Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (12 page)

this process, far removed from that of the seventeenth century.89 Still, we

may relevantly ask how many other cases of commoners acceding directly

to such elevated responsibilities at Versailles could be cited by historians

of the old regime. Granted, the balance between robe and sword within

the ranks of high officialdom was shifting; yet upward mobility into those

ranks was not exactly revolutionized.

88 For all these calculations, see Doyle,
Origins of the French Revolution
, pp. 119–20, 129–30.

89 J. Franc¸ois Bluche, “The Social Origins of the Secretaries of State under Louis XIV, 1661–

1715,” in Ragnhild Hatton, ed.,
Louis XIV and Absolutism
(London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 90, 95–96.

The ancien régime

43

Research done on the eighteenth-century provincial intendants leads

to similar conclusions. It would appear that, toward the end of the eigh-

teenth century, a greater proportion of Louis XVI’s intendants were new

to the nobility and to the robe than had been the case with their pre-

decessors under Louis XIV. As a matter of fact, Louis XVI’s intendants

were still busily engaged in making themselves “acceptable” in the highest

ranks of the social hierarchy. Service to the king on his Council and in the

provinces, therefore, may well have furnished increasing opportunities for

social advancement in the twilight years of the ancien régime.90 Moreover,

the crown, assuming new domestic functions even as it pursued an ever

more ambitious foreign policy, needed administrators with technical ex-

pertise in specific areas of domestic life – thus providing one more reason

for recruiting into government the skills of those still engaged in the pro-

cess of consolidating their status in society.91 Yet, again, for the intendants

struggling to manage provincial affairs as for the secretaries of state work-

ing at Versailles, the reality was that careers were not yet “open to talent”

in any fully revolutionary sense.

In the ranks of the ever more indispensable financiers, too, a logical

if somewhat less than revolutionary correlation between state service and

social promotion manifested itself throughout the last century of the old

regime. The Farmers-General, managers of the crown’s indirect taxes, illus-

trated this correlation particularly well. As late as 1726, one investigator

has noted, the membership of the “Company of General Farmers” was

“a motley of financial speculators, stock jobbers, court favorites, and newly

rich bureaucrats drawn from the upper echelons of the General Farms.”

Before Louis XV’s reign was out, however, the Farmers-General were

“usually men not only of wealth but of assured and cultivated manner,”

and their families now “interlaced at every level with the high nobility, the

magistracy, and the clans which supplied the state with its chief adminis-

trators.”92 In other words, the Farmers-General, like other state financiers,

had “arrived” socially. Yet here social evolution was, if anything, producing

more securely entrenched
nobles, not
newer
nobles. And for this the government would pay dearly. As John Bosher and others have repeatedly

pointed out, royal fiscal woes were aggravated in the course of the eigh-

teenth century by the crown’s inability to extract unseemly profits from

socially “well-connected” financiers (as it had in earlier times squeezed

90 Vivian R. Gruder,
The Royal Provincial Intendants: A Governing Elite in Eighteenth-Century France
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 205–6.

91 Shelby T. McCloy,
Government Assistance in Eighteenth-Century France
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1946).

92 G. T. Matthews,
The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth-Century France
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 238– 41. On this point, see also Yves Durand,
Finance et mécénat: Les Fermiers-Généraux au XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Hachette, 1976), passim.

44

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

ill-gotten gains from less well-established “capitalists”) in extrajudicial

proceedings.93

The considerable, but ultimately limited, impact of state service was

evident in the law courts as well. To be sure, the Bourbon kings had never

really wielded a tight control over the personnel in the hierarchy of tri-

bunals. The so-called sovereign courts at the apex of the judicial system –

parlements, chambers of accounts, courts of
aides
, and so on – had long

been self-recruiting bodies, and the ordinary workings of venality and

heredity in office ensured that a similar situation prevailed also in the

middle- and lower-echelon tribunals. On the one hand, this made for a

degree of ongoing social evolution. Careful examination of the Paris and

provincial parlements has revealed that the highly educated and techni-

cally skilled “robe” nobles, men who were often of fairly recent bourgeois

provenance, achieved the same ascendancy in the higher courts as did their

counterparts in the central and provincial administration. In these hugely

influential courts, as in the king’s Council and the provincial intendancies,

the eighteenth century witnessed not so much an “aristocratic reaction”

as a “professionalization” of elite Frenchmen.94 Nonetheless, as a rule the

parlements and other “sovereign courts” continued to be dominated by

nobility of one stripe or another under Louis XV and his successor, and

several of these institutions – most notoriously the parlement at Rennes –

remained veritable citadels of the old sword. This could only guarantee

heightened social frustrations – all the more in that the recruitment of liter-

ally thousands of ambitious and intelligent bourgeois into the “presidial,”

bailliage
, and
sénéchaussée
courts at the intermediate level and into the provost and seigneurial tribunals at the lowest level of the judiciary served

to diffuse professional and civic values – and, more to the point, expecta-

tions of promotion – among ever greater numbers in middle-class society.95

In judicial as in administrative (and financial) ranks, then, service to the

bellicose state contributed to (but could not, before 1789, complete) the

modernization of elite French society.

