolution frightened the Dutch into the Triple Alliance with England and Sweden, which led to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668). Then, in the Dutch War that followed shortly afterward (1672–78), Louis intended to warn the Dutch that France was a serious commercial competitor and to force the Dutch to give him a free hand in the Spanish Netherlands when the issue of the Spanish succession came to the fore. He learned from that war that he could never hope to incorporate a large part of the Netherlands into France against Dutch opposition; but he also continued to fear the manner in which the Dutch might try to influence the government of the Spanish Netherlands for their own economic benefit. Here again was an example of mutual hostility and suspicion in which interpretations of motives in Versailles and in The Hague were diametrically opposed. At the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697) the Dutch gained the right to keep a series of Dutch barrier fortresses within the southern Netherlands as a check against French aggression; it was Louis’s seizure of these fortresses in 1701 that precipitated the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14).

That war has usually been depicted as the most significant element in an assessment of Louis’s total foreign policy: for some historians, all his relations with the rest of Europe were geared to this great issue; for others, it was the final misjudgment born of overconfidence, provoked by his own ambitious miscalculations, and destined to ruin France. It is certainly true that the approaching end of the direct ruling line in Spain had interested European rulers for many years, and the Bourbon claim to a share in that rich inheritance—deriving from Louis’s marriage to Marie-Thérèse, elder daughter of King Philip IV of Spain—was accepted as a key factor in the situation. In 1668 Louis and Emperor Leopold I had gone so far as to sign a partition treaty, more than 30 years before the death of the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II. No European statesman was surprised, therefore, at Louis’s later concern when, after the signature of the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, he undertook negotiations with the English king William III out of which two further partition treaties emerged. The crucial moment came when Charles II’s last will was published, offering the Spanish crown, in opposition to the second partition treaty, to Louis’s grandson Philip, duc d’Anjou (later Philip V). Louis’s decision to accept did not in itself provoke war. Besides, if Louis had snubbed the Spanish offer, it would have been made to Austria, and the spectre of the restoration of Charles V’s empire—probably coupled with French losses on the northeastern frontiers—was intolerable. In addition, Louis had recently made peace after the War of the Grand Alliance, the hardest conflict in which he had so far been engaged, and thus had no illusions about the difficulty of overcoming another coalition under William III’s leadership. One may conclude that he did not seek war. But he did make decisions that made war likely, including his recognition of the Old Pretender as James III of England, his unexplained decision to protect his grandson’s right to the French throne (he was envisaging not a single, united realm of France and Spain but two Bourbon kingdoms, with the senior heir succeeding in France), his occupation of the barrier fortresses, and his seizure of the monopoly of the Spanish-American trade.

When peace was signed at Utrecht in 1713, Louis, despite the disasters of the intervening years, succeeded in holding onto the gains in Europe that he had considered vital throughout his reign, including Alsace and Strasbourg. In addition, his grandson remained king of Spain, despite all the efforts of the Grand Alliance to replace him with their candidate, the Austrian archduke Charles (as Charles III). It is true that in the darkest time of the war, during 1708–10, when the kingdom was in the grip of famine and the royal treasury on the brink of bankruptcy, the desperate king was ready to give up these precious gains and was prevented only by the intransigence of his opponents with their impossible demand that he should himself assist in driving his grandson from the throne of Spain. Likewise, a fortuitous change of government in England in 1710, which ushered in the Tory peace ministry, and the elevation of the Austrian archduke to the imperial title as Charles VI in 1711 weakened the unity of purpose of the Grand Alliance and enabled Louis’s most effective soldier, Claude-Louis-Hector, duc de Villars, to stage a military revival. Therefore, the relatively successful conclusion of the war from France’s point of view was not entirely of Louis’s own fashioning. Had events forced Louis to accept a total surrender, it would have been even more tempting for historians to blame the defeat upon the excessive ambitions of an arrogant man.

It cannot be denied that Louis was arrogant and that his arrogance aroused fear and resentment in his neighbours. Equally, he was intolerant, like most of his contemporaries, and feared by Protestant powers as the leader of a new and vengeful Counter-Reformation, an irony in view of his secret encouragement of the Turks in order to weaken the emperor. Both facets of the great king need to be borne in mind when assessing his overall foreign policy, and they help to counter any tendency to overestimate the defensive nature of his strategy. That defensive element, however, is of significance and has been largely lost sight of, especially in assessments of the reign written in English. Louis frightened Europe with his quest for la gloire, by which he meant the favourable verdict of history on his contribution to French security and territorial integrity but which his enemies interpreted more narrowly as a preoccupation with military triumphs and vainglorious display. That contemporary interpretation, still widely accepted nearly three centuries later, does less than justice to Louis’s shrewd appreciation of political realities and of France’s long-term interests. French culture in the 17th century

If historians are not yet agreed on the political motives of Louis XIV, they all accept, however, the cultural and artistic significance of the epoch over which he and his two 17th-century predecessors reigned. In their different ways—Henry IV’s interest lay in town planning, Louis XIII’s in the visual arts, and Louis XIV’s in the theatre and in landscape gardening—they all actively stimulated the emergence of great talents and were aided by such royal ministers as Richelieu and Mazarin, who were considered patrons in their own right.

Louis XIV and His Family, oil painting by Nicolas de Largillière, 1711; in the Wallace Collection, London.Reproduced by permission of the trustees of the Wallace Collection, London; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

From Henry IV’s reign dates the rebuilding of Paris as a tasteful, ordered city, with the extensions to the Louvre, the building of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine, and, outside the capital, the renovations and extensions at Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Henry succeeded in making Paris what it had never been before—the centre of polite society—and, though he was not personally interested in such matters, he must therefore be given some credit for the atmosphere that later led to the establishment of the famous salon of Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, which flourished from 1617 until 1665. There men of letters mingled with the great nobility to the mutual advantage of both. The guests at her salon included the statesmen Richelieu and the Great Condé; the epigrammatist the duc de La Rochefoucauld; the letter writer Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, and Mme de La Fayette; the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry; the poet François de Malherbe; and the dramatist Pierre Corneille.

Richelieu also was a key figure in the artistic and architectural development of Paris during his years in power. He was fortunate to employ the great architect Jacques Lemercier, who built for him, close to the Louvre, the Palais-Cardinal, later the Palais-Royal; it contained two theatres and a gallery for the cardinal’s objets d’art. Under the same patron, Lemercier also built the church of the Sorbonne, where Richelieu is buried. In the world of painting, the cardinal supported Simon Vouet, who decorated the Palais-Cardinal, and Philippe de Champaigne, whose surviving portraits include famous representations of Richelieu himself. The cardinal’s most notable contribution, however, was in the field of letters, with the establishment in 1634 of the Académie Française to regulate and maintain the standards of the French language. One of its first tasks was the production of a standard dictionary, a massive work published in four volumes in 1694. The Académie succeeded over the years in making the pursuit of letters socially acceptable, though still inferior to the pursuit of arms. Richelieu’s great interest in the theatre persuaded him to patronize a number of dramatists, including Corneille and Jean de Rotrou.

Richelieu’s patronage of the arts was taken over by his great pupil Mazarin, who collected some 500 paintings. In 1648 Mazarin established the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which encouraged artists to follow the examples of Nicolas Poussin, the greatest French exponent of the Classical style, and of the landscape artist Claude Lorrain. Mazarin housed his own art collection in the Palais Mazarin (now the Institut de France and home of the Académie Française), which itself was enlarged for Mazarin by the architect François Mansart. Mazarin also commissioned Louis Le Vau to rebuild part of the medieval castle of Vincennes, thus setting him off on his successful career.

Louis XIV’s patronage centred on Versailles, the great palace that also played such an important part in the political life of 17th-century France. There André Le Nôtre designed the formal gardens, which still attract a multitude of admiring visitors, as they did when they were first completed. There Jules Hardouin-Mansart added the long, familiar garden facade, and, with unforgettable magnificence, Charles Le Brun decorated the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) and the adjoining Salon de la Paix (Salon of Peace) and Salon de la Guerre (Salon of War). There the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully devised and directed a number of musical entertainments with such success that Louis granted him noble status and the office of a royal secretary. There, too, the comic genius Molière was encouraged by the king’s support; after the dramatist’s death, Louis was directly responsible for the establishment, in 1680, of the Comédie-Française. There, finally, Louis recognized the genius of Jean Racine, whose great tragedies, from Bérénice (1670) to Iphigénie (1675), earned him membership in the Académie Française and a noble office, that of trésorier de France (treasurer of France), from the king.

Jean Racine, oil painting, 17th century; in the National Museum of Versailles and of Trianons, France.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

This blossoming of the arts was aided though not inspired by the patronage of kings and ministers. The artistic creations evince a strong element of order and simplicity, culminating in the Classical grandeur of Racine’s plays and the facade of Versailles. Thus, they might seem to reflect the growth of political stability and order over which Louis XIV presided. The monarchy continued to expand its support for culture during his reign. In 1663 the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres was founded; originally intended to compose inscriptions for royal medals and monuments, it eventually became a centre for historical research. Three years later Louis XIV sponsored the creation of the Académie des Sciences and a training centre for French artists in Rome. The Académie d’Architecture and the Académie Royale de Musique began in 1671. It is, however, dangerous to tie creative achievements in the arts and sciences too closely to their political environment. Moreover, there are significant counterpoints to the theme of Classical order. The philosopher René Descartes’s doubting, rationalist approach to the fundamental questions of God’s existence and man’s relationship to God undermined the rigid adherence to revealed truths propounded by religious orthodoxy. The Jansenist Blaise Pascal, one of the most versatile geniuses of the century, represented and defended a minority religious movement that Louis XIV believed dangerously subversive. Toward the end of his long reign, Louis encountered the fierce social criticism of Jean de La Bruyère and the skepticism of the exiled Huguenot Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary") raised questions about the sacred status of the Bible and foreshadowed the secularism of the Enlightenment. These discordant elements draw attention to the fact that the absolute state which Versailles was intended to represent concealed tensions that would surface after the king’s death. Nonetheless, the splendour of Versailles and the Classical simplicity of Racine’s tragedies represent a high point in creative human achievement, and it is to the king’s credit that he chose to be identified with them.

