Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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monarchy had constantly to resort to forced loans at high interest rates from the syndicates of its own tax-farmers, who were themselves at the same time officiers who had bought positions in the treasury section of the State apparatus.14 This vicious circle of financial improvisation inevitably maximized confusion and corruption. The multiplication of venal offices, in which a new noblesse de robe now became lodged, impeded any firm dynastic hold over major agencies of public justice and finance, and dispersed bureaucratic power both centrally and locally.
Yet it was in the same epoch that, curiously interlaced with this system, Richelieu and his successors started to build a rationalized administrative machine capable for the first time of direct royal control and intervention throughout France. De facto ruler of the country from 1624 onwards, the Cardinal proceeded promptly to liquidate the remaining Huguenot fortresses in the South-West, with the siege and capture of La Rochelle; crushed successive aristocratic conspiracies with summary executions; abolished the highest mediaeval military dignities; levelled noble castles and banned duelling; and suppressed Estates where local resistance permitted (Normandy). Above all, Richelieu effectively created the intendant system. The Intendants de Justice, de Police et de Finances were functionaries dispatched with omnibus powers into the provinces, at first on temporary and ad hoc missions, who later became permanent commissioners of the central government throughout France. Appointed directly by the monarchy, their offices were revocable and non-purchasable: normally recruited from the earlier maîtres de rêquites and themselves small or medium nobles in the 17th century, they represented the new power of the Absolutist State in the farthest reaches of the realm. Extremely unpopular with the officier stratum, on whose local prerogatives they infringed, they were used with caution at first, and coexisted with the traditional governorships of the provinces. But Richelieu broke the quasi-hereditary character of these regional lordships, long the peculiar prey of the highest aristocratic magnates, so that by the end of his rule, only a quarter were still held by men who predated his accession to power. There was thus a simultaneous and contradictory development of both officier and commissaire groups within the overall structure of the State during this period. While the role of the intendants grew progressively more prominent and authoritarian, the magistrature of the various parlements of the land, champions of legalism and particularism, became the most vocal spokesmen of officier resistance to them, intermittently hemming the initiatives of the royal government.
The compositional form of the French monarchy thus came, both in theory and practice, to acquire an extreme, ornate complexity. Kossmann has described its contours for the consciousness of the possessing classes of the time, in a striking passage: ‘Contemporaries felt that Absolutism in no way excluded that tension which seemed to them inherent in the State and altered none of their ideas of government. For them, the State was like a baroque church in which a great number of different conceptions mingle, clash and are finally absorbed into a single magnificent system. Architects had recently discovered the oval, and space came alive in their ingenious arrangements of it: everywhere the splendour of oval forms, gleaming from their corners, projected onto the construction as a whole the supple energy and swaying, uncertain rhythms cherished by the new style.’15 These ‘aesthetic’ principles of French Absolutism, nevertheless, corresponded to functional purposes. The relationship between taxes and dues in the traditional epoch, as has been seen, has been termed a tension between ‘centralized’ and ‘local’ feudal rent. This ‘economic’ duplication was in a sense reproduced in the ‘political’ structures of French Absolutism. For it was the very complexity of the architecture of the State which permitted a slow yet relentless unification of the noble class itself, which was gradually adapted into a new centralized mould, subject to the public control of the intendants, while still occupying privately owned positions within the officier system and local authority in the provincial parlements. Simultaneously, moreover, it achieved the feat of integrating the nascent French bourgeoisie into the circuit of the feudal state. For the purchase of offices represented such a profitable investment that capital was perpetually diverted away from manufacturing or mercantile ventures into a usurious collusion with the Absolutist State. Sinecures and fees, tax-farms and loans, honours and bonds all drew bourgeois wealth away from production. The acquisition of noble titles and fiscal immunity became normal entrepreneurial goals for roturiers. The social consequence was to create a bourgeoisie which tended to become increasingly assimilated to the aristocracy itself, via the exemptions and privileges of offices. The State, in its turn, sponsored royal manufactures and public trading companies which, from Sully to Colbert, provided business outlets for this class.16 The result was to ‘side-track’ the political evolution of the French bourgeoisie for a hundred and fifty years.
The weight of this whole apparatus fell on the poor. The reorganized feudal State proceeded to batten mercilessly on the rural and urban masses. The extent to which local commutation of dues and growth of a monetarized agriculture were compensated by centralized pumping of the surplus from the peasantry can be seen with stark clarity in the French case. In 1610, the fiscal agents of the State collected 17 million livres from the taille. By 1644, the exactions of this tax had trebled to 44 million livres. Total taxation actually quadrupled in the decade after 1630.17 The reason for this sudden and enormous increase in the fiscal burden was, of course, Richelieu’s diplomatic and military intervention in the Thirty Years’ War. Mediated at first by subventions to Sweden and then by hire of German mercenaries, it ended with large French armies in the field. The international effect was decisive. France settled the fate of Germany and destroyed the ascendancy of Spain. The Treaty of Westphalia, four years after the historic French victory at Rocroi, extended the frontiers of the French monarchy from the Meuse to the Rhine. The new structures of French Absolutism were thus baptised in the fire of European war. French success in the anti-Spanish struggle, in effect, coincided with domestic consolidation of the dual bureaucratic complex that made up the early Bourbon State. The military emergencies of the conflict facilitated the imposition of intendency in invaded or threatened zones: its huge financial expense at the same time necessitated unprecedented sale of offices and yielded spectacular fortunes for banking syndicates. The real costs of the war were borne by the poor, among whom it wrought social havoc. The fiscal pressures of war-time Absolutism provoked a constant ground-swell of desperate revolts by the urban and rural masses throughout these decades. There were town riots in Dijon, Aix and Poitiers in 1630; jacqueries in the countryside of Angoumois, Saintonge, Poitou, Périgord and Guyenne in 1636–7; a major plebeian and peasant rebellion in Normandy in 1639. The more important regional upsurges were interspersed with constant minor outbreaks of unrest against tax-collectors over large areas of France, frequently patronized by local gentry. Royal troops were regularly deployed for repression at home, while the international conflict was being fought abroad.
The Fronde can in certain respects be regarded as a high ‘crest’ of this long wave of popular revolts,18 in which for a brief period sections of the top nobility, the office-holding magistrature and the municipal bourgeoisie used mass discontents for their own ends against the Absolutist State. Mazarin, who succeeded Richelieu in 1642, had skilfully steered French foreign policy through to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and with it the acquisition of Alsace. After the Peace of Westphalia, however, Mazarin provoked the crisis of the Fronde by prolonging the anti-Spanish war into the Mediterranean theatre, where as an Italian he aimed at the sequestration of Naples and Catalonia. Fiscal extortion and financial manipulation to support the military effort abroad coincided with successive bad harvests in 1647, 1649 and 1651. Popular hunger and fury combined with a war-weary revolt of officiers led by the Parlement of Paris against the intendant system; the disgruntlement of rentiers at an emergency devaluation of government bonds; and the jealousy of powerful peers of the realm at an Italian adventurer manipulating a royal minority. The upshot was a confused and bitter mêlée in which, once again, the country seemed to fall apart as provinces detached themselves from Paris, marauding private armies wandered across the land, towns set up rebel municipal dictatorships, and complex manoeuvres and intrigues divided and reunited the rival princes competing for control of the court. Provincial governors sought to settle scores with local parlements, while municipal authorities seized the opportunity to attack the regional magistratures.19 The Fronde thus reproduced many elements of the pattern that marked the Religious