Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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in Italy, launched by Charles VIII in 1494 and concluded by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, was unsuccessful. The Spanish monarchy – politically and militarily more advanced, strategically commanding the Habsburg bases in Northern Europe, and navally superior through its Genoese alliance – cleanly routed its French rival for control of the transalpine peninsula. Victory in this contest went to the State whose process of Absolutization was earlier and more developed. Ultimately, however, defeat in its first foreign adventure probably helped to ensure a sounder and more compact foundation for French Absolutism, forced back in on its own domestic territory. Immediately, on the other hand, it was the termination of the Italian wars, combined with the uncertainty of a succession crisis, which was to reveal how insecurely the Valois monarchy was still anchored in the country. The death of Henry II precipitated France into forty years of internecine strife.
The Civil Wars which raged after Cateau-Cambresis were, of course, set off by the religious conflicts attendant on the Reformation. But they provided a kind of radiography of the body politic in the late 16th century, in the way in which they exposed the multiple tensions and contradictions of the French social formation in the epoch of the Renaissance. For the struggle between the Huguenots and the Holy League for control of the monarchy, in practice politically vacant after the death of Henry II and the regency of Catherine of Medici, served as an arena for the coalescence of virtually every type of internal political conflict characteristic of the transition towards Absolutism. The Religious Wars were led, from first to last, by the three rival magnate lineages of Guise, Montmorency and Bourbon, each controlling a domanial territory, extensive clientele, leverage inside the State apparatus, loyal troops and international connections. The Guise family was master of the North-East from Lorraine to Burgundy; the Montmorency-Chatillon line was based on hereditary lands stretching through the whole Centre of the country; the Bourbon bastions lay essentially in the South-West. The inter-feudal struggle between these noble houses was intensified by the plight of needy rural squires all over France, previously habituated to plundering forays into Italy and now caught by the price inflation; this stratum provided military cadres ready for prolonged civil warfare, quite apart from the religious affiliations which divided it. Moreover, as the struggle wore on, the towns themselves split into two camps: many of the Southern cities rallying to the Huguenots, while the Northern inland towns became virtually without exception bulwarks of the League. It has been argued that differing commercial orientations (to the overseas or domestic market) influenced this division.7 It seems more probable, however, that the general geographical pattern of Huguenotism reflected a traditional regional separatism of the South, which had always lain farthest from the Capetian homelands in the He de France, and where the local territorial potentates had kept their independence longest. At the start, Protestantism had generally spread from Switzerland into France via the main river-systems of the Rhone, Loire and Rhine,8 providing a fairly even regional distribution of the Reformed faith. But once official toleration ceased, it rapidly reconcentrated in the Dauphine, Languedoc, Guyenne, Poitou, Saintonge, Beam and Gascgony – mountainous or coastal zones beyond the Loire, many of them harsh and poor, whose common characteristics were not so much commercial vitality as manorial particularism. Huguenotism always mustered artisans and burghers in its towns, but the appropriation of tithes by Calvinist notables ensured that the appeal of the new creed to the peasantry was very limited. Huguenot social leadership, in fact, was drawn overwhelmingly from the landowning class, where it could claim perhaps half the nobility in France in the 1560’s – while it never surpassed more than 10–20 per cent of the population as a whole.9 Religion retreated in the South into the embrace of aristocratic dissidence. The general strain of the confessional conflict can be seen as thus simply having split the tenuous fabric of French unity along its inherently weakest seam.