Descartes, RenéRené Descartes.National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland J.H. Shennan Jeremy David Popkin France, 1715–89

The year 1789 is the great dividing line in the history of modern France. The fall of the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a state prison, on July 14, 1789, symbolizes for France, as well as for other nations, the end of the premodern era characterized by an organicist and religiously sanctioned traditionalism. With the French Revolution began the institutionalization of secularized individualism in both social life and politics; individualism and rationality found expression in parliamentary government and written constitutionalism. Obviously, the English and American revolutions of 1688 and 1776 prefigure these changes, but it was the more universalist French Revolution that placed individualism and rationality squarely at the centre of human concerns.

Because the revolutionary events had such earthshaking power, the history of France in the century preceding 1789 has until recently been seen as a long prologue to the coming drama, a period marked by the decay of the ancien régime (“old regime”), a locution created during the Revolution. Some contemporary historians, however, reject this view and present 18th-century France as a society undergoing rapid but manageable social, economic, and cultural change. They perceive the French Revolution as a political event that could have been avoided if the French monarchy had been more consistent in its effort to modify political institutions in order to keep up with the new needs of its people. The social and political heritage The social order of the ancien régime

To understand the developments of the 18th century and to follow the scholarly debates, one may begin with a definition of the ancien régime. Its essence lay in the interweaving of the state’s social, political, and economic forms; the term itself, though primarily a political concept, has also always had a clear social and economic resonance.

In the society of the ancien régime, all men and women were, by birth, subjects of the king of France. In theory always and in practice often, the lives of French men and women of all ranks and estates took shape within a number of overlapping institutions, each with rules that entitled its members to enjoy particular privileges (a term derived from the Latin words for “private law”). Rights and status flowed as a rule from the group to the individual rather than from individuals to the group, as was true after 1789.

France itself can be conceived of as an aggregate of differentiated groups or communities (villages, parishes, or guilds), all of them theoretically comparable but all of them different. In many respects the kingdom was an assembly of varying provinces, a number of them endowed with vestigial representative institutions. In some important ways France was not truly a unit of government. Unlike England, for example, France was not a single customs union; more tariffs had to be paid by shippers on brandy floated down the Garonne to Bordeaux than on wine shipped from France to Britain.

The concept of national citizenship was not unknown in France under the ancien régime, existing in the sense that all Frenchmen, regardless of their rank and privileges, had certain legal rights denied to all foreigners. There was, however, no French nation whose citizens taken one by one were equal before man-made law, as was true after 1789. Laws were in the main inherited, not made.

This is not to say that France, though structured around the “premodern” concept of the guild, or group, or corps, was a static or, materially speaking, a stable society. For many artisans, peregrination was a way of life, and many years of their young manhood were spent on a tour de France, which took them from city to city in order to learn their trade. Serfdom was practically unknown (only 140,000 serfs remained in France in 1789, none of them on crown lands, where Jacques Necker, the comptroller general, had abolished serfdom in 1779), and peasants were free to move as they wished from one village to the next. Indeed, such large numbers of people were moving around that the fear of unattached vagrants was strong in prerevolutionary France. Monarchy and church

In the 18th century, justifications of royal authority drew on many traditions. The king still claimed the status of a feudal suzerain of his subjects. Familial imagery was an important component of royal rhetoric; the king of France was father of his subjects. His right to reign echoed all husbands’ right to rule over their wives and all fathers’ right to rule over their children. His messages, however draconian and confiscatory they might be, were invariably couched in a rhetoric of religious and paternal solicitude.

The king, moreover, was a Christian monarch and as such was endowed with quasi-priestly functions. He was anointed at his coronation with holy chrism said to have been brought from heaven by a dove. It was thought that, as evidence of his special status, he could cure scrofula by his touch. The relationship of church and state was complex. Oftentimes the king did not hesitate to exploit the church, over which he held extensive power by virtue of the still-valid Concordat of Bologna of 1516. Monarchs used their right to appoint bishops and abbots to secure the loyalty of impoverished or ambitious nobles. The crown asserted its right to regulate church policies, limit the authority of the pope over French Catholics, and abolish or consolidate monastic orders.

Nonetheless, until 1788 the Roman Catholic Church retained in France unusually broad doctrinal rights and social prestige, even by the standards prevailing in central or southern Europe, not to speak of what held true in the far more tolerant countries of northern Europe (Prussia, Holland, and Britain). French Protestants were denied religious toleration until 1787. Jews were tolerated only as quasi-foreigners until 1791. Of considerable symbolic importance was the fact that before 1789 it was the church that kept the registers of births and deaths that marked the beginning and end of each person’s earthly existence. The church, the police, and the courts collaborated closely to maintain the prestige of religion; until at least the 1780s the church severely condemned licentious or irreligious books such as Rousseau’s Émile, which was burned in 1762 by order of the Parlement of Paris, a measure that did little to stop its circulation.

The monarchy basically respected the various rights of the church accrued by tradition, as it did the civil and property rights, or “liberties,” of its subjects generally. Continuity ordinarily seemed to be the first principle of the French state, and it was inherent in the concept of king itself: the king was held to have two bodies, a physical one, which necessarily decayed, and a spiritual one, which never died. In this view, the main purpose of the French state was to defend vested interests—i.e., to maintain continuity rather than to change the existing order. Commitment to modernization

The great peculiarity of the ancien régime was that a system committed to preserving tradition also contained within it powerful forces for change. The absolute monarchy developed between 1624 and 1642 by Richelieu and later by Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, and Louis XIV was guided by a modern raison d’état, in which the state was eager to further changes of all kinds for its own purposes. Administratively, its absolutist will, formulated at Versailles in a complex array of governmental councils, was enforced in the provinces by the intendants and their subordinates. The monarchy favoured modern manufacturing and, more desultorily, modern finance. It protected and firmly guided intellectuals through the Académie Française. With greater hesitation, the monarchy also promoted France’s drive to obtain economic and military supremacy not just in Europe but overseas as well, in North America, India, Africa, and the Caribbean.

Divided in its goals, some of them traditional and others modern, the state was also ideologically double-minded. In the 17th century many intellectuals (some of them clerics such as Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet" class="md-crosslink">Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet [1627–1704]) developed a Hobbesian justification of absolutist rule, which was renewed throughout the 18th century. Religion and tradition went hand in hand, but absolutist theoreticians went further. They justified the state’s right not only to legislate and tax more or less at will but also to imprison arbitrarily without due process of law. The lettres de cachet, which allowed the king to have individuals committed to the Bastille and to other prisons forever and without any kind of trial, were seldom given out, usually to fathers who wished to correct their wayward children. But they did exist, as liberal or scurrilous propagandists knew full well, sometimes firsthand: about one-fourth of the 5,279 people imprisoned in the Bastille between 1660 and 1790 were connected with the world of the book. Royal proclamations often stressed, however, the king’s obligation to govern in the interests of his people. The parlements, frequent critics of arbitrary rule, spread the notion that subjects’ rights were protected by a fixed, if ill-defined, constitution that could not be altered without the consent of their representatives. Continuity and change

The political history of 18th-century France can be conceptualized in terms of the double heritage and the problems it entailed. The discussion may be linked to two issues: first, the economic transformation of a traditional and essentially agricultural society by both commerce and ideas; and, second, the state’s efforts (and eventual inability) to modernize and unify its structure and purpose to encompass the changed economic and cultural expectations of the nation’s elites.

In contrast to the France of Louis XIV’s grand siècle (“great century”), beset by economic stagnation and periodic food shortages, 18th-century France enjoyed a climate of growing prosperity, fueled in part by a sustained rise in population. The kingdom’s population, which had barely grown at all during the years 1500 to 1700, increased from approximately 20 million at the end of Louis XIV’s reign to about 28 million by 1789. Better preventive medicine, a decline in infant mortality, and the near disappearance of widespread famine after 1709 all served to increase the population. Birth rates continued to be very high, despite both a traditional pattern of late marriage (men on the average at age 27, women at 24 or 25) and the beginnings of the practice of birth control, the effect of which was to become evident only after the Revolution. The yearly number of deaths per 10,000 fell from about 400 in 1750 to 350 in 1775, 328 in 1790, and 298 in 1800. The increased population meant more mouths to feed but also more consumers, more workers seeking employment, and more opportunities for investment; in short, every aspect of French life was affected. Agricultural patterns

In its basic organization, French agriculture continued its age-old patterns. This contrasted starkly with England, where new agricultural techniques as well as major changes in the control of land—convertible husbandry (a progressive form of land use that did away with the wasteful fallowing of land every two or three years) and the enclosure movement (which made possible the consolidation of small parcels of land into large farms fenced off from use by the rest of the community)—were beginning to cause an agricultural revolution. In France there was no significant enclosure movement, despite enabling legislation that allowed the division of some common lands in 1767 and again in 1773. Communal patterns of planting—very common in northern France, where a three-field system ordinarily prevailed—were not suspended. Modest improvements in farming techniques and the introduction of new crops such as corn (maize) and potatoes allowed French farms to feed the country’s growing population. The increased number of peasants led to further subdivision of land and greater competition for leases; the economic benefits of agricultural growth went mostly to landlords and the small minority of prosperous peasants. In fact, the economic status of many peasants deteriorated markedly in the 18th century; perhaps as many as one-third of them were sporadically indigent, though there was no decline in the peasants’ share of the land. In 1789 French peasants still owned about one-third of the arable land, most of it in small plots of less than 10 acres (4 hectares); nobles owned about one-fifth of the land, the church one-sixth, and bourgeois landlords about one-third. Industrial production

After 1740 industrial production in France rose annually by about 2 percent overall and even more in some sectors. During the later decades of the 18th century, French industrial production grew rapidly, although not on the same scale as in Britain, whose industrial development had begun 60 years before that of the French. Coal mining was a major industry by 1789, its production nearly 6 percent higher in the 1780s than in the preceding decade. Mining attracted vast amounts of capital, some of it from the aristocracy. In 1789 the Mines d’Anzin near the Belgian border already employed thousands of workers. In textiles, entrepreneurs such as the Swiss Protestant Guillaume-Philippe Oberkampf created new manufactories that permitted better regulation and control of production. Most production continued to be centred in small artisanal workshops, however, and power-driven machinery remained a rarity.

