4. The Political Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

Firstly, the aforesaid Lord King [Philip IV of Spain] declares and recognizes that the aforesaid Lords States General of the United Netherlands and the respective provinces thereof, with all their associated districts, cities, and dependent lands, are free and sovereign states, provinces, and lands, upon which, together with their associated districts, cities, and lands aforesaid, he, the Lord King, does not now make any claim, and he himself and his successors descendants will in the future never make any claim; and therefore is satisfied to negotiate with these Lords States, as he does by these presents, a perpetual peace, on the conditions hereinafter described and confirmed.

It is obviously difficult for a population as large as that of our city suddenly to unite and arm itself. Good opportunities are rare: therefore when they occur, it is an act of prudence and great magnanimity to accept them. If you only are clear-sighted enough to recognize it, you will see that God has already delivered you into the hands of good fortune.…

And have no fear, fellow Neapolitans, of [the Spaniards’] power, for they allowed themselves to be expelled from the seven provinces of Flanders [sic] by Dutch fisherman, and from Portugal on their frontiers; and though on each occasion they were supported by your forces, they were powerless to resist. What, then, can they do without you, against you?

The most common idea that is spreading among the people [of Paris] is that the Neapolitans have acted intelligently, and that in order to shake off oppression, their example should be followed. It is understood, however, that allowing the people in the streets to shout aloud their enthusiasm for the revolt of Naples has caused great inconvenience. Therefore measures have been taken to prevent gazettes from reporting further on it.

The 1640s were especially trying for the Spanish branch of the Habsburg dynasty. Aside from the ongoing challenge of ending the long and costly war with his rebellious provinces in the northern Netherlands, Philip IV was faced in 1640 with two new revolutions: in May, the principality of Catalonia, which on the commercial strength of Barcelona was the most important part of his Aragonese possessions, rose up in revolt; in December, the kingdom of Portugal, which had been cobbled into the composite Habsburg state in Iberia and Italy some sixty years earlier, declared its independence, taking with it a vast array of colonial interests. After an unsuccessful military campaign to subdue Barcelona as well as a diplomatic failure to prevent a Catalonian alliance with France, the Habsburg regime in Madrid appeared to be incapable of mounting even a token resistance to the Portuguese secession. Meanwhile, although the effective loss of Portugal had simplified some of the sticking points in negotiating peace with the Dutch, it was not until 1647 that a preliminary treaty, formally recognizing the independence of the Dutch Republic, was completed in the Westphalian city of Münster. Thus even before the Peace of Münster could be ratified and officially promulgated (1648), a spectacular popular revolt in Naples in the summer of 1647, paired with several others in Sicily, threatened even more serious damage to Philip’s dynastic house of cards. Surely all of this opposition merely confirmed the English ambassador’s belief, expressed as early as 1641, that “the greatness of this monarchy is near to an end.” ^[1]

Yet the tribulations of Philip IV were hardly unique. At the same time that Philip was being confronted with the obvious limits of his autonomy as the sovereign of a composite monarchy in the Mediterranean, the Austrian Habsburgs were coming to grips with the limits of their imperial ambitions in Germany. Though imperial forces had enjoyed considerable success and Ferdinand III had entered the initial negotiations to end the Thirty Years’ War boldly by claiming to speak for the empire as a whole, he had to negotiate alongside and with many of his nominal subordinates and was eventually forced to acknowledge the sovereignty of the constituent units of his empire in the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Meanwhile, the same English ambassador who observed the decline of the Spanish monarchy saw his homeland engulfed in civil war (1642–1649) and his own sovereign executed before the decade was out. And the same French monarchy that had sought to take advantage of Spanish troubles in Barcelona, Lisbon, and Naples found itself under direct attack at home during the so-called Fronde, which began in earnest in 1648 and forced the young king, Louis XIV, to flee Paris. In an imaginary political commodities market around 1650, then, the value of princely futures in general would surely have been depressed; in fact, given the evidence most readily at hand, only the most adventurous of investors were willing to risk a great deal on new investments in the future of monarchical or imperial consolidation.

The simultaneity of so many serious challenges to the sovereign claims of existing regimes has spawned a sizable literature regarding what is usually called the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. R. B. Merriman ([1938] 1963) first explored the similarities and connections among “six contemporaneous revolutions” at midcentury, but in the 1950s and beyond the “crisis” debate, spawned by Eric Hobsbawm and H. R. Trevor-Roper, paid relatively little attention to these political conflicts, focusing instead on questions relating to the characteristics of a more general social and economic crisis of which Merriman’s “revolutions” were said to be symptomatic (Ashton 1965; Parker and Smith 1978). Before long the crisis metaphor itself became the focus of attention as a new generation of scholars found ever more crises to explore, either in other dimensions of the mid-seventeenth-century European experience or in other decades, reaching all the way back to the early sixteenth century. Eventually, T. K. Rabb (1975) suggested that the original crisis of the mid-seventeenth century might most usefully be seen as merely the climax of a much grander social, political, and cultural “struggle for stability” that began in the early sixteenth century and finally gave way to the relative stability of Europe’s ancien régime by the 1680s.^[2]

For our purposes, it is essential to refocus on the political dimensions of the mid-seventeenth-century crisis and to situate these multiple challenges to Europe’s dynastic princes within both the changing spaces of European politics and the larger history of popular political practice. Looking prospectively from the end of the sixteenth century, this chapter examines the constellation of political conflicts that finally yielded to a relatively durable pattern of religious and political settlement in the second half of the seventeenth century. I argue that the political action of ordinary people was instrumental in transforming the composite states created by aggressive princes nearly everywhere in Europe, not just in those areas where a broad-based Reformation coalition had succeeded in implanting Protestant churches in the sixteenth century. This is not to say, of course, that popular political actors were everywhere (or even anywhere unambiguously) triumphant; rather, surveying the revolutionary conflicts that constituted the midcentury crisis, I highlight the variable, transient, and often ambiguous outcomes of the religious and political struggles. My goal, in proceeding from one region to the next, is to describe and account for the complex interactions of rulers and subjects in a number of revolutionary situations and to suggest how the outcomes of these struggles structured, in turn, the political opportunities of ordinary people under Europe’s new regime.

The End of the Religious Wars?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was credible evidence to suggest that the dangerous and destructive cycle of “religious” wars that had attended the reformations of the sixteenth century might actually be coming to an end. The most promising signs of hope first appeared in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes in France and the death of Philip II in Spain. On the face of it, the Edict of Nantes might have been just another in the dismal series of merely temporary truces that had marked the intervals between no less than nine wars in France, but two developments signaled that the depoliticization of the question of religious difference might actually be possible. In the first place, a special system of courts proved to be remarkably effective in limiting the scope of conflicts between Protestants and Catholics regarding the practical implications of the edict’s formal recognition of religious difference.^[3] But equally important, Henry IV apparently convinced enough of the elite leaders on both sides of the Protestant/Catholic divide, with the help of liberal subsidies and pensions, to accept him as the guarantor of their political interests; consequently, the risk of personal losses in a revived war appeared to be greater than the political costs of continuing an initially unsatisfying peace. By 1610 the peace in France was secure enough to survive even the assassination of Henry IV. Similarly, after so many years of Philip II’s stubborn refusal to accept any kind of compromise with Protestantism, the ascension of Philip III to the Castilian throne brought with it the possibility of compromise in the Spanish Habsburgs’ very costly war with their rebellious Dutch provinces. Though a permanent peace that resolved the especially thorny issues of colonial competition still proved to be elusive, an armistice in 1607 yielded to the Twelve-Year Truce (1609–1621) by which, for all practical purposes, Spain recognized the sovereignty of the United Provinces.

