Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (10 page)

not avoid reviving old constitutional questions, thus conjuring up once

again the specter of the Estates General. They did so in part by levying

a new tax called the
vingtième
on noble as well as common landowners.

Lords who in many cases had already been helping impoverished peasant

tenants pay their own “ignoble” tax (the so-called
taille
) would in future

have to pay taxation assessed at 5 percent on their own lands. This turn

56 David Parker,
The Making of French Absolutism
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 146.

57 Cited in Joseph Klaits,
Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV. Absolute Monarchy and
Public Opinion
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 211–13.

58 Ibid., 267. See also, on this subject, Lionel Rothkrug,
Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political
and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965).

The ancien régime

35

of events gave rise to a spate of antitax protests in the
parlements,
those royal courts of final appeal whose acknowledged right to approve or

criticize royal acts made them lodestones of constitutional controversy

throughout the eighteenth century.59 The judges of these tribunals,

being the king’s “men,” were expected to confine their remonstrances

against royal edicts to protests relayed confidentially to Versailles; but

as the
parlementaires
became increasingly embroiled in disputes with

the crown in the 1750s and 1760s, “private” remonstrances increasingly

gave way to published protests that were devoured by the reading

public.

So law courts customarily devoted to upholding the writ of royalty set

a precedent, dangerous to both the crown and themselves, of invoking the

notion of “no taxation without representation.” The Paris Parlement in

remonstrances of 1763 (that year of Gallic diplomatic humiliation) insisted

to Louis XV that “to levy a tax without consent” was “to do violence to

the constitution of the French government” and – more to the point – to

“injure . . . the rights of the Nation.”60 And what the Parisian jurists,

restrained somewhat by a special working relationship with Versailles,

did not altogether explicate, the more vociferous judges in the provinces

did. “As long as there were Estates in France,” the magistrates at Rouen

recalled nostalgically, “the people . . . were familiar with the nature and

extent of the government’s needs. . . . knowing [also] the nature and extent

of their own resources, they could determine and regulate their tax con-

tributions.” Concluded the Normans: “The right of consent is the right

of the Nation.”61 It was “crystal clear,” stated Brittany’s parlementaires

unequivocally, that “in the common law of France the consent of the

three orders . . . in the Assembly of the Estates-General is necessary for

the establishment . . . of taxes.”62

More of this was to follow, in a steadily escalating assault on the crown

that eventually provoked, during 1770–74, an attempt at Versailles to gov-

ern without judicial interference in political affairs. But those who de-

nounced Chancellor René-Nicolas-Charles Augustin de Maupeou’s coup

of 1770 against the parlements were in the end rescued by something

less fortuitous than Louis XV’s death in 1774. For, even prior to that

event, the government was apparently moving toward a complete reversal

of Chancellor Maupeou’s policy. It seems, in other words, that extreme

authoritarianism in France – meaning, chiefly, government without the

moderating influence of institutions like the parlements – was viewed at

59 For an overview of the parlements, see Jean Egret,
Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire,
1715–1774
(Paris: A. Colin, 1970).

60 Cited in Elie Carcassonne,
Montesquieu et le problème de la constitution franc¸aise au
XVIIIe siècle
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1927), p. 292.

61 Ibid., pp. 292–93.

62 Ibid., p. 294.

36

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Versailles as unworkable. Therefore, Durand Echeverria’s assertion that

Louis XVI’s dismissal of Maupeou in 1774 was “the inevitable liquidation

of an exhausted expedient” essentially rings true.63

But, as the new king’s government verged on yet another passage at

arms with London, and was worried as well about developments in eastern

Europe, it could not help but revisit constitutional issues. In early 1776 the

Council debated whether or not to call the Estates General; that it chose

not to do so did not necessarily mean that those in power were unaware of

the benefits conferred on Britain by its parliamentary form of government.

“The strong bond between citizens and the state,” Finance Minister Jacques

Necker was later to observe, “the influence of the nation on the govern-

ment, the guarantee of civil liberty to the individual, the patriotic support

which the people always give to their government in times of crisis, all con-

tribute to making the English constitution unique in the world.”64 Because

of his onerous fiscal responsibilities, Necker had somehow to find ways –

short of British-style parliamentarianism – to bolster that confidence of

taxpayers and bondholders in government failing which Vergennes would

have no chance of achieving his geopolitical designs. Hence Necker’s un-

flagging attempts in preambles to fiscal edicts, financial statements like

the famous
Compte rendu
of 1781, and more general treatises to elucidate

his reforms of the financial system, his curbing of courtiers’ pensions and

gratuities and landed proprietors’ tax privileges, and his insistence that in-

terest on state loans be paid out of a surplus in the “ordinary” or “fixed”

finances of the crown.65 Hence, also, his institution of provincial assem-

blies of landowners in the provinces of Berri and Haute-Guyenne – others

were to follow elsewhere – to share with agents of the crown an array of

tax-allocating and other administrative duties.66

Such initiatives, automatically, incurred the hostility of self-appointed

champions of French absolutism and (in conjunction with other factors)

brought about the disgrace of this resourceful finance minister in 1781.