Although transportation difficulties and internal customs barriers meant that France on the eve of the Revolution was not yet a unified national market (as Britain had long since been), price discrepancies from province to province, as well as between northern and southern France, were less significant than before. Throughout the country the demand rose for urban manufactured goods and for those luxury items (textiles, porcelains, furniture, articles de Paris) that the French excelled in producing before 1800. French engineers and artisans were highly skilled. French ship design, for example, was superior to that of the English, who routinely copied captured French men-of-war. George Washington, the president of the United States, wishing to buy the best watch available anywhere, turned to the American minister in Paris because the world’s most accurate timepieces were still made in France. Commerce

Commerce, especially with the colonies, was an important area of change as well. France’s first colonial empire, essentially located in North America, was a source of great wealth. Even though France lost both Canada and India during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the Caribbean sugar islands continued to be the most lucrative source of French colonial activity in the last 100 years of the ancien régime. The French shared the West Indies with Spain and England: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the eastern half of Hispaniola belonged to Spain; Jamaica belonged to England; but Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti)—the richest of all nonwhite 18th-century colonies in the world—were French. In Saint-Domingue 30,000 whites stood an uneasy watch over a black slave population that grew to more than 400,000 by 1789. In the islands, the slaves produced sugarcane and coffee, which were refined in France at Nantes, Rochefort, and Bordeaux and often reexported to central and northern Europe. This triangular trade grew 10-fold between 1715 and 1789, and the value of international exports in the 1780s amounted to nearly one-fourth of national income. The sugar trade enriched the planters, the bankers in Paris who had acted as brokers for import and reexport, and the manufacturers of luxury goods that were shipped from France to the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, the French colonial trade was a closely watched process, governed by mercantilist protective tariffs and rules.

Indirectly millions of Frenchmen were affected by the accelerating tempo of economic life. The circulation of gold specie in the kingdom as a whole rose from 731 million livres in 1715 to some 2 billion livres in 1788. Domestic commerce also expanded in the 18th century. The urban population and even prosperous peasants began to acquire a taste for new luxuries. Estate inventories show that even modest households were buying more varied clothing, a wider range of furniture, kitchen articles, books, and other items their ancestors could not have afforded. By the early 1780s more than 40 regional newspapers with advertising, or affiches, had been founded, a clear sign that France was becoming a consumer society. Cities

Commerce rather than industry buoyed up French cities, especially the Atlantic seaports. In 1789, 15 percent of Frenchmen lived in cities with more than 2,000 inhabitants. Still, Paris, a city of about 600,000 inhabitants, was only half the size of London, the world’s largest seaport. But, regardless of their size, French cities were centres of intellectual transformation. It was there, in the Sociétés de Pensées, Masonic lodges, and some 32 provincial academies, that writers found their public. There also took place the cultural revolution that inspired the writers in turn and the economic changes that gave momentum to the cultural upheaval. Cultural transformation The Enlightenment

The industrial and commercial developments, already significant by themselves, were the cause, and perhaps also the effect, of a wider and still more momentous change preceding the Revolution—the Enlightenment. Today the Enlightenment can be understood as the conscious formulation of a profound cultural transformation. Epistemologically, the French Enlightenment relied on three sources: rationalism, which had in France a strong tradition dating to Descartes; empiricism, which was borrowed from English thought and which in France underpinned the work of such writers as Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–71), Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach (1723–89), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80), and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–51), the author of a book eloquently entitled L’Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine); and an amorphous concept of nature that was particularly strong in the immensely popular and important work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and, in the 1780s, in the works of widely read pre-Romantic writers such as Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814). The relationship between these intellectual developments and the Revolution of 1789 remains a subject of dispute among historians, but there is no doubt that Enlightenment critiques undermined belief in the traditional institutions that the Revolutionary movement was to destroy.

Though far apart from one another in a strict philosophical sense, these sources of inspiration generated a number of shared beliefs that were of obvious political consequence. The enlightened subjects of Louis XV and Louis XVI were increasingly convinced that French institutions of government and justice could be radically improved. Tradition seemed to them an increasingly inadequate principle to follow in such matters. Meliorism, gauged especially by the progress of the sciences, was one of the cardinal beliefs of the age. Regarding the economy, physiocrats such as the king’s own doctor, François Quesnay (1694–1774), praised the virtue of free-market economics and, as they put it, of “laissez-faire, laissez-aller” (“allow to do, allow to go”). The Encyclopédistes—the contributors to the great Encyclopédie edited by Denis Diderot (1713–84)—spread the idea that agricultural and manufacturing processes could be rationally analyzed and improved; the work also criticized religious and political orthodoxy. Voltaire (1694–1778), the most celebrated French Enlightenment author, used his sharp wit to skewer the absurdities of absolutism and intolerance. His eloquent defense of the Protestant merchant Jean Calas, broken on the wheel in 1762 for the supposed murder of his suicidal son, made him the model of the engaged intellectual, rallying public opinion against injustice. The influence of Montesquieu and Rousseau

Two Enlightenment authors who had an especially profound impact on the future revolutionaries were Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). In his Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters), Montesquieu, a wealthy aristocratic member of the Parlement of Bordeaux, used the device of a foreign visitor to highlight the contradictions of the government shortly after the death of Louis XIV. His daring jabs at the pope, "an ancient idol, worshiped now from habit," and at Catholic doctrine brought down the wrath of the authorities but did nothing to stop the book’s success. Written in an entertaining and accessible style, the Persian Letters did not present a clear set of doctrines: instead, readers were drawn into a process of dialogue and critique modeled by the novel’s characters. In his masterwork, De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of the Laws), Montesquieu presented a survey of political institutions throughout the world. Drawing on both the rationalist and empiricist traditions, he analyzed politics in purely secular terms, arguing that each country’s laws developed in response to its climate and the nature of its customs. His comparative approach made it clear that, in his view, no political system could claim divine sanction. His personal sympathies lay with mixed forms of government, in which a separation of powers protected individual liberties; his description of the English constitution, in which the king shared power with Parliament, strongly influenced French political thinking. A former parlementaire himself, Montesquieu argued that the aristocratic courts were "intermediary bodies" whose resistance to royal authority prevented abuses. Although he was himself no revolutionary, his ideas had great influence at the beginning of the Revolutionary movement in 1789; in the Revolution’s early phase, he was cited more often than any other authority.

Rousseau, Jean-JacquesJean-Jacques Rousseau, drawing in pastels by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, 1753; in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.Courtesy of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva; photograph, Jean Arlaud

A generation younger than Montesquieu, Rousseau raised profound questions about both private and public life. According to Rousseau, the self becomes empowered in private union with the beloved other, as portrayed in his immensely popular novel Julie; ou, la nouvelle Héloïse (1761; Julie; or, The New Eloise), or in public union with one’s fraternally minded fellow citizens, as explained in Du contrat social (1762; The Social Contract), a work less widely read before 1789 but even more symptomatic of change.

Rousseau argued for a reconstruction of private and domestic as well as public life, to make both more in accord with human nature. Women, he claimed, have a natural vocation to be wives and mothers; they are to leave public affairs to men. He put forward the harmonious domestic family as a new cultural ideal and stigmatized ancien régime society, with its emphasis on fashion and its influential "public women," such as royal mistresses and the salon hostesses who played a critical role in promoting the Enlightenment. Rousseau’s insistence that mothers should breast-feed their children clashed with the realities of French life, where the employment of wet nurses was more common than in any other European country, and symbolized his program for a more "natural" style of life.

Rousseau’s second best-selling novel, Émile; ou, de l’éducation (1762; Émile; or, On Education), illustrated how children could be educated to lead a "natural" life. Its most controversial chapter, the "Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar," suggested that nature alone provided humanity with the religious knowledge it needed; this dismissal of the church and the Bible naturally led to the book’s condemnation. Rousseau’s concern for education was part of a wider movement.

The French administrator, reformer, and economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l’Aulne (1712–81), expressed the new sensibility when he wrote that the education of children was the basis of national unity and mores.

In 1763 a prominent parlementaire named La Chalotais even put forward a scheme for lay and national primary education. An important landmark in this respect was the expulsion from France in 1764 of the Jesuits, who had theretofore dominated French secondary education. Increasingly, the French language was substituted for Latin in the secondary schools, or collèges (the forerunners of today’s lycées). Rhetoric gave way to an emphasis on more “natural” manners and modes of expression. History was raised to the level of a serious discipline; with Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751; The Age of Louis XIV), modern French historiography began, and there were echoes of this new attitude in the programs of the secondary schools, which added mathematics, physics, and geography to their curriculum.

