From the Ancien Regime to the Revolution
13.3.1 Louis XV and the Decline of the French Monarchy
Louis XIV’s power was clearly on the wane during the final years of his reign, which had undeniably entered into crisis during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713).
In the end, however, through the negotiations carried out at the Peace of Utrecht, the “Sun King” managed to reach a favorable settlement for his kingdom which allowed him to conclude his reign still widely held to be a great king. Just the opposite would happen to his successor, Louis XV.13.3.1.1 Louis XV: From “Beloved” to Loathed
Louis XV was the Sun King’s great-grandson, taking the throne at the age of five, and remaining on it for a reign spanning 59 years (1715-1774). Unlike his greatgrandfather, however, the new king took no interested in affairs of state. When reading accounts of his time on the throne one has the impression that France was adrift, as the quality of its government depended entirely upon the minister to whom the reins of power had been entrusted. France’s policies were erratic, causing Europe’s most powerful kingdom to falter and enter into a spiral of rapid decay.[665]
Among other setbacks, the French monarchy lost virtually all of its colonial possessions in North America (Canada) and India to England, while Louis XV also failed to score any significant victories in the endless wars France was waging against England, Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The nation which capitalized most upon French decline was England, which over the course of the eighteenth century rose to supersede France as Europe’s primary power. Worst of all for France was that at the end of Louis XV’s reign, its political decline triggered a serious economic crisis which decimated the king’s prestige in the eyes of his people. So ultimately maligned was the monarch that when he died had to be buried at night in a clandestine ceremony.
13.3.1.2 Louis XVI: An Intelligent and Educated King, but One Poorly Prepared for Politics
When Louis XVI’s reign began, France was suffering a serious economic crisis and the state was still bogged down by the sluggishness characterizing the Ancien Regime. Consequently, it was incapable of confronting the changes and transformations spawned by new economic realities and the ideas and trends ushered in by the Enlightenment.[666]
Louis XVI (May 10,1774-October 10,1789) was intelligent, cultured and a man of goodwill who earnestly endeavored to govern to promote his subjects’ best interests. He was, however, a terrible politician. He was weak of will and utterly lacked experience, which was no fault of his own, for he simply had not been educated to reign, since he initially was not the crown prince, having been preceded in the line of succession by his father Louis of France (1729-1765), and his older brother Louis Joseph Xavier de Bourbon (1751-1761). Defying all expectations, their premature deaths placed him upon the throne in spite of himself. There is an anecdote that when he was told that his grandfather had died and he had become the new king of France (“The king is dead! Long live the king!”) he replied, desperate: “It seems that the whole universe is going to fall upon me! My God! What a burden has beset me, at my age (he was 20) I have not been taught anything!”[667]
Louis XVI was fully conscious of the fact that it was necessary to undertake major reform measures, and actually made efforts to address the situation. During the first years of his reign, he strove to rouse France from its lethargy. The new king, with the best of intentions, successively placed the government in the hands of reformist ministers such as Turgot, Necker, Calonne and Lomenie de Brienne (Vardi 2012, 241-242). In fact, the monarch was able to introduce some reform by abolishing in 1781 and 1788 torture in criminal procedure (Johnson 2013, 20), suppressing feudal servitude on royal lands in 1779 (Kropotkin 2009, 20), and eliminating the personal tax levied on the Jews of Alsace in 1784 (Johnson 1998, 306).
In 1787 he also promulgated an edict of tolerance to protect Protestants and those who did not profess the Catholic religion (Zagorin 2003, 299), although his most important reform effort was his attempt to introduce an egalitarian direct tax.[668]All of this impetus for innovation, however, would be met by opposition amongst the privileged classes who, clinging to the estate-based structure inherited from the Middle Ages, did all they could to foil the king’s policies.[669]
13.3.2 Reactionary Forces Prevail in French Society
Unlike what happened in England, where as of the sixteenth century the bourgeoisie, both merchant and industrial, came to form part of the country’s powerful gentry, sharing power with the old nobility, in France, the old military nobility, along with the clergy, would fight tooth and nail to retain their ancient, anachronistic privileges.[670] This reaction meant that the bourgeoisie, or “Third Estate”, failed to exert influence on the kingdom’s government. Firstly, this was because of the ineffectiveness of the French Estates-General, which should have been the institutional channel through which the estate, representing the immense majority of the king of France’s subjects, was to participate in the government. Secondly, the only institution in Ancien Regime France that could offer significant opposition to the monarchy, the parlements, did not promote the general welfare, but rather defended the established order and sought to protect their own privileges.