Subtler, though no less important, signs of hope for an enduring religious peace were also visible within the German-Roman Empire, the heartland of the first phase of the European Reformation (see Munck 1990; Hughes 1992). The significant question there was whether the apparently inflexible and unambiguously authoritarian principle of cuius regio eius religio, as articulated in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, could accommodate either renewed contestation between particular subjects and rulers over matters of religious choice and identity or ongoing changes in the larger confessional map of central and eastern Europe. With regard to the latter, by the turn of the century a series of princely conversions had demonstrated the resilience of the agreement, even when princes like the elector of the Palatinate embraced Calvinism instead of Lutheranism, which was the only officially recognized Protestant sect under the Augsburg settlement.^[4] As for ongoing conflicts between subjects and rulers, a combined municipal and ecclesiastical revolution in the East Frisian town of Emden in 1595 preserved the local Calvinist church and liberated the municipal council from an aggressively Lutheran count (Schilling 1991); it demonstrated that broadly popular challenges to the territorial prince’s exclusive claim to the ius reformandi would not necessarily lead to a new cycle of war. Similarly, the successful resistance of the Lutheran city of Lemgo to the count of Lippe’s attempt to impose Calvinism in the 1610s highlighted the extent to which the authoritarian claims of Germany’s rulers could be openly challenged by determined subjects within the framework of the empire (Schilling 1988). Meanwhile, Protestantism seemed to flourish informally even in the patrimonial lands of the Austrian Habsburgs under both Maximilian II (1564–1576) and Rudolf II (1576–1612). Although the latter successfully expelled Protestant pastors from Vienna, his authority nearly collapsed altogether when he tried unsuccessfully to promote the Counter-Reformation in Hungary; in 1609 he was even forced to grant the Letter of Majesty in Bohemia, which entailed not only important political concessions to the Estates of Bohemia but also religious guarantees to the many Protestant groups that were thriving there (Polisensky 1971; Evans 1979; Eberhard 1995).

If, taken together, these were signs of hope for a general religious peace in Europe, they were equally signs of the fragility of peace. Religion and politics remained thoroughly intertwined, and religious difference retained its potential as a marker of political enmity as long as rulers entertained exclusive claims to cultural sovereignty or significant numbers of their subjects actively sought the exclusive reformation or counterreformation of whole polities. Thus the temporary absence of religious war on a large scale merely suggests the temporary absence of comprehensive Reformation and Counter-Reformation coalitions willing and able to press mutually exclusive claims to religious hegemony (see fig. 6); and, for the time being at least, religious dissent and political conflict on the local or regional scale did not automatically lead to a new round of religious war on a broader scale. More precisely, the relative peace of the early years of the seventeenth century appears to have been predicated on the momentary willingness of Europe’s princely rulers—rooted as often as not in political and military necessity—to moderate their attempts to consolidate their power over matters of religious conscience. Indeed, it is telling that when the elector of Brandenburg officially embraced Calvinism in 1613, he restricted the scope of this Second Reformation to the court for the sake of peace with his overwhelmingly Lutheran subjects. But on the other side of the same coin, when the Austrian Habsburgs in alliance with the papacy sought to overturn the political and religious compromises they had been forced to accept in Bohemia in 1609, it was enough to precipitate after 1618 yet another round of religious war. This cluster of extremely destructive conflicts, known retrospectively as the Thirty Years’ War, eventually involved all of the great powers of Europe before it was resolved by the relatively durable treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648 (see Parker 1984).

What made the Thirty Years’ War a “religious” war was hardly the purity of religious motives among the many combatants. Rather, like the religious wars that preceded it—from the Peasants’ War and the Schmalkaldic War in Germany through the civil wars in France and the Dutch War of Independence—the Thirty Years’ War was specifically religious in at least three ways: (1) it was precipitated by significant challenges to an established ruler’s claim to a comprehensive political and religious sovereignty over his subjects; (2) it invoked and mobilized large-scale, armed coalitions within the empire that were identified in large measure with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation causes; and (3) an unambiguous military victory for one side or the other potentially promised an equally unambiguous victory for the Protestant or Roman Catholic church in the polities of central and eastern Europe where the battles were principally fought. In this sense, although it is well known that the Thirty Years’ War was fought by military alliances in which religious conviction took a back seat to political and strategic calculation, it is equally safe to say that it revived and expanded the truly “confessional” era in European history during which an uncompromising princely claim to cultural and religious sovereignty became the hallmark of what is often called absolutism (cf. Hsia 1989). By the same token, the compromise settlements that finally brought an end to the carnage in 1648 did not bring an end to the era of religious politics or even to the age of religious war on a more limited scale within specific polities.^[5] Indeed, as long as Europe’s rulers were tempted to use religious beliefs and institutions to extend or consolidate their authority over their subjects, religion and politics would continue to be thoroughly entwined.

For our purposes, however, it is important to realize that, even in the territories most directly affected by the Thirty Years’ War, religion remained only one of a very mixed bag of issues that animated popular political action. In the Austrian Erblände,^[6] for example, locally mobilized peasant resistance to economic and social subjection at the hands of noble landlords in what is often called the “second serfdom” coalesced into a major peasant uprising (the largest within the empire since 1525) across Upper and Lower Austria between 1594 and 1597 (Evans 1979: 85–100; Rebel 1983). Since the areas of the revolt were also areas where a variety of forms of Protestant worship had largely overshadowed a weakened Catholic church, however, the military defeat of the peasants provided a pretext for the vigorous assertion of the Counter-Reformation in the Austrian countryside in the course of the seventeenth century. Even though there was intermittent popular resistance to wartime exactions, the Thirty Years’ War, like its sixteenth-century predecessors, quickly and effectively closed down most of the opportunities for independent popular political action in those areas most directly affected by it. Thus the Catholic armies in alliance with an aggressive Counter-Reformation clergy succeeded in enforcing the political sovereignty and cultural politics of Ferdinand II—which boiled down to the equation of Protestantism with all manner of disloyalty and the stern insistence on a single-confession state—in Bohemia and the Austrian Erblände in the 1620s; this, in turn, produced massive flows of Protestant refugees comparable to the flight of Protestants from the southern Netherlands after 1585.^[7]

The intermixture of religion and politics remained volatile in France and the Low Countries, too, especially with the coming of the Thirty Years’ War, but in both places it failed to reignite the fires of civil or religious war on the scale of the sixteenth century. In France the relative tranquillity of the first two decades of the seventeenth century—retrospectively seen as a “golden age” in French historiography—gave way to more serious political dissension in the 1620s, and once again it invoked elements of the Huguenot alliance. Though the Protestant magnates who led the wars of the sixteenth century had been pacified in 1598, they had certainly not disappeared altogether. Thus when the royal government began seriously to reconstruct the king’s authority by undermining the political concessions of the Edict of Nantes, they encountered serious resistance from some of the political elites whose power was most directly threatened in the Protestant strongholds of the south and southwest. Following the king’s successful attack in 1620 on the county of Béarn, a defiant Protestant stronghold in the Pyrenees, there were a series of piecemeal confrontations in which local Protestant resistance might occasionally hold off the royal offensive, as at Montauban. But the monarchy’s determination was amply rewarded by the Treaty of Montpellier (1622), which prescribed the dismantling of virtually all of the Protestants’ fortified towns (places de sureté). What is remarkable about these encounters is that they failed to invoke or re-create the fully articulated Huguenot alliance of the sixteenth-century civil wars; most Protestant leaders, indeed, seem to have concluded that open rebellion was useless or counterproductive (Briggs 1977: 92–94), while those who did revolt enjoyed very little popular support. An ill-conceived commitment of English support to La Rochelle in 1627 finally provided the royal government with a pretext for a direct attack on this last bastion of Huguenot independence. Yet when La Rochelle finally fell after a fourteen-month siege, the Peace of Alais (1629), which forced the Huguenots to give up the last of their fortresses and troops, nevertheless guaranteed their liberty of conscience. Though severely tested, then, the central compromise of the Edict of Nantes granting Protestants a limited freedom of worship held firm; and for the time being the volatile identification of religious difference with political revolt was once again broken along with the independent military strength of the Protestant magnates. But the Protestants were more dependent than ever on the king’s “protection.”

This is not to say, of course, that the relations between subjects and rulers in France remained tranquil. On the contrary, in 1635 France began a direct and exceedingly costly engagement in the Thirty Years’ War that precipitated a widespread series of both urban and rural revolts including two very significant regional rebellions—those of the Croquants in 1636–1637 and the Nu-Pieds in 1639—and culminated in the Fronde at midcentury (Tilly 1986; Briggs 1989; Bercé 1990). Just as the religious peace had brought ordinary people a measure of tax relief after 1598, the king’s increasingly aggressive domestic and foreign policies in the 1620s and 1630s brought with them a steep rise in royal taxation—both in the taille, the tax on peasant land, and in the aides, the urban excises on foodstuffs and other essential commodities (Tilly 1981, 1986). Widespread evasion combined with corruption to produce only an incrementally small yield on these new taxes at the same time that the determination of the state’s fiscal agents provided the king’s subjects with ready targets for their resentment and opposition. Again the building block of popular political opposition was local mobilization against specific officials and over concrete issues. For their part in confronting these local oppositions, royal officials generally followed a two-pronged strategy of compromise when necessary and violent repression when possible, both of which were intended to limit the scope of popular opposition.

