pp. 41, 43: the best work on the period.
36. Vilar, Oro y Moneda, pp. 348–61, 315–17.
37. There is a memorable portrait of this class in Raymond Carr, ‘Spain’, in Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 43–59.
38. Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 93, 178.
39. Domínguez provides an ample survey of the whole pattern of the señoríos in his chapter, ‘El Ocaso del Régimen Señorial’, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 300–42, in which he describes them in the phrase cited above.
France presents an evolution very distinct from the Hispanic pattern. Absolutism there enjoyed no such early advantages as in Spain, in the form of a lucrative overseas empire. Nor, on the other hand, was it confronted with the permanent structural problems of fusing disparate kingdoms at home, with radically contrasted political and cultural legacies. The Capetian monarchy, as we have seen, had slowly extended its suzerain rights outwards from its original base in the He de France, in a gradual movement of concentric unification during the Middle Ages, until they reached from Flanders to the Mediterranean. It never had to contend with another territorial realm within France of comparable feudal rank: there was only one kingship in the Gallic lands, apart from the small and semi-Iberian State of Navarre in the remote folds of the Pyrenees. The outlying duchies and counties of France had always owed nominal allegiance to the central dynasty, even if as vassals initially more powerful than their royal overlord – permitting a juridical hierarchy that facilitated later political integration. The social and linguistic differences that divided the South from the North, although persistent and pronounced, were never quite as great as those set the East off from the West in Spain. The separate legal system and language of the Midi did not coincide, fortunately for the monarchy, with the main military and diplomatic rift which split France in the later Middle Ages: the house of Burgundy, the major rival power ranged against the Capetian dynasty, was a Northern duchy. Southern particularism nevertheless remained a constant, latent force in the early modern epoch, assuming masked forms and novel guises in successive crises. The real political control of the French monarchy was never territorially uniform: it always ebbed at the extremities of the country, progressively decreasing in the more recently acquired provinces farthest from Paris. At the same time, the sheer demographic size of France in itself posed formidable obstacles for administrative unification: some 20 million inhabitants made it at least twice as populous as Spain in the 16th century. The rigidity and clarity of the domestic barriers to a unitary Absolutism in Spain were consequently balanced by the thicker profusion and variety of regional life contained within the French polity. No linear constitutional advance thus occurred after the Capetian consolidation in mediaeval France. On the contrary, the history of the construction of French Absolutism was to be that of a ‘convulsive’ progression towards a centralized monarchical State, repeatedly interrupted by relapses into provincial disintegration and anarchy, followed by an intensified reaction towards concentration of royal power, until finally an extremely hard and stable structure was achieved. The three great breakdowns of political order were, of course, the Hundred Years’ War in the 15th century, the Religious Wars in the 16th century, and the Fronde in the 17th century. The transition from the mediaeval to the Absolute monarchy was each time first arrested, and then accelerated by these crises, whose ultimate outcome was to create a cult of royal authority in the epoch of Louis XIV with no equal anywhere else in Western Europe.
The slow concentric centralization of the Capetian kings, discussed earlier, had come to an abrupt end with the extinction of the line in the mid 14th century, which proved the signal for the onset of the Hundred Years’ War. The outbreak of violent magnate feuds within France itself, under weak Valois rulers, eventually led to the combined Anglo-Burgundian attack on the French monarchy of the early 15th century, which shattered the unity of the realm. At the height of the English and Burgundian successes in the 1420’s, virtually the entire traditional demesne of the royal house in Northern France lay under alien control, while Charles VII was driven into flight and exile in the South. The general story of the eventual recovery of the French monarchy and the expulsion of the English armies is well known. For our purposes here, the critical legacy of the long ordeal of the Hundred Years’ War was its ultimate contribution to the fiscal and military emancipation of the monarchy from the limits of the prior mediaeval polity. For the war was only won by abandoning the seigneurial ban system of knightly service, which had proved disastrously ineffective against the English archers, and creating a regular paid army whose artillery proved the decisive weapon for victory. To raise this army, the first important country-wide tax to be collected by the monarchy was granted by the French aristocracy – the taille royale of 1439, which became the regular taille des gens d’armes in the 1440’s.1 The nobility, clergy and certain towns were exempt from it, and in the course of the next century the legal definition of nobility in France became hereditary exemption from the taille. The monarchy thus emerged strengthened in the later 15th century to the extent that it now possessed an embryonic regular army in the compagnies d’ordonnance, captained by the aristocracy, and a direct fiscal levy not subject to any representative control.
On the other hand, Charles VII made no attempt to tighten central dynastic authority in the Northern provinces of France, when they were successively reconquered: in fact, he promoted assemblies of regional Estates and transferred financial and judicial powers to local institutions. Just as the Capetian rulers had accompanied their extension of monarchical control with cession of princely appanages, so the early Valois kings combined reassertion of royal unity with provincial devolution to an entrenched aristocracy. The reason in both cases was the same: the sheer administrative difficulty of managing a country the size of France with the instruments of rule available to the dynasty. The coercive and fiscal apparatus of the central State was still very small: Charles VII’s compagnies d’ordonnance never numbered more than 12,000 troops – a force entirely insufficient for control and repression of a population of 15 million.2 The nobility thus retained autonomous local power by virtue of its own swords, on which the stability of the whole social structure ultimately depended. The advent of a modest royal army had even increased its economic privileges, the institutionalization of the taille securing nobles a complete fiscal immunity they had not hitherto enjoyed. Charles V’s convocation of Estates-Generals, an institution which had lapsed for centuries in France, was thus inspired precisely by his need to create a minimal national forum in which he could induce the various provincial estates and towns to accept taxation, ratify treaties and provide advice on foreign affairs: its sessions, however, rarely granted proper satisfaction to his demands. The Hundred Years’ War thus bequeathed to the French monarchy permanent troops and taxes, but little new civilian administration on a national scale. English intervention had been cleared from French soil: Burgundian ambitions remained. Louis XI, who succeeded in 1461, tackled both internal and external opposition to Valois power with grim resolution. His steady resumption of provincial appanages such as Anjou, systematic packing of municipal governments in the major towns, arbitrary exaction of heavier taxes and quelling of aristocratic intrigues, greatly increased the royal authority and treasury in France. Above all, Louis XI secured the whole eastern flank of the French monarchy by encompassing the downfall of its most dangerous rival and enemy, the Burgundian dynasty. Fomenting the Swiss cantons against the neighbouring Duchy, he financed the first great European defeat of feudal cavalry by an infantry army: with the rout of Charles the Bold by the Swiss pikemen at Nancy in 1477, the Burgundian State collapsed and Louis XI annexed the bulk of the Duchy. In the next two decades, Charles VIII and Louis XII absorbed Brittany, the last major independent principality, by successive marriages to its heiress. The French realm now for the first time bounded all the vassal provinces of the mediaeval epoch, beneath a single sovereign. The extinction of most of the great houses of the Middle Ages and the reintegration of their domains into