13.3.2.1 The Ineffectiveness of the Estates-General
As we already know, in France the Estates-General had never been well established as an estate-based assembly because it did not meet regularly. The kings of France only resorted to convoking the Estates during periods of crisis (a confrontation with the pope, the Hundred Years War, Wars of Religion), giving the body an ad hoc character. Moreover, we already saw in Chap.
8 how the Estates General were rendered dormant by Richelieu (1630-1642), as he was of the opinion that they were not compatible with royal sovereignty, which spurred him to begin abolishing the Provincial States as well. One fact suffices to indicate the situation in this regard: when Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General to Versailles in May of 1789, it had not met since 1614. The kings, then, had governed France without consulting the kingdom’s representatives for over 165 years.This situation had been possible, to a great extent, because the kings did not require the Estates-General’s financial support. As of the mid fifteenth century they had been levying permanent taxes assuring them regular revenues.[671] The result was that the Estates-General did not play in France a role moderating royal authority by any means, as occurred with the Parliament in England, or the cortes of the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon in Spain. In fact, they never managed to check or control the king.
13.3.2.2 The Singular Opposition of the “Parlements”
The function of curtailing royal authority which might have lay with the Estates General in the France of the Ancien Regime fell upon another institution: the “parlements”, which were not estate-based assemblies, but rather high courts of Justice. The most important of them was the Parlement of Paris, but there were regional parlements as well. These bodies were very important because at the close of the eighteenth century the French king, institutionally, continued to be more of a supreme judge than a reformer.
The clout of the parlements essentially stemmed from the fact that they were the guarantors of the application of the old local customs, which in France still constituted, even in the last third of the eighteenth century, the essential nucleus of private law. Thus to legislate in this area, they had to have the approval of a set of parlements which had the right “to register” (formally record) royal laws, a step without which they could not be applied.
The members of the parlements developed the practice (Daubresse 2005, 28) of taking advantage of this privilege to present “complaints” (droit of remontrance) to the king, whenever the monarch requested the registration of a law, making its registration (and enactment) contingent upon the satisfaction of their pleas. This right turned the parlements into the only bodies capable of institutional opposition to the monarchy in France under the Ancien Regime.The parlements eventually became renegade institutions, backing a military revolt against the king in the War of the Fronde (1648-1653), during the regency of Louis XIV. The ensuing chaos led the king to resolve to rule in an authoritarian manner once he was old enough to assume the throne. [672]
The problem was that the parlements did not use their power to promote the general welfare, but rather to defend the established order and protect their own privileges. They did not function, by any means, as an institutional channel transmitting the people’s concerns to the king. The members of the parlements were jurists (Fitzsimmons 1987, 1-32). Educated at schools of law, they purchased their posts as judges, prosecutors, barristers, solicitors and notaries, charges which they passed down to their sons, paying the crown the corresponding tax. This system turned the legal class from which they proceeded into a closed social group, a kind of caste (“Nobles of the Robe”), predominantly concerned with defending their privileged positions (Stone 1986, 75-124).
Louis XV, weary of the parlements’ constant hindrances and hampering, chose to subjugate them by means of force through the reform measures advanced by his Chancellor, Rene Nicolas Charles Augustin de Maupeou, in 1771. In response to the systematic resistance which the Parlement of Paris put up the chancellor dismissed the defiant body and prohibited judicial offices from being purchased or inherited (Baker 1992, 1-16). With one stroke of the legislative pen, the judges lost their traditional prerogatives and were reduced to simple civil servants. In this way, the monarchy took a major step towards the forging of a new France in which the privileged classes were to be required to serve the general interest (Echeverria 1985).
Louis XVI, undeniably with the best of intentions, though in an utterly imprudent step, abolished Maupeou’s reforms, which had made it possible to control the institution that had most effectively stymied royal authority in France.[673] This had serious consequences, as it was the members of the Parlement of Paris, those who most staunchly opposed the reform efforts which the king endorsed, and who led the ideological debate (Baker 1978, 279-303), who initiated the first act of the French Revolution in what came to be called, significantly, the Revolt of the Nobles.[674]
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