Rousseau developed the political consequences of his thought in his Social Contract (1762). Because men are by nature free, Rousseau argued, the only natural and legitimate polity is one in which all members are citizens with equal rights and have the ability to participate in making the laws under which they live. Like Montesquieu, Rousseau himself was no revolutionary; he expressed a deep pessimism about the chances of freeing humanity from the corrupting institutions that were in place. Although his theories did influence critics of the French monarchy even before 1789, they achieved an unanticipated relevance during the Revolution, especially during its radical phase when Rousseau was read as an advocate of Jacobin-style democracy.

Exposure to such writers as Diderot, Guillaume-Thomas, abbé de Raynal (1713–96), author of the anticolonialist Histoire des deux Indes (1770; History of the Two Indies), and Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–95); to such painters as Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Joseph-Marie Vien (1716–1809); to such musicians as Christoph Gluck (1714–87); and to such visionary architects as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) and Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–99) enabled the educated public of the 1770s and ’80s to pursue and sharpen their new insights. It allowed them to explore the limits of the private domain as well as to clarify their new understanding of the public good. These radical ideas had transforming power. Rousseau’s message especially appealed to the deeper instincts of his contemporaries, inspiring them with a quasi-utopian view of what might be done in this world.

The ideological or cultural transformation was in some ways limited to a narrow segment of society. In 1789 only one-third of the population, living for the most part in northern and eastern France, could both read and write French. (Outside the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, literacy for women was considerably below that of men.) About one-third of the king’s subjects could not even speak French. Nonetheless, even though probably not much more than half a million people were directly involved in the cultural upheaval, their influence was decisive.

The concerns of the new “high culture” were intensely personal and, for that reason, deeply felt, even by people who did not participate in it directly. Readers of sentimental prose might after all also be employers, husbands, and fathers, who would treat their dependents differently. Printed materials were certainly more widely available in the 18th century than ever before, and new ideas reached a wide public, even if often only in watered-down form. Newspapers, some of them from abroad, were widely read (and manipulated by the royal government to influence opinion). Many pamphleteers were ready to be hired by whoever had money to pay for their services. Lawyers published their briefs. Theatrical performances, such as Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro), which openly exposed aristocratic privilege, were widely publicized events. In the 1780s censorship was increasingly desultory. Public opinion, whose verdict was identified by the middle class not with the expression of its own particular desires but as the voice of universal common sense and reason, became a tribunal of ideological appeal, an intellectual court of last resort, to which even the monarchy instinctively appealed.

These sweeping changes had created a country that by 1788 was deeply divided ideologically and economically. The salons of Paris, many of them directed by women, were the worldwide focus of a rationalist and Deist Enlightenment; both Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson, though far removed from each other in most respects, shared an abiding interest in the latest intellectual fashions from Paris. But, whatever held true for influential circles, most Frenchmen in these same years remained deeply religious, certainly in the provinces but possibly in Paris as well. Most of the books and pictures Parisians bought on the eve of the Revolution were still related to religious themes. The country was also divided economically; whereas France’s foreign trade was very lively, most of the rural communities were, by English standards, unproductive and immobile villages. The political response The historical debate

In broad terms, 18th-century French politics could be defined as the response of the monarchic state to the emergence of the new cultural and economic configurations that had transformed the lives and especially the imaginations of French men and women. The question was whether the Bourbon monarchy could rationalize its administration and find a way to adapt itself in the 1770s and ’80s to the new perception of the relationship between citizen and state as it had come to be defined by the changes that characterized the period.

On the issue of political mutation, historical opinion is divided. One set of discussions revolves around the issue of whether the monarchy’s efforts at reform were sufficient; whereas some historians believe that the ancien régime almost succeeded, first in the 1770s and once again in the early 1780s, others argue more pessimistically that the efforts of the monarchy were insubstantial. A more radical view, by contrast, holds that the extent of reform was irrelevant because no monarch, however brilliant, could have met the rising liberal and nationalist expectations of tens of thousands of dissatisfied and vocal people, steeped in Enlightenment thought, who were committed to becoming the empowered citizens of a fraternal state.

The weight of evidence appears to be that the monarchy was by the late 1780s doomed to destruction, both from its inability to carry on the absolutist, administrative work formerly accomplished by such men as Colbert and by the nature of its critics’ desires; the gap separating the traditionalism of the monarchy and the ambitions of nascent public opinion was too wide. Foreign policy and financial crisis

The 18th-century French monarchy lacked both the ambition and the means to pursue a foreign policy as far-reaching as that of Louis XIV. From the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), when France had been invaded and nearly beaten, French statesmen pursued a double goal—the preservation of the balance of power in Europe and, in the world at large, the expansion of the French colonial empire and the containment of England. In the first decades after Louis XIV’s death, French leaders sought to avoid a renewal of large-scale conflict. After 1740, when Prussia’s aggressive monarch Frederick II (the Great) attacked Austria, France was drawn into a war against its traditional Habsburg foe and Vienna’s ally, Britain. The end of this War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) brought France little. By 1754 France was again fighting Britain in North America. On the Continent, Prussia’s rapprochement with the British drove Louis XV to break tradition and ally with the Austrians in the "diplomatic revolution" of 1756, leading to the Seven Years’ War. Frederick the Great’s army inflicted humiliating defeats on the poorly led French armies, while the British captured French possessions in Canada, the Caribbean, and India. After the peace settlement of 1763, the foreign minister, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, began military reforms that laid the basis for French successes in the Revolutionary era, but France was unable to stop its Continental rivals Prussia, Austria, and Russia from seizing territory from its traditional client Poland in the First Partition of 1772.

The one French success in the century-long competition with Britain was the support given to the rebellious North American colonies in the American Revolution (1775–83). French military officers, most notably the young marquis de Lafayette, fought with the American forces, and for a short while the French navy had control of the high seas. The real victor of the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia (1781), in which the British were defeated, was less General George Washington than Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse (1722–88), whose fleet had entered Chesapeake Bay. The American victory enhanced French prestige but failed to bring any territorial gains or economic advantages.

Regardless of defeat or victory, colonial and naval wars were problematic because of their prohibitive cost. In Bourbon France (as in Hanoverian England and the Prussia of the Fredericks) a high percentage of the governmental income was earmarked for war. Navies were a particularly costly commodity. The crown’s inability to manage the ever-swelling deficit finally forced it to ask the country’s elites for help, which, for reasons unrelated to the various wars and conflicts, they were unwilling to extend unconditionally. Money thus was a large factor in the collapse of the monarchy in 1789.

Ultimately, to be sure, it was not the crown’s inability to pay for wars that caused its downfall. Rather, the crown’s extreme financial difficulties could have led to reforms; the need for funds might have galvanized the energies of the monarchy to carry forward the task of administrative reordering begun during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. A more determined king might have availed himself of the problems raised by the deficit in order to overwhelm the defenders of traditionalism. In so doing, the monarchy might have satisfied enough of the desires of the Enlightenment elite to defuse the tense political situation of the late 1770s and the ’80s. Although in 1789 a program of “reform from above” was no longer possible, it might well have succeeded in the early 1770s. Domestic policy and reform efforts

As stated above, in the context of 17th-century absolutism, Louis XIV had already initiated many rationalizing reforms. This statist and anticorporatist program was now embraced, but in a more liberal register, by the Enlightenment partisans of meritocratic individualism. Though Montesquieu had defended intermediary bodies such as guilds as guarantees of civic liberty, thinkers of the Enlightenment attacked them in the name of public utility and of what would later be called the rights of man. In an article written for the Encyclopédie, Turgot denied the sanctity of what he called foundations: “Public utility is the supreme law, and cannot be countervailed by a superstitious respect for what has been called the intents of the founders.” Most foundations, he thought, had as their only purpose the satisfaction of frivolous vanity. At the other end of the social spectrum, the Protestant Rabaut Saint-Étienne, later president of the National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale), argued that “every time one creates a corporate body with privileges one creates a public enemy because a special interest is nothing else than this.” No distinction was made between private interest and factional selfishness; in 1786 the future Girondin leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot was expressing what had become a commonplace when he wrote that “the history of all intermediary bodies proves, in all evidence, that to bring men and to bind men together is to develop their vices and diminish their virtues.” Private benevolence applied to public purpose was loudly praised in the 1780s, and Louis XVI’s finance minister, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), did a great deal for his reputation by endowing a hospital for sick children, which stands to this day. By 1789 public and charitable concern had become the themes of countless didactic works of literature and painting.

Many of the monarchy’s efforts to institutionalize this new sensibility were often significant. The crown encouraged not only agriculture but also manufacturing and commerce. It allowed tax exemptions for newly cultivated land. It subsidized the slave trade, on which much of the prosperity of the Atlantic seaports was based. It improved communications and in 1747 founded the School of Bridges and Roads to train civil engineers for the royal engineering service that had existed since 1599. In the provinces, many intendants took an active role in road building and in the modernization of urban space. The crown’s administrators also gave sustained thought to the abolition of internal customs and to the creation of what would have been the largest free-trade zone in Europe at the time. Social mobility was made possible; after 1750 many successful merchants and bankers were ennobled.

These were important steps. But the royal bureaucrats tried to go much further in regard to both the rationalization of the state’s financial machine and the meritocratic individuation of social and economic forms. Tax reform

In 1749–51 Jean-Baptiste de Machault d’Arnouville, then comptroller general of finances, tried to deal with the debts resulting from the just-concluded War of the Austrian Succession by proposing a partial reform of the tax system, his particular concern being to restrict the financial immunities of the church. In 1764 and 1765 another comptroller general, François de L’Averdy, attempted a reform of municipal representation and administration. All royal officials understood the need to reform and rationalize both the imposition and the collection of taxes; many nobles were exempted from taxation, especially in northern France, and many taxes were inefficiently collected by private tax-farmers.