As tax evasion gave way to open resistance, however, and local resistance aggregated into broadly based regional revolts, as it did in 1636 and 1639, the French monarchy was faced with fully articulated opposition coalitions of the sort that had briefly disappeared in the first third of the seventeenth century. What made these opposition coalitions especially frightening and dangerous is that they combined a broad base of popular mobilization with locally significant elite leadership, but what these coalitions generally lacked was the ideological glue, the more experienced mercenaries, and the international networks of support that had sustained both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation coalitions during the wars of religion. Professing allegiance to the king while attacking “corrupt” officials and “tyrannical” policies, then, the popular armies of regional revolt were in the long run no match for the far more professional and resourceful armies of the king. At this level, too, repression was combined with concession to produce inequalities in taxation that would in turn fuel more and different kinds of opposition another day. Yet in the impressively diverse catalog of “contentious gatherings” that Charles Tilly gives us for five selected regions of France in the 1630s and 1640s, the common denominator remains “the royal effort to raise money for war” (1981: 139; see also tables, 140–143).

In the Dutch Republic religious difference also threatened to return as a salient marker of political enmity and opposition, but in a rather different way. To the extent that the Union of Utrecht represented a religious settlement for this new polity, it privileged the Reformed church as the exclusive public church, but it forbade the persecution of individuals in matters of religious conscience. What emerged in the northern Netherlands, then, was a pluralistic society that afforded religious “dissenters” locally variable opportunities, not only to survive, but in some places even to flourish.^[8] Though the relations among the public church, the dissenting communities, and the local officials (who functioned as reluctant referees as much as cultural sovereigns) were often contentious and unstable, it was conflict within the Reformed church—not between confessional groups—that most seriously disrupted Dutch politics on a national scale during the truce with Spain.^[9] Two antagonistic factions within the Reformed church, the Gomarists and the Arminians, differed from one another not only in the fine points of Calvinist theology—Gomarus and Arminius were theology professors at Leiden—but also on issues relating to church and state or, as they typically stated it, religion and regime. The Gomarists laid a strong claim to Calvinist “orthodoxy” and favored a “pure” Reformed church with significant disciplinary authority over its members but separate from direct political influence; by contrast, the Arminians espoused a less stringent Calvinism as well as a more open, capacious public church closely allied with and supportive of the republican regime. These issues echoed broadly in the voluminous pamphlet literature of the early republic, and although neither side was connected with a political “party” in any direct way, it was evident already in the negotiations leading up to the truce in 1609 that the orthodox Calvinists—many of them refugees from the southern provinces—favored continuation of the war with Spain with an eye to the “liberation” of all the Low Countries. They accused their more latitudinarian enemies—that is, those who advocated the truce and were a good deal less zealous in the promotion of the “true” reformation of the Church—of both political and religious lassitude (Harline 1987).

During the truce these latent differences over religion and regime became more dangerous and more manifest as the two sides—now called Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants—clashed over both the constitutionality and the political wisdom of a proposed “national” synod of the Reformed church to settle the whole range of theological and ecclesiastical issues.^[10] This struggle culminated in 1618 with the calling of the Synod of Dordrecht, in which the orthodox Calvinists established unambiguous control of the principal institutions of the Reformed church; its tragic denouement was the trial and execution in 1619 of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt for treason. Oldenbarnevelt had been one of the principal political architects of the Dutch Republic since the late 1580s and the chief advocate of the truce; the authorities who tried and condemned him were closely allied with Maurits of Nassau, son of William of Orange and the heroic military leader of the fledgling republic. The complexity of this difficult and dangerous struggle not only reflects the ambiguous position of the public Reformed church in a pluralist Dutch society, it underscores the peculiarities of the Dutch republican regime. For our purposes it is important to note that ordinary people were very much involved in religious politics at the local level in the sense that their religious affiliations established important limits on the political options available to local rulers, and when they were organized in conventicles, underground churches, and civic militias, they could be an especially dynamic element in determining both the policy and the personnel of local governments. Local rulers, for their part, were often caught in an untenable position between the insistent demands of well-organized groups at home and the pressures of national claimants to power. Meanwhile, the two principal claimants to national leadership, Oldenbarnevelt and Maurits, were, as political appointees, by no means surrogates for the princely sovereignty that by the 1580s had been abjured and defeated; rather, they were the brokers and national symbols of two different and volatile factions of the “regent” oligarchy who claimed the “sovereignty” of the republic by virtue of their membership in a layered system of corporate ruling bodies—the city councils, variously constituted provincial estates, and the national Estates General, which was composed of “instructed” delegates from the provincial estates (see Price 1994).

In this context issues involving religion and regime could become especially volatile when they linked small but zealous groups of orthodox Calvinists through the factional networks of the ruling oligarchy with the military resources commanded by Maurits, the captain-general of the republic’s armies. In many of Holland’s very independent cities popular Counter-Remonstrant (i.e., orthodox Calvinist) demonstrations, often reinforced by official visits by Maurits as stadhouder (formerly the royal governor, now appointed by the provincial Estates), forced the purge of Arminians from the ruling councils. But in the critical case of Utrecht, Maurits deployed troops under his command to purge its municipal council and to disarm a local military contingent outside his control (Israel 1995; Kaplan 1995). In the face of this formidable coalition, Oldenbarnevelt and his allies proved to be no match even where they had solid support at the community level because direct military intervention by the prince tipped the balance in favor of Oldenbarnevelt’s religious and political enemies who eventually dominated the synod of the Reformed church as well as the corporate bodies of the republican regime. In the short term the triumph of the orthodox Calvinists at the Synod of Dordrecht resulted in a purge of the clerical leadership of the Reformed church as well as sporadic persecution of a broad range of religious groups who stubbornly asserted their “dissenting” religious identities through conventicles and underground churches. But as long as the Union of Utrecht remained the touchstone of Dutch politics, the newly purified public church would never be in a position, either ideologically or politically, to enforce an exclusive reformation in the northern Netherlands (cf. Kaplan 1995; Hakkenburg 1996). By the same token, the triumph of Maurits’s military leadership virtually ensured both the republic’s deep involvement in the Thirty Years’ War and the resumption of the war against Spain, but it did not alter the constitutional structure of the Dutch Republic in which Maurits and his successors as captain-general of the union and stadhouders of the various provinces remained public appointees (with extensive patronage and indirect “influence” over factions of the regent elite) rather than “sovereigns” in their own right. Before long, then, the issues of religion and regime ceased to be as volatile when the transient coalition of orthodox Calvinists with the republic’s military leadership began to dissolve under Frederik Hendrik, Maurits’s half-brother and his successor as captain-general of the republic (1625–47).

The Spanish Crisis in Iberia: Catalonia and Portugal

Against the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War in central and eastern Europe and the changing patterns of political contention in France and the Dutch Republic, we are now in a better position to consider the character and significance of the six contemporaneous revolutions that are said to have constituted the original crisis of the midseventeenth century. R. B. Merriman began his survey with the “Revolt in Catalonia” (1640–1652), the “Revolution in Portugal” (1640–1668), and the “Uprising in Naples” (1647–1648), all three within the composite monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. To these he added the “Puritan Revolution” in England (1642–1660), the “Fronde” in France (1648–53), and the “Revolution in the Netherlands” (1650). According to Merriman, writing in the 1930s and openly troubled by predictions of “world” revolution, “The causes, courses and results of these six revolutions afford an admirable example of the infinite variety of history. Though contemporaneous, they were curiously little alike; their differences were far more remarkable than their similarities” ([1938] 1963: 89). It will be useful for us to be more precise about the variety; indeed, I should like to treat the first three, along with the urban uprisings in Sicily in 1646 and 1647, as constituting a cycle of protest and revolution within a single composite state and the last three, though not unrelated to one another and to the conflicts within the Spanish domain, as relatively discrete political contests within very different states. This distinction is especially evident and useful, I think, when we approach the seventeenth-century crisis from the point of view of popular political practice.

