The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598-1661

Alan James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317878896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This controversial study takes the provocative line that the French monarchy was a complete success. James turns the idea of royal absolutism on its head by redefining the French monarchys success from 1598 - 1661.

The Origins of French Absolutism, 1598-1661 maintains that building blocks were not being laid by the so-called architects of absolutism, but that by satisfying long-established, traditional ambitions, cardinal ministers Richelieu and Mazarin undoubtedly made the confident, ambitious reign of the late century possible.

Part One

The Background

Chapter One

Early Bourbon Monarchy

Henri IV enjoys one of the most favourable reputations of all French monarchs, for his reign is synonymous with the peace and stability brought by the Edict of Nantes of 1598, perhaps the most famous piece of legislation in French history. By enshrining in law a guarantee of freedom of worship for Huguenots in France, the edict has long been celebrated as an early expression of toleration in an intolerant age and for bringing an end to the long, sixteenth-century civil Wars of Religion. The relative peace and stability which followed the edict was indeed the most significant factor in the subsequent recovery of royal authority. Yet there is a danger in seeing in 1598 a sea change in the religious, or political, history of France. It was, rather, merely a step in the ‘struggle for stability’, as Mark Greengrass refers to the period of Henri IV’s reign (Greengrass, 1995).

On occasion during the difficult years of the civil wars, which had raged intermittently since 1562, the French monarchy had been crippled by factional fighting among the nobility and by religious hatred which had brought widespread disorder and suffering to the country at large. Latterly, as the extinction of the Valois line of kings looked likely, the wars were fought specifically over the legitimacy of the succession of the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV of France, because of his faith. This raised complex constitutional questions and damaged the image of the monarchy. While it is easy to exaggerate the extent to which royal authority had collapsed during the wars, the challenge, nevertheless, would be to confirm the legitimacy of the new dynasty and to restore the prestige of the crown. By 1598, Henri IV had come a long way, yet none of the major problems he faced had been entirely resolved. The religious settlement itself was far less secure than has often been assumed. France still feared foreign intervention, not least from Spain, which was far from indifferent to the prospect of a resurgent France under a strong monarchy. More imminently, perhaps, armed aristocratic rebellion and dangerous political factions remained a serious threat to effective government. These three concerns, therefore, of confessional discord, disruption from Spanish aggression and noble disaffection did not simply belong to a previous era. On the contrary, their resolution was the priority of Henri IV’s reign, just as they would drive the subsequent evolution of royal government throughout the seventeenth century.

The ‘Peace’ of Nantes

The city of Nantes was chosen for the promulgation of the famous edict of the same name because Henri IV was there in 1598 to sign the Peace of Vervins with Spain. He was celebrating the final defeat in Brittany of the lingering, occupying Spanish forces which had supported his enemies within France during the preceding civil wars. Indeed, to contemporary observers, this settlement with Spain was by far the more significant of the two, more likely to bring the stability so badly craved by war-torn France. Unlike Vervins, the Edict of Nantes was clearly the result of military stalemate, only grudgingly accepted by both sides of the confessional divide. In this respect, and in most of its specific terms, it differed little from the many previously unsuccessful and tortuously complex edicts of pacification that had appeared during the wars. In other words, there was nothing intrinsic to this particular settlement which promised to have any greater, or lasting, effect.

Although often credited with allowing freedom of worship, the terms imposed on the Huguenots by the edict were actually very restrictive. Protestant worship was to be allowed wherever it could be proven to have been openly practised in 1596–97. Outside these few privileged areas and the lands of certain Huguenot nobles, however, it was to be restricted to two specific locations within each bailliage, or local administrative district, to be chosen by special commissioners of the crown whose purpose was to enforce these terms. In practice, this made life difficult for the Huguenots. Paris was exempt, and many other towns refused to allow ‘heretical’ worship within their walls. Often Huguenots were forced, therefore, to meet in inconvenient locations at some distance from home. The main body of the edict also made clear that the Huguenots were not allowed any sort of national political assembly. That is to say, they could meet to discuss theological matters in a national synod, but as a group capable of organised political or military action, the Huguenots were to be disbanded [Doc. 4].

