Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (11 page)

72 Daniel Mornet,
Les Origines intellectuelles de la Révolution franc¸aise 1715–1787
(Paris: A. Colin, 1933), pp. 473–75.

73 See, on these various activities, Daniel Roche,
Le Siècle des lumières en province: Académies
et académiciens provinc¸iaux, 1680–1789
(Paris: Mouton, 1978); Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,”
Eighteenth-

Century Studies
22 (1989): 329–50; and Alain Le Bihan,
Francs-Mac¸ons et ateliers parisiens
de la grande loge de France au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1973).

74 Pierre Grosclaude,
Malesherbes, témoin et interprète de son temps
(Paris: Fischbacher, 1961).

75 See Marcel Marion,
Machault d’Arnouville
(Paris: Hachette, 1891); and Maurice Bordes,

“Les Intendants éclairés de la fin de l’ancien régime,”
Revue d’Histoire Economique et
Sociale
39 (1961): 57–83.

The ancien régime

39

“Political” Jansenists in the Paris Parlement, longtime champions of those

liberties, were, by the 1750s, calling for a monarchy in France that would be

under parlementary and, ultimately, national tutelage even as it controlled –

on the nation’s behalf – a democratically structured “Gallican” Catholic

Church. Since their ultramontane adversaries supported absolutism in both

church and state, it was altogether predictable that some Gallican-Jansenist

judges and lawyers would be tempted to appeal to “the nation” and

even to invoke the Estates General explicitly in their increasingly radical

discourse.76

Yet, in the coming years, the informed citizenry’s attention would be

inexorably drawn away from religious imbroglios (except, briefly, for that

over the Jesuits’ juridical status in the realm) and toward secular problems

so perdurably inhering in the state’s internationalist posture. Scholars may

be right to descry traces of the old Jansenist ecclesiology in the par-

lementary rhetoric of those later decades; still, the judicial assault upon

“ministerial despotism” that provoked the so-called Maupeou Revolution

of 1770, and the Parisian and provincial judges’ risky use of American

antitax diatribes to combat Necker’s augmentation of
vingtième
taxes a few

years later, had to do chiefly with the mundane wages of war.77 Moreover,

the high judiciary’s strictures against the alleged abuses of absolutism were

echoed in a myriad of quarters. Barristers in the parlements, radicalized

by their experience during the Maupeou crisis, and drawing on the legal

briefs they could publish in uncensored form, were able to convert their

tribunals into veritable forums for the discussion of religious, judicial, and

social issues.78 The
Encyclopédie
, as edited now by the press entrepreneur

Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, continued to disseminate its message that

“rational standards, when applied to contemporary institutions, would

expose absurdity and iniquity everywhere.”79 A pamphlet literature, tak-

ing its cue from the antiministerial polemics of the early 1770s, dissected

76 Dale Van Kley,
The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750–1770

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 172–73; and Jeffrey W. Merrick,
The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 49–125.

77 On the latter controversy, refer to Bailey Stone,
The Parlement of Paris, 1774–1789
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 77–82 and 96–100. On the persistence of Jansenism in the courts, see Van Kley,
The Religious Origins of the French Revolution:
From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

78 David A. Bell,
Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 207. See also Sarah Maza,
Private Lives and
Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

79 Robert Darnton,
The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie
1775–1800
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 539–40.

40

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

“social contract” concepts developed by writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau

and exalted the Estates General as embodying the popular will in France.80

All the while, at a more visceral level, the
libelles
and
nouvelles à la main
that were pouring from the presses of Grub Street mocked the king for

his sexual impotence and used causes célèbres like the “diamond necklace

affair” to pillory decadence and despotism in high places.81 Public opinion

may have been deriving some of its influence in these years from serving –

at least in some people’s minds – as a replacement for a kingship whose

sacral qualities they could no longer accept.

Paradoxically, the government contributed to the “contamination”

of the political culture at home by pursuing its strategic goals abroad.

Vergennes was warned by supporters in and out of the ministries that his

espousal of anticolonialist insurgency in America, and in particular his

subsidization of pro-American propaganda, could undermine his own

country’s absolutist credo.82 And in fact there is some truth to the con-

tention, articulated in many a textbook on the period, that French involve-

ment in the American War became a Pandora’s box out of which poured

books and articles propounding all kinds of social and constitutional ideas

inimical to monarchical absolutism.83 The writings of Franklin, Paine, and

Dickinson, the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confedera-

tion, the constitutions and bills of rights of the various American states,

and the resolutions and acts of the new American Congress were all widely

reprinted and circulated in France. They could not, in the end, help but

make all partisans of the ancien régime nervous – and this surely included

Vergennes, already worried about the resonance of subversive ideas among

the public. In 1782 and 1783, the foreign minister reportedly spent nearly

as much time badgering British authorities to suppress a gutter press run

by émigré French
libellistes
as he did sounding them out on diplomatic

preliminaries to the Treaty of Paris!84 Vergennes’s quandary was that, for

geostrategic reasons we have already analyzed, he did not really feel that

he could forego the attempt, however questionable, to turn the uprising

80 See Carcassonne,
Montesquieu
, pp. 553–54; Jeremy Popkin, “Pamphlet Journalism at the End of the Old Regime,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies
22 (1989): 363; and Roger Barny,
Prélude idéologique
`
a la Révolution franc¸aise: Le Rousseauisme avant 1789
(Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1985).

