Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (9 page)

The army, to begin with, was top-heavy, burdened with so many gener-

als, it was often said, that they had to exercise their commissions in rota-

tion. Luxury softened the battle-readiness of some pampered generals and

officers of inferior rank. At the other extreme, however, were those officers

of the needy provincial nobility whose very survival in the army was jeop-

ardized by late payment (or nonpayemnt) of wages from the government.

Quarreling and insubordination among the generals all too often found an

echo in the pillaging and general disorder of the soldiery on campaign. The

military efforts of the French often foundered on their failure to discard

the siege mentality of the past in favor of the much more aggressive, mobile

style of war adopted with devastating effect by the Prussians. Finally – and

we shall return to this point later on – conflicting visions of how the army

officer corps should be
socially
constituted had a detrimental impact on

morale in the ranks.

43 Anderson,
Europe in the Eighteenth Century
, pp. 191–92.

44 Blanning,
Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars
, p. 41.

45 Ibid.

46 Soltau,
Duc de Choiseul
, pp. 16–17.

47 For examples, see Lee Kennett,
The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967); Emile G. Léonard,
L’Armée et ses problèmes au
XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Plon, 1958); and André Corvisier,
Armies and Societies in Europe,
1494–1789
, trans. Abigail T. Siddall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).

The ancien régime

31

Admittedly, all the other continental states (most notably Austria)

experienced similar problems in their military establishments to one ex-

tent or another. Yet in one crucial respect the ills afflicting the French war

effort stood out: they pointed up the insoluble dilemma of a power striving

to uphold a decisive role both in Europe and on the seas. The intractable

nature of this problem has emerged forcefully in scholarship stressing the

fiscal restraints placed upon France’s armies in the wars of the eighteenth

century, much as it has come to dominate conclusions regarding the funding

(or, more to the point, the habitual underfunding) of Louis XV’s navy.48 Just

as its failure to concentrate adequately on the requirements of naval warfare

hobbled France in its struggle against Britons so versed in maritime matters,

so its failure to focus single-mindedly on the very different requirements

of continental warfare inhibited France in its campaigns against a Prussian

prince necessarily proficient in such warfare.

So the eighteenth-century French, aspiring to glory on both land and sea,

stumbled in both competitive theaters. They could not help but be dimin-

ished in an international state system that was acquiring ever more global

characteristics. And at the same time, in part because of their very effort to

“keep up” with and master that outer world, those who were ruling France

inadvertently sponsored – yet failed to “keep up” with – destabilizing

changes at home.

s o c i o p o l i t i c a l c h a n g e i n t h e o l d r e g i m e

Long before French foreign policy assumed the “modern” attributes of

global outreach, a political theorist named Louis Turquet de Mayerne

had precociously invoked France’s need for an Estates General wielding

real legislative powers and for a renovated social elite of industrious,

meritorious citizens.49 His words have for us today an eerily prophetic

ring. For, however much the warring rulers of the old regime might

build up the apparatus of absolutism, they could not in the end help but

undermine it both by provoking a debate over representative governance

and by introducing a certain degree of change into the hierarchy of social

orders.

That successive Bourbon kings elected to rule without consulting their

subjects in regularly convened representative bodies, opting instead to de-

velop, in piecemeal fashion, institutions of absolutism, was no doubt a logi-

cal reaction to the disorder of the sixteenth century’s “religious” civil wars,

and to the political instability that seemed to attend every royal minority.

48 Kennett,
French Armies
, pp. 138–39.

49 For a discussion of this political theorist’s ideas, see Elizabeth Adams, “Seventeenth-Century Attitudes toward the French Estates General” (Ph.D. diss., University of

West Virginia, 1976), pp. 170–87.

32

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

By the early eighteenth century the architects of absolutism apparently

had their task well in hand.50 France was a land effectively ruled by the

standards of the day. Power at the center lay in the hands of the sovereign

and varying combinations of ministers, “secretaries of state” heading up

operative governmental departments, “councillors of state,” and “masters

of requests” transacting business and setting policy in the “committees”

that were specific emanations for specific purposes of the king’s Council.

Decisions hammered out at Versailles were then applied in provincial

France by intendants “commissioned from the Council,” aided by their

“subdelegates” and (in a somewhat uneasy collaboration) by military

governors, provincial Estates, and municipal and village officeholders.

As a general phenomenon, we may thus acknowledge, absolutism re-

sponded first of all to historical developments
within
France. Yet, as the

French state in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both explored

the possibilities and experienced some of the intrinsic limitations of

absolutism, it did so increasingly as a result of its quest for security

and preeminence in the larger European world.

It is clear, to start with, that under Louis XIV and Louis XV a frequent

resort to war that transcended immediate domestic considerations led

to a concentration of authority and prestige in the hands of ministers,

intendants, and a host of financiers and minor administrators.

It is only to be expected that we should be able to attribute to the

long personal reign of the former king especially important refinements in

the structure and methods of absolutism – refinements that scholars have

generally been able to correlate with international events. For example,

though experts may still differ on precisely when prerogatives accu-

mulated in the hands of the intendants, they agree in associating that

process closely with France’s growing involvement in war.51 They see

similar forces at work behind the rise to power of “fiscal functionaries” at

Versailles. In general, Michel Antoine has written, each of the Sun King’s

wars “demanded . . . greater and greater resources, and the last one, that of

the Spanish Succession, called for a genuine policy of national emergency.”

