France before 1789

The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime

Jon Elster

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200927
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía política

A masterful new account of old regime France by one of the world's most prominent political philosophers France before 1789 traces the historical origins of France's National Constituent Assembly of 1789, providing a vivid portrait of the ancien régime and its complex social system in the decades before the French Revolution. Jon Elster writes in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described this tumultuous era with an eye toward individual and group psychology and the functioning of institutions. Whereas Tocqueville saw the old regime as a breeding ground for revolution, Elster, more specifically, identifies the rural and urban conflicts that fueled the constitution-making process from 1789 to 1791. He presents a new approach to history writing, one that supplements the historian's craft with the tools and insights of modern social science. Elster draws on important French and Anglo-American scholarship as well as a treasure trove of historical evidence from the period, such as the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, the letters of Madame de Sévigné, the journals of the lawyer Barbier and the bookseller Hardy, the Remonstrances of Malesherbes, and La Bruyère's maxims.Masterfully written and unparalleled in scope, France before 1789 is the first volume of a trilogy that promises to transform our understanding of constitution making in the eighteenth century. Volume 2 will look at revolutionary America in the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 while the third volume will examine all facets of the French and American assemblies, from how they elected their delegates and organized their proceedings to how they addressed issues of separation of powers and representation.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The Nature of the Ancien Régime

The French ancien régime was exceedingly complex, at all levels. In agriculture, which occupied at least 80 percent of the population, almost each piece of land was subject to an immense variety of formal and informal burdens, duties, and rights, which varied from province to province,¹ from one village to its neighbor, and from one family to another. Trade and, indirectly, production were hampered by internal tolls.² Citizens paid a number of direct and indirect taxes, which also varied across regions and were subject to numerous exemptions as well as to arbitrary methods of assessment and collection.³ Because the French kings were in constant need of money for their many wars, taxes often had to be supplemented by loans (often in the form of government bonds), the interest on which was paid irregularly if at all. The offices in the legal system were the private property of those who held them, creating a large space for arbitrary or self-interested decisions. The courts were also engaged in a constant tug-of-war, even a “kind of civil war,”⁴ with the king, one of many reasons why a literal reading of the idea of an “absolute” monarchy is meaningless.⁵ The kings had absolute power only in the small circle of their family and the Court, where they often exercised it tyrannically. If someone contradicted them, they often responded by turning their back on their interlocutor. The decisions taken by the king’s council in Paris were executed in the provinces by officials who often behaved as petty tyrants. The division of the population in three orders—clergy, nobility, and commoners—with many-layered subdivisions generated an intense struggle for préséance or rank that could paralyze decision-making. In Paris (after 1682 at Versailles, 21 kilometers west of Paris), the royal court was not only a financial drain, but also a hotbed of intrigues where ministers came and went on the basis of the whims of the king, his mistresses, his entourage, and, under Louis XVI, his wife. The kings were also obsessed with the private lives of the citizens and established a cabinet noir that could open their letters, a system people exploited to make false statements about their enemies. The kings also used, to an extent unparalleled elsewhere in Western Europe, the tool of exiling those who for some reason displeased them to their landed properties or to towns distant from Paris.

The purpose of this book is to present the main features of this prodigiously complex social system. In doing so, I shall try to go beyond formal institutions to show how they worked in practice. Like Tocqueville, but with more examples, I shall cite many contemporary texts that illuminate the perverse and sometimes pathological effects of the system. Although the presentation of many examples does not transform anecdotes into a law-like regularity, they do indicate that we are dealing with a robust mechanism rather than an idiosyncratic event.⁶ I shall not hide, however, that some episodes and anecdotes are included, in part, for their sheer entertainment value. This procedure has also a more substantive justification, since wit (esprit) was a dominant value in the French elite. Wit could ruin the career of the target of a bon mot and promote, but also occasionally ruin, that of the person who displayed it.

In chapter 5, I shall go back to 1302, to study the origin and further development of the institution of the Estates-General and other representative bodies. Most of the discussion will focus, however, on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the emergence of absolute monarchy during the reign of Louis XIII, its stabilization under Louis XIV, and its increasing brittleness under his two successors.

We have to ask, obviously, whether the ancien régime, which for many purposes can be defined as the period from the beginning of the personal reign of Louis XIV in 1661 to the 1789 Revolution, has sufficient internal coherence and continuity to count as one regime.⁷ Repeating some earlier remarks, and anticipating on later chapters, some important features that remained more or less the same are the following.

Continuity

Individuals, institutions such as the Church, and the government were obsessed (the word is not too strong) with keeping their financial affairs away from the light of publicity.

