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The ancien régime: challenges not met,
a dilemma not overcome
On 7 September 1782, French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de
Vergennes, acknowledged in a letter to his eventual successor, Armand-
Marc, comte de Montmorin, that England had “in its constitution and in
the establishments which it has permitted her to form, resources which
are lacking to us.” Eight weeks later, the foreign minister again referred to
English “advantages which our monarchical forms do not accord us.”1 It is
striking that Vergennes, however loyal to his country’s absolutist traditions,
should nevertheless have ruminated so uneasily upon differences between
the constitutional systems of the two rival powers. His reflections point
to a basic discrepancy in the old France – that between the far-reaching
objectives of its foreign policy and the national means actually marshaled
to attain those objectives.
In retrospect, it is clear that those ruling France in the years before 1789
confronted a challenge that in time became an unmanageable dilemma. The
challenge was to preserve French influence in an increasingly competitive
system of West Eurasian states while at the same time maintaining fiscal,
constitutional, and social stability at home. The dilemma was that the pur-
suit of what became an ever more ambitious foreign policy could not, in the
end, be judged strategically realistic – or be squared with the sociopolitical
tenets undergirding the ancien régime in France.
The statesmen/politicians of revolutionary France would find them-
selves similarly bedeviled by the interrelated complexities of foreign and
domestic policy. But that is a matter for later chapters to address. For the
time being, we shall concern ourselves with the prerevolutionary phase of
the story. The following pages first recapitulate the historic drive of the old
France toward security and greatness in (and beyond) Europe. The focus
1 Cited in Jonathan R. Dull,
The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms
and Diplomacy, 1774–1787
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 304, 316–17.
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The ancien régime
15
then will shift to the ways in which the old regime state, in pursuing its goals
abroad, became the primary catalyst for
domestic
changes that contravened
its own legitimating sociopolitical principles. Finally, we shall reassess the
“prerevolution” of 1787–88, seeing in it a convergence of deeply rooted
diplomatic, constitutional, and social crises that would soon topple the old
regime.
t h e p r o b l e m a t i c d r i v e t o w a r d g r e a t n e s s
i n t h e o l d r e g i m e
The European state system in which absolutist France had to compete –
and which it ever wished to dominate – was manifestly
not
designed for the
weak. As Prussia’s Frederick the Great put it, harshly but realistically:
“the kingdom of heaven . . . is won by gentleness; those of this world belong
to force.”2 Perhaps more revealing from a French point of view were the
remarks of René-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’Argenson. Although repu-
tedly a “philosopher” in public office, d’Argenson could comment in 1739:
“A state should always be at the ready, like a gentleman living among
swashbucklers and quarrellers. Such are the nations of Europe, today more
than ever; negotiations are only a continual struggle between men without
principles, impudently aggressive and ever greedy.”3
The French themselves had long been prominent contributors to this
state of affairs. Preoccupied before 1648 with beating off the armies of the
Austro-Spanish Habsburgs, they had subsequently assumed an increas-
ingly aggressive European and extra-European role under the long-lived
Louis XIV. The Sun King had developed over many years a national tra-
dition meshing ambitions of a continental and mercantile/colonial nature.
Moreover, he had stamped this national tradition with the imprimatur of
his charismatic reign. If princelings all over Europe scrambled to emulate
the
Grand Roi
by raising châteaux and gathering entourages and leading
lives styled after his, is it any wonder that French statesmen found it natural
in later years to assess their country’s needs in terms at least as grandiose
as those bequeathed to them by Louis XIV?
France’s involvement in the two great mid-eighteenth-century wars
witnessed starkly to these realities. The Sun King’s ghost – the specter of
his long adherence to a foreign policy implying warfare on both land and
sea – continued to haunt Versailles.
The first of those conflicts, the War of theAustrian Succession (1740–48),
was triggered by the death in 1740 of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI
2 Cited in Rohan Butler,
Choiseul: Father and Son, Vol. 1: 1719–1754
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 310.
3 Quoted in Derek McKay and H. M. Scott,
The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815
(London: Longman, 1983), p. 214.
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Reinterpreting the French Revolution
and the lightning occupation toward the end of that year of Austrian Silesia
by Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Yet even before events boiled over on the
Continent, Great Britain and Spain had drifted into war over tensions in
the West Indies – and this was a war in which France was tempted early on
to intervene. Louis XV’s chief minister, Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury,
would have preferred to keep France out of the continental struggle en-
tirely and to bring all French strength to bear against the rival across the
Channel.4 Yet, tellingly, Fleury himself had helped to unleash the dogs of
war on land, not only by clandestinely encouraging Bavarian demands on
the Habsburgs in the 1730s, but also by appointing the young and bellicose
comte de Belle-Isle to represent Versailles among the German states of the
empire. Belle-Isle had been charged only with securing the election of a
French candidate to the vacant imperial throne; but the count, “who knew
that he spoke with the authority of public approval,”5 exceeded his min-
isterial mandate by putting together in central Europe a coalition of states
(including, eventually, France) that aimed at nothing less than the dismem-
berment of the Habsburg possessions. In the end, the French, proving true
to their past, would try to have it both ways, warring simultaneously on
land and sea.