The Catalan Revolt illustrates the essential dynamics of the challenges to Spanish-Habsburg power in the Mediterranean in that it grew out of resistance to the forceful assertion of royal authority within a constitutionally and fiscally peripheral component of the composite Habsburg monarchy (Elliott 1963, 1970). Though Catalonia was both economically and strategically invaluable to the Castilian core of the Habsburg state, it was constitutionally peripheral in the sense that the Habsburg dynastic succession was predicated on the king’s solemn pledge to guarantee its historic liberties and exemptions (fueros); it was fiscally peripheral in the sense that it contributed nothing directly to the defense budget of the Castilian-dominated composite. Such an arrangement produced obvious frustration at the center of this extensive and very diverse composite; from Madrid it was possible, if not always realistic, to dream of a unified kingdom of Spain to replace the diverse sovereignties that had been accumulated by the dynastic union of Aragon and Castile. In an attempt to move in that direction and to consolidate his extractive authority, Philip IV (or perhaps more accurately his chief minister, the count-duke of Olivares) developed the so-called Union of Arms according to which the royal government in Madrid imposed new obligations on its peripheral provinces in the name of a common defense. Specifically, this entailed the imposition on the Catalans of both new taxes and new obligations to billet the king’s infantry regiments (tercios) in 1639 and 1640. Amid formal and largely unavailing protests by the principality’s indigenous elites, however, a broad-based popular mobilization in the spring of 1640 proved to be the most dynamic element in an otherwise familiar standoff between the central government and its nominal agents of indirect rule on the periphery.

The roots of the popular mobilizations in Catalonia in 1640 were, like popular mobilizations everywhere, locally variable. In the more mountainous and remote parts of the principality where the movement drew its original strength, it was rooted in traditions of peasant mobilization reaching back to the so-called syndicates of the fifteenth-century civil wars and to the networks of rural bandits more recently active in Catalonia (Elliott 1963: 421–422). In the first week of May, well-armed and well-organized bands of such rustics, summoned quickly to action by the ringing of church bells, challenged the government’s attempts to billet troops in several towns and villages in the provincial interior, forcing the tercios to retreat to the coast. But when the viceroy attempted to punish the rebels by sacking the town of Santa Coloma de Farnes, he not only failed to intimidate them but also effectively transformed a localized resistance into a more generalized uprising. One official captured the seriousness of the political situation in early May just before the sack of Santa Coloma:

All this land, by which I mean the peasantry, is so disaffected that I doubt that there are any who do not feel the same way as those of Santa Coloma. And the common people of this town [Girona] are by no means well-disposed. It is true that the town councillors and the superior classes are showing themselves to be devoted to His Majesty’s service, but few of the clergy and members of the religious orders are similarly inclined, and most of them follow the voice of the people. (Quoted in Elliott 1963: 422)

When the bishop of Girona excommunicated the entire tercio responsible for the official retribution in Santa Coloma (which included the gratuitous destruction of a church in the village of Riudinarnes), it was relatively easy for the rebels to proclaim that they were fighting for God and their churches; their enemies could quite simply be identified as the hated soldiers, the king’s viceroy, and “all the traitors,” presumably including the officials and superior classes who had showed themselves to be “devoted to His Majesty’s service” as well as those who “gave shelter to the soldiers” (Elliott 1963: 431).

The popular initiative is once again evident when the resistance movement spread from the countryside to the cities, where riots in the poorer districts typically combined with incursions of armed rebels from the countryside (ibid., 464–465). Amid rumors that the tercios were about to attack Barcelona, for example, a band of rural rebels entered the city on May 22 and quickly emptied the prison of both its political and its criminal inmates before they were convinced to leave again by the local bishop. On May 26, university students, aided by the armed rustics who once again entered the city, attacked the houses of several officials and wealthy residents, announcing “Death to traitors and bad Christians.” Meanwhile, the tercios besieged by armed rebels at Blanes, were forced to retreat to the fortified garrison town of Roses in the neighboring Rosselló (Roussillon). Finally, on June 7 yet another group of rural rebels entered Barcelona and, aided by many of the inhabitants and abetted by the refusal of the guild companies to oppose them, precipitated five days of riots, attacked the so-called traitors, and even killed the viceroy as he attempted to flee the city. With all the king’s ministers in flight or in hiding and the central government’s authority in collapse, it fell to Barcelona’s civic elite to organize civic militias to restore order. By the May 11 it appeared to the syndic of Manresa “that we are in paradise in contrast to the state we were formerly in.…It is now considered certain that the soldiers of the king are no longer in Catalonia. There is not much fear that they will come back for the time being, and it is hoped that they will also leave Rosselló, where they are at present.” Before long, the king’s troops were also under attack at Perpinyà (Perpignon), the capital of Rosselló, but in this case, after an all-night bombardment that left half of the city in ruins, the army prevailed.

In short order, then, the popular rebellion first attacked the troops, then the king’s ministers, and finally local officials they saw as traitors. The aggregate of these essentially uncoordinated events spread over some six weeks is what J. H. Elliott has called a “social revolution, beginning in the countryside and spreading to the more discontented elements of the towns” (1963: 462). Yet this was only the beginning of the Catalan Revolt. The popular unrest clearly presented the indigenous governing classes with a very difficult choice: they could either seek to negotiate with Philip and Olivares, at the risk of popular attack, or they could try to harness the popular mobilization to a political revolution against Castilian domination. The second phase of the Catalan Revolt began when the Diputats, a council of six Catalan notables that had long symbolized the historic freedoms of the Catalans, chose the latter course and allied themselves with the popular rebellion. Led by Pau Claris, canon of Urgell, the Diputats were able to tap their extensive networks of family and political clientage to sustain an elite resistance to Madrid in the summer and fall. Those more loyal elites who did not quietly leave were forced finally to choose when, in response to a popular revolt in July in Tortosa (the populace seized gunpowder being sent to the local garrison, attacked local “traitors,” and subsequently expelled the troops altogether), the central government decided to send an army to pacify Catalonia. While the Catalan towns tried to obtain weapons and ammunition for local defense, the Diputats began, with only mixed results, to levy new taxes and to raise a sizable Catalan army while at the same time solidifying an alliance with France. In October, Olivares summed up the gravity of the situation: “In the midst of all our troubles, the Catalan is the worst we have ever had, and my heart admits of no consolation.…Without reason or occasion they have thrown themselves into as complete a rebellion as Holland, for news has today arrived that they have signed an agreement with the French and placed themselves under the protection of that king” (quoted in Elliott 1963: 510).

Despite widespread popular opposition to the exactions of the Castilian-dominated state, raising a Catalan army, indeed organizing the military defense of the rebellious principality in general, proved to be far more difficult than the Diputats had anticipated. Thus when the king’s troops first moved into Catalonia in late November, proclaiming a peaceful mission, they met with little resistance, moving quickly northward from Tortosa along the coast toward Barcelona. At Cambrils in mid-December, however, some six hundred Catalan defenders, who had surrendered to the invading force, were massacred, and when this news along with news of the peaceful surrender of Tarragona reached Barcelona, there was once again a violent popular reaction against the threat of Castilian domination. On Christmas eve a crowd of insurgents, again including forces from outside the city, attacked and murdered officials accused of being traitors, forced open the prisons, and set fire to a number of houses, both in Barcelona and in surrounding villages. The English ambassador offered the following commentary: “In Barcelona there hath happened a great dissension between the magistrates and officers of justice, who would have come to an agreement with the king, and the people that would not.…I do now begin to think that this madness of the common people (who are many, and the nobility and gentry few, not exceeding 600) will throw the Principality into the hands of the French” (quoted in Elliott 1963: 521). In fact, the Catalan ruling elite was deeply divided, and once again the demonstrative action of ordinary people tipped the balance in favor of resistance. The Diputats quickly worked out an agreement with the emissary of France by which the Catalans would declare a republic and put themselves under French protection.

The declaration of the Catalan Republic on January 16, 1641, may be said to have been the climax of the second phase of the Catalan Revolt—the political revolution against the Spanish monarchy—but it was hardly the end of the story. Within a week, in the face of French dissatisfaction with the proposed form of the new republican government, Pau Claris proposed that instead of creating an independent republic, the principality should submit itself to the French monarchy “as in the time of Charlemagne, with a contract to observe our constitutions.” Thus on January 23 the elite leaders of “revolutionary” Catalonia replaced one aggressive “prince” (Philip IV) with another (Louis XIII) in the fervent hope that this would preserve their historic privileges. On January 26 the French alliance did pay an immediate dividend when a combined Catalan-French force defeated Spanish forces under the marquis of los Vélez, but before long the French armies became an occupying force, both provoking and repressing anti-French riots. The French king also appointed his own viceroy, and the governance of the principality was carefully concentrated in the hands of a small group of French supporters.

