“The division of classes was the crime of the old monarchy, and later became its excuse.”[551]
Tocqueville’s analysis of the ancien regime has left an indelible imprint on our understanding of French political development and social theory more broadly.[552] Unfortunately, his explanation of the most crucial problem in his study - why ancien regime society was so divided and individualism undermined collective action - displayed a moralism that has imbued many subsequent studies and our understanding of representation.
Taking a voluntarist stance, he ascribed the steps generating French outcomes to purposive action: either a “crime” or an “art” practiced by “the majority of kings to divide the people, so that they can govern them more absolutely.”3 The critical event, in his account, that led England and France to irrevocably diverge despite similar origins was the levying of taxes without consent under Charles VII (1422-61). This ended the fourteenth-century tradition, he claimed, of “no taxation without consent.” The reason for this was that the people were “tired of the interminable disorders” and the nobles were “cowardly enough to allow the Third Estate to be taxed provided that it remained exempt.” He briefly admitted the crown was constrained by a powerful nobility. However, voluntarism also shaped his analysis of England: nobles were driven by “ambition” to engage with other social classes and retained their political liberty, preventing the divisions that led the French people into revolution.4
Though I will return to noble tax exemption in the next chapter, the book so far suggests that this diagnosis of a later period sidesteps the most critical factor: the power balance between the two main competitors, the crown and the nobility.5 The English nobility did not intermingle with the “commoners” out of “ambition,” at least not originally; it did so because it was compelled.
And the French crown was not engaged in a crime or an art - it was compelled to choose the most feasible option given its disadvantageous position.Although modern social science abjures moralism, similar assumptions of a crown suppressing representation in a “weak” society permeate major approaches. Much of the literature, despite great variation in explanatory models, sees France and other Continental countries through the prism of the later predisposition towards absolutism, which is identified with strong central power.[553] Downing viewed the Capetian and Valois kings as stronger than English ones, even while noting the strength of provincial institutions and the nobility.[554] Ertman often invoked English strength and the original Continental “fragmented political landscape” dating to the Carolingian collapse, which implies ruler weakness originally. However, he claimed that the “attempts of ambitious rulers to maximize their own power” favored “the creation first of a top-down, non-participatory pattern of local government and then of structurally weak, corporately organized representative assemblies which proved unable to stand up to” those rulers. The critical “switchmen,”[555] moreover, were the Roman imperial ideas that endowed rulers with “nearly limitless powers,”[556] an idea that was also central to Perry Anderson’s account of the origins of the absolutist state.[557]
This view ties in more smoothly with later accounts, such as that of Barrington Moore, who predicated his classic account on a French nobility that was “a decorative appanage of the king” and was eventually destroyed - an outcome shaped by prerevolutionary developments.11 Accordingly, the “French kings managed to establish ?absolutist’ rule and govern without parliament” “by simply not convening it again, leading to the virtual impotence of the institution in the period between the 1570s and 1789.”12 The problem, therefore, was an overmighty ruler.13 Ultimately, this echoes the “weak society, strong state” model that was incisively critiqued by Migdal.14
Historians, however, as we have seen, have long argued that absolutism emanated from royal weakness, not strength.
In this chapter, I examine France and another classic case of European “absolutism,” Castile, to show that rulers could not compel the nobility or the hinterland under its jurisdiction, preventing polity-wide inclusion in representative institutions. Accordingly, towns became the key actors in representative practices, both in France and in Castile. Moreover, rulers could not impose plenipotentiary powers systematically on representatives, thus weakening effective governance. It was thus not Roman law that undermined representation; it was the weak enforcement of some Roman law, specifically of plena potestas, that did so. The Roman legacy was not monolithic; it contained both “absolutist” and “constitutional” elements and both were appropriated by medieval rulers. What determined the balance between them was the strength of the ruler - the less it was, the more the need for “absolutist” royal measures.5.1