The country’s overall fiscal structure was highly irrational, as it had been developed by fits and starts under the goad of immediate need. There were direct taxes, some of which were collected directly by the state: the taille (a personal tax), the capitation, and the vingtième (a form of income tax from which the nobles and officials were usually exempt). There were also indirect taxes that everyone paid: the salt tax, or gabelle, which represented nearly one-tenth of royal revenue; the traites, or customs duty, internal and external; and the aides, or excise taxes, levied on the sale of items as diverse as wine, tobacco, and iron. All the indirect taxes were extremely unpopular and had much to do with the state’s inability to rally the rural masses to its side in 1789. In the 1740s attempts had been made to amend this system but had foundered on the parlements’ opposition to a more equitable distribution of taxation. By 1770 the swelling debt made it obvious that something should be done. Unpopular measures, such as forced loans, were put into effect. Joseph-Marie Terray, Louis XV’s comptroller general of finances, repudiated a part of the debt.

Some observers, partisans of enlightened despotism—such as Voltaire, who defended it indirectly in his play of 1773 titled Les Lois de Minos (The Laws of Minos)—argued that the French monarchy stood in this particular instance for administrative rationalization and progress. But the current of opinion was already moving against the crown. Many writers saw in Terray a tool of royal despotism, plain and simple, and his ministerial colleague René-Nicolas-Charles-Augustin de Maupeou (1714–92) was even more detested for his destruction of the parlements, which had become the bastion of conservative opposition to royal reform. Parlements

The 13 parlements (that of Paris being by far the most important) were by their origins law courts. Although their apologists claimed in 1732 that the parlements had emerged from the ancient judicium Francorum of the Frankish tribes, they had in fact been created by the king in the Middle Ages to dispense justice in his name. With the atrophy of the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, the parlements now claimed to represent the Estates when those were not in session. In 1752 a Jansenist parlementaire, Louis-Adrien Le Paige, developed the idea that the various parlements should be thought of as the “classes” or parts of a larger and single “Parlement de France.”

This was a politically significant claim because these courts had taken on many other quasi-administrative functions that were related to charity, education, the supervision of the police, and even ecclesiastical discipline. Royal decrees were not binding, claimed the parlementaires, unless the parlements had registered them as laws. Although the parlementaires admitted that the king might force them to register his decrees by staging a lit-de-justice (i.e., by appearing in person at their session), they also knew that the public deplored such maneuvers, which manifestly went against the grain of the monarch’s supposed Christian and paternalist solicitude for the well-being of his subjects.

Various social, cultural, and institutional developments had served to turn the parlements into strongholds of resistance to reforms that increased the crown’s powers. Since the 17th century the monarchy’s need for money and the ensuing venality of offices had enabled the parlementaires to purchase their positions and to become a small and self-conscious elite, a new “nobility of the robe.” In 1604 the creation of the paulette tax had enabled the parlementaires to make their offices a part of their family patrimony, even if the value of their offices fell somewhat during the course of the 18th century. They had gained status by intermarrying with the older chivalric nobility of the sword. By 1700 the parlementaires had become a hereditary and rich landowning elite. (Near Bordeaux, for example, the best vineyards were theirs.) The interregnum of the regency after the death of Louis XIV (1715–23) had given them a chance to recapture some of the ground they had lost during Louis’s reign; the value of their offices, however, fell again somewhat in the course of the 18th century. The parlementaires’ Jansenist leanings and their recent espousal of antiabsolutism—expressed in the work of Montesquieu, himself a baron and a parlementaire—gave this elite ideological consistency.

In 1764 the Jansenist parlementaires, as ideological “progressives,” secured the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. Incidents such as the death sentence administered by the Parlement of Paris in 1766 against the 18-year-old chevalier de la Barre, accused of mutilating a crucifix and owning a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), showed, however, that the courts were not entirely on the side of the Enlightenment. In 1768–69 the Parlement of Brittany, in an antiabsolutist stance, forced the resignation of an appointed royal official, the duc d’Aiguillon, who had boldly tried to limit the power of the local nobility, with whom the Parlement was now in close alliance. King and parlements

In 1770 the conflict with the parlements had reached such a level that Louis XV was finally goaded into a burst of absolutist energy. The Paris Parlements, which had dared to attack Terray’s financial reform, were dissolved on January 19, 1771. Maupeou was then authorized to create an altogether different set of parlements with appointed judges shorn of administrative and political power.

In time, opinion might well have accepted Terray’s and Maupeou’s reforms, despite the outcry raised by the parlements’ supporters, who argued that the arbitrary uprooting of these centuries-old institutions threatened to turn France into a "ministerial despotism.” France might then, like Prussia, have avoided revolution from below through the practice of a revolution from above. But the death of Louis XV in 1774 put an end to the experiment. His 20-year-old successor, Louis XVI (reigned 1774–92), unsure of himself and eager to please, recalled the parlements and forced Maupeou into retirement.

Louis XVI, oil on canvas by Antoine-François Callet, 1786; in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.Fine Art Images/age fotostock

In late 1774 Louis XVI appointed Turgot, a former intendant, comptroller general. Perhaps because he thought that the success of his reforms would guarantee their acceptance, perhaps also because he thought it vain to attack the Parlement directly so soon after Maupeou’s dismissal, Turgot carried through his measures without first destroying the institutional bases of privileged conservatism. He left the Parlement alone and attempted instead to reduce government expenditures and to alter the methods of tax collecting. In accordance with his physiocratic laissez-faire principles, he freed the grain trade from restraint; suppressed the corvée, or forced labour service, exacted from the peasants; and abolished the guilds, which had limited both access to artisanal professions and the competition within them. Finally, he suggested that Protestants should be given freedom of conscience. In short, Turgot attempted to rationalize the administrative practices of the French state and to individuate French social and economic life. The solution to the financial crisis, he thought, would come not through the state’s appropriation of a larger share of extant resources but from the expansion of the nation’s ability to produce and pay. The strength of creative individualism, he thought, would break the political impasse.

In May 1776, however, Turgot was dismissed. Opposition to his measures had come from all sides: a poor harvest had sparked peasant disturbances, the clericalists were antagonized by Turgot’s philosophical friends (his greatest and most loyal disciple was Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, the future Girondin), and, when the Parlement of Paris once again refused to register the new edicts, Louis abandoned Turgot as he had dismissed Maupeou. Thenceforth, the state carried through only minor reforms, none of them on a scale commensurate with the needs felt by the Enlightenment bourgeoisie and notables of the cities and towns. The vestiges of serfdom were suppressed in 1779, and in 1780 torture was abolished. In 1784 the king’s use of lettres de cachet for purposes of arbitrary imprisonment without trial was considerably curtailed. But these were minor adjustments. Nothing was done to solve the fundamental problems of the organization of society and of the state in a manner that would be acceptable to progressive public opinion.

The issue of fundamental reform came to the fore again in 1786, when the loans floated to pay for the American war began to come due, and the controller general, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802), had to tell the king that they could not be repaid. "The only way to bring real order into the finances is to revitalize the entire state by reforming all that is defective in its constitution," Calonne told his sovereign.

Marie-Antoinette, painting by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, 18th century; in the Versailles Museum.© Ronald Sheridan/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection

Although Louis XVI accepted Calonne’s proposal to convene an Assembly of Notables, chosen from the country’s elites, and to seek their endorsement for a comprehensive reform program, the monarchy had already frittered away the prestige and authority that might have allowed this gamble to succeed. Repeated changes of policy in the previous decades had made the public wary of royal initiatives. Louis XV’s sexual adventures, especially his public liaison with Mme du Barry, widely rumoured to have once been a prostitute, had severely damaged the monarchy’s image. Louis XVI’s embarrassing inability to consummate his marriage with Marie-Antoinette for seven years also undermined respect for the throne, which suffered a further blow from the Affair of the Diamond Necklace of 1785–86, in which a high-ranking prelate was accused of having tried to seduce the queen.

The Assembly of Notables that Calonne had suggested met in February 1787. The minister presented a program that offered the country’s upper classes some voice in lawmaking in exchange for their consent to the abolition of many traditional privileges, particularly the nobility’s immunity to taxes. Although he did not suggest the creation of a national parliament, Calonne’s plan involved the establishment of provincial assemblies that would oversee the use of public money. Even though Calonne’s proposals were a major step in the direction of representative government and the abolition of special privileges, the notables refused to accept proposals put forward by a minister who they held responsible for previously worsening the deficit. Desperate to obtain badly needed new revenues, Louis XVI replaced Calonne with Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, who had been one of Calonne’s strongest critics in the Assembly of Notables. Almost at once Loménie reversed himself and came to Calonne’s conclusion: the state could not go on as it had. The notables, however, refused to be more amenable to Loménie than they had been to Calonne. Despairing of securing the consent of the privileged orders, Loménie dismissed the assembly in May of 1787, and in August the Paris Parlement was exiled to Troyes.

But these measures were desperate, and already the monarchy was beginning to lose control of the political process. Indeed, for the next two years it floundered from one scheme to another in the impossible hope of squaring the circle of modernistic reform, popular hostility, respect of privilege, and the preservation of royal absolutism. Essentially unwilling to force the privileged notables to yield their corporate rights, the crown was unable to assert any coherent policy. The Parlement was therefore recalled from Troyes in September 1787, again dismissed in May 1788, and, in the face of a beginning of a breakdown of law and order and of the inability of officials to collect taxes, once more recalled to Paris by the crown in August 1788.

