France: Noble Military Service, Taxation, and Estates-General

In 1407, Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430), a French-Italian author writing for the Duke of Burgundy on the constitution of princely power, lambasted the inequity of noble tax exemption.

the rich and high officials of the king or princes who have their rank and power as a gift of the king and princes and are able to carry the burden, are exempt from taxes, and the poor who have nothing from the king have to pay. Is it not reasonable if I have given a great gift to my servant, and give him a rich livelihood and his estate, and it happened that I had some need, that he comes to my aid more than one who has nothing from me? It is a strange custom that is used nowadays in this kingdom in the setting of taxes... I say these things for the poor. Compassion moves me because their tears and moans come bitterly forth.^[728]

This “strange custom” was more than simply unjust, I argue; it under­mined institutional consolidation. In the early period, the nobility was expected to pay “tax in blood.”⁴⁷ Though documentation is “scattered,” it shows “that nobles sometimes paid taxes to avoid serving and some­times escaped paying because they served.” However, nobles became effectively exempt in 1445, six years after the Estates-General approved raising taxation annually - the step identified by Tocqueville as the turning point for French absolutism.⁴⁸

Why did the French distributional and representative patterns evolve this way? Assemblies flourished whilst war with England escalated after the 1360s and until 1440, as bellicist theories would predict. However, as

Table 6.2 Frequency of Estates-Generalper decade contrasted with military troops raised per year, per thousand of population

Sources: Formeetings, see Soule 1968; Desjardins 1871; Major 1960b.

Ertman points out, “French rulers had little use for the Estates General” after 1440.^[729] That is paradoxical, because military campaigns continued not only unabated, mainly against the Burgundians, but at a higher level of troop mobilization against Italy under Louis XII (1498-1515; Table 6.2). Until 1440, meetings averaged over two per decade and average forces raised about 13,000. While meetings declined after 1440 however, average troop size exploded to 42,000 until 1617, and 120,000 until 1789. The monarchy did not reinstate a central assembly even during the Thirty Years War, at the height of the Military Revolution,^[730] except once in 1614; it relied on regional negotiations instead.⁵¹

A strict bellicist logic would predict instead that the more pressures rose, the more rulers would call on assemblies. Especially since, as Ertman astutely notes, the French crown had achieved its greatest victor­ies during the period of intense “constitutionalism” before 1440 - which could not have been lost on the king and his agents. So why did general assemblies cease to be called, relying on the more cumbersome local meetings? Existing explanations emphasize weak constitutional forces and absolutism. Downing follows the historian J. Russell Major in claim­ing that the crown did not “seek to weaken or destroy the estates”; nonetheless, whether intentionally or not, they were only called again twice in the next 120 years.⁵² Ertman explains the suspension of assem­blies as part of a “progressive decline” of Estates in Latin Europe, because assemblies were “plagued by basic structural weaknesses. ” This weakness prevented them from blocking the absolutist tendencies in the royal revival of Roman law. The attitude of “working together with their Estates” was “foreign to the princely mind” except in moments of crisis, a view that echoes Major’s argument.

But why would they do that when assemblies had helped them win the Hundred Years War? As argued already in Chapter 5, it was not Roman law that encouraged absolutism but weak French capacity to enforce crucial elements of it, especially plenipotentiary representative powers. Only the central assembly, the Estates-General, was structurally weak. French rulers were so weakened by war, they could not compel the nobility to either attend central institutions or contribute fiscally. Local organization was not less effective in blocking royal power than English resistance was; it was just decentralized. The crown abandoned the Estates-General after a protracted effort to compel the nobility that resulted in the nobility appropriating even greater powers over the rev­enue concerned.

In fact, representative activity mirrored noble compellence. In the fourteenth century, the nobility was repeatedly asked to approve collec­tion of taxes for the Hundred Years War from their subjects. Both noble compellence and meetings of the Estates-General are observed between 1300 and 1440: about two meetings per decade occurred on average. Both plummeted after that.

Meetings declined in large part at least because the nobility’s burden did. The tax burden changed for everyone, as in the 1350s “the French began to pay annual taxes without regard for the state of war or peace.”^[732] This was a period of emergency as King John II (1350-1364) was cap­tured by the English. The bargaining that occurred under severe war pressure thus indeed led to a “permanent system of taxation.”^[733] However, this did not lead to enduring representative institutions; it led to noble privileges instead. Nobles succeeded in blocking the Estates- General from imposing higher rates on them, even though noble tax rates were low (about 2 percent in the 1340s).⁵⁶ The great appanage princes who ruled over the provinces, like Burgundy, instead requested to retain a third of the taxes collected.

Eventually, the princes succeeded in keeping a part of the taxes col­lected from their lands after the 1360s. In 1389, Louis d’Orleans was allowed to receive half the gabelle and the aides, as was the Duke of Anjou in 1392 and the dukes of Burgundy, Berri, and Bourbon in the following years. In 1394, Louis d’Orleans got all of the taxes, as did the rest of the royal princes between 1397 and 1402.^[734] By the end of the fifteenth century the great principalities often converted the king’s taxes for their own use.^[735] Incentives for the local nobility to bargain in a central assem­bly weakened as individual exemptions proliferated.^[736] Only five meetings were called for six decades after 1360, while war with England raged.

Representative activity spiked again as the English occupied Paris in the 1420s.^[737] This echoes the bellicist logic again; representation did increase under military pressure and the tax regime changed. After endless bar­gaining with local assemblies, in 1439 the royal direct tax (taille) replaced the seigniorial one, ending the feudal regime.^[738] However, assemblies lapsed after that, until 1560. Even Tocqueville thought they had granted the king the right to levy annual taxes without assent. Historians have corrected that “completely erroneous theory.”⁶⁴ Instead, they point to inadequate demand for subsequent meetings, with strong variation between the (more compliant) north and the south.⁶⁵ But this did not vary in the previous period; only noble taxation did. Nobles were no longer taxed after 1445, like their English counterparts, and they were no longer incentivized to demand consent.

The full causes of representative decline are more complex than this dynamic, and crucial evidence is lacking (for instance, on loans and debt), but outcomes accord with the expectations set by the hypotheses of this study. The more the nobility was engaged, the more likely Estates- General were to be called. The effective exemption of the nobility (as well as the clergy, royal officials, and bourgeois oligarchies of large towns) by the 1440s removed the major motor of polity-wide representation and reflected the crown’s weak infrastructural powers.⁶⁶ Despite regional variation, enough provinces were so uncooperative as to make the Estates-General not a productive mechanism for tax collection.⁶⁷ French fiscal troubles suggest that one intuitive hypothesis about repre­sentative weakness there - that France was richer and therefore the crown needed to make fewer concessions^[739] - does not mean that the crown could easily access that wealth.

6.3