81 Robert Darnton,
The Literary Underground of the Old Regime
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).

82 See Bernard Fay,
The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America
, trans. Ramon Guthrie (New York: Cooper Square, 1966); and Patrice Higonnet,
Sister Republics: The Origins of
French and American Republicanism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), passim.

83 Echeverria,
Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 42.

84 Darnton,
Literary Underground
, p. 195.

The ancien régime

41

in America to French purposes. Events were soon to show, however, that

for the globally oriented government of France there could be no lasting

alternative to a new constitutional compact with its own people.

That problem, moreover, was further complicated by the growing dis-

crepancy between the crown’s traditional vision of three “estates” – clergy,

nobility, and Third Estate – and the much more dynamic reality of social

evolution in France. And what was so ironic about this was the pivotal

role played in social change by a state determined in theory to
resist
so-

cial change. It has been a commonplace since Voltaire’s day to note that

French absolutism in earlier times had lifted the curse of civil war from

the land, thereby facilitating an increase in trade, manufactures, and the

arts of peace as well as in governmental activities.85 From this process of

statist consolidation in France, several consequences followed. For one, a

burgeoning governmental apparatus, having (at least temporarily) achieved

law and order at home, was now able to take up an increasingly audacious

mission abroad, which in turn meant a skyrocketing need for money and

for professionals to perform the tasks of modern governance. For another,

the very encouragement of “trade, manufactures, and the arts of peace”

ensured that there would be a growing number of wealthy and ambi-

tious bourgeois who could satisfy these statist needs (and their own social

aspirations) by purchasing their way into the nobility – thereby altering

over the long run the character of the social elite in France. In a nutshell,

then, the crown did much to create the preconditions for sustained (and, in

the end, destabilizing) social evolution and decided (for its own, largely

geopolitical purposes) to cater to the needs and sensibilities of those who

flourished in such circumstances.

Serving its own and its subjects’ needs meant above all that the belliger-

ent French state sold off vast numbers of titles of nobility and even huger

numbers of offices conferring nobility or at least an enhanced social status.

Louis XIV sold 500 noble titles by a single edict in March 1696, “and many

hundreds more during the last 15 years of his reign.”86 His successors

were less inclined toward this practice but could not entirely abandon it.

At the same time, the traffic in offices boomed. J.-B. Colbert had esti-

mated the number of venal posts at 45,780 in 1664; a government inquiry

yielded a round figure of 51,000 in 1778. Both calculations, William Doyle

has speculated, were “probably underestimates.”87 Of these posts in the

eighteenth century, perhaps 3,700 could in theory ennoble the purchasers

85 C. B. A. Behrens,
Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of
Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1985),

pp. 55–56.

86 Ibid., pp. 49–50.

87 Doyle, “The Price of Offices in Pre-Revolutionary France,”
Historical Journal
27 (1984): 857, n. 181.

42

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

or their descendants; possibly two-thirds of them actually did so, going to

ambitious Frenchmen still lacking their spurs of caste. How many people

were thereby ennobled over the century? “One estimate is 6,500, another

nearer 10,000. Multiplied by five for the families who inherited noble sta-

tus from their newly ennobled heads, this gives a minimum total of 32,500

or a maximum of 50,000 new nobles during the eighteenth century – a

major proportion of the whole order however it is calculated.” If we note

as well that at least 47,000 bourgeois families (meaning, by extension,

several hundred thousand individuals) clambered up the ladder toward

noble status via purchase of non-ennobling offices during the 1700s, we can

begin to grasp the importance of officeholding for bourgeois infiltration

into French society’s elite ranks.88

There can be no doubt that, in its central and provincial administra-

tion, its financial apparatus, its judiciary, and its armed forces, the French

government was driven by geostrategic and derivative fiscal necessity to

encourage the assimilation of “new” civilian officeholding (or “robe”) no-

bility to older military (or “sword”) noblesse, and of wealthy bourgeoisie

to recent “robe” nobility. In this sense, the crown was indeed an agent

of social evolution – more specifically, of the metamorphosis of exclusive

nobility into more inclusive “notability.” Yet it is just as incontrovertible

that there were limits in the old regime to this kind of social change.

Take, for instance, the case of the secretaries of state at Versailles. Al-

though it is incontrovertible that distinctions still existed between the civil-

ian and military branches of government personnel in Louis XIV’s time, we

know that the Sun King himself labored continually to reduce the “prestige

differential” between the two branches. And indeed, at the level of secre-

taries of state this invidious differential had all but disappeared. In this

purlieu of power men chosen from the robe nobility, recently risen from

bourgeois ranks, were authorized to integrate with and become the equal of

the highest nobles of the realm. As a result, their status was henceforward

so high that they dominated the Second Estate. The eighteenth-century

situation – in which even such commoners as Cardinal Guillaume Dubois

and Jacques Necker could serve as secretaries of state – was, by virtue of