By this time, the government had already announced the summoning of a national representative assembly, the Estates-General. All the king’s subjects would be allowed to participate in choosing representatives and in drafting lists of grievances, called cahiers de doléances, in which they could voice their opinions about the problems facing the kingdom. When the just-restored Parlement of Paris, concerned to prevent ministerial manipulation of the Estates-General, rushed to declare that it should be structured "according to the forms of 1614," with the two privileged orders (the clergy and the nobility) having separate chambers and a veto on all legislation, the judges quickly lost most of their popularity. Leadership of the movement for political reform passed to new men who had no stake in preserving old institutions.

Self-proclaimed "patriot" pamphleteers such as the abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, whose pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (1789; What Is the Third Estate?) was one of the most widely read of the thousands of tracts published as the royal censorship system ceased to function, demanded that the upcoming assembly be structured so that the Third Estate of commoners, the vast majority of the population, could prevent the privileged orders from paralyzing its deliberations. In a last and fitful assertion of authority, at the behest of Necker, recalled as minister when Loménie was dismissed in August 1788, the crown decided on December 27 to overrule the Paris Parlement. The Estates, it resolved, would meet separately, but the Third Estate would have as many deputies as the other two orders combined. The stage was set for the coming Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution

In an immediate sense, what brought down the ancien régime was its own inability to change or, more simply, to pay its way. The deeper causes for its collapse are more difficult to establish. One school of interpretation maintains that French society under the ancien régime was rent by class war. This position implies that the French Revolution revolved around issues of class; it has led to the class analysis of prerevolutionary society as well as to the class analysis of the opposing Revolutionary factions of Girondins and Montagnards and, more generally, to what the historian Alfred Cobban called “the social interpretation of the French Revolution.”

In keeping with this interpretation, Marxist historians from the 1930s to the ’70s emphasized that the French 18th-century bourgeoisie had assumed a distinct position in French society in that it was in control of commerce, banking, and industry. Revisionist historians in the 1980s, however, responded that the bourgeoisie had no monopoly in these sectors; nobles were also heavily involved in foreign trade, in banking, and in some of the most modern industries, such as coal mining and chemicals.

Most historians today argue that, on balance, it was becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish clearly between the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Like most nobles, wealthy French non-nobles were landlords and even owners of seigneuries, which were bought and sold before 1789 like any other commodity. Although one can speak of a secularized “bourgeois” ethic of thrift and prudence that had come into its own, supporters of this ethic, as of the Enlightenment ethic, were both noble and non-noble.

There were two areas, however, in which the nobility enjoyed important institutional privileges: the upper ranks of the army and the clergy were, in the main, aristocratic preserves and had become more so in the 1780s. Henri de Boulainvilliers, in his posthumous essays of 1732 on the nobility of France, had even developed a wholly fraudulent but widely praised theory of noble racial superiority. Thus, there were some issues on which all the bourgeoisie might unite against most of the nobility. But such issues, it is now claimed, were relatively unimportant.

Proponents of a social explanation of the Revolution have also emphasized the role of the lower classes. As population increased during the 18th century, peasant landholdings tended to become smaller, and the gap between rich and poor grew. Although the general trend after 1715 had been one of greater overall prosperity, the 20 years before 1789 were a time of economic difficulties. The months leading up to the convening of the Estates-General coincided with the worst subsistence crisis France had suffered in many years; a spring drought was followed by a devastating hailstorm that ruined crops in much of the northern half of the country in July 1788. Distressed peasants were thus eager to take advantage of a situation in which the privileges of their landlords seemed vulnerable to attack. Urban workers, who suffered acutely when bread prices rose, as they had after Turgot’s reforms in 1775 and again after the 1788 hailstorm, also had social grievances. Some felt menaced by the development of large-scale manufacturing enterprises; others resented the regulations that, for example, prevented journeymen from setting up their own shops in competition with privileged guild masters. The process of elections to the Estates-General gave both rural and urban populations an unprecedented opportunity to articulate grievances against elite privileges that had been endemic under the ancien régime but that had not been openly voiced.

Contemporary historiography has refocused the discussion regarding the causes for the Revolution. Studying the representation of politics, the shape of revolutionary festivals, and the revolutionary cults of sacrifice and heroism, scholars have come to place the transformation of culture at the core of their discussion. What really mattered was the desanctifying of the monarchy, the new understanding of the self and the public good, and the belief that thinking individuals might seize the state and fundamentally reshape it. Other historians, by contrast, have emphasized the persistent liabilities that French political culture carried through the Enlightenment, such as the suspicion of dissent and the readiness to rely on force to subvert it.

From either of these two perspectives, it follows that the prospects of the monarchy’s survival were dim in 1788. Many government officials, it is true, were finely attuned to public opinion. The vast neorepublican canvases of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1845), such as his Oath of the Horatii (1784), glorifying traditional republicanism, were commissioned by the king’s dispenser of patronage, the marquis d’Angivillers, a friend of Turgot. Visionary architects, developing a style of Revolutionary Neoclassicism, similarly received royal commissions for new public works. Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes (1721–94), another friend of Turgot and, like him, a minister of the crown, protected the Encyclopédistes. On balance, however, it is hard to see how the monarchy, even if it had resolved its financial problems, which it was very far from doing, could have extended this ecumenism from art to politics and social life. To do so, it would have had to transform its institutions in keeping with new conceptions regarding men’s public and private affairs and to commit itself to the rejection of the corporatist ethic in economic life. Thus, the monarchy seemed fated to failure and the stage set for revolution.

Oath of the Horatii, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1784; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York Patrice Louis-René Higonnet Jeremy David Popkin The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815 The destruction of the ancien régime The convergence of revolutions, 1789 The juridical revolution

Louis XVI’s decision to convene the Estates-General in May 1789 became a turning point in French history. When he invited his subjects to express their opinions and grievances in preparation for this event—unprecedented in living memory—hundreds responded with pamphlets in which the liberal ideology of 1789 gradually began to take shape. Exactly how the Estates-General should deliberate proved to be the pivotal consciousness-raising issue. Each of the three Estates could vote separately (by order) as they had in the distant past, or they could vote jointly (by head). Because the Third Estate was to have twice as many deputies as the others, only voting by head would assure its preponderant influence. If the estates voted by order, the clergy and nobility would effectively exercise a veto power over important decisions. Most pamphleteers of 1789 considered themselves “patriots,” or reformers, and (though some were nobles themselves) identified the excessive influence of “aristocrats” as a chief obstacle to reform. In his influential tract Qu’est-ce que le tiers état? (1789; What Is the Third Estate?) the constitutional theorist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès asserted that the Third Estate really was the French nation. While commoners did all the truly laborious and productive work of society, he claimed with some exaggeration, the nobility monopolized its lucrative sinecures and honours. As a condition of genuine reform, the Estates-General would have to change that situation.

A seismic shift was occurring in elite public opinion. What began in 1787–88 as a conflict between royal authority and traditional aristocratic groups had become a triangular struggle, with “the people” opposing both absolutism and privilege. A new kind of political discourse was emerging, and within a year it was to produce an entirely new concept of sovereignty with extremely far-reaching implications.

Patriots were driven to increasingly bold positions in part by the resistance and bad faith of royal and aristocratic forces. It is not surprising that some of the Third Estate’s most radical deputies came from Brittany, whose nobility was so hostile to change that it finally boycotted the Estates-General altogether. Hoping that the king would take the lead of the patriot cause, liberals were disappointed at the irresolute, business-as-usual attitude of the monarchy when the Estates opened at Versailles in May 1789. While the nobility organized itself into a separate chamber (by a vote of 141 to 47), as did the clergy (133 to 114), the Third Estate refused to do so. After pleading repeatedly for compromise and debating their course of action in the face of this deadlock, the Third Estate’s deputies finally acted decisively. On June 17 they proclaimed that they were not simply the Third Estate of the Estates-General but a National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale), which the other deputies were invited to join. A week later 150 deputies of the clergy did indeed join the National Assembly, but the nobility protested that the whole notion was illegal.

Now the king had to clarify his position. He began by closing the hall assigned to the Third Estate and ordering all deputies to hear a royal address on June 23. The deputies, however, adjourned to an indoor tennis court on the 20th and there swore a solemn oath to continue meeting until they had provided France with a constitution. Two days later they listened to the king’s program for reform. In the “royal session” of June 23, the king pledged to honour civil liberties, agreed to fiscal equality (already conceded by the nobility in its cahiers, or grievance petitions), and promised that the Estates-General would meet regularly in the future. But, he declared, they would deliberate separately by order. France was to become a constitutional monarchy, but one in which “the ancient distinction of the three orders will be conserved in its entirety.” In effect the king was forging an alliance with the nobility, whose most articulate members—the judges of the parlements—only a year before had sought to hobble him. For the patriots this was too little and too late.

In a scene of high drama, the deputies refused to adjourn to their own hall. When ordered to do so by the king’s chamberlain, the Assembly’s president, astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93), responded—to the official’s amazement—that “the assembled nation cannot receive orders.” Such defiance unnerved the king. Backing down, he directed the nobles several days later to join a National Assembly whose existence he had just denied. Thus, the Third Estate, with its allies in the clergy and nobility, had apparently effected a successful nonviolent revolution from above. Having been elected in the bailliages (the monarchy’s judicial districts, which served as electoral circumscriptions) to represent particular constituents to their king, the deputies had transformed themselves into representatives of the entire nation. Deeming the nation alone to be sovereign, they, as its representatives, claimed sole authority to exercise that sovereignty. This was the juridical revolution of 1789. Parisian revolt

In fact, the king had by no means reconciled himself to this revolutionary act. His concession was a strategic retreat until he could muster the military power to subdue the patriots. Between June 27 and July 1 he ordered 20,000 royal troops into the Paris region, ostensibly to protect the assembly and to prevent disorder in the restive capital. The assembly’s pleas to the king to withdraw these menacing and unnecessary troops fell on deaf ears. For all of their moral force, the deputies utterly lacked material force to counter the king’s obvious intentions. The assembly was saved from likely dissolution only by a massive popular mobilization.