In retrospect it is certainly tempting to declare the Catalan Revolt a bitter disappointment, if not a complete failure, especially by the definitional standards of modern social and political revolution. But we will do well to recognize how effectively the Catalans protected their fueros by playing one dynastic state maker off against another. Indeed, even after a very destructive decade at the crossroads of the Spanish-French military rivalry, the Catalans were “reunited” with Spain on October 12, 1652, under the very terms they had demanded at the beginning: Philip IV agreed to a general pardon and promised, as count of Catalonia rather than as king of Spain, to preserve the principality’s constitutions. We will also do well to remember that the rebels of Holland, with whom Olivares aptly compared the Catalans, also actively sought a replacement sovereign and toyed with English “protection” under the earl of Leicester before they finally backed into the formation of an independent republic. In fact, from the perspective of early modern popular politics, it is important to recognize how thoroughly familiar the political dynamics and the eventual settlement of the Catalan Revolt actually are even though they do not involve religious allegiance as a critical marker of political enmity.^[11]

At bottom, the Catalan Revolt is familiar because it involves so clearly the triangulated set of political actors that was the characteristic legacy of dynastic or composite state formation (see fig. 2): national or princely claimants to power (plus their agents), indigenous or local ruling elites, and ordinary political subjects. Although political alignments between aggressive princes—with often urgent fiscal and military needs—and local rulers—the jealous guardians of historic privileges that were the basis of their position locally—were nearly always uneasy and contentious, they nevertheless consolidated the power of local elites vis-à-vis their local populations (fig. 2b). This pattern of elite consolidation was clearly ruptured in Catalonia as a result of popular political action that forced the local elites to choose between royal political favors and local solidarities. When an important faction of the Catalan elite openly chose the side of the popular resistance, it opened up a revolutionary situation that entailed the possibility of a local consolidation of power under an independent Catalan republic (fig. 2a). But the urgent need for military protection against the king’s armies quickly resulted instead in what might well be called a coup d’état in the sense that one very powerful prince replaced another and quickly consolidated his power in conjunction with a faction of the local elites with whom he had struck an alternative dynastic bargain. As the power of both of the contending princes ebbed in the course of the next decade, however, the “restoration” of 1562 returned Catalonia to a version of the status quo ante.

Clearly the Catalans did not challenge the aggressive claims of their dynastic prince in a vacuum. In fact, neither the vigor of the central government’s political provocations nor the relative success of the Catalans’ reactions is comprehensible without reference to Spanish-French competition and war making on a European scale. Meanwhile, the Catalan Revolt dovetailed with other challenges to Spanish-Habsburg rule in Portugal, Italy, and even the New World.^[12] What made these conflicts similar and bound them together as part of a single crisis was the fact that they were all provoked by the king’s attempt to enforce the Union of Arms, which greatly increased the fiscal and military demands of the Castilian core on the composite’s peripheral provinces. Yet the differences in their outcomes will help us to understand both the dynamics and the consequences of early modern revolutions.

On the face of it, the revolution in Portugal seems very different from the Catalan Revolt because it resulted in the permanent separation of the kingdom of Portugal from the Habsburg composite state (Elliott 1991). But it is important to acknowledge their structural similarities at the outset. Though Portugal had not been part of the Habsburg composite as long as Catalonia, both were, from the perspective of the Castilian core, constitutionally and fiscally peripheral provinces whose advantages were clearly threatened by the proposed Union of Arms. In addition, because of the pattern of elite consolidation that characterized the Habsburg composite in Portugal as well as Catalonia, it should not be surprising that the initial impetus for open resistance to the king’s policies came from below. Indeed, as early as 1637 the government’s attempts to raise a substantial fixed revenue from Portugal for the defense of the country and the recovery of its overseas possessions awakened serious popular discontent, with riots reported in Évora and other cities. As in Catalonia, too, the popular movement was reportedly abetted by the clergy, and the French government even hoped to take advantage of the unrest by establishing contact with the leaders.

The interaction between the Catalan and Portuguese challenges to Castilian domination became evident in the fall of 1640 when the government in Madrid sought to mobilize for a military offensive against Catalonia. Though the Portuguese elite had appeared to remain loyal to Philip in the face of popular protests, they began to defect when the sizable nobility was called to military service in the campaign to subdue Barcelona. Suddenly the carefully cultivated alignment between the Spanish Crown and the Portuguese elite began to unravel, and with the defection of the duke of Braganza, who was willing to come forward as pretender to the Portuguese throne, it was possible to put together a formidable, if informal, local coalition against Philip IV (Elliott 1963: 512–519). On December 1, 1640, Portuguese conspirators broke into the palace of the duchess of Mantua (the official representative of the Spanish monarchy), killed Miguel de Vasconcellos (the hated symbol of Spanish authority), and expelled all Castilians (the principal agents of Spanish control) from Lisbon. Having thus declared their independence from Madrid, the populace of Lisbon jubilantly acclaimed the duke of Braganza as King John IV the next day—this at the same time that the marquis de los Vélez was slowly advancing on Barcelona. Only later, in January 1641, did the Portuguese Cortes formally ratify this popular acclamation and remove the Spanish garrisons from the rest of the kingdom. Distracted by events elsewhere, especially in Catalonia, Philip IV’s government did not even undertake a serious effort to regain Portugal until 1643, and the Portuguese, despite a relatively undisciplined and poorly equipped army, easily defeated the Spanish troops at Montijo in May 1644. The war flared up again briefly in the 1650s and 1660s, but it was not until 1668 that Spain recognized Portuguese independence (Merriman [1938] 1963).

Though the relatively bloodless establishment and successful military defense of a new monarchy in Lisbon may seem less than revolutionary today, the revolution of 1640 in Portugal may be considered an especially clear example of “successful” revolution within a late medieval composite monarchy. In the midst of a more general crisis of authority within the Spanish-Habsburg state, popular unrest that implicitly challenged the authority of local elites as well as a distant monarch created an unanticipated opportunity to form a broad-based revolutionary coalition united by its resentment of increased exactions by easily identifiable outsiders. To be sure, the new “revolutionary” government was deliberately modeled on historical precedents, but neither the dynasty nor the popular-based revolutionary coalition that established and sustained it can be considered a simple re-creation of a medieval past. What is more, both the popular and the elite elements of this coalition may be said to have achieved significant and satisfying results—for example, the elimination of the new fiscal demands and the removal of rival Castilian elites—without the long-term sacrifices and setbacks of the Dutch or Catalan wars for independence. Yet in the final analysis, the Portuguese revolution clearly lacks the excitement and narrative drama of the Catalan and southern-Italian revolutions between which it was sandwiched in time.

The Spanish Crisis in Italy: Sicily and Naples

The high drama and political danger of the southern Italian revolutions are due especially to the power and dynamism of popular mobilization that threatened the relatively stable political alignment of local rulers with their distant prince. Though the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were geographically less proximate to the Castilian core of the Spanish-Habsburg state, they contributed more, fiscally and militarily, to the welfare of the composite than either Catalonia or Portugal. Indeed, by the seventeenth century southern Italy, Naples in particular, had become an especially critical element within the complex system that sustained the Spanish military machine, not only in the Mediterranean but also, via the fabled Spanish Road across the Alps, in Germany and the Low Countries.^[13] To be sure, both kingdoms had been cobbled into the Spanish composite in 1504 with constitutional limitations on their distant sovereign, but the consolidation of local elite power that was typical of such bargains had worked especially to the advantage of the landed nobility; not only did the nobility dominate local institutions of government, they were among the principal investors in local government debt that supported Spain’s military operations abroad while they were exempt from the excises on basic necessities that were dedicated to the repayment of these government obligations. This meant that the sizable urban populations—Naples at 300,000 and Palermo at 150,000 were among Europe’s largest cities—were both vulnerable to fiscal exploitation and politically isolated.