But state service doubtless had its most divisive impact in the armed

forces, those most immediate instruments of Bourbon geopolitics. Under

the Sun King and his successor, duty as commissioned officers in the army

imposed a formidable financial burden upon the men seemingly destined

93 Bosher, “
Chambres de justice
in the French Monarchy,” in John Bosher, ed.,
French
Government and Society 1500–1850: Essays in Memory of Alfred Cobban
(London: Athlone Press, 1973), pp. 19–40.

94 The pertinent research is summarized in Bailey Stone,
The French Parlements and the
Crisis of the Old Regime
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 16–74.

95 See, on this point, Ralph Giesey, “State-Building in Early Modern France: The Role of Royal Officialdom,”
Journal of Modern History
55 (1983): 191–207.

The ancien régime

45

for that role in the “society of orders”: namely, the sons of the proud but

penurious families of the provincial sword. As the novel geostrategic needs

of the state had to take precedence over old-fashioned considerations of

pedigree, France’s monarchs, after having turned to the old provincial no-

blesse and to sons of old and moneyed court families as well, had again and

again to avail themselves of the services of “new” nobles. The familial wealth

of the last-named individuals, amassed from financial, administrative, and

judicial service to the crown, and also from overseas trade and domestic

industry, enabled them to purchase commissions and lead the increasingly

luxurious style of life that seemed incumbent upon the king’s officers.

Moreover, the state had at times to reach out beyond even these circles to

enlist into officer ranks out-and-out commoners whose wealth, obtained

much as fortunes were obtained by nobles of recent vintage, accorded them

preference in the army over the impecunious sons of the country noblesse.

An additional factor favoring newer nobles and commoners was their abil-

ity to parlay personal wealth into the kind of formal education whose end

result – an enhanced mental discipline and specialized, technical knowl-

edge – was ever more in demand in military as in civilian state service.96

Such modernizing tendencies in recruitment, however, were bound to

foment discord among military men. With the spectacular defeats suffered

by French arms at Rossbach and elsewhere in midcentury, this discord

erupted into a major debate within military circles – and, to some extent,

within society as a whole – over how the French army’s officer ranks

should be composed and what values they should embody.97 If we set

aside the hopelessly anachronistic yearning of some commentators for an

army commanded exclusively by the sons of the old provincial “sword,”

three schools of thought on this divisive issue stand out. First, reformist

ministers like Choiseul and Saint-Germain and high-born essayists like

Vauvenargues and the chevalier d’Arc advocated a kind of Prussian-style

state-service military elite, rewarding its members (preferably but not nec-

essarily issuing from the “sword”) according to strictly defined criteria of

military function and merit. Second, spokesmen for rich noble courtiers

and bourgeois not unnaturally continued to chant the praises of venality in

the commissioned ranks. Finally, there were those publicists (among them,

Jean-Jacques Rousseau) who envisaged a citizen army, modeled along clas-

sical Greco-Roman or idealized modern Genevan lines, whose members,

hailing from all walks of society, would share an intense emotional identi-

fication with the
patrie
.

96 On this subject, see, most recently, Jay M. Smith,
The Culture of Merit: Nobility,
Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).

97 See, in addition to Jay Smith’s recent monograph, David D. Bien, “La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’Example de l’armée,”
Annales: E. S. C.
29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34.

46

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Of course, whether one argued for a meritocratic, a monetary, or a

civic-republican criterion in visualizing the ideal French fighting force of

the future, one was conceding the necessity, in the army as in other public

institutions, to broaden the country’s sociopolitical elite and modernize the

constituent values of that elite. But it was perfectly natural for affronted re-

actionaries in various quarters to reject all such prescriptions. Admittedly,

military reforms promulgated in the 1770s and early 1780s complicated the

situation somewhat. Efforts to require at least four generations of nobility

for commissioned officers (the notorious Ségur law of 22 May 1781),

phase out venality, establish military schools for sons of the provincial

noblesse, and cut back on prestigious ceremonial units and infantry compa-

nies alike tended as much to roil relations between wealthy court grandees

and necessitous country squires, and between lords of ancient pedigree and

upstart
anoblis
, as to foreshadow any “class warfare” between nobility and

Third Estate. It remains no less true that, for most commoners, elevation

into officers’ ranks after 1781 was only attainable through the uncertain

career of officer of fortune. The day would soon come when commoners’

resentment over noble domination of the officer corps would boil over,

resulting in (among other things) the purge of most noble officers. Those

who replaced them would, for the most part, be
roturiers
whose simmering

discontents had been largely ignored in the old regime.98

In the eighteenth-century navy as in the army, statist needs promoted a

measure of social evolution without, however, bursting the chrysalis of the

old society of orders. Whatever the ambivalence of social attitudes within

France’s fleet, it seems safe to conclude that its officer corps was under-

going major reform in the late ancien régime. In 1786 Castries did away

with the
Gardes de la marine
, long seen as a root cause of arrogance and

insubordination within the Grand Corps, and replaced them with
élèves-

aspirants
and
volontaires
who, though drawn from elite society, were to be technically knowledgeable and beneficiaries of a new stress upon practical

training at sea. Castries also suppressed the traditional intermediate offi-

cer grades, as well as the rank of
enseigne
, and created the new grade of

“sublieutenant.” These officers, recruited principally from the
volontaires
, might very well be commoners, could command small warships during

hostilities, and were to be permanent members of the officer corps.

It is worthy of note that, in the navy as in the army, such reforms only