During the momentous political events of 1788–89, much of the country lay in the grip of a classic subsistence crisis. Bad weather had reduced the grain crops that year by almost one-quarter the normal yield. An unusually cold winter compounded the problem, as frozen rivers halted the transport and milling of flour in many localities. Amid fears of hoarding and profiteering, grain and flour reserves dwindled. In Paris the price of the four-pound loaf of bread—the standard item of consumption accounting for most of the population’s calories and nutrition—rose from its usual 8 sous to 14 sous by January 1789. This intolerable trend set off traditional forms of popular protest. If royal officials did not assure basic food supplies at affordable prices, then people would act directly to seize food. During the winter and spring of 1789, urban consumers and peasants rioted at bakeries and markets and attacked millers and grain convoys. Then, in July, this anxiety merged with the looming political crisis at Versailles. Parisians believed that food shortages and royal troops would be used in tandem to starve the people and overwhelm them into submission. They feared an “aristocratic plot” to throttle the patriot cause.

When the king dismissed the still-popular finance minister Necker on July 11, Parisians correctly read this as a signal that the counterrevolution was about to begin. Instead of yielding, however, they rose in rebellion. Street-corner orators such as Camille Desmoulins stirred their compatriots to resist. Confronting royal troops in the streets, they won some soldiers to their side and induced officers to confine other potentially unreliable units to their barracks. On July 13, bands of Parisians ransacked armourers’ shops in a frantic search for weapons. The next day a large crowd invaded the Hôtel des Invalides and seized thousands of rifles without resistance. Then they moved to the Bastille, an old fortress commanding the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which had served as a notorious royal prison earlier in the century but was now scheduled for demolition. Believing that gunpowder was stored there, the crowd laid siege to the Bastille. Unlike the troops at the Invalides, the Bastille’s tiny garrison resisted, a fierce battle erupted, and dozens of Parisians were killed. When the garrison finally capitulated, the irate crowd massacred several of the soldiers. In another part of town two leading royal officials were lynched for their presumed role in the plot against the people. Meanwhile, the electors of Paris, who had continued to meet after choosing their deputies to the Estates-General, ousted the royal officials of the city government, formed a revolutionary municipality, and organized a citizens’ militia, or national guard, to patrol the streets. Similar municipal revolutions occurred in 26 of the 30 largest French cities, thus assuring that the capital’s defiance would not be an isolated act.

By any standard, the fall of the Bastille to the Parisian crowd was a spectacular symbolic event—a seemingly miraculous triumph of the people against the power of royal arms. The heroism of the crowd and the blood of its martyrs—ordinary Parisian artisans, tradesmen, and workers—sanctified the patriot cause. Most important, the elites and the people of Paris had made common cause, despite the inherent distrust and social distance between them. The mythic unity of the Third Estate—endlessly invoked by patriot writers and orators—seemed actually to exist, if only momentarily. Before this awesome material and moral force, Louis XVI capitulated. He did not want civil war in the streets. The Parisian insurrection of July 14 not only saved the National Assembly from dissolution but altered the course of the Revolution by giving it a far more active, popular, and violent dimension. On July 17 the king traveled to Paris, where he publicly donned a cockade bearing a new combination of colours: white for the Bourbons and blue and red for the city of Paris. This tricolour was to become the new national flag. Peasant insurgencies

Peasants in the countryside, meanwhile, carried on their own kind of rebellion, which combined traditional aspirations and anxieties with support of the patriot cause. The peasant revolt was autonomous, yet it reinforced the urban uprising to the benefit of the National Assembly.

Competition over the ownership and use of land had intensified in many regions. Peasants owned only about 40 percent of the land, leasing or sharecropping the rest from the nobility, the urban middle class, and the church. Population growth and subdivision of the land from generation to generation was reducing the margin of subsistence for many families. Innovations in estate management—the grouping of leaseholds, conversion of arable land to pasture, enclosure of open fields, division of common land at the lord’s initiative, discovery of new seigneurial dues or arrears in old ones—exasperated peasant tenants and smallholders. Historians debate whether these were capitalistic innovations or traditional varieties of seigneurial extraction, but in either case the countryside was boiling with discontent over these trends as well as over oppressive royal taxes and food shortages. Peasants were poised between great hopes for the future raised by the calling of the Estates-General and extreme anxiety—fear of losing land, fear of hunger (especially after the catastrophic harvest of 1788), and fear of a vengeful aristocracy.

In July peasants in several regions sacked the castles of nobles and burned the documents that recorded their feudal obligations. This peasant insurgency eventually merged into the movement known as the Great Fear. Rumours abounded that these vagrants were actually brigands in the pay of nobles, who were marching on villages to destroy the new harvest and coerce the peasants into submission. The fear was baseless, but hundreds of false alarms and panics stirred up hatred and suspicion of nobles, led peasants to arm themselves as best they could, and set off widespread attacks on châteaus and feudal documents. The peasant revolt suggested that the unity of the Third Estate against “aristocrats” extended from Paris to villages across the country. The Third Estate truly seemed invincible. The abolition of feudalism

Of course the violence of peasant insurgency worried the deputies of the National Assembly; to some it seemed as if the countryside were being engulfed by anarchy that threatened all property. But the majority were unwilling to turn against the rebellious peasants. Instead of denouncing the violence, they tried to appease peasant opinion. Liberal nobles and clergy began the session of August 4 by renouncing their ancient feudal privileges. Within hours the Assembly was propelled into decreeing “the abolition of feudalism” as well as the church tithe, venality of office, regional privilege, and fiscal privilege. A few days later, to be sure, the Assembly clarified the August 4 decree to assure that “legitimate” seigneurial property rights were maintained. While personal feudal servitudes such as hunting rights, seigneurial justice, and labour services were suppressed outright, most seigneurial dues were to be abolished only if the peasants paid compensation to their lords, set at 20 to 25 times the annual value of the obligation. The vast majority of peasants rejected that requirement by passive resistance, until pressure built in 1792–93 for the complete abolition of all seigneurial dues without compensation.

The abolition of feudalism was crucial to the evolution of a modern, contractual notion of property and to the development of an unimpeded market in land. But it did not directly affect the ownership of land or the level of ordinary rents and leases. Seigneurs lost certain kinds of traditional income, but they remained landowners and landlords. While all peasants gained in dignity and status, only the landowning peasants came out substantially ahead economically. Tenant farmers found that what they had once paid for the tithe was added on to their rent. And the Assembly did virtually nothing to assure better lease terms for renters and sharecroppers, let alone their acquisition of the land they tilled. The new regime

By sweeping away the old web of privileges, the August 4 decree permitted the Assembly to construct a new regime. Since it would take months to draft a constitution, the Assembly on August 27 promulgated its basic principles in a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. A rallying point for the future, the declaration also stood as the death certificate of the ancien régime. The declaration’s authors believed it to have universal significance. “In the new hemisphere, the brave inhabitants of Philadelphia have given the example of a people who reestablished their liberty,” conceded one deputy, but “France would give that example to the rest of the world.” At the same time, the declaration responded to particular circumstances and was thus a calculated mixture of general principles and specific concerns. Its concept of natural rights meant that the Revolution would not be bound by history and tradition but could reshape the contours of society according to reason—a position vehemently denounced by Edmund Burke in England.

The very first article of the declaration resoundingly challenged Europe’s old order by affirming that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.” Most of its articles concerned individual liberty, but the declaration’s emphasis fell equally on the prerogatives of the state as expressed through law. (Considering how drastically the erstwhile delegates to the Estates-General had exceeded their mandates, they certainly needed to underscore the legitimacy of their new government and its laws.) The declaration, and subsequent Revolutionary constitutions, channeled the sovereignty of the nation into representative government, thereby negating claims by parlements, provincial estates, or divine-right monarchs as well as any conception of direct democracy. Though the declaration affirmed the separation of powers, by making no provision for a supreme court, it effectively left the French legislature as the ultimate judge of its own actions. The declaration defined liberty as “the ability to do whatever does not harm another…whose limits can only be determined by law.” The same limitation by positive law was attached to specific liberties, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of expression, and freedom of religious conscience. The men of 1789 believed deeply in these liberties, yet they did not establish them in autonomous, absolute terms that would ensure their sanctity under any circumstances. Restructuring France

From 1789 to 1791 the National Assembly acted as a constituent assembly, drafting a constitution for the new regime while also governing from day to day. The constitution established a limited monarchy, with a clear separation of powers in which the king was to name and dismiss his ministers. But sovereignty effectively resided in the legislative branch, to consist of a single house, the Legislative Assembly, elected by a system of indirect voting. (“The people or the nation can have only one voice, that of the national legislature,” wrote Sieyès. “The people can speak and act only through its representatives.”) Besides failing to win a bicameral system, the moderate Anglophile, or monarchien, faction lost a bitter debate on the king’s veto power: the Assembly granted the king only a suspensive or delaying veto over legislation; if a bill passed the Legislative Assembly in three successive sessions, it would become law even without royal approval.

Dismayed at what he deemed the ill-considered radicalism of such decisions, Jean-Joseph Mounier, a leading patriot deputy in the summer of 1789 and author of the Tennis Court Oath, resigned from the Assembly in October. In a similar vein, some late-20th-century historians (notably François Furet) suggested that the Assembly’s integral concept of national sovereignty and legislative supremacy effectively reestablished absolutism in a new guise, providing the new government with inherently unlimited powers. Nor, they believed, is it surprising that the revolutionaries abused those powers as their pursuit of utopian goals encountered resistance. In theory this may well be true, but it must be balanced against the actual institutions created to implement those powers and the spirit in which they were used. With a few exceptions—notably the religious issue—the National Assembly acted in a liberal spirit, more pragmatic than utopian, and was decidedly more constructive than repressive.