In both Sicily and Naples the revolutions of 1647 grew out of one of the most basic interactions between early modern rulers and their urban subjects: the so-called food riots occasioned by apparently arbitrary or unjust governmental decisions regarding the price of staples like bread. Since the price of basic foodstuffs was directly related to the burdensome excises by which these governments taxed their urban populations, protests over the price and availability of food easily dovetailed with more general attacks on tax collectors or demands for the repeal of burdensome exactions and unjust regulations. Inasmuch as most local rulers had insufficient means to quell such episodic events as food riots and local tax protests, they were often obliged to make temporary concessions such as subsidizing the price of bread in times of dearth or even repealing taxes that were identified as particularly irksome. Repression and exemplary punishment, if it occurred, usually attended the arrival of troops from outside the community (cf. Beik 1997). In both Palermo and Naples, however, these almost routine interactions issued into obviously revolutionary situations that threatened to displace both the local rulers and the larger pattern of elite consolidation of which they were an essential part.

In Sicily the first food riots took place in Messina in the fall of 1646; these were suppressed by Spanish troops and the leaders executed, though the government also supplied more food (Koenigsberger 1971b). In May 1647, however, similar protests over the price of bread in Palermo quickly developed into a massive demonstration at the Spanish viceroy’s palace: “Long live the king and down with taxes and bad Government.” The demonstrators also broke open the prisons, freeing some six hundred inmates, burned the gates of the palace, and warned the archbishop not to oppose their movement. Soon this popular mobilization, apparently under the leadership of a miller, focused its attacks on the treasury and tax offices, demanding in particular the abolition of the five gabelles, the excises on grain, wine, oil, meat, and cheese. Apparently lacking the means of immediate repression, the viceroy made impressive concessions: he restored the price and quality of bread, abolished the excises, issued an amnesty for the attack on the prison, deposed the local senate, and granted the artisan guilds the right to elect two senators. Soon the guilds were taking over the city’s fortifications and restoring order; the leaders of the original food riots were, however, tortured and executed. On May 25 the viceroy tried belatedly and unsuccessfully to introduce Spanish troops into the city, but as H. G. Koenigsberger suggests, “the guilds remained in control of the city, and for the moment the government was too weak to take decisive counteraction. The nobles, solidly behind the government, retired to their country estates” (1971b: 260–261).

In the summer of 1647, parallel revolts enjoying varying degrees of support from local clergy and advancing similar demands against Spanish taxation occurred in other smaller cities such as Girgenti, Syracuse, and Cefalù, though Messina, which had earlier seen the repression of popular protest, remained squarely in government hands. Meanwhile, in Palermo, the leaders of the guilds began to press for further constitutional reform; as one contemporary observer reports, “with truly unspeakable audacity they began to treat of the reform of the city, not knowing how to govern their own house,” and to formulate new capitoli (laws) for the city (ibid., 1971: 262). In August, amid reports of the sensational revolt in Naples in July, a new wave of popular mobilization, rooted especially in the large tanners’ and fishers’ guilds and led by an artisan who had witnessed the revolt in Naples, attempted to establish a revolutionary government in cooperation with the Spanish government. The movement’s self-proclaimed and charismatic leader demanded the government’s acceptance of forty-nine capitoli, formulated by the guilds, which would abolish the gabelles in the entire kingdom, grant the guilds far greater participation in local government, dismiss most treasury officials, reform legal procedures and codes, and introduce three popularly elected representatives to watch over the work of the local senate. Though the viceroy tried to break the movement by murdering their leader and arresting several guild consuls, he was forced on August 23 to publish the capitoli and release the guild leaders he had arrested. The viceroy was allowed to retain the trappings of his office even though he had obviously lost control of the capital city.

The contemporaneous revolution in Naples was in many ways similar, though more violent and, by extension, more famous. In Naples the popular collective action began with what Peter Burke (1983) has described as a ritualized confrontation, full of religious symbolism, between a more or less spontaneous crowd of protesters and the tax authorities on July 7, 1647. Very quickly, however, the protesters, under the charismatic leadership of a fisherman named Masaniello,^[14] confronted the viceroy, reportedly crying “Long live the king” and “Down with taxes.” Immediate concessions were followed by an unsuccessful attempt by the viceroy and the archbishop to restore order, and in angry response, Masaniello called out the civic guard, who numbered in the thousands, were well organized in the city’s wards and were readily called into action by the ringing of bells. At this point the popular mobilization, a great deal more organized, was directed especially at the wealthy officials who, by profiting from the fiscal exploitation of the city, were seen as traitors of the people. The level of violence—the ritualized degradation of victims as well as the systematic destruction of their homes—clearly separated the revolution in Naples from that in Palermo, yet it did not differ a great deal politically in that the militia-led rebels at first sought to establish a revolutionary government with royal sanction.

Even after Masaniello was assassinated on July 16 the rebels made several overtures to the royal government, although they were repeatedly betrayed by the viceroy. At long last, on October 1, a flotilla of ships carrying some five thousand Spanish troops arrived in support of the viceroy, but when they attacked the city, the rebels, now under the leadership of an illiterate blacksmith, claimed a decisive victory. Thus on October 24, 1647, the Neapolitan rebels formally renounced Spanish rule and declared an independent republic. At this point the Neapolitan revolution came to resemble the Catalan revolution, of which its leaders were very well aware, in that they actively sought French protection against a likely Spanish invasion. When timely French support was not forthcoming, the rebellious city finally fell to the Spanish in February 1648. Meanwhile, the revolution in Palermo faded away more gradually as popular enthusiasm for guild leadership and the requirements of constant political vigilance waned; in July 1648 the guilds finally surrendered the fortifications to Spanish troops and the population was disarmed.

These immediately famous conflicts undoubtedly reflected, in some measure, the extremes of conjunctural social dislocation—bad harvests, artificial scarcity due to corruption, famine, migration of dislocated peasants from the countryside—to which many scholars ascribe their occurrence (see esp. Villari 1993). But from the perspective of popular political practice, they can also usefully be seen as a reflection of both exceptional political opportunities and the formidable capacity of popular political actors in a dense urban setting. The opportunities were clearly afforded by the more general crisis of the Spanish-Habsburg state: (1) the state’s fiscal demands combined with its dependence on a privileged rural nobility fractured the critical relations between urban subjects and local rulers; (2) insurrections and war making elsewhere undermined the government’s ability to repress popular dissent; and (3) France was willing to profit from Spain’s temporary weakness by positioning itself as an ally or protector of revolutionary coalitions. Yet clearly the dynamism, the initiative, and the critical decisions in these remarkable sequences came from the popular political actors. In both Palermo and Naples these popular coalitions were not only numerous but also well organized and armed.

That the revolutionary governments failed to last may be said to reflect two fundamental weaknesses of the revolutionary coalitions. On the one hand, both revolutionary movements failed to work out an alignment, though they appear to have tried, with at least a segment of the local political elite; such an alignment might have resulted more readily in a consolidation of local power of the sort that occurred in the Dutch Revolt. On the other hand, they also failed to make horizontal coalitions with other locally mobilized movements and thereby failed to transcend the jurisdictional boundaries of their familiar urban political spaces. To be sure, the revolutionaries in Palermo benefited from the simultaneous and complementary popular political movements in other Sicilian cities, and the Neapolitans surely drew some of their strength and boldness from the massive insurrections that shook the countryside of the kingdom of Naples in the summer of 1647 (Villari 1993). Yet in the absence of political brokers or preexisting networks of organization and communication, these popular movements failed to find a basis for “national” solidarity within the much larger political spaces that they shared as subjects of a common monarch.^[15] That they actually aspired to a political alignment with their distant prince against local political elites, whom they accused of treason, may seem naive and fanciful in retrospect, but had they been able to realize such an alignment, they certainly would have moved their political histories in a dramatically different direction (see fig. 2c).

