investment that capital was perpetually diverted away from manufacturing or mercantile ventures into a usurious collusion with the Absolutist State. Sinecures and fees, tax-farms and loans, honours and bonds all drew bourgeois wealth away from production. The acquisition of noble titles and fiscal immunity became normal entrepreneurial goals for roturiers. The social consequence was to create a bourgeoisie which tended to become increasingly assimilated to the aristocracy itself, via the exemptions and privileges of offices. The State, in its turn, sponsored royal manufactures and public trading companies which, from Sully to Colbert, provided business outlets for this class.16 The result was to ‘side-track’ the political evolution of the French bourgeoisie for a hundred and fifty years.
The weight of this whole apparatus fell on the poor. The reorganized feudal State proceeded to batten mercilessly on the rural and urban masses. The extent to which local commutation of dues and growth of a monetarized agriculture were compensated by centralized pumping of the surplus from the peasantry can be seen with stark clarity in the French case. In 1610, the fiscal agents of the State collected 17 million livres from the taille. By 1644, the exactions of this tax had trebled to 44 million livres. Total taxation actually quadrupled in the decade after 1630.17 The reason for this sudden and enormous increase in the fiscal burden was, of course, Richelieu’s diplomatic and military intervention in the Thirty Years’ War. Mediated at first by subventions to Sweden and then by hire of German mercenaries, it ended with large French armies in the field. The international effect was decisive. France settled the fate of Germany and destroyed the ascendancy of Spain. The Treaty of Westphalia, four years after the historic French victory at Rocroi, extended the frontiers of the French monarchy from the Meuse to the Rhine. The new structures of French Absolutism were thus baptised in the fire of European war. French success in the anti-Spanish struggle, in effect, coincided with domestic consolidation of the dual bureaucratic complex that made up the early Bourbon State. The military emergencies of the conflict facilitated the imposition of intendency in invaded or threatened zones: its huge financial expense at the same time necessitated unprecedented sale of offices and yielded spectacular fortunes for banking syndicates. The real costs of the war were borne by the poor, among whom it wrought social havoc. The fiscal pressures of war-time Absolutism provoked a constant ground-swell of desperate revolts by the urban and rural masses throughout these decades. There were town riots in Dijon, Aix and Poitiers in 1630; jacqueries in the countryside of Angoumois, Saintonge, Poitou, Périgord and Guyenne in 1636–7; a major plebeian and peasant rebellion in Normandy in 1639. The more important regional upsurges were interspersed with constant minor outbreaks of unrest against tax-collectors over large areas of France, frequently patronized by local gentry. Royal troops were regularly deployed for repression at home, while the international conflict was being fought abroad.
The Fronde can in certain respects be regarded as a high ‘crest’ of this long wave of popular revolts,18 in which for a brief period sections of the top nobility, the office-holding magistrature and the municipal bourgeoisie used mass discontents for their own ends against the Absolutist State. Mazarin, who succeeded Richelieu in 1642, had skilfully steered French foreign policy through to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and with it the acquisition of Alsace. After the Peace of Westphalia, however, Mazarin provoked the crisis of the Fronde by prolonging the anti-Spanish war into the Mediterranean theatre, where as an Italian he aimed at the sequestration of Naples and Catalonia. Fiscal extortion and financial manipulation to support the military effort abroad coincided with successive bad harvests in 1647, 1649 and 1651. Popular hunger and fury combined with a war-weary revolt of officiers led by the Parlement of Paris against the intendant system; the disgruntlement of rentiers at an emergency devaluation of government bonds; and the jealousy of powerful peers of the realm at an Italian adventurer manipulating a royal minority. The upshot was a confused and bitter mêlée in which, once again, the country seemed to fall apart as provinces detached themselves from Paris, marauding private armies wandered across the land, towns set up rebel municipal dictatorships, and complex manoeuvres and intrigues divided and reunited the rival princes competing for control of the court. Provincial governors sought to settle scores with local parlements, while municipal authorities seized the opportunity to attack the regional magistratures.19 The Fronde thus reproduced many elements of the pattern that marked the Religious Wars. This time, the most radical urban insurrection coincided with one of the traditionally most disaffected rural zones: the Ormée of Bordeaux and the extreme South-West were the last centres to hold out against Mazarin’s armies. But the popular seizures of power in Bordeaux and Paris occurred too late to affect the outcome of the criss-crossed conflicts of the Fronde; local Huguenotism in general remained studiously neutral in the South; and no coherent political programme emerged from the Ormée, beyond its instinctual hostility to the local Bordelais bourgeoisie.20 By 1653, Mazarin and Turenne had stamped out the last refuges of revolt. The progress of administrative centralization and class reorganization achieved within the mixed structures of the French monarchy in the 17th century had revealed its efficacy. Although the social pressure from below was probably more urgent, the Fronde was actually less dangerous to the monarchical State than the Religious Wars, because the propertied classes were by now more united. For all the contradictions between the officier and intendant systems, both groups were predominantly recruited from the noblesse de robe, while the bankers and tax-farmers against whom the Parlements protested were in fact closely connected in personnel to them. The annealing process permitted by the coexistence of the two systems within a single State thus ended by ensuring much prompter solidarity against the masses. The very depth of the plebeian unrest revealed by the Fronde shortened the last emotional breakaway of the dissident aristocracy from the monarchy: although there were to be further peasant risings in the 17th century, no conflux of rebellion from above and below ever occurred again. The Fronde cost Mazarin his projected gains in the Mediterranean. But when the Spanish War ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, Roussillon and Artois had been added to France; and a picked bureaucratic elite was practised and ready for the imposing administrative order of the next reign. The aristocracy was henceforward to settle down under the consummated, solar Absolutism of Louis XIV.
The new sovereign assumed personal command of the whole state apparatus in. 1661. Once royal authority and executive capacity were reunited in a single ruler, the full political potential of French Absolutism was rapidly realized. The Parlements were silenced, their claim to present remonstrances before registering royal edicts annulled (1673). The other sovereign courts were reduced to obedience. The provincial Estates could no longer dispute and bargain over taxes: precise fiscal demands were dictated by the monarchy, which they were compelled to accept. The municipal autonomy of the bonnes villes was bridled, as mayoralties were domesticated and military garrisons were installed in them. Governorships were granted for three years only, and their holders frequently obliged to reside with the court, rendering them merely honorific. Command of fortified towns in frontier regions was carefully rotated. The higher nobility was forced to reside at Versailles once the new palace complex was completed (1682), and divorced from effective lordship over its territorial domains. These measures against the refractory particularism of traditional institutions and groups provoked, of course, resentment both among the princes and peers, and the provincial gentry. But they did not alter the objective bond between the aristocracy and the State, henceforward more efficacious than ever in protecting the basic interests of the noble class. The degree of economic exploitation guaranteed by French Absolutism can be judged by the recent calculation that throughout the 17th century, the nobility – 2 per cent of the population – appropriated 20–30 per cent of the total national income.21 The central machinery of royal power was thus now concentrated, rationalized and enlarged without serious aristocratic resistance.
Louis XIV inherited his key ministers from Mazarin: Le Tellier, in charge of military affairs, Colbert who came to combine management of the royal finances, household and navy, Lionne who directed foreign policy, and Séguier who as Chancellor handled internal security. These disciplined and competent administrators formed the apex of the bureaucratic order now at the disposal of the monarchy. The king presided in person over the deliberations of the small Conseil d’en Haut, comprising his most trusted political servants and excluding all princes and grandees.