This ensured that “fiscal-administrative governance, and therefore statism

in general” would emerge “in a chronology patterned after the chronology

of warfare.”52

Under Louis XV, the growing significance of the controller-general

of finance witnessed to the increasingly symbiotic relationship between

50 See Pierre Goubert,
L’Ancien Régime
, 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1969–73); and Michel Antoine,
Le Conseil du Roi sous le règne de Louis XV
(Geneva: Droz, 1970).

51 See, for example, J. Russell Major,
Representative Government in Early Modern France
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 668; and Bonney,
Political Change
in France under Richelieu and Mazarin
, pp. 282–83 and 131–32.

52 Antoine,
Conseil du Roi
, pp. 76–77, 631.

The ancien régime

33

war and absolutism. Indeed, Antoine has noted, “the War of the Austrian

Succession and the Seven Years’ War . . . [brought] to its apogee the pre-

ponderant authority of the bureau of the controller-general of finance.”53

It need hardly be added that this tendency continued right into the reign

of Louis XVI, whose finance ministers, from Jacques Necker on, wrestling

with the budgetary consequences of renewed war against Britain, would

increasingly hold the fate of the regime in their hands.

There was, of course, a dampening message in all of this for royalty.

In France, as in the other powers competing for security and prestige

in eighteenth-century Europe, the purportedly “absolute” monarch was

coming to play second fiddle to those impersonal administrative proce-

dures that alone afforded him the money, men, and matériel required to

support military campaigns. As Frederick the Great might have put it,

the French king was becoming little more than the “first servant of the

State.” He must, in a real procedural sense, defer to his controller-general

at Versailles, to his intendants and their subdelegates and all collectors and

dispensers of royal moneys in the field, and to the innumerable, faceless

administrators who assisted these agents of the crown at all levels. Even if

we can agree that royal government in the final century of the old regime

was at best “quasi-bureaucratic,” that is, not yet fully bureaucratic in the

modern sense, we are no less struck by the increasingly
depersonalized

nature of that government.54

However, if their waging of war on an unprecedented scale led the

Bourbons to implement a certain kind of “administrative” absolutism, it

also brought them up against the limits of that absolutism. Part of the prob-

lem, of course, was that the existence of privileged corps – craft guilds,

syndicates of financiers, even peasant villages – under the panoply of abso-

lutism made for networks of special interests that could deprive the crown

of badly needed revenue in the long run. Plainly, the diversion of capital

from agriculture, industry, and commerce to offices in guilds and high

finance, and the economic conservatism of most peasants, only inhibited

(taxable) economic development; at the same time, financiers battening

upon the crown’s fiscal operations had compelling reasons to oppose re-

forms in the royal fiscal administration.55 But what ultimately underlay the

53 Ibid., p. 631.

54 Vivian R. Gruder,
The Royal Provincial Intendants: A Governing Elite in Eighteenth-Century France
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 208.

55 On these points, see, among many sources, the articles by Gail Bossenga, Liana Vardi, and Cissie Fairchilds in
French Historical Studies
15 (1988): 688ff.; Hilton L. Root,
Peasants
and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Julian Dent,
Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society
in Seventeenth-Century France
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), pp. 234–35; and Bosher,
French Finances
, passim.

34

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

crown’s fiscal difficulties (at least among
domestic
factors) was its lack of accountability, and this stemmed from the kings’ decision to rule in nonrepresentative fashion. “Without a representative body,” one specialist has

observed, “French kings had the greatest difficulty in gathering support for

their policies throughout the realm. In a sense the administrative apparatus

that came slowly into being filled the vacuum which existed. But it was

never a complete substitute.”56

That, in fact, “it was never a complete substitute” was something the

absolutists ruling France would themselves be forced to concede as their

involvement in foreign affairs deepened. When, for instance, Louis XIV

faced the prospect of defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, he thought

of seeking national support for his embattled government by addressing

something like an Estates General. “I come to you,” he said in a speech

apparently drafted for such an event, “in order to ask your counsel and

your aid in this meeting, which will assure our salvation. By our united

efforts our enemies will know that we are not in the state they wish to

have believed, and we can by means of the indispensable aid I ask of you

oblige them to make a peace . . . honorable for us. . . .”57 At some point, this

radical gesture, envisaged so incongruously by the exemplar of divine-right

absolutism, was abandoned. Yet Louis still found it necessary to issue two

extraordinary appeals for national support in the form of public letters,

one to the French bishops and the other to the provincial governors. It

is, moreover, telling that during subsequent peace talks the Sun King’s

negotiators were morbidly sensitive to allied propaganda concerning the

Estates General. Such touchiness, it now seems, reflected the crown’s fear

that military defeat or a dictated peace could entail the destruction of

Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy.58

In the event, France and its enemies were able to achieve peace at

Utrecht and Rastadt; and absolutism in France survived to fight another

day. But a generation later, French ministers scouring the country for

new sources of revenue with which to finance renewed warfare could