The revolutionaries took civil equality seriously but created a limited definition of political rights. They effectively transferred political power from the monarchy and the privileged estates to the general body of propertied citizens. Nobles lost their privileges in 1789 and their titles in 1790, but, as propertied individuals, they could readily join the new political elite. The constitution restricted the franchise to “active” citizens who paid a minimal sum in taxes, with higher property qualifications for eligibility for public office (a direct-tax payment equivalent to 3 days’ wages for voters and 10 days’ wages for electors and officeholders). Under this system about two-thirds of adult males had the right to vote for electors and to choose certain local officials directly. Although it favoured wealthier citizens, the system was vastly more democratic than Britain’s.

Predictably, the franchise did not extend to women, despite delegations and pamphlets advocating women’s rights. The Assembly responded brusquely that, because women were too emotional and easily misled, they must be kept out of public life and devote themselves to their nurturing and maternal roles. But the formal exclusion of women from politics did not keep them on the sidelines. Women were active combatants in local conflicts that soon erupted over religious policy, and they agitated over subsistence issues—Parisian women, for example, made a mass march to Versailles in October that forced the king to move back to the capital. In the towns, they formed auxiliaries to local Jacobin clubs and even a handful of independent women’s clubs, participated in civic festivals, and did public relief work.

Gouvernements before 1789.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Revolutionary départements after 1789.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.The Assembly’s design for local government and administration proved to be one of the Revolution’s most durable legacies. Obliterating the political identity of France’s historic provinces, the deputies redivided the nation’s territory into 83 départements of roughly equal size. Unlike the old provinces, each département would have exactly the same institutions; départements were in turn subdivided into districts, cantons, and communes (the common designation for a village or town). On the one hand, this administrative transformation promoted decentralization and local autonomy: citizens of each département, district, and commune elected their own local officials. On the other hand, these local governments were subordinated to the national legislature and ministries in Paris. The départements therefore became instruments of national uniformity and integration, which is to say, centralization. This ambiguity the legislators fully appreciated, assuming that a healthy equilibrium could be maintained between the two tendencies. That the Revolutionary government of 1793 and Napoleon would later use these structures to concentrate power from the centre was not something they could anticipate.

The new administrative map also created the parameters for judicial reform. Sweeping away the entire judicial system of the ancien régime, the revolutionaries established a civil court in each district and a criminal court in each département. At the grass roots they replaced seigneurial justice with a justice of the peace in each canton. Judges on all of these tribunals were to be elected. While rejecting the use of juries in civil cases, the Assembly decreed that felonies would be tried by juries; if a jury convicted, judges would merely apply the mandatory sentences set out in the Assembly’s tough new penal code of 1791. Criminal defendants also gained the right to counsel, which had been denied them under the jurisprudence of the ancien régime. In civil law, the Assembly encouraged arbitration and mediation to avoid the time-consuming and costly processes of formal litigation. In general, the revolutionaries hoped to make the administration of justice more accessible and expeditious.

Guided by laissez-faire doctrine and its hostility to privileged corporations, the Assembly sought to open up economic life to unimpeded individual initiative and competition. Besides proclaiming the right of all citizens to enter any trade and conduct it as they saw fit, the Assembly dismantled internal tariffs and chartered trading monopolies and abolished the guilds of merchants and artisans. Insisting that workers must bargain in the economic marketplace as individuals, the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791 (named after reformer Jean Le Chapelier) banned workers’ associations and strikes. The precepts of economic individualism extended to rural life as well. In theory, peasants and landlords were now free to cultivate their fields as they wished, regardless of traditional collective routines and constraints. In practice, however, communal restraints proved to be deep-rooted and resistant to legal abolition. Sale of national lands

The Assembly had not lost sight of the financial crisis that precipitated the collapse of absolutism in the first place. Creating an entirely new option for its solution, the Assembly voted to place church property—about 10 percent of the land in France—“at the disposition of the nation.” This property was designated as biens nationaux, or national lands. The government then issued large-denomination notes called assignats, underwritten and guaranteed by the value of that land. It intended to sell national lands to the public, which would pay for it in assignats that would then be retired. Thus, church property would in effect pay off the national debt and obviate the need for further loans. Unfortunately, the temptation to print additional assignats proved too great. Within a year the assignat evolved into a paper currency in small and large denominations, with sharp inflationary effects.

As the national lands went on sale, fiscal needs took priority over social policy. Sales were arranged in large lots and at auction in the district capitals—procedures that favoured wealthier buyers. True, for about a year in 1793–94, after émigré property was added to the biens nationaux, large lots were divided into small parcels. In addition, small-scale peasants acquired some of this land through resale by the original buyers. But overall the urban middle classes and large-scale peasants emerged with the bulk of this land, to the intense frustration of small-scale peasants. The French historian Georges Lefebvre’s study of the Nord département, for example, found that 7,500 bourgeois purchased 48 percent of the land, while 20,300 peasants bought 52 percent. But the top 10 percent of these peasant purchasers accounted for 60 percent of the peasants’ total. Whatever the social origins of the buyers, however, they were likely to be reliable supporters of the Revolution if only to guarantee the security of their new acquisitions. Seeds of discord

Security could not be taken for granted, however, because the Revolution progressively alienated or disappointed important elements of French society. Among the elites, opposition began almost immediately when some of the king’s close relatives left the country in disgust after July 14, thus becoming the first émigrés. Each turning point in the Revolution touched off new waves of emigration, especially among the nobility. By 1792 an estimated two-thirds of the royal officer corps had resigned their commissions, and most had left the country. A contentious royalist press bitterly denounced the policies of the Assembly as spoliation and the Revolutionary atmosphere as a form of anarchy. Abroad, widespread enthusiasm for the events in France among the general public from London to Vienna was matched by intense hostility in ruling circles fearful of revolutionary contagion within their own borders.

After the first months of solidarity, long-standing urban-rural tensions took on new force. Though peasants might vote in large numbers, the urban middle classes predictably emerged with the lion’s share of the new district and département offices after the first elections of 1790. Administrative and judicial reform gave these local officials more powers for intrusion into rural society than royal officials ever had, with battalions of armed national guards to back them up. Peasants might easily view urban revolutionary elites as battening on political power and national lands. And, while the Assembly made the tax system more uniform and equitable, direct taxes remained heavy and actually rose in formerly privileged regions, while nothing was done to relieve the plight of tenant farmers. Later, when the Revolutionary government sought to draft young men into the army, another grievance was added to the list. Religious tensions

It was religious policy that most divided French society and generated opposition to the Revolution. Most priests had initially hoped that sweeping reform might return Roman Catholicism to its basic ideals, shorn of aristocratic trappings and superfluous privileges, but they assumed that the church itself would collaborate in the process. In the Assembly’s view, however, nationalization of church property gave the state responsibility for regulating the church’s temporal affairs, such as salaries, jurisdictional boundaries, and modes of clerical appointment. On its own authority the Assembly reduced the number of dioceses and realigned their boundaries to coincide with the new départements, while requesting local authorities to redraw parish boundaries in conformity with population patterns. Under the Assembly’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 1790), bishops were to be elected by départements’ electoral assemblies, while parish priests were to be chosen by electors in the districts. Clerical spokesmen deplored the notion of lay authority in such matters and insisted that the Assembly must negotiate reforms with a national church council.

In November 1790 the Assembly forced the issue by requiring all sitting bishops and priests to take an oath of submission. Those who refused would lose their posts, be pensioned off, and be replaced by the prescribed procedures. Throughout France a mere seven bishops complied, while only 54 percent of the parish clergy took the oath. Contrary to the Assembly’s hopes, the clergy had split in two, with “constitutional” priests on one side and “refractory” priests on the other. Regional patterns accentuated this division: in the west of France, where clerical density was unusually high, only 15 percent of the clergy complied.

The schism quickly engulfed the laity. As refractories and constitutionals vied for popular support against their rivals, parishioners could not remain neutral. Intense local discord erupted over the implementation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. District administrations backed by urban national guards intervened to install “outsiders” chosen to replace familiar or even beloved refractory priests in many parishes; villagers responded by badgering or boycotting the hapless priests who took the oath. Opinion on both sides tended to fateful extremes, linking either the Revolution with impiety or the Roman Catholic Church with counterrevolution. Political tensions

The political life of the new regime was also proving more contentious than the revolutionaries had anticipated. With courage and consistency, the Assembly had provided that officials of all kinds be elected. But it was uncertain whether these officials, once the ballots were cast, could do their duty free from public pressure and agitation. Nor was it clear what the role of “public opinion” and the mechanisms for its expression would be. The spectacular development of a free press and political clubs provided an answer. Fearful that these extra-parliamentary institutions could be abused by demagogues, the Assembly tried to curb them from time to time but to no avail. Freed entirely from royal censorship, writers and publishers rushed to satisfy the appetite for news and political opinion. The first journalists included deputies reporting to their constituents by means of a newspaper. Paris, which had only 4 quasi-official newspapers at the start of 1789, saw more than 130 new periodicals by the end of the year, most admittedly short-lived, including 20 dailies. As the journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot put it, newspapers are “the only way of educating a large nation unaccustomed to freedom or to reading, yet looking to free itself from ignorance.” Provincial publishers were as quick to found new periodicals in the larger towns. Bordeaux, for example, had only 1 newspaper in 1789, but 16 appeared within the next two years. While some papers remained bland and politically neutral, many had strong political opinions.