America. The paradox of French Absolutism, in fact, was that its greatest domestic florescence did not coincide with its greatest international ascendancy: on the contrary, it was the still defective and incomplete State structure of Richelieu and Mazarin, marked by institutional anomalies and torn by internal upheavals, which achieved spectacular foreign successes, while the consolidated and stabilized monarchy of Louis XIV – with its enormously augmented authority and army – momentously failed to impose itself on Europe, or make notable territorial gains. Institutional construction and international expansion were dephased and inverted in the French case. The reason, of course, lay in the acceleration of a time distinct from that of Absolutism altogether, in the Maritime countries – Holland and England. Spanish Absolutism held European dominance for a hundred years; first checked by the Dutch Revolution, its ascendancy was finally broken by French Absolutism in the mid 17th century, with the aid of Holland. French Absolutism, however, enjoyed no comparable spell of hegemony in Western Europe. Within twenty years of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, its expansion had already been effectively halted. Louis XIV’s ultimate defeat was not due to his numerous strategic mistakes, but to the alteration in the relative position of France within the European political system attendant on the advent of the English Revolutions of 1640 and 1688.30 It was the economic rise of English capitalism and the political consolidation of its State in the later 17th century which ‘overtook’ French Absolutism, even in the epoch of the latter’s own ascent. The real victors of the War of the Spanish Succession were the merchants and bankers of London: a world-wide British imperialism was ushered in by it. The late feudal Spanish State had been brought down by its French counterpart and rival, aided by the early bourgeois State in Holland. The late feudal French State was stopped in its path by two capitalist States of unequal power – England, Holland – assisted by its Austrian counterpart. Bourbon Absolutism was intrinsically much stronger and more unified than Spanish Absolutism had been: but the forces arrayed against it were proportionately more powerful too. The strenuous inner preparations of Louis XIV’s reign for outer dominion proved vain. The hour of supremacy for Versailles, which seemed so near in the Europe of the 1660’s, never struck.
The advent of the Regency in 1715 announced the social reaction to this failure. The higher nobility, its pent-up grievances against royal autocracy suddenly released, staged an immediate come-back. The Regent secured the agreement of the Parlement of Paris to set aside Louis XIV’s will in exchange for restoring its traditional right of remonstrance: government passed into the hands of peers who promptly terminated the Ministerial system of the late king, assuming direct power themselves in the so-called polysynodie. Both the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe were thus institutionally reinstated by the Regency. The new epoch was in fact to accentuate the overt class character of Absolutism: the 18th century witnessed a regression of non-noble influence in the State apparatus, and the collective dominance of an increasingly unified upper aristocracy. The magnate take-over of the Regency itself did not last: under Fleury and then two weak kings who succeeded him, the decision-making system at the summit of the State reverted to the old Ministerial pattern, now no longer controlled by a commanding monarch. But the nobility henceforward maintained a limpet grip on the highest offices of government: from 1714 to 1789, there were only three Ministers who were not titled aristocrats.31 The judicial magistrature of the parlements now likewise formed a closed stratum of nobles, both in Paris and the provinces, from which commoners were effectively barred. The royal intendants, once the scourge of provincial landowners, became a virtually hereditary caste in their turn: 14 of them in the reign of Louis XVI were sons of former intendants.32 In the Church, all archbishops and bishops were of noble origin by the second half of the century, and most abbacies, priories and canonries were controlled by the same class. In the Army, the top military commands were solidly occupied by grandees; purchase of companies by roturiers was banned in the 1760’s, when it became necessary to have unambiguous noble descent in order to qualify for the rank of officer. The aristocratic class as a whole retained a rigorous late feudal statute: it was a legally defined order of some 250,000 persons, which was exempt from the bulk of taxation and enjoyed a monopoly of the highest echelons of the bureaucracy, judiciary, clergy and army. Its subdivisions were now punctiliously defined in theory, and between the highest peerage and the lowest rural hobereaux there existed a great gulf. But in practice the lubricants of money and marriage made its upper reaches in many ways a more flexibly articulated group than ever before. The French nobility in the age of the Enlightenment possessed complete security of tenure within the structures of the Absolutist State. Yet an irreducible sentiment of discomfort and friction subsisted between the two, even in this last period of optimal union between aristocracy and monarchy. For Absolutism, no matter how congenial its personnel and how attractive its service, remained an inaccessible and irresponsible power wielded over the heads of the nobility as a whole. The condition of its efficacy as a State was its structural distance from the class from which it was recruited and whose interests it defended. Absolutism in France never became unquestioningly trusted and accepted by the aristocracy on which it rested: its decisions were not accountable to the titled order which gave it life – necessarily so, as we shall see, because of the inherent nature of the class itself; yet also perilously so, because of the danger of unconsidered or arbitrary actions taken by the executive rebounding on it. Plenitude of royal power, even when mildly exercised, bred seigneurial reserve towards it. Montesquieu – President of the Parlement of Bordeaux under the easygoing regime of Fleury – gave unanswerable expression to the new type of aristocratic oppositionism characteristic of the century.
In fact, the Bourbon monarchy of the 18th century made very few moves of a ‘levelling’ type against the ‘intermediary powers’ which Montesquieu and his consorts cherished so intensely. The Ancien Régime in France preserved its bewildering jungle of heteroclite jurisdictions, divisions and institutions – pays d’états, pays d’éléctions, parlements, sénéschaussées, généralités – down to the Revolution. After Louis XIV, little further rationalization of the polity occurred: no uniform customs tariff, tax-system, legal code or local administration was ever created. The monarchy’s one attempt to impose a new conformity on a corporate body was its persistent effort to secure theological obedience in the clergy by persecution of Jansenism – which was invariably and vigorously combated by the Parlement of Paris in the name of traditional Gallicanism. The anachronistic quarrel over this ideological issue became the chief flash-point of relations between Absolutism and the noblesse de robe from the Regency to the epoch of Choiseul, when the Jesuits were formally expelled from France by the parlements, in a symbolic victory for Gallicanism. Much more serious, however, was to be the financial deadlock which eventually developed between the monarchy and the magistrature. Louis XIV had left a State massively encumbered with debts; the Regency had halved these by the Law system; but the costs of foreign policy from the War of the Austrian Succession onwards, combined with the extravagance of the court, kept the exchequer in steady and deepening deficit. Successive attempts to levy new taxes, puncturing the fiscal immunity of the aristocracy, were resisted or sabotaged in the Parlements and provincial Estates, by refusal to register edicts or presentation of indignant remonstrances. The objective contradictions of Absolutism here unfolded in their plainest form. The monarchy sought to tax the wealth of the nobility, while the nobility demanded controls on the policies of the monarchy: the aristocracy, in effect, refused to alienate its economic privileges without gaining political rights over the conduct of the royal State. In their struggle against the Absolutist governments over this issue, the judicial oligarchy of the Parlements came increasingly to use the radical language of the philosophes: migrant bourgeois notions of liberty and representation started to haunt the rhetoric of one of the most inveterately conservative and caste-like branches of the French aristocracy.33 By the 1770’s and 1780’s, a curious cultural contamination of sections of the nobility by the estate below it was pronounced in France.
For the 18th century had meanwhile seen a rapid growth in the ranks and fortunes of the local bourgeoisie. The epoch from the Regency onwards was in general one of economic expansion, with a secular increase of prices, relative agrarian prosperity (at least in the period 1730–74), and demographic recovery: the population of France rose from some 18/19 to 25/26 million between 1700 and 1789. While agriculture remained
