Abstract
The appropriateness of the term ‘absolutism’ as a description of the seventeenth-century French monarchy has been the subject of extensive debate among historians since the year 1945, when Roland Mousnier published his impressive thesis on the venal office-holding system under the first two Bourbons.1 His exhaustive examination of the Norman bureaucracy revealed the extent to which these hereditary offices were distinct from the royal authority which had created them. Their holders were theoretically agents of the crown, but the right of an officier to designate his own successor ensured that the king had little control over the personnel of his own administration. These officials often carried out the tasks entrusted to them, not least because it was by doing so that they derived their income, but there were many occasions when they openly refused or covertly failed to implement the instructions of their sovereign and his ministers.
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Bibliography
The best introductions to early modern French ‘absolutism’ are David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (1983), and Richard Bonney, L’absolutisme, ‘Que sais-je?’ no. 2486 (Paris, 1989), both of which also examine the relevant medieval background. William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-century France: a Study in the Evolution of Ideas (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), summarises monarchical and resistance theories during the ‘religious wars’, and Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols (New York, 1939; reprinted London 1964), examines the economic ideas and reforms associated with absolute monarchy. Relations between the crown and the parlements are discussed by A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: the Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652 (Princeton, 1971), who demonstrates the primarily legal priorities and methods of the judges, and by Albert N. Hamscher, who charts the re-establishment of cooperation in two books, The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde, 1653–1673 (Pittsburgh, 1976), and The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the Age of Louis XIV: a Study in French Absolutism (Philadelphia, 1987). The relations of the government with a provincial parlement, studied by Sharon Kettering in Judicial Politics and Urban Revolt in Seventeenth-century France: the Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Princeton, 1978), are shown to have been further complicated by the interference of other elites and institutions in the province, and she has developed this investigation, especially by examining the mechanisms of patronage, in Patrons, Clients and Brokers in Seventeenth-century France (Oxford, 1988). Other excellent studies of rivalries among provincial elites have been made by David Parker, La Rochelle and the French Monarchy: Conflict and Order in Seventeenth-century France (1980), and William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), each based on a clearly defined geographical unit. Others have selected a group because of its function in the kingdom, the aristocratic governors in the case of Robert R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: the Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, 1978), the varied people who acted as financiers in Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au grand siècle (Paris, 1984), and the judicial and mercantile families who administered the capital in Barbara B. Diefendorf, Paris City Councillors in the Sixteenth Century: the Politics of Patrimony (Princeton, 1983). A different approach has been taken by Eugène L. Asher, who has traced the provincial opposition to a single government policy in The Resistance to the Maritime Classes: the Survival of Feudalism in the France of Colbert (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1960), while Joseph Bergin, in Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (1985), examines the power base of a single minister and finds that he used traditional methods of clientage to establish his position. All these studies stress the importance of patronage, family influence and clienteles in the social and political mechanisms of early modern France, and Roger Mettam, in Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 1988), incorporates their conclusions into a more wide-ranging discussion of power structures in seventeenth-century France. Local jurisdictional rivalries became even more complicated when the ecclesiastical authorities were involved, often forcing the crown to intervene and causing embarrassing dilemmas for the royal ministers. Two such confrontations are examined in all their complexity by Richard Golden, The Godly Rebellion: Parisian Curés and the Religious Fronde, 1652–1662 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), and B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in early Eighteenth-century Paris (Princeton, 1978). Finally, the power of the crown cannot be understood without an understanding of the fiscal system and of the forces of order at the disposal of the king. Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981), admirably describes the inadequacy and unpredictability of royal revenues, while André Corvisier, Louvois (Paris, 1983), shows that many reforms of the army were never implemented satisfactorily and that here too the effects of aristocratic patronage and of local interest groups remained strong.
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© 1990 Roger Mettam
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Mettam, R. (1990). France. In: Miller, J. (eds) Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21121-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21121-0_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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