Leaving such eventualities aside, however, it is possible to combine the revolutions in Palermo and Naples with their counterparts in Portugal and Catalonia in a more focused discussion of the political results or outcomes of revolutionary situations within composite states. It is probably safe to say that given the obvious level of popular discontent in Catalonia in 1640 and Sicily and Naples in 1648, the likelihood of revolution was extremely high, but it is equally safe to say that the likelihood that these revolutions would produce a durable republican form of government to replace the monarchy—something that even by modern definitional standards would qualify as a revolutionary outcome—was always remote. In theory, the simple reason is that the conditions that are conducive to the appearance of revolutionary situations are significantly different from those that are conducive to revolutionary outcomes that entail radical transformations of political power. As we have already seen—from the Comunero Revolt in Castile to the War of Independence in the Low Countries; from the Peasants’ War in Germany to the Croquant revolts in France—even transient alignments between popular political actors and a segment of the indigenous ruling elite were enough to produce revolutionary situations within late medieval composite states (cf. Tilly 1993); in exceptional cases, such as we have seen in the large provincial capitals of southern Italy, ordinary political subjects might even be able to precipitate a revolutionary situation on their own. But the closely related cases of Catalonia, Portugal, Sicily, and Naples allow us to discern, more clearly than the sixteenth-century conflicts, the conditions for different kinds of revolutionary outcomes.

As we have seen in the previous chapters, when local revolutions were repeatedly swallowed up by large-scale religious wars on a national and international scale, the relative proximity and capacity of national claimants (and their armies) are certainly salient factors in determining the outcomes of local revolutionary situations.^[16] But the strength of local political alignments was equally important in shaping the historically specific political results. Figure 8 suggests how we might imagine the interaction between the two in accounting for revolutionary outcomes or transfers of power within composite states. In one dimension, with reference to the capacity of princely or central authorities, this figure captures both the structural/geographic variations between different parts of the same composite state—the core as opposed to the periphery—and the more transient variations that occur within them, as when a princely army or flotilla draws near to a regional capital like Barcelona or Naples. In the other dimension, this figure encompasses variations in the social basis of the revolutionary coalition between narrow and disjointed coalitions at either end of the social scale or more comprehensive and organized coalitions within or among communities.

Within this framework, then, one would account for the fairly straightforward “success” of the Portuguese separation from Castile in terms of both the relative distance or incapacity of the Madrid government and the durability of the broad cross-class coalition against Castilian domination. By contrast, the Neapolitan and Catalan revolutions are more complicated (and for that reason illuminating) in that they both cycled through a series of transient outcomes.

In the beginning of the story in Catalonia (fig. 9a), a socially limited and essentially uncoordinated popular mobilization in May and June 1640—what J. H. Elliott called the “social revolution”—quickly produced ad hoc concessions to popular demands (plus the hasty retreat of the tercios), which in essence confirmed Catalonia’s fiscal and military exemptions. Yet the persistence and spread of popular mobilization forced the defection of an important segment of the Catalan elite and helped to create a truly revolutionary republican government on January 16, 1641. With the rapid approach of two powerful princely armies, however, the Catalan Republic gave way to what might be considered a French coup d’état just a week later. With the gradual disaffection, co-optation, repression, and demobilization of the bulk of the popular political actors under the French regime, Catalonia was finally “reunited” with Spain in 1652 under the specific guarantee of its historic privileges. Against the backdrop of this sequence of transient settlements, even a return to a semblance of the status quo ante may be considered a “revolutionary” outcome in the very real sense that it did not result in the consolidation of absolute princely power in the territorial state that Olivares had in mind; indeed, the defeat of Philip’s “Spanish” pretensions was so complete that, as J. H. Elliott observes from the perspective of Catalonia, “the second half of the seventeenth century was…for the Spanish monarchy the golden age of provincial autonomy—an age of almost superstitious respect for regional rights and privileges by a Court too weak and too timid to protest” (1963: 547; cf. Kamen 1980).

The revolution in Naples (fig. 9b) not only took a different course, but it set the kingdom of Naples on a different historical trajectory after the restoration of the Spanish viceroy. The popular movement, initially an informal coalition based on a common opposition to the hated excises, gained some immediate concessions in July 1647. But over time it tapped the neighborhood networks and organizational strength of the civic militia, it received an assist from simultaneous and widespread peasant attacks on noble landlords in the countryside, and it gained a certain degree of political and military experience. Thus the revolutionary coalition confidently declared its independence from Spain and the creation of a revolutionary republic in October 1647. Still, lacking both elite allies and political connections in the countryside, the municipal revolution disintegrated in the face of superior Spanish force in February 1648. In the process, however, the power of the Madrid government had become a good deal more proximate and directly coercive even though it still depended in practice on some of the traditional forms of indirect rule through a dependent but privileged local elite. Unlike the Catalan experience, then, the kingdom of Naples can hardly be said to have enjoyed a golden age of provincial autonomy in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Multiple Revolutions in the British Isles

When we move from the first cluster of Merriman’s “contemporaneous revolutions” in Spain to the “Puritan Revolution” in England, it is clear that we have moved into another historical world. If nothing else, the voluminous historical literature and the lively debates concerning the causes, character, and consequences of the English Revolution are an unmistakable warning against broad generalizations and facile comparisons. Still, the essential political facts with which we are concerned are not in dispute: at the end of 1648 and the beginning of 1649 a faction of the broad parliamentary coalition that had been at war with the English king intermittently for more than six years expelled its enemies from the House of Commons, tried and executed the king, Charles I, abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords, and established a Puritan commonwealth (Underdown 1971; Manning 1992). To be sure, these events are so dramatic that they have invited comparison with revolutionary challenges in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917, and in this company, the English Revolution is often considered the first of the “modern” or “great” revolutions that have become the normative baseline for a succession of academic models of revolution in the twentieth century.

For our purposes, however, it is important to locate the political engagement of ordinary people more precisely within early modern composite states and to recognize the role that religious differences played in shaping the multiple conflicts of which the events of 1648–1649 may be considered the climax. It may thus be useful to take as our starting point John Morrill’s (1984: 178) boldly contentious suggestion that “the English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the Wars of Religion.” ^[17] Here I should like to argue, more specifically, that although the English civil war, which began in 1642, may usefully be considered a “religious war,” it can also usefully be considered a revolutionary situation (cf. Tilly 1993: 104–141); its climax in the events of 1648–1649 can, by extension, be considered a singularly “revolutionary” outcome—albeit, like so many others in the seventeenth century, a transient one.^[18]

Let us begin with the civil war. Instead of highlighting the nature of social dislocation and the particulars of constitutional crisis within England, Conrad Russell (1987, 1990, 1991) begins his revisionist account of the “causes of the English Civil Wars” by emphasizing the compositeness of the British state.^[19] The kings of England had striven for centuries to become masters of all the British Isles—not to mention some major sections of the Continent—but the composite that the Stuart dynasty ruled in the middle of the seventeenth century was in its specifics of relatively recent date (see chap. 2). Following the loss of England’s continental possessions during the fifteenth century and the successful incorporation of Wales within the English monarchy at the beginning of the sixteenth, the Tudor monarchy had once again become a composite with the formal acquisition of the Irish throne in 1543 and the dynastic union, after Elizabeth I, of the thrones of Scotland and England under James Stuart in 1603. Like all early modern composite state makers, James was continually facing fiscal constraints, but having steered clear of direct involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, the financial burdens that Charles I inherited from his father in 1625 were not the worst of his problems.^[20]

Whereas the top-down reformation of the Church of England had asserted the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy from the 1530s onward, the steady growth of “Puritan” dissent within England as well as the addition of Catholic Ireland and Presbyterian Scotland presented the new Stuart dynasty with a minefield of ecclesiastical politics. Under James, the Church of England proved to be a remarkably capacious institution, accommodating a variety of religious sensibilities and theological tendencies (Collinson 1982, 1991). But in the 1630s Charles—not unlike his continental counterparts prior to the outbreak of “religious wars” in France, the Low Countries, and Bohemia—began ever more insistently to demand religious conformity from all of his subjects. In England Charles’s particular brand of high church Arminianism brought him face-to-face with a parliamentary opposition that eventually included a broad spectrum of Presbyterians and Independents. Though the often-debated motives and social interests of the leaders on all sides in this escalating conflict were undoubtedly mixed, the factions in this thoroughly divided political elite were increasingly identified, in word as well as parliamentary deed, in terms of their ecclesiastical politics (Morrill 1984). Yet rather than two clearly defined parties, the Long Parliament, which began its fateful sitting in 1640, was composed of a cacophony of political and religious voices. And the political dynamics that transformed a sufficient number of the parliamentary elite of England into “Puritan” revolutionaries—albeit by most accounts reluctant ones—were neither exclusively ecclesiastical, nor narrowly aristocratic, nor parochially English.