Once under way, however, the struggle unleashed deeper social conflicts than those of feudal secessionism. When the South was lost to Conde and the Protestant armies, a redoubled weight of royal taxation for the war fell on the beleaguered Catholic cities of the North. The urban misery that resulted from this development in the 1580’s provoked a radicalization of the Holy League in the towns, compounded by Henry III’s assassination of Guise. While the ducal lords of the Guise clan – Mayenne, Aumale, Elbeuf, Mercoeur – detached Lorraine, Brittany, Normandy and Burgundy in the name of Catholicism, and Spanish armies invaded from Flanders and Catalonia to aid the League, municipal revolutions exploded in the Northern cities. Power was seized in Paris by a dictatorial committee of discontented lawyers and clerics, backed by the famished plebeian masses and a fanatical phalanx of friars and preachers.10 Orléans, Bourges, Dijon, Lyon followed suit. Once the Protestant Henry of Navarre became the legal successor to the monarchy, the ideology of these urban revolts started to veer towards republicanism. At the same time, the tremendous devastation of the countryside by the constant military campaigns of these decades pushed the South-Central peasantry of Limousin, Périgord, Quercy, Poitou and Saintonge into menacingly non-religious risings in the 1590’s. It was this dual radicalization in town and country that finally reunited the ruling class: the nobility started to close ranks as soon as there was a real danger of an upheaval from below. Henry IV tactically accepted Catholicism, rallied the aristocratic patrons of the League, isolated the Committees, and suppressed the peasant revolts. The Religious Wars ended in a reaffirmed royal state.
French Absolutism now came relatively rapidly of age, although there was still to be one radical setback before it was definitively established. Its great administrative architects in the 17th century were, of course, Sully, Richelieu and Colbert. The size and diversity of the country were still largely unconquered when they began their work. Royal princes remained jealous rivals of the monarch, often in possession of hereditary governorships. Provincial parlements composed of a combination of rural gentry and lawyers represented bastions of traditional particularism. A commercial bourgeoisie was growing in Paris and other cities, and controlled municipal power. The French masses had been aroused by the civil wars of the previous century, when both sides had at different times appealed to them for support, and retained memories of popular insurgency.11 The specific character of the French Absolutist state which emerged in the grand siècle was designed to fit, and master, this complex of forces. Henry IV fixed royal presence and power centrally in Paris for the first time, rebuilding the city and making it into the permanent capital of the kingdom. Civic pacification was accompanied by official care for agricultural recovery and promotion of export trades. The popular prestige of the monarchy was restored by the personal magnetism of the founder of the new Bourbon dynasty himself. The Edict of Nantes and its supplementary articles contained the problem of Protestantism, by conceding it limited regional autonomy. No Estates-General was summoned, despite promises to do so made during the civil war. External peace was maintained, and with it administrative economy. Sully, the Huguenot Chancellor, doubled the net revenues of the State, mainly by shifting to indirect taxes, rationalizing tax-farms and cutting expenses. The most important institutional development of the reign was the introduction of the paulette in 1604: sale of offices in the state apparatus, which had existed for over a century, was stabilized by Paulet’s device of rendering them inheritable, in exchange for payment of a small annual percentage on their purchase value – a measure designed not only to increase the income of the monarchy, but also to insulate the bureaucracy from magnate influence. Under the frugal regime of Sully, sale of offices still represented only some 8 per cent of budget receipts.12 But from the minority of Louis XIII onwards, this proportion rapidly altered. A recrudescence of noble factionalism and religious unrest, marked by the last and ineffectual session of the Estates-General (1614–15) before the French Revolution, and the first aggressive intervention of the Parlement of Paris against a royal government, led to the brief dominance of the Due de Luynes. Pensions to buy off captious grandees and resumption of war against the Huguenots in the South increased state expenditures greatly. Henceforward, the bureaucracy and judiciary was to pullulate with the largest single volume of venal transactions in Europe. France became the classical land of sale of offices, as an ever-growing number of sinecures and prebends were created by the monarchy for revenue purposes. By 1620–4, the traffic in these provided some 38 per cent of royal revenues.13 Tax-farms, furthermore, were now regularly auctioned to large financiers, whose collecting systems might tap up to two-thirds of fiscal receipts on their way to the State. The steeply rising costs of foreign and domestic policy in the new international conjuncture of the Thirty