Apart from this limited freedom of worship and a few other privileges, such as access to public office, the real advantage to the Huguenots as a corporate body came in additional warrants, or brevets, that were part of the complex assembly of articles of different legal status that together made up the Edict of Nantes. These brevets, however, did not belong in the main body of the theoretically ‘irrevocable’ edict, and their terms, therefore, were not binding on future kings. They were granted for a limited time and would need periodic renewal to remain valid. According to these concessions, the Huguenots would be allowed some 200 security towns where they could guarantee their physical safety. These could have Protestant governors and would be garrisoned for their defence, about half of them at the crown’s expense [Doc. 12]. Although in practice even these terms were not always respected and the financial support was slow to arrive, the Huguenots still had a military presence of sorts, especially in the south and west of the country and specifically in their major centres of La Rochelle, Montauban, Sancerre, St Jean-d’Angély and Montpellier.

With the military tension still not entirely resolved and both sides uncomfortable with the religious compromise, one might ask how it was that the Edict of Nantes was so successful at bringing peace. One answer is that the situation now simply seemed impossible to resolve through military force alone, and so a general war-weariness led people to accept it. Yet war-weariness was not new to France in 1598. What made the difference was the extent to which the legal authority of the monarch had been re-established. By this time, Henri IV was in a privileged position to impose a religious settlement and, crucially, to enforce its terms.

On the surface of it, Henri IV seems a most unlikely person to have brought religious peace to France. The succession fell to him in 1589, when the last Valois king, Henri III, died with no direct heir. At the time, he was already king of the largely Protestant, independent principality of Navarre on the southern frontier of France with Spain, and he was the military leader of the Huguenots within France. He had fought, defending the few privileges that the minority enjoyed in an otherwise thoroughly Catholic realm. The Catholic League, which had formed in 1576 to defend Catholic interests, naturally refused to accept the idea of an ‘heretical’ king of France. In 1593, however, Henri IV undercut the legal and moral basis for opposition to him by publicly renouncing his faith and formally converting to Catholicism, a crucial event which is largely responsible for bringing the wars to an end.

The king’s conversion has often been seen as a cynical ploy, and it was undoubtedly a pragmatic move calculated to bring political advantage. Yet there was much more to the consolidation of his authority. Henri IV did not just seize an easy opportunity to secure his throne in this way. He first fought for his legal inheritance. By demonstrating his willingness to fight, and his martial prowess, he had already gone a long way towards establishing his legitimacy as king. Indeed, it seems he had put off earlier chances to convert to Catholicism which would also have been politically expedient (Love, 2001). He did not want just to be a king against whom one no longer had a legal right to rebel, but to be one who commanded active support and respect. The spiritual and the martial were two quintessential elements of early-modern kingship, both of which had to be fostered.

With the king now for all intents and purposes a committed Catholic, many of the Protestant nobles subsequently demonstrated their loyalty in a series of similar conversions. Although Henri IV was more open to having Huguenots in his service than previous, or indeed subsequent, French kings, there was little left to be gained politically for most people at court from remaining steadfastly and defiantly Protestant. These conversions had a profound effect on the Huguenot church, for the nobility had long been largely responsible for the military strength of the community, providing the resources and leadership necessary to take up arms. As they defected, therefore, the Huguenots became increasingly weak. Yet it was not just this weakness which kept them relatively docile. Rather, it was a recognition that, even though Henri IV had not proven himself to be the champion of Protestantism that they had hoped, their best interests still lay in the meagre terms of the Edict of Nantes and in maintaining the personal, and precarious, goodwill of the king to renew and to enforce them. Implicit in this position is a recognition that a Catholic king of France had the right to impose a religious settlement. Thus, as Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, an influential Huguenot leader and theologian, argued, the Huguenots had to find a way to reconcile their faith with the need for political obedience.

The most high-profile exception to the trend of noble conversions to Catholicism was the Duke of Sully, an old comrade in arms of the king during the civil wars who rose to a position of political pre-eminence in the king’s council. Despite entreaties from his royal master, however, Sully always refused to follow his lead and to renounce Protestantism. By refusing to convert, Sully was taking a political risk. For this reason, he could be celebrated for the strength of his faith, unwilling to compromise his convictions for political advantage. While there is undoubtedly merit in this, it could be countered that his favour with the king and his political success was actually already so complete that he simply did not need to convert. Either way, far more than his piety, Sully’s actions demonstrate the virtues in this age of personal political loyalty and obedience to the king. He demanded the same principle of loyalty from the Huguenot community to which he maintained close ties. To Sully, and to many other Huguenots who thought the same way, this obedience was the only practical and legitimate basis of survival in the seventeenth century.

Despite the docility of many within the Huguenot community and his own reluctance to be harsh, Henri IV still had to take an active role in implementing the restrictive terms of the Edict of Nantes. The importance of sustaining his resolution to enforce the letter of the law cannot be over-stated, for the edict met with widespread disapproval and resistance from many quarters [Docs 4 and 5]. To begin with, it would need to be registered in the various parlements, which were judicial courts whose role was to register and to enforce the law. The most important of these was the parlement of Paris whose jurisdiction covered about two thirds of France and was considered to be the superior of the provincial parlements. Unhappy with the confessional compromise contained in the edict, the Paris parlement refused to register it for ten months until the king finally exercised his right to hold a lit de justice, that is to attend a session of parlement in person and to force its registration. In doing so, he was delivering a strong message. While he was willing to be accommodating and patient, as king he expected, ultimately, to be obeyed. The edict was finally registered, and the king’s will prevailed. Yet it should not be overlooked that the parlement introduced some alterations, further reducing the permitted sites of worship for the Huguenots. Thus, there were clearly limits to the king’s ability to impose the settlement, and the opposition to it was entrenched, active and effective.

As with previous edicts of pacification, to be successful the Edict of Nantes could not simply be pronounced and then registered. It had to be enforced and, indeed, interpreted for the particular circumstances that applied in countless localities throughout France. To this end, royal commissioners were named to each region. There they encountered simmering confessional tensions and were faced with many petitions and intractable legal conflicts which involved them ever more closely in municipal politics. Their success required a combination of determination and authority but also flexibility or sensitivity to local concerns and conditions. In sum, this peace was not the result of theological insight or enlightened dedication to modern notions of toleration. It was a difficult and imperfect effort to reinforce the king’s traditional legal right to make law. Its success, however, is demonstrated by the fact that both Catholics and Protestants tended, henceforth, to appeal to royal justice to redress their grievances, not to a call to arms.

The Recovery of Royal Authority

Just as important as finding a military and confessional settlement for the stability of the new Bourbon dynasty was restoring the traditional fidelity of the nobility to the crown. Having only recently emerged from civil war, in which many of France’s leading nobles had fought in opposition to Henri IV’s succession to the throne, this would require a good deal of diplomacy in addition to many appeals to the nobles’ innate sense of duty to their prince. On the whole, the king chose to be generous with his erstwhile enemies, offering full pardons, and often lucrative pensions, in exchange for formal declarations of obedience. While this strategy succeeded in pacifying the majority, the danger of armed, noble rebellion did not disappear altogether, and at times Henri IV also had to act quite forcefully. In 1602, for example, he faced a rebellion led by the Duke of Biron who was arrested, tried for treason and executed. Most of the other nobles implicated pleaded for forgiveness, though one, the Duke of Bouillon, who had aspired to the Huguenot leadership after Henri IV’s conversion, went on to lead another revolt a few years later. The latter was put down by an army led by the king himself [Doc. 6]. Although neither rebellion posed a very serious challenge, they had been led by men who had previously received royal favour, revealing the fragility of the peace the king had established with his most powerful subjects. Recreating a stable, mutually-profitable relationship with the nobility would remain an elusive goal of the French crown for many decades.

Henri IV was particularly uneasy with the highest ranking nobles, the princes of the blood, for they posed the greatest threat to his dynastic ambitions. Although the king had managed to establish his own legitimacy, there were lingering doubts about the validity of his divorce from his first wife and, therefore, to the succession of his children by Marie de Medici whom he married in 1600. Henri II, Prince of Condé, for one, was a Bourbon prince himself. He had been heir presumptive prior to the birth of Louis XIII and, therefore, retained a plausible future claim to the throne and was always considered a potentially serious focus of future rebellion. In 1609, possibly partly due to inappropriate advances by Henri IV to his bride, Condé went into exile, from where the threat of revolt in alliance with foreign powers consequently grew.

