to the laws and magistrates’, confided Jean Bodin. ‘This was perhaps the principal reason why Francis I disbanded in 1534 the seven regiments, each of 6,000 infantry, which he had created in this kingdom.’24 Conversely, mercenary troops ignorant of the very language of the local population, could be relied on to stamp out social rebellion. German Landsknechten dealt with the East Anglian peasant risings of 1549 in England, while Italian arquebusiers ensured the liquidation of the rural revolt in the West country; Swiss Guards helped to repress the Boulonnais and Camisard guerrillas of 1662 and 1702 in France. The key importance of mercenaries, already increasingly visible in the later Middle Ages, from Wales to Poland, was not merely an interim expedient of Absolutism at the dawn of its existence: it marked it down to its very demise in the West. In the late 18th century, even after the introduction of conscription into the main European countries, up to two-thirds of a given ‘national’ army could be composed of hired foreign soldateska.25 The example of Prussian Absolutism, both bidding and kidnapping manpower beyond its border, using auction and empressment, is a reminder that there was not necessarily a clear distinction between the two.
At the same time, however, the function of these vast new agglomerations of soldiers was also visibly distinct from that of later capitalist armies. There has hitherto been no Marxist theory of the variant social functions of war in different modes of production. This is not the place to explore the subject. Yet it can be argued that war was possibly the most rational and rapid single mode of expansion of surplus extraction available for any given ruling class under feudalism. Agricultural productivity was, as we have seen, by no means stagnant during the Middle Ages: nor was the volume of trade. But both grew very slowly for the lords, compared with the sudden and massive ‘yields’ afforded by territorial conquest, of which the Norman invasions of England or Sicily, the Angevin seizure of Naples or the Castilian conquest of Andalusia were only the most spectacular examples. It was thus logical that the social definition of the feudal ruling class was military. The economic rationality of war in such a social formation is a specific one: it is a maximization of wealth whose role cannot be compared to that which it plays in the developed forms of the successor mode of production, dominated by the basic rhythm of the accumulation of capital, and the ‘restless and universal change’ (Marx) of the economic foundations of every social formation. The nobility was a landowning class whose profession was war: its social vocation was not an external accretion but an intrinsic function of its economic position. The normal medium of inter-capitalist competition is economic, and its structure is typically additive: rival parties may both expand and prosper – although unequally – throughout a single confrontation, because the production of manufactured commodities is inherently unlimited. The typical medium of inter-feudal rivalry, by contrast, was military and its structure was always potentially the zero-sum conflict of the battlefield, by which fixed quantities of ground were won or lost. For land is a natural monopoly: it cannot be indefinitely extended, only re-divided. The categorial object of noble rule was territory, regardless of the community inhabiting it. Land as such, not language, defined the natural perimeters of its power. The feudal ruling class was thus essentially motile, in a way that a capitalist ruling class later could never be. For capital itself is par excellence internationally mobile, thereby permitting its holders to be nationally fixed: land is nationally immobile, and nobles had to travel to take possession of it. A given barony or dynasty could thus typically transfer its residence from one end of the continent to the other without dislocation. Angevin lineages could rule indifferently in Hungary, England or Naples; Norman in Antioch, Sicily or England; Burgundian in Portugal or Zeeland; Luxemburger in the Rhineland or Bohemia; Flemish in Artois or Byzantium; Habsburg in Austria, the Netherlands or Spain. No common tongue had to be shared between lords and peasants in these varied lands. For public territories formed a continuum with private estates, and their classical means of acquisition was force, invariably decked out in claims of religious or genealogical legitimacy. Warfare was not the ‘sport’ of princes, it was their fate; beyond the finite diversity of individual inclinations and characters, it beckoned them inexorably as a social necessity of their estate. For Machiavelli, as he surveyed the Europe of the early 16th century, the final rule of their being was a verity as obvious and unimpeachable as the sky above them: ‘A prince should thus have no other thought or aim than war, nor acquire mastery in anything except war, its organization and discipline; for war is the only art expected of a ruler.’26
The Absolutist States reflect this archaic rationality in their inmost structure. They were machines built overwhelmingly for the battlefield. It is significant that the first regular national tax to be imposed in France, the taille royale, was levied to finance the first regular military units in Europe – the compagnies d’ordonnance of the mid-15th century, of which the premier unit was composed of Scots soldiers of fortune. By the mid-16th century, 80 per cent of Spanish State revenues went on military expenditure: Vicens Vives could write that ‘the impulse towards the modern type of administrative monarchy began in Western Europe with the great naval operations of Charles V against the Turks in the Western Mediterranean from 1535 onwards.’27 By the mid-17th century, the annual outlays of continental principalities from Sweden to Piedmont were everywhere predominantly and monotonously devoted to the preparation or conduct of war, now immensely more costly than in the Renaissance. Another century later, on the peaceful eve of 1789, according to Necker two-thirds of French state expenditure were still allocated to the military establishment. It is manifest that this morphology of the State does not correspond to a capitalist rationality: it represents a swollen memory of the mediaeval functions of war. Nor were the grandiose military apparatuses of the late feudal state left idle. The virtual permanence of international armed conflict is one of the hallmarks of the whole climate of Absolutism. Peace was a meteorological exception in the centuries of its dominance in the West. It has been calculated that in the entire 16th century, there were only 25 years without large-scale military operations in Europe;28 while in the 17th century, only 7 years passed without major wars between states.29 Such calendars are foreign to capital, although as we shall see, it eventually contributed to them.
The characteristic civilian bureaucracy and tax system of the Absolutist State was no less paradoxical. It appears to represent a transition to Weber’s rational legal administration, in contrast to the jungle of particularist dependencies of the high Middle Ages. Yet at the same time, the Renaissance bureaucracy was treated as saleable property to private individuals: a central confusion of two orders that the bourgeois State has everywhere kept distinct. Thus the prevalent mode of integration of the feudal nobility into the Absolutist State in the West took the form of acquisition of ‘offices’.30 He who privately purchased a position in the public apparatus of the State could then recoup himself by licensed privileges and corruption (fee-system), in a kind of monetarized caricature of investiture in a fief. Indeed, the Marqués del Vasto, Spanish governor of Milan in 1544, could request the Italian office-holders of that city to pledge their fortunes to Charles V in his hour of need after the defeat of Ceresole, on an exact model of feudal traditions.31 Such office-holders, who proliferated in France, Italy, Spain, Britain or Holland, could hope to make up to 300–400 per cent profit, and perhaps very much more, on their purchase. The system was born in the 16th century and became a central financial support of the Absolutist States during the 17th century. Its grossly parasitic character is evident: in extreme situations (France during the 1630’s is an example), it could even cost a royal budget something like as much in disbursements (via tax-farms and exemptions) as it supplied in remunerations. The growth of the sale of offices was, of course, one of the most striking by-products of the increased monetarization of the early modern economies and of the relative ascent of the mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie within them. Yet by the same token, the very integration of the latter into the State apparatus by the private purchase and inheritance of public positions and honours, marked its subordinate assimilation into a feudal polity in which the nobility always necessarily constituted the summit of the social hierarchy. The officiers of the French parlements who played with municipal republicanism and sponsored the Mazarinades in the 1650’s became the most die-hard rampart of noble reaction in the 1780’s. Absolutist bureaucracy both registered the rise of mercantile capital, and arrested it.
If the sale of offices was an indirect means of raising