And, just as predictably, many in France saw the strategic stalemate they
extracted from involvement in the war of 1740–48 as inadequate. That the
French and the British “switched partners” in the so-called Diplomatic
Revolution of 1756, with France embracing the traditional continental ad-
versary Austria and England establishing ties with Prussia, was less momen-
tous than the fact that French foreign policy (unlike that of any other power)
continued to portend major aggression in both the overseas and the con-
tinental arenas. In the midst of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), one diplo-
matic servant of Louis XV was to articulate to a colleague the philosophy
underlying this policy. “The object of the politics of this crown,” wrote
Franc¸ois-Joachim de Pierre, cardinal de Bernis to Etienne-Franc¸ois, duc
de Choiseul, in 1759, “has been and always will be to play in Europe
the superior role which suits its seniority, its dignity, and its grandeur; to
reduce every power which attempts to force itself above her, whether by
trying to take away her possessions, or by arrogating to itself an unjust pre-
eminence, or, finally, by seeking to take away . . . her influence and general
credit in the affairs [of Europe].”6 Inspired by such a canon, the French once
4 See Jeremy Black, “French Foreign Policy in the Age of Fleury Reassessed,”
English
Historical Review
103 (1988): 359–84.
5 Arthur M. Wilson,
French Foreign Policy during the Administration of Cardinal Fleury,
1726–1743
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 331.
6 Cited in Orville T. Murphy,
Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in
the Age of Revolution, 1719–1787
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), p. 213.
The ancien régime
17
again made war on both sea and land, striving to curb British expansion in
North America, eject the British altogether from India, and drive London’s
vessels from the seas even as they abetted Austria’s war of revenge against
Frederician Prussia. That the duc de Choiseul, who took over Versailles’s
foreign policy in the midst of this conflict, should have conceived a spec-
tacular scheme to end it to France’s advantage by invading the British Isles,
bespoke his country’s current discomfiture as eloquently as it did the per-
sistence of French ambitions. How often during the “Second Hundred
Years’ War” of 1689–1815 did the French, hopelessly overextended, dream
of resurrecting their fading prospects by the deceptively simple means of
a sudden thrust across the Channel!
Yet it was probably with Choiseul’s tenure in the foreign ministry
after
the Seven Years’ War that France’s commitment to a world vision in strate-
gic affairs became most unequivocal. The ink was scarcely dry on the Peace
of Paris, registering genuinely disastrous French reverses, before Choiseul
was once more at work weaving ambitious geopolitical designs – designs
aimed primarily against the hated islanders across the Channel. “England,”
he declared in a memo of 1765 to Louis XV, “is the declared enemy of your
power and of your state; she always will be. . . . Centuries will pass before
you can make a durable peace with that country which aims at supremacy
in the four quarters of the globe.”7
Accordingly, Choiseul and his collaborators prepared for a resumption
of war “in the four quarters of the globe.”8 They carried out sweeping
army and naval reforms and urged their Spanish counterparts to do the
same. They annexed the island of Corsica in 1768, thereby reinforcing
France’s strategic position in the western Mediterranean. Choiseul sent
secret agents to the British colonists in America, whose rebellion against
London he was one of the first to foresee. He also incited Hyder-Ali,
an Indian prince, to rebel against British influence in the Eurasian sub-
continent. He established even closer relations between Versailles and
Madrid, and strengthened as best he could the traditionally pro-Bourbon
monarchist faction in Sweden. In addition, Choiseul’s ministry fortified
several strategic islands in the Indian Ocean, upgraded the defenses of
the Caribbean colonies, and sponsored settlers in Guyana on the South
American mainland. In all of this, we should reiterate, the duke envisioned
7 Quoted in R. John Singh,
French Diplomacy in the Caribbean and the American Revolution
(Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1977), p. 35.
8 For additional sources on this subject, see: Roger Soltau,
The Duc de Choiseul
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1908); John Fraser Ramsey,
Anglo-French Relations 1763–1770: A Study of
Choiseul’s Foreign Policy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936); and Thadd Hall,
France and the Eighteenth-Century Corsican Question
(New York: New York University Press, 1971). Eventually, interested readers may also want to consult the next volume in Rohan Butler’s three-volume biography of Choiseul.
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Reinterpreting the French Revolution
England as the cardinal antagonist of the future. Yet the sheer scope of the
Choiseulist global vision is also indicated by the fact that it posited a grand
interlocking of events in the overseas world, where British power was wax-
ing, with tendencies in eastern Europe, menaced by Austria, Prussia, and,
especially, Russia. Hence, when Choiseul exhorted Turkey after 1766 to
make war on Russia, he did so both to challenge St. Petersburg directly
and to put pressure on a British state viewed at Versailles as being far too
friendly toward the Romanov colossus.
A British diplomatic historian has argued that, at the start of 1770, the