But Necker’s fall from power could not spare a regime that was awash in

geopolitically engendered debt from having eventually to seek a constitu-

tional understanding with its own subjects. The Bourbons’ engagements

in the world beyond France had led them to adopt various refinements

63 Durand Echeverria,
The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism,
France, 1770–1774
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), pp. 34, 122. This is also Egret’s conclusion in
Louis XV et l’opposition parlementaire
, p. 228.

64 Cited in Robert D. Harris,
Necker: Reform Statesman of the Ancien Régime
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 121.

65 On these points, see also Harris, “Necker’s Compte renduof 1781: A Reconsideration,”

Journal of Modern History
42 (1970): 161–83; and Bosher,
French Finances
, passim.

66 See, on the provincial assemblies, Pierre Renouvin,
Les Assemblées provinc¸iales de 1787:
Origines, développements, résultats
(Paris: A. Picard, 1921).

The ancien régime

37

of fiscal-administrative absolutism; but the same policies forced them in

the end to acknowledge, and finally to try to overcome, the constitutional

flaws inherent in that absolutism.

Clearly, then, geostrategic and constitutional issues were ever more

closely interrelated as the eighteenth century wore on. However, that those

issues resonated as powerfully as they did was due to their
ideological
and
social
context. This involved, to begin with, an expanding public commentary upon issues of state. True, “public opinion” was an old phenomenon

in France; still, as Keith Baker and others have been stressing for some

time, it only arrived as a potent
political
force after midcentury.67 “There is a philosophical wind blowing toward us from England in favor of free,

anti-monarchical government,” wrote the marquis d’Argenson. “All the

orders of society are discontented together . . . a disturbance could turn

into a revolt, and revolt into a total revolution.”68 “There has always been

frivolous and inconsequential reasoning in France about the conduct of

government,” complained the eminent jurisconsult Pierre Gilbert de

Voisins; “but today the very foundations of the constitution and the order

of the State are placed in question.”69 Symptomatically, Jacob-Nicolas

Moreau, a publicist and acolyte of royalism, urged the ministers in a mem-

orandum of 1759 to take the offensive against the parlements and trumpet

the virtues of monarchy in France.70

That the “mysteries of State” were being indiscreetly debated in public

view owed something to broader trends in French society. The steady if not

spectacular growth of the economy and related increase in population (most

notably, of leisured bourgeois) must have found their reflection in a larger

reading public (and in the associated rise of public opinion).71 That public,

in turn, was now encountering in Denis Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
and a le-

gion of less voluminous works the message of the philosophes. Under the

aegis of “Enlightenment,” if we may believe one of its most distinguished

67 Keith M. Baker, “On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution,”

in Dominick LaCapra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds.,
Modern European Intellectual History
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 216–17. On the linkage between “public opinion” and larger geopolitical issues, see Orville T. Murphy,
The Diplomatic Retreat of
France and Public Opinion on the Eve of the French Revolution, 1783–1789
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997).

68 Cited in Baker, “On the Problem of the Ideological Origins,” pp. 208–9.

69 Cited in ibid., p. 213.

70 Ibid., pp. 214–15. See also, on Moreau, Keith M. Baker,
Inventing the French Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 59–85.

71 On these points, see C. E. Labrousse,
Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en
France au XVIIIe siècle,
2 vols. (Paris: Dalloz, 1933), and
La Crise de l’économie franc¸aise
à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1940); and Jacques Dupâquier,
La Population franc¸aise aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979).

38

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

students, educated individuals “started to assume . . . that politics must not

be different from physics, from chemistry, or from the growing of wheat,

that there should be no mysteries, no secrets, no
raisons d’Etat
, [and] that one had the right to observe, to discuss and to insist upon real and practical

state reforms, just as if one were analyzing the composition of air or med-

itating upon the ripening of crops.”72 And certainly unheard-of numbers

of nobles and bourgeois outside the precincts of government were in these

years dabbling in “science,” frequenting meetings of provincial academies

and Masonic societies, patronizing reading clubs, and reviewing in salons

and cafés the policies and rumored peccadilloes of the high and mighty at

Versailles.73 But more important, perhaps, the Enlightenment was sapping

the “Establishment” from within. Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de

Malesherbes, in those days chief censor of the regime, made it possible

for Diderot to bring out the first edition of the
Encyclopédie
, and pro-

tected the literary efforts of other social critics as well.74 What was more,

ministers like Jean Baptiste Machault d’Arnouville, Etienne de Silhouette,

and Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin, grappling with the kingdom’s

geopolitically induced fiscal problems, had to espouse “enlightened” val-

ues insofar as they were trying to rationalize administrative procedures and

curb the tax exemptions and other privileges of regions, groups, and indi-

viduals. Their actions were perforce emulated (and their values endorsed)

by the provincial intendants and their subdelegates.75

Moreover, the crown was challenged by men still fighting the battles of

the past as well as by those struggling to define the issues of the future. Most

notably, recent inquiries have shown how deeply embroiled the monarch

and his parlementaires were in religious controversies over Jansenism and

Gallicanism. Initially little more than a strain of thought stressing pre-

destinarian and other austere tendencies within Catholicism, Jansenism in

time became a focal point of constitutional debate in the old regime. The

effort by both papacy and crown to suppress the Jansenists, whom they

viewed as subversive, revived in some Frenchmen’s eyes the old bugbear of

an ultramontane attack upon the kingdom’s historic “Gallican liberties.”