Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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security of tenure within the structures of the Absolutist State. Yet an irreducible sentiment of discomfort and friction subsisted between the two, even in this last period of optimal union between aristocracy and monarchy. For Absolutism, no matter how congenial its personnel and how attractive its service, remained an inaccessible and irresponsible power wielded over the heads of the nobility as a whole. The condition of its efficacy as a State was its structural distance from the class from which it was recruited and whose interests it defended. Absolutism in France never became unquestioningly trusted and accepted by the aristocracy on which it rested: its decisions were not accountable to the titled order which gave it life – necessarily so, as we shall see, because of the inherent nature of the class itself; yet also perilously so, because of the danger of unconsidered or arbitrary actions taken by the executive rebounding on it. Plenitude of royal power, even when mildly exercised, bred seigneurial reserve towards it. Montesquieu – President of the Parlement of Bordeaux under the easygoing regime of Fleury – gave unanswerable expression to the new type of aristocratic oppositionism characteristic of the century.
In fact, the Bourbon monarchy of the 18th century made very few moves of a ‘levelling’ type against the ‘intermediary powers’ which Montesquieu and his consorts cherished so intensely. The Ancien Régime in France preserved its bewildering jungle of heteroclite jurisdictions, divisions and institutions – pays d’états, pays d’éléctions, parlements, sénéschaussées, généralités – down to the Revolution. After Louis XIV, little further rationalization of the polity occurred: no uniform customs tariff, tax-system, legal code or local administration was ever created. The monarchy’s one attempt to impose a new conformity on a corporate body was its persistent effort to secure theological obedience in the clergy by persecution of Jansenism – which was invariably and vigorously combated by the Parlement of Paris in the name of traditional Gallicanism. The anachronistic quarrel over this ideological issue became the chief flash-point of relations between Absolutism and the noblesse de robe from the Regency to the epoch of Choiseul, when the Jesuits were formally expelled from France by the parlements, in a symbolic victory for Gallicanism. Much more serious, however, was to be the financial deadlock which eventually developed between the monarchy and the magistrature. Louis XIV had left a State massively encumbered with debts; the Regency had halved these by the Law system; but the costs of foreign policy from the War of the Austrian Succession onwards, combined with the extravagance of the court, kept the exchequer in steady and deepening deficit. Successive attempts to levy new taxes, puncturing the fiscal immunity of the aristocracy, were resisted or sabotaged in the Parlements and provincial Estates, by refusal to register edicts or presentation of indignant remonstrances. The objective contradictions of Absolutism here unfolded in their plainest form. The monarchy sought to tax the wealth of the nobility, while the nobility demanded controls on the policies of the monarchy: the aristocracy, in effect, refused to alienate its economic privileges without gaining political rights over the conduct of the royal State. In their struggle against the Absolutist governments over this issue, the judicial oligarchy of the Parlements came increasingly to use the radical language of the philosophes: migrant bourgeois notions of liberty and representation started to haunt the rhetoric of one of the most inveterately conservative and caste-like branches of the French aristocracy.33 By the 1770’s and 1780’s, a curious cultural contamination of sections of the nobility by the estate below it was pronounced in France.
For the 18th century had meanwhile seen a rapid growth in the ranks and fortunes of the local bourgeoisie. The epoch from the Regency onwards was in general one of economic expansion, with a secular increase of prices, relative agrarian prosperity (at least in the period 1730–74), and demographic recovery: the population of France rose from some 18/19 to 25/26 million between 1700 and 1789. While agriculture remained the overwhelmingly dominant branch of production, manufactures and commerce registered notable advances. French industry increased some 60 per cent in output in the course of the century;34 true factories started to appear in the textile sector; the foundations of iron and coal industries were laid. Far more rapid, however, was the progress of trade, above all in the international and colonial arenas. Foreign commerce proper quadrupled from 1716–20 to 1784–8, with a regular export surplus. Colonial trade achieved faster growth with the rise of the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations in the Antilles: in the last years before the Revolution, it came to two-thirds as much as French foreign trade.35 The commercial boom naturally stimulated urbanization; there was a wave of new building in the towns, and by the end of the century the provincial cities of France still outdistanced those of England in size and numbers, despite the much higher level of industrialization across the Channel. Meanwhile, sale of offices had dwindled away, with the aristocratic closure of the State apparatus. Absolutism in the 18th century switched increasingly to public loans, which did not create the same degree of intimacy with the State: rentiers did not receive ennoblement or tax-immunity as officiers had done. The wealthiest single group within the French capitalist class remained the financiers, whose speculative investments reaped the huge profits of army contracts, tax farms or royal borrowing. But by and large, the simultaneous diminution of commoner access to the feudal State and development of a commercial economy outside it, emancipated the bourgeoisie from its subaltern dependence on Absolutism. The merchants, manufacturers and shipowners of the Enlightenment, and the lawyers and journalists who grew up together with them, now increasingly prospered outside the ambit of the State, with inevitable results for the political autonomy of the bourgeois class as a whole.
The monarchy, for its part, now proved incapable of protecting bourgeois interests, even when they nominally coincided with those of Absolutism itself. Nowhere was this clearer than in the external policies of the late Bourbon State. The wars of the century followed an unerringly traditional pattern. Small annexations of land in Europe always in practice achieved priority over defense or acquisition of overseas colonies; maritime and commercial power was sacrificed to territorial militarism.36 Fleury, bent on peace, successfully ensured the absorption of Lorraine in the brief campaigns over the Polish Succession in the 1730’s, from which England stayed aloof. The War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740’s, however, saw the British fleet punish French shipping all the way from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, inflicting huge trading losses on France, while Saxe conquered the Southern Netherlands in an accomplished but futile land campaign: peace restored the status quo ante on both sides, but the strategic lessons were already clear to Pitt in England. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), in which France committed itself to join an Austrian attack on Prussia against every rational dynastic interest, brought disaster for the Bourbon colonial empire. The continental war was this time fought listlessly by French armies in Westphalia, while the naval war launched by Britain swept away Canada, India, West Africa and the West Indies. Choiseul’s diplomacy recuperated the Bourbon possessions in the Antilles at the Peace of Paris, but the chance of France presiding over a mercantile imperialism on a world scale was over. The American War of Independence allowed Paris to achieve a political revenge on London, by proxy: but the French role in North America, although vital to the success of the American Revolution, was essentially a spoiling operation, which brought no positive gains to France. Indeed, it was the costs of Bourbon intervention in the War of American Independence which forced on the ultimate fiscal crisis of French Absolutism at home. By 1788, the State debt was so large – payment of interest on it accounting for nearly 50 per cent of current expenditure – and the budgetary deficit so acute, that Louis XVI’s last ministers, Calonne and Loménie de Brienne, resolved to impose a land tax on the nobility and clergy. The Parlements furiously resisted these schemes; the monarchy in desperation decreed their dissolution; then, retreating before the uproar from the propertied classes, reestablished them; and finally, capitulating to the Parlements’ demands for an Estates-General before any tax-reform was granted, convoked the three Estates amidst the disastrous grain shortage, widespread unemployment and popular misery of 1789. The aristocratic reaction against Absolutism therewith passed into the bourgeois revolution which overthrew it. Fittingly, the historical collapse of the French Absolutist State was tied directly to the inflexibility of its feudal formation. The fiscal crisis which detonated the revolution of 1789 was provoked by its juridical inability to tax the class which it represented. The very rigidity of the nexus between State and nobility ultimately precipitated their common downfall.
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