"The Oxford History of the French Revolution" III - Le Déluge Arrive

"Après moi, le déluge" - Attributed to Louis XV*

Been about a week and a half since I last posted, apologies.  This book has proven a bit more dense than the previous books, so a bit more time was required to get to the real meat of the history.

Let me start with an opening salvo: the radicals were right.   Not just right on the merits, but they were right to be outraged.  Right to demand action.  And right to try and take down the monarchy.  L'audace* was not a bad place to start. 

France under the Bourbon monarchy was, plainly put, a mess.  As a painting, it'd be a vintage Jackson Pollock.  And like a Jackson Pollock, good luck to the casual historian of making heads or tails of that nonsense.

In theory, absolute monarchies governed their nations like private fiefdoms.  The king was a benevolent pater familias patriae, tending to his nation the way a good father would tend to his family and his lands.  In practice, this was less tidy English manor and garden, and more like the Hoarders approach to governing.  From the time of the Charlemagne to the eve of the Revolution, the borders of France had grown, shrunk, and regrown as wars, dynastic marriages, and strategic annexations had slowly congealed to form the Kingdom of France.  And like all great hoarders, France just hated to modify or throw out any little thing about its newly found treasures.  (Preciouses?)  The cumulative effect over a millennium was that there was an absolutely mind-blowing lack of uniformity from region to region.  In addition to international borders, there internal customs unions.  Some regions had noble parliaments; some did not.

"Apart from royal edicts on certain general issues, the king's domains were subject to no law and no administrative practice common to them all without exception.  Southern provinces regulated their affairs by written, Roman law; but even there, in isolated regions like the Pyrenees, local customs were more important.  In northern France, they were all important....  This meant that the law relating to marriage, inheritance, and tenure of property could differ in important respects from one district to another. Every district, too, had its own range of weights and measures, and the same term often meant different values in different places.  In these circumstances fraud, or fear of it, bedeviled all exchanges..." (p. 4) 

This did have the effect of occasionally freeing up the hand of a region to exploit opportunities. By the 1780's, France had developed a small but growing class of industrialists and bourgeois who were to play a critical role in upending the old order.


Even more insidious than this was the proliferation of privilege.  A good deed done for an old king of France done there, and another done here, and said family or region or estate was exempt from one tax or another.   By the 1780's, this array of exemptions and privileges was dizzying:

What then made nobility so desirable?  Obviously there was the glamor, distinction, and recognition that noble status had always brought.  Then there was a range of privileges which all nobles enjoyed... Privilege was the hallmark of a country without uniform laws or institutions...  Nobles took precedence on public occasions... They were not subject to the corvée [the system of unpaid, mandatory labor], billeting of troops, or conscription into the militia... They escaped much of the weight of the gabelle, the hated, extortionate, salt monopoly...(p. 27)

The combination was, frankly, toxic.  The brew of idiosyncratically-ruled regions and inherited exemptions for individuals meant that by the 1780's, France had a small but entrenched minority of the population with a deeply personal stake in the continuation of not just the system of monarchy, but the Bourbon monarchy itself.  Worse, is that this meant that the glass ceiling of France that stood in the way of the successful bourgeois and the positions of ultimate power were effectively blood and the royal whim.  Some tiny fraction of the non-ennobled nouveau riche were able to acquire political power through the purchase of "venal offices", but only at tremendous expense.  This had the effect of embittering the ascendent bourgeois, who not only had to watch people eminently poorer, less-educated, dumber, but with the pedigree a thoroughbred would wicker in envy of, be granted the best military commissions, the best positions at court, and not have to pay the often heavy taxes imposed by the king.  The gap these privileges exposed between the entitled and the Third Estate was so glaring, that even on the eve of the Revolution, many nobles were agreeing to give up their fiscal privileges.
 
The first five chapters, while ostensibly a background in pre-Revolutionary France, fascinated me.  Among many other things, one of the best reasons to study history is that it is a chronicle of one, long experiment of human beings trying different things, and often failing.   The ancien régime is a case-study of everything that can possibly go wrong with absolute monarchy and then some.  Most of the people lived in abject poverty, one bad harvest away from starvation.  The nobility was a mix of poor, threadbare landowners clinging to old titles, and a lucky few ensconced at court, paying often ruinous sums to stay abreast of the latest fashions at Versailles.  The bourgeoisie was squeezed in the middle. Wealthier than the peasants, but deprived of any formal representation and significant legal rights, the bourgeoisie burned with resentment against their titled, often poorer, betters.

To boot, because the king could direct war policy as an extension of his person and his reputation, France was deeply indebted, after having come to the aid of the Americans in the Revolutionary War.  Why did France overextend itself to help a bunch of Yankee colonialists?  To avenge the loss of French North America in the Seven Years War.  Not that we contemporary Americans can relate to being over our heads in debt due to spending too much money liberating a foreign people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Or anything.

I am, admittedly, a man more of a David Brooks-style temperment (if not his politics), so I find conceding to any kind of radicalism galling, by instinct.  Normally, I suspect that greatest fault made by contemporary liberals and conservatives on a crusade to "change Washington" is to be heedless of the Folly of Chesterton's Fence, the idea that when coming upon an obstructive fence in the road, the first instinct of a reformer will be to demand the removal of the fence instead of asking why it got there.  In France, this had long since surpassed a case of dealing with Chesterton's Fence.  Chesterton's fence had spread like kudzu, turning the whole country into a hopeless labyrinth of white pickets. The Jacobins, coming across this maze in the road, were right to size it up, and to remove the Louis XVI-sized plug in the levee, and hope that the deluge would wash it all away.

At least, at first...


* Some debate about who said it, but Merriam-Webster's acknowledges Louis XV.

** A quote by the moderate Jacobin Georges Danton, inveighing his fellow deputies to stand strong at the height of the crises of 1793, "Pour les vaincre, messieurs, il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace et la Patrie sera sauvée!". Translation: "To beat them, gentlemen, if we are bold, bolder still, forever bold, then France is saved!" (p. 191)