From the broader point of view of the composite monarchy, the British crisis of the mid-seventeenth century clearly began in earnest in Scotland (Stevenson 1973, 1977). There had been periodic friction between Charles and the local aristocratic rulers of Scotland throughout the 1630s, but as Keith Brown (1992: 107) argues, “it was his religious policy which caused most controversy and which provided the popular support for aristocratic action against the king.” Specifically, the forceful introduction in 1637 of a new liturgy (in the form of an Anglican prayer book) as the exclusive basis for Protestant worship was greeted with both a howl of official Presbyterian protest and popular demonstrations in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The adamant refusal of the royal government to compromise in the face of local opposition led in February 1638 to the signing of a national “covenant,” which took the apparently conservative form of a traditional bond expressing loyalty to the king but nevertheless implied a “radical agenda aimed at the destruction of Charles’s authoritarian, imperial monarchy and the episcopal church” (Brown 1992: 112). Though it started in aristocratic circles, the national covenant was popularized by evangelical preaching and found a popular organizational base in conventicles and private churches (Morrill 1990). This growing popular movement eventually forced the uncompromising king to call a general assembly of the Scottish church in November 1638, and dominated by “covenanters,” the general assembly directly challenged the king’s claim to ecclesiastical authority, abolishing the episcopal structure and undoing his liturgical reforms.

As military confrontation loomed in 1639, the covenanters consolidated their control within local parishes and presbyteries—creating rival institutions when they could not control the existing structures—and established a national military apparatus rooted in organizations and mobilization at the local level; a national army, 18,000 strong, was led by soldiers with mercenary experience on the Continent. Eventually, the Scottish parliament also met, without royal permission, in June 1640 and within a matter of days fashioned a new constitutional structure to sustain itself as an independent political force. “The covenanters refashioned government entirely,” Keith Brown writes, “replacing the old model with one based on committees in parliament and the general assembly, and locally in the shire committees of war and the presbyteries” (1992: 119; see also Macinnes 1990). Anticipating attack by royal armies, the Scottish army boldly crossed the English border at the end of August 1640, emphatically defeating the king’s hastily assembled and poorly equipped army.

To this point, then, the Scottish Covenanter Revolution appears to be a particularly illuminating case of a well-organized political alignment between local rulers and popular political actors yielding quickly to a revolutionary government and a local consolidation of power vis-à-vis a nonresident composite monarch (see fig. 2a). But the Scottish covenanters were hardly acting in a political vacuum. Indeed, their success in challenging Charles in Scotland forced Charles to call the Long Parliament that would directly challenge him “at home” in England. What is more, by 1641, when there appeared to be little basis for a peaceful restoration of royal authority in Scotland except on decidedly Scottish terms, Ireland had begun to follow a similar path, though with decidedly Irish variations on the theme. The destruction of the records of the Irish rebellion prevents us from seeing as clearly the internal organization of the revolutionary coalition, but in broad outline the dynamics appear to be familiar.

Both the politicization of Irish religious identities and the transformation of Irish society under British rule help to account for the distinctiveness of the Irish case (see Dunlop [1906] 1934; Clarke 1984; Fitzpatrick 1988; Russell 1988). Though the historical background of Irish/English relations is complicated and deeply conflicted, the heart of the matter in the first half of the seventeenth century can be stated briefly: having utterly failed to convert the Irish to Protestantism in the sixteenth century, the agents of British rule initiated a policy of radical social transformation that involved “planting” Protestantism on Irish soil through the confiscation of Catholic land, the removal of the Catholic population to the western periphery, and the importation of Protestant settlers (mostly Scots) to fill the demographic void. The project was begun with considerable vigor in Ulster, but before it could be expanded it began to founder on growing divisions within the local ruling elite. Historians often refer to the earliest English elites in Ireland, those who predated the Reformation and remained to a great extent Catholic, as the “old English,” as distinct from the “new English” who were the Protestant beneficiaries of the plantation scheme. In the 1630s the British government effectively played these factions of the local elite off against one another to extract the fiscal and military resources it wanted, but as the old English became increasingly fearful of the anti-Catholicism of the British system, they came to feel like the “new Irish.” These divisions within the aristocracy, combined with the example of the Scottish covenanters, set the stage for an Irish uprising, supported by a comprehensive coalition of all Catholics in Ireland.

The Irish Revolution of 1641 appears to have been deliberately planned: a coup d’état by well-connected and well-armed elites at Dublin was to be paired with popular uprisings, especially in Ulster, where the Catholic population had been effectively marginalized but not removed. The coup at Dublin failed, but the popular uprising, led by a group of sworn “confederates,” proved to be a surprising success. That this Confederate Revolution fed on local Catholic solidarity in the face of official anti-Catholicism is obvious; that it was nurtured and sustained both by the local Catholic clergy and the Counter-Reformation church in Rome is also evident. What is especially ironic is that in the confusion of British politics in the early 1640s, the Irish rebels continued to profess (not unlike popular revolutionaries in Naples and Sicily in 1647) support and loyalty to their distant monarch (in his ongoing battle with the Puritans in the Long Parliament) while their actions on the ground effectively dismantled his sovereignty as well as his social and religious policies (cf. Canny 1994). In contrast to the apparent “national” solidarity of covenanter Scotland, however, confederate Ireland was more clearly divided between a Catholic majority and a small but resourceful Protestant minority.

The political chaos of the composite British state in the early 1640s—occasioned by the Covenanter and Confederate revolutions on the periphery as much as parliamentary opposition at the core—certainly helps us to understand the depths of the crisis of the English monarchy well before the trial and execution of the king in 1649. To this we should also add a growing tide of popular protest in many parts of England—protest that variously attacked enclosures, defied taxes, and destroyed the symbols of the new Anglican liturgy while precipitating a kind of “moral panic” among those in the parliamentary elite who were particularly fearful of the “many-headed monster” of popular insurrection (Morrill and Walter 1985). But the severity of this crisis should also serve to underscore more precisely what was distinctive about the English Revolution. For while the king’s enemies in the peripheral kingdoms moved quickly and decisively to establish “revolutionary” governments that they would be forced to defend against various “British” enemies in the course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1643–1648), his enemies “at home” in England were thrust immediately into a civil war that, their leaders claimed loudly and eloquently, was not revolutionary at all but a morally justifiable defense of the established political order. Despite their defensive claims, of course, those who took up arms against Charles within England were, in the terms we have employed above, no less revolutionary than their rebellious counterparts in Scotland and Ireland. That their efforts to press political claims unacceptable to their immediate sovereign resulted in a long and difficult war is a reflection not only of Charles’s dogged determination to have his own way but also of the immense difficulty of displacing a composite monarch at the territorially consolidated core of his state where his power is necessarily more proximate and usually more integrated through alignments with local elites.

While the crisis of the composite state helps us to understand the origins of the revolutionary situation, then, it does not go very far in illuminating the dynamics of revolutionary conflict within England during and after the civil war. Indeed, that the English monarchy actually survived as long as it did in the face of such seemingly universal opposition to its authoritarian policies may be a useful perspective from which to focus on the role of popular politics in the English Revolution. Despite a good deal of controversy on other matters, especially the nature and significance of divisions among the aristocracy, British historians seem generally to agree that the people of England were deeply divided by the political crisis of the British monarchy, and in the midst of that division there was a significant and sustained level of popular support for the king.^[21] That this popular royalism was regionally differentiated, that it was in many ways equivalent to the level of popular support for the king’s parliamentary enemies, and that in the long run the majority of the population of England and Wales preferred to remain politically independent or as unengaged as possible with either side seems, by all accounts, to be generally accepted as well. Indeed, though historians continue to debate the social, political, and religious motives that underlay it, the thoroughgoing political division of English society, at all levels, would seem to be the most obvious reason why England, like France in the second half of the sixteenth century, was plunged into a prolonged and costly civil war between two uncompromising and comprehensive coalitions contending for national power.^[22] Quite unlike the French civil wars, however, the climax of the English civil wars was the total defeat of the king.

Not surprisingly, the civil war opened up unprecedented political opportunities for a broad range of ordinary political subjects in England. On the parliamentary side especially, the ongoing war effort afforded the “middle sort” of independent craftsmen and yeoman farmers the possibility of direct engagement in political activities that were normally reserved for the established elite (Underdown 1971:chap. 2). The collapse in many parts of the country of the authority of the established Church also gave birth to a variety of new religious groups and allowed others, who had in the past lived a shadowy, underground existence in conventicles or private churches, to thrive as never before in full public view