Louis XIV

J. H. Shennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415090681
• eBook ISBN: 9781134875948
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Looks at the king and his beliefs, domestic problems, and foreign policy.

Domestic policy

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT: THE ADMTNISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

France under Louis XIV was governed by a conciliar system. If we look closely at this system of councils we can learn a great deal about some of the most important features of the reign.

There is often confusion about the number of royal councils existing at this time. In fact, there was only one, the King’s Council. Had there been more than one the unique authority of the king would have been threatened by the possibility of division. The confusion has been due to the fact that the council met under a series of different names in order to deal with differing kinds of business. The personnel changed too, according to the type of session, but all were royal councillors and all the sessions were deemed to be meetings of the royal council because their authority depended upon the King. However, the number of titles under which the royal council met fluctuated over the course of the reign. There were four which had a continuous existence: the High Council, the Council for the Interior or the Despatches, the Royal Council of Finance and the Privy Council. The king always chaired the first three and though he did not attend the Privy Council, an empty armchair symbolized that it too was a meeting of the royal council.

The High Council was the king’s chief committee. It was concerned with all important matters of state, though it tended increasingly to concentrate on foreign affairs. Its membership was very small, between three and five councillors. These were the ministers of state about whom it is worth making several observations. Nobody sat by right, or by virtue of his office, at the High Council. The title of minister depended upon the king’s summons and if he ceased to call a particular adviser that individual at once ceased to be a minister.

Thus the absolute authority of the king was reconciled with the obligation traditionally accepted by his predecessors to take counsel. Louis expressed both aspects of royal authority in advising his grandson (who in 1700 became King Philip V of Spain) to listen to his Council but then to take the final decisions himself. Louis believed that professional advice had to be taken seriously, but he also believed that his vocation as king by divine right gave him an additional wisdom and insight which justified his having the last word.

Louis’s ministers were more professional than their predecessors. No longer could members of the royal family, princes of the blood, representatives of great noble dynasties, expect to be summoned to advise the king simply because they were who they were. Instead, the king looked to his controller-general of finance and to his secretaries of state, experts in the fields of administration and diplomacy, in military and naval affairs.

These ministers have sometimes been misleadingly described as middle-class, a misapprehension which can be traced to the hostility expressed against these powerful new figures by members of the high nobility who had lost their political influence. Louis was too conscious of rank and dignity ever to employ non-nobles in such high offices of state. Their very position as royal councillors guaranteed them nobility, though in fact their background was of the minor nobility. Having acquired such distinction in the king’s service, his councillors, particularly his ministers, could expect their families to rise rapidly in the social hierarchy. Though the father of Louis’s great minister, Colbert, was an undistinguished petty nobleman from Rheims, all his granddaughters married dukes.

Louis appointed only seventeen ministers in the course of his long reign and most of them belonged to or were connected by marriage with one of three families, the Colbert, the Le Tellier and the Phélypeaux. In addition, a total of five secretaries of state who did not achieve ministerial rank came from the latter two families. They were not all of equal ability, but where else should the king look for his chief servants if not to those families which had demonstrated their total commitment to his cause, in which sons and grandsons grew up apprenticed to his service? He valued their expertise in the task of making central government more effective and he was surer of their loyalty than he had been of the loyalty of an earlier generation of great men surrounding his throne. Louis was also skilled at balancing the power and influence of these men, thereby preventing any faction or family group from becoming too dominant. There was one notable absentee from the High Council: the office of First Minister was not filled after Mazarin’s death. Though Louis had been genuinely fond of his godfather, he never forgot how attacks on the first minister during the Frondes had weakened royal authority. After the Cardinal’s death in 1661 he decided to be his own first minister.

The Council for the Interior received reports from the king’s agents in the provinces and sent out its own instructions in response. Its membership was a little larger than that of the High Council including, besides the king, the chancellor, the secretaries of state and the controller-general of finance. This latter figure was a key member of the small Royal Council of Finance which was responsible both for broad economic and financial policy and for detailed accounting and book-keeping.

The Privy Council had quite a different appearance from the three government councils so far discussed. The king himself was absent and the chair was taken by his chief legal officer, the chancellor. The council’s personnel consisted of several dozen lawyers, for its primary function was judicial, that of deciding cases withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts. As the organization of government had gradually grown more complex the crown had created a series of law courts through which judicial authority would normally be exercised. Yet kings retained the power to dispense personal justice to their subjects, a power which in Louis XIV’s reign was invested in the Privy Council. It provided the king with a means of reinforcing that central government control which had proved to be so vulnerable during the Frondes. However, if the king persistently circumvented his own courts he risked being accused of despotism, thereby undermining his own legal authority. That risk would become a serious problem for Louis’s successor in his relations with the Parlement of Paris.

