notable advances. French industry increased some 60 per cent in output in the course of the century;34 true factories started to appear in the textile sector; the foundations of iron and coal industries were laid. Far more rapid, however, was the progress of trade, above all in the international and colonial arenas. Foreign commerce proper quadrupled from 1716–20 to 1784–8, with a regular export surplus. Colonial trade achieved faster growth with the rise of the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations in the Antilles: in the last years before the Revolution, it came to two-thirds as much as French foreign trade.35 The commercial boom naturally stimulated urbanization; there was a wave of new building in the towns, and by the end of the century the provincial cities of France still outdistanced those of England in size and numbers, despite the much higher level of industrialization across the Channel. Meanwhile, sale of offices had dwindled away, with the aristocratic closure of the State apparatus. Absolutism in the 18th century switched increasingly to public loans, which did not create the same degree of intimacy with the State: rentiers did not receive ennoblement or tax-immunity as officiers had done. The wealthiest single group within the French capitalist class remained the financiers, whose speculative investments reaped the huge profits of army contracts, tax farms or royal borrowing. But by and large, the simultaneous diminution of commoner access to the feudal State and development of a commercial economy outside it, emancipated the bourgeoisie from its subaltern dependence on Absolutism. The merchants, manufacturers and shipowners of the Enlightenment, and the lawyers and journalists who grew up together with them, now increasingly prospered outside the ambit of the State, with inevitable results for the political autonomy of the bourgeois class as a whole.
The monarchy, for its part, now proved incapable of protecting bourgeois interests, even when they nominally coincided with those of Absolutism itself. Nowhere was this clearer than in the external policies of the late Bourbon State. The wars of the century followed an unerringly traditional pattern. Small annexations of land in Europe always in practice achieved priority over defense or acquisition of overseas colonies; maritime and commercial power was sacrificed to territorial militarism.36 Fleury, bent on peace, successfully ensured the absorption of Lorraine in the brief campaigns over the Polish Succession in the 1730’s, from which England stayed aloof. The War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740’s, however, saw the British fleet punish French shipping all the way from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, inflicting huge trading losses on France, while Saxe conquered the Southern Netherlands in an accomplished but futile land campaign: peace restored the status quo ante on both sides, but the strategic lessons were already clear to Pitt in England. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), in which France committed itself to join an Austrian attack on Prussia against every rational dynastic interest, brought disaster for the Bourbon colonial empire. The continental war was this time fought listlessly by French armies in Westphalia, while the naval war launched by Britain swept away Canada, India, West Africa and the West Indies. Choiseul’s diplomacy recuperated the Bourbon possessions in the Antilles at the Peace of Paris, but the chance of France presiding over a mercantile imperialism on a world scale was over. The American War of Independence allowed Paris to achieve a political revenge on London, by proxy: but the French role in North America, although vital to the success of the American Revolution, was essentially a spoiling operation, which brought no positive gains to France. Indeed, it was the costs of Bourbon intervention in the War of American Independence which forced on the ultimate fiscal crisis of French Absolutism at home. By 1788, the State debt was so large – payment of interest on it accounting for nearly 50 per cent of current expenditure – and the budgetary deficit so acute, that Louis XVI’s last ministers, Calonne and Loménie de Brienne, resolved to impose a land tax on the nobility and clergy. The Parlements furiously resisted these schemes; the monarchy in desperation decreed their dissolution; then, retreating before the uproar from the propertied classes, reestablished them; and finally, capitulating to the Parlements’ demands for an Estates-General before any tax-reform was granted, convoked the three Estates amidst the disastrous grain shortage, widespread unemployment and popular misery of 1789. The aristocratic reaction against Absolutism therewith passed into the bourgeois revolution which overthrew it. Fittingly, the historical collapse of the French Absolutist State was tied directly to the inflexibility of its feudal formation. The fiscal crisis which detonated the revolution of 1789 was provoked by its juridical inability to tax the class which it represented. The very rigidity of the nexus between State and nobility ultimately precipitated their common downfall.
1. P. S. Lewis, Later Mediaeval France: the Polity, London 1968, pp. 102–4.
2. For this point, see J. Russell Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, 1421–1559, Madison 1960, p. 9.
3. Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, p. 6.
4. There is a particularly trenchant statement of the general thesis that Estates-Generals in France and elsewhere nearly always served, not hindered, the promotion of royal power in the Renaissance, in Major’s excellent study: Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, pp. 16–20. In fact, Major perhaps presses the argument somewhat too unilaterally; certainly, in the course of the 16th century, it became steadily less true, if it had once been so, that monarchs ‘had no fear of the assemblies of estates’ (p. 16). But this is nevertheless one of the most illuminating single discussions of the topic in any language.
5. See the convergent opinions expressed by Lewis and Major: P. S. Lewis, ‘The Failure of the French Mediaeval Estates’, Past and Present, No. 23, November 1962, pp. 3–24, and J. Russell Major, The Estates-General of 1560, Princeton 1951, pp. 75, 119–20.
6. Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, pp. 126–7.
7. This thesis is advanced in the stimulating essay by Brian Pearce, ‘The Huguenots and the Holy League: Class, Politics and Religion in France in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’ (unpublished), who suggests that the Northern towns were consequently more concerned with the consolidation of French national unity. However, many of the main ports in the South and West also remained Catholic: Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille all rallied to the League. Marseille suffered in consequence, pro-Spanish policies depriving it of its traditional Levantine trade: G. Livet, Les Guerres de Religion, Paris 1966, pp. 105–6.
8. Livet, Les Guerres de Religion, pp. 7–8.
9. J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598, London 1968, p. 96, which includes inter alia a skilful narrative of this period in French history, in the setting of the international political struggles of the age.
10. For a political sociology of the municipal leadership of the League in Paris at the height of the Religious Wars, see J. H. Salmon, ‘The Paris Sixteen, 1584–1594: The Social Analysis of a Revolutionary Movement’, Journal of Modern History, 44, No. 4, December 1972, pp. 540–76. Salmon shows the importance in the Council of Sixteen of the middle and lower ranks of the legal profession, and stresses its manipulation of the plebeian masses, together with a provision of some economic relief, under its dictatorship. A brief comparative analysis is sketched in H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 27, December 1955, pp. 335–51. But much work remains to be done on the League, one of the most complex and enigmatic phenomena of the century; the movement which invented urban barricades has yet to find its Marxist historian.
11. This point is emphasized by J. H. Salmon, ‘Venality of Office and Popular Sedition in 17th Century France’, Past and Present, July 1967, pp. 41–3.
12. Menna Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, in H. Trevor-Roper (ed.), The Age of Expansion, London 1968, p. 199.
13. Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, p. 199.
14. There is a good discussion of this phenomenon