Members of all social orders were obsessed (again, the word is not too strong) with rank or préséance.

Because of its constant wars and the inefficient tax system, the government was obsessed (again, the word is not too strong) with the need for money, a fact that induced a short time-horizon which never left any breathing space to reform the administration.

Individual agents, too, were rarely in a position to pursue their long-term interest.

Many public offices were de jure the personal property of the office-holder and his family, while others approximated the same status de facto, creating a patrimonial system that prevented the emergence of a rational bureaucracy.

The separation of powers was never complete, since the kings had their own “retained justice” (justice retenue) that allowed them to take any legal case out of the ordinary courts to be judged by a royal official or a special royal court.

This mechanism, which allowed the administration to be judge in the cases brought against it, was reproduced at a local level in the form of seigneurial justice.

In a system that was both inefficient and inequitable, nobles, the Church, and privileged commoners were exempt from the main property tax (taille).

Taxes were supplemented by the issuing of government bonds, at interest and reimbursement schedules that were at the intersection of social, economic, and political conflicts.

The psychology of the kings often prevented them, for reasons I discuss in chapter 4, from appointing competent advisers or listening to their advice.

The kings also had at their disposal informal tools of oppression and control, such as exile, imprisonment without a court order, and the opening of private letters.

At the same time, inevitably, there were some more or less sharp discontinuities.

Change

Living standards increased; in the eighteenth century, barring the cruel years of 1709–10, few people died of hunger.

The tax system was reformed, introducing new direct taxes from which no one was exempt as well as indirect taxes that came to be a more important source of revenue than direct taxes.

There was less state violence and less popular violence, but increased violence by the private armies of tax farmers.

There was substantial increase in the power of the intendants

The century-long exclusion of nobles from the government ended around 1760.

The half-century-long exclusion of the courts (parlements) from politics ended in 1715.

The justice retenue became less important under Louis XV and Louis XVI.

The desacralization of the kings went hand in hand with a decline in religious fervor, both facts being arguably causes, or effects, or constitutive, of the Enlightenment.

In the decades before 1789, one observed a quiet revolt of the parish priests against the upper clergy, who had completely dominated them in the past.

Overall, the regime became less harsh, a fact that Tocqueville used to explain its downfall (chapter 2).

In some ways, the continuity dominates the change. To be sure, in accounting for the Revolution of 1789, recent events, such as the near-bankruptcy of the public finances in 1788 and near-starvation in parts of the countryside in 1789, often have more explanatory power than the more distant past. Yet the impact of these dramatic circumstances was always mediated by dispositions that had been shaped over centuries, be it the concern of the Parisian bourgeoisie over the payment of interest on governmental bonds, the obsession of people in the towns with the price of bread, the tendency of the courts to refuse to register royal edicts, or peasant fears of hoarders and speculators.

Yet the regime fell in 1789, not in 1750 or 1715. As suggested by the subtitle of the present book, the cumulative impact of the changes made it increasing brittle and vulnerable. Drawing on Tocqueville’s two main works, we can move beyond descriptive enumeration and ask the causal question of stability versus instability. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville argued for the stability of American democracy by presenting it as what Marc Bloch, referring to medieval agriculture, called “un admirable engrenage,” a set of wonderfully interlocking parts. As Tocqueville wrote, ‘[d]esires proportion themselves to means. Needs, ideas, and sentiments follow from one another. Leveling is complete; democratic society has finally found its footing [est enfin assise].”⁸ In a draft manuscript, he drew a contrast between this stable American society, in which “everything hangs together” (tout s’enchaîne) and the unstable European societies, in which there is “confusion in the intellectual world, opinions are not in harmony with tastes nor interests with ideas.”⁹ In another draft he notes that “Laws act on mores and mores on laws. Wherever these two things do not support each other mutually there is unrest, division, revolution.”¹⁰

Almost certainly, the last phrase refers to the 1789 Revolution. Although his book on the ancien régime does not contain explicit theoretical statements similar to those I just quoted, it does propose some destabilizing mechanisms. In a succinct statement from the notes for the unfinished second volume, Tocqueville writes that “Men had developed to the point where they had a clearer sense of what they lacked and suffered more from it, even though the sum total of their suffering was much smaller than before. Their sensitivity had grown far faster than their relief. This was true of the grievances of liberty and equality as well as of money.”¹¹

The “grievance of liberty”—the removal of one form of oppression makes the remaining ones more acutely felt—will concern me in chapter 2.¹² The “grievance of money” is spelled out as follows:

Poor manage...