In formal terms, then, the central government was run by the king in conjunction with his councils. Louis had learned his professionalism from Mazarin and throughout his life he devoted a number of hours a day on most days of the week to the routines of administration. The conciliar system affirmed the responsible nature of his authority without challenging its absolute character. However, subtle modifications were being introduced which promised to strengthen the power of central government but at the cost of making it appear irresponsible or arbitrary. Roland Mousnier’s description of the conciliar system as ‘a magnificent façade’ exaggerates the position but draws attention to the need to look closely at what was happening behind the scenes.

First and foremost, government was becoming more bureaucratic. The increased professionalism to which we have drawn attention did not stop with the king and his chief councillors. Records had to be kept and officials appointed to advise the king’s advisers. Such changes threatened to undermine the traditional character of the government which required the king to be viewed as his country’s chief judge, not its chief administrator. There was a legality about the former role which was not necessarily to be found in the latter. That would seem particularly so if the administrative processes were to become detached from the normally accepted procedures.

A sign that this development was beginning to take place can be observed in the changing roles of the chancellor and the controllergeneral of finance. As the king’s chief judicial expert, the former had long played a leading part in government, even deputizing for the king as chairman of the Royal Council. Under Louis XIV, however, the office lost much of its effective authority. The chancellor was not even an ex-officio member of the Royal Council for Finance, though previously chancellors had figured prominently in the administration of the king’s finances. There were of course no ex-officio members of the High Council. Louis only summoned those chancellors to attend who were already ministers of state.

As the office of chancellor lost political importance so that of controller-general acquired new significance. He became the effective head of the financial administration of the country and of all aspects of the economy. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that he acquired overall responsibility for domestic affairs. He took over from the chancellor, for example, the task of nominating the provincial intendants, thereby pushing his authority over a wide range of affairs deep into the localities.

Nor was that the limit of the controller-general’s new-found influence. Many important matters were decided privately in discussions between the king and the controller-general and then formally approved in council. Two highly significant financial edicts, the Capitation (1695) and the Tenth (1710), both of which incorporated the novel principle of taxing privileged and nonprivileged subjects alike, were handled in this way. The controller-general’s bureau became a centre of expertise which no outsider could fully comprehend and control. For form’s sake its decisions were sometimes pushed through the conciliar system, but sometimes they acquired executive force simply by virtue of the controller-general’s signature on behalf of the king.

The growth in importance of the post of controller-general provides the best evidence of a significant but subtle shift in the nature of government under Louis XIV which would become apparent after his death. Despite the survival of the conciliar system, based upon the king’s primacy as a judge, a new administrative régime was beginning to take shape alongside it. This new order made for greater central government control because of the relative speed and efficiency with which business could be despatched. It also provided the king with one formidable agent in the person of the controller-general who yet remained a royal creature. For although the secretaries of state and most of the other members of the royal council (though not the chancellor, who was appointed by the king for life) had been allowed to buy, inherit and bequeath their offices, thereby acquiring a degree of independence from government control, the function of the controller-general remained a commission dependent entirely upon the king’s pleasure. The importance of the role played by Louis’s most famous minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in the expansion of the powers of this commission will be examined in a subsequent section.

THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE PROVINCES

The most important provincial official during Louis XIV s reign was the intendant, whose increasing influence in the localities had been one of the causes of the Frondes. The intendant was a particularly effective agent of central government because of the extreme range and flexibility of his powers. His title, l’intendant de police, justice et finances, indicated that there were no matters of domestic policy beyond his reach. Like the controller-general, the intendant was a royal commissioner, unable to purchase his office and therefore directly dependent upon the king’s continued support. The commission itself, which could be revoked at any time, enumerated the tasks of the intendant and the status of his decisions, whether, for example, they were subject to appeal in the supreme courts or only in the King’s Council. These instructions were frequently modified or extended by subsequent council decrees. The government was therefore able to employ the intendants both in a broad supervisory capacity and to deal with particular matters. The latter might be the organization of a new tax, like the Capitation of 1695, or the implementation of an important piece of legislation, like the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) which revoked the Edict of Nantes and led to the persecution of the French Protestants.

The most important area of the intendants’ activities was that of finance. Indeed, their rise to pre-eminence in the years before the Frondes was primarily as fund raisers to enable France to remain at war. Though France was a rich country the crown experienced great difficulty in raising the financial resources which were needed to maintain security in wartime. That was for two reasons.

First, Frenchmen did not see themselves, nor did the government see them, as automatically obliged to take on that burden. Franc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series
• Contents
• Foreword
• Maps
• Prologue
• Influences upon the king
• Domestic policy
• Foreign policy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography