the Conseil des Dépêches dealt with provincial and domestic matters, and the newly created Conseil des Finances supervised the economic organization of the monarchy. The departmental efficacy of this relatively taut system, linked by the tireless activity of Louis XIV himself, was much greater than that of the cumbersome conciliar paraphernalia of Habsburg Absolutism in Spain, with its semi-territorial lay-out and interminable collective ruminations. Below it, the intendant network now covered the whole of France – Brittany was the last province to receive a commissioner in 1689.22 The country was divided into 32 généralités, in each of which the royal intendant now ruled supreme, assisted by sub-délégués, and vested with new powers over the assessment and supervision of the taille – vital duties that were transferred from the old officier ‘treasurers’ formerly in control of them. The total personnel of the civilian sector of the central state apparatus of French Absolutism in the reign of Louis XIV was still very modest: perhaps 1,000 responsible functionaries in all, both at court and in the provinces.23 But these were backed by a massively augmented coercive machinery. A permanent police force was created to keep order and repress riots in Paris (1667), which was ultimately extended throughout France (1698–9). The Army was enormously increased in size during the reign, rising from some 30–50,000 to 300,000 by its end.24 Regular pay, drill and uniforms were introduced by Le Tellier and Louvois; military weaponry and fortifications were modernized by Vauban. The growth of this military apparatus meant the final disarming of the provincial nobility, and the capacity to strike down popular rebellions with dispatch and efficacy.25 The Swiss mercenaries who provided Bourbon Absolutism with its household troops helped to make short work of the Boulonnais and Camisard peasantry; the new dragoons operated the mass ejection of Huguenots from France. The ideological incense surrounding the monarchy, lavishly dispensed by the salaried writers and clerics of the regime, swathed the armed repression on which it relied, but could not conceal it.
French Absolutism achieved its institutional apotheosis in the last decades of the 17th century. The State structure and concordant ruling culture perfected in the reign of Louis XIV was to become the model for much of the rest of the nobility in Europe: Spain, Portugal, Piedmont and Prussia were only the most direct later examples of its influence. But the political rayonnement of Versailles was not an end in itself: the organizational accomplishments of Bourbon Absolutism were designed in the conception of Louis XIV to serve a specific purpose – the superior goal of military expansion. The first decade of the reign, from 1661 to 1672, was essentially one of internal preparation for external adventures ahead. Administratively, economically and culturally these were the most effulgent years of Louis XIV’s rule; nearly all its most lasting work dated from them. Under the able superintendancy of the early Colbert, fiscal pressure was stabilized and trade promoted. State expenses were cut by the wholesale suppression of new offices created since 1630; the depredations of tax-farmers were drastically reduced, although collection was not itself resumed by the State; royal demesne lands were systematically recovered. The taille personnelle was lowered from 42 to 34 million livres; while the taille réelle in the more lightly burdened pays d’états was raised by some 50 per cent; the yield of indirect taxes was increased some 60 per cent by vigilant control of the farming system. The net revenues of the monarchy doubled from 1661 to 1671, and a budgetary surplus was regularly achieved.26 Meanwhile, an ambitious mercantilist programme to accelerate manufacturing and commercial growth in France, and colonial expansion overseas, was launched: royal subventions founded new industries (cloth, glass, tapestry, iron-ware), chartered companies were created to exploit the trade of the East and West Indies, shipyards were heavily subsidised, and finally an extremely protectionist tariff system imposed. It was this very mercantilism, however, which led directly to the decision to invade Holland in 1672, with the intention of suppressing the competition of its trade – which had proved easily superior to French commerce – by incorporating the United Provinces into the French domains. The Dutch war was initially successful: French troops crossed the Rhine, lay within striking distance of Amsterdam, and took Utrecht. An international coalition, however, rapidly rallied to the defense of the status quo – above all, Spain and Austria; while the Orange dynasty regained power within Holland, forging a marital alliance with England. Seven years of fighting ended with France in possession of the Franche-Comté and an improved frontier in Artois and Flanders, but with the United Provinces intact and the anti-Dutch tariff of 1667 retracted: a modest balance-sheet abroad. At home, Colbert’s fiscal retrenchment had been permanently wrecked: sale of offices was multiplied once again, old taxes were increased, new taxes were invented, loans were floated, commercial subsidies were jettisoned. War was henceforward to dominate virtually every aspect of the reign.27 The misery and famine caused by the State’s exactions and a series of bad harvests led to renewed risings of the peasantry in the Guyenne and Brittany in 1674–5, and summary armed suppression of them: this time no lord or squire attempted to use them for his ends. The nobility, relieved of monetary charges that Richelieu and Mazarin had tried to impose on it, remained loyal throughout.28
The restoration of peace for a decade in the 1680s, however, merely accentuated the surquedry of Bourbon Absolutism. The king now became immured in Versailles; ministerial calibre declined, as the generation chosen by Mazarin gave way to more or less mediocre successors by hereditary cooption from the same group of inter-related families in the noblesse de robe; clumsy anti-Papal gestures were mixed with heedless expulsion of Protestants from the realm; creaking legal chicanery was used for a series of small annexations in the North-East. Agrarian depression continued at home, if maritime commerce recovered and boomed, to the apprehension of English and Dutch merchants. The defeat of the French candidate for the Electorate of Cologne, and the accession of William III to the English monarchy, were the signals for the resumption of international conflict. The War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) ranged virtually the whole of Western and Central Europe against France – Holland, England, Austria, Spain, Savoy, and most of Germany. French armies had been more than doubled in strength, to some 220,000 in the intervening decade. The most they proved able to do was hold the coalition to a costly draw: Louis XIV’s war aims were everywhere frustrated. The sole gain registered by France at the Treaty of Ryswick was European acceptance of the absorption of Strasbourg, secured before the fighting had broken out: all other occupied territories had to be evacuated, while the French navy was driven from the seas. To finance the war effort, a cascade of new offices was invented for sale, titles were auctioned, forced loans and public rents were multiplied, monetary values manipulated, and for the first time a ‘capitation’ tax was imposed that the nobility itself did not escape.29 Inflation, hunger and depopulation ravaged the countryside. But within five years, France was plunged back into the European conflict for the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV’s diplomatic ineptitude and brusque provocations once again maximized the coalition against France in the decisive military contest that was now joined: the advantageous testament of Charles II was flouted for the French heir, Flanders occupied by French troops, Spain directed by French emissaries, the slave-contracts with its American colonies annexed by French merchants, the exiled Stuart claimant ostentatiously hailed as legitimate monarch of England. Bourbon determination to monopolize the totality of the Hispanic Empire, refusing any partition or diminution of the vast Spanish haul, inevitably united Austria, England, Holland, and most of Germany against it. By reaching for everything, French Absolutism eventually secured virtually nothing from its supreme effort of political expansion. The Bourbon armies – now 300,000 strong, equipped with rifles and bayonets – were decimated at Blenheim, Ramillies, Turin, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. France itself was battered by invasion, as tax-farms collapsed at home, the currency was debased, bread riots raged in the capital, frost and famine numbed the countryside. Yet apart from the local Huguenot rising in the Cévennes, the peasantry remained still. Above it, the ruling class was compactly serried about the monarchy, even amidst its autocratic discipline and foreign disasters, which were shaking the whole society.
Tranquillity only came with final defeat in the war. The peace was mitigated by divisions in the victorious coalition against Louis XIV, which allowed the junior branch of the Bourbon dynasty to retain the monarchy in Spain, at the price of political separation from France. Otherwise, the ruinous ordeal had yielded Gallic Absolutism no benefit. It had merely established Austria in the