Henri IV faced pressure from another quarter too. Some of his loyal followers felt aggrieved and excluded by the extension of royal favour to his former enemies and wished to be included on the royal council. The Count of Soissons, another of Henri IV’s relations, also had a claim to the throne and was another potential focus of rebellion. For this reason he, too, was excluded from the royal council, specifically in favour of Sully. This was all part of an emerging trend of excluding the higher nobility from the council. In his difficult dealings with his nobles, Henri IV tried to resist their demands in order to name only loyal appointees. In this way, the council could act as direct representatives of the royal will. No longer could the most powerful noblemen simply assume a place or expect, in this way, to monopolise the king’s ear and direct royal policy. Thus, just as the council was to be the instrument for the enforcement of the religious settlement, it was also to act, and be seen to be acting, as a neutral arbiter in all manner of legal disputes. The widespread acceptance of this role of the royal council was an important legacy of Henri IV’s reign, something that Richard Bonney has identified as a distinctly ‘Bourbon style of government’ (Bonney, 1989).

Although Sully was a noble of considerable lineage and stature, this is not what earned him his favour. He was included on the council solely because he was a loyal and able servant of the king. His career is by far the most significant of the royal councillors, for indeed he, more than anybody else, embodied the administrative style of Henri IV’s reign. Named Superintendent of Finance in 1598, Sully went on to acquire other responsibilities, including the grand-mastership of the artillery, and eventually established his pre-eminence on the royal council. In particular, Sully kept a firm grip on the royal treasury. Indeed, from 1605, all of the crown’s important financial documents carried his signature only. Thus it was that he became the first of a series of minister-favourites in the seventeenth century who would dominate the royal council and who would be largely responsible for the daily administration of the country. This, as much as anything else, characterised the government of the Bourbon monarchs until 1661.

Sully’s more immediately obvious legacy included improvements to the network of roads and the construction of canals and bridges, along with a number of architectural achievements in Paris and elsewhere. Yet he is also credited with the highly unusual situation in which the crown found itself in 1610 of actually enjoying a healthy budget surplus. Sully undoubtedly deserves his reputation for administrative competence. He kept a tight control on royal expenditure while trying to increase revenues. This he did by trying to root out corruption and inefficiency in the tax collection system, especially that of what was essentially a hearth tax, the taille, the main direct tax. A number of chambres de justice were held, which were formal investigations into the affairs of a given tax official or collector, which could lead to fines, arrest, imprisonment, or worse. He also increased other indirect taxes, the most important of which was the gabelle, a tax on salt. Élus, or tax collection officers who were directly responsible to the Paris government, were introduced in certain provinces. This was not the extent of his attempts at change, however. At times, he even tried to restrict the power of the courts, such as the chamber of accounts. As a theoretically ‘sovereign court’ of the realm, it objected to Sully’s rather forceful and direct methods of administration.

One must be careful, however, not to exaggerate Sully’s accomplishments. His success was achieved largely by debt restructuring. In other words, only by refusing to honour many of the debts that had accumulated during the civil wars was he able to put the royal finances on a sound footing. That he was able to do this without ruining the king’s credit rating is probably a more important achievement than the budget surplus itself, which dissipated very quickly and to no great effect after he left office in 1611. Similarly, one must be careful not to read into Sully’s actions a careful, deliberate plea to centralise government or to increase the crown’s tax-raising powers for their own sake. His primary aim was simply to raise as much money as possible, and for this reason there are seemingly contradictory elements to his administration. Often taxes were simply farmed out. That is to say that speculators were allowed to bid for the right to collect a given tax for an area. From the crown’s point of view, the competitive bidding could ensure a good price, and the cash was guaranteed by the tax farmer. For the financier involved, there was the possibility of collecting more than was invested. Also, the use of élus, which appears to have been an effort to over-ride provincial authorities and to increase the direct authority of the crown, was not systematic. Often their introduction was only threatened as a way of encouraging co-operation. Similarly, the chambres de justice were often invoked simply in the hope of extracting a financial ‘gift’ which could be exchanged for a pardon or for turning a blind eye to dubious practices. In other words, it seems that innovations were attempted for the immediate effect they would have on revenue, not on the longer-term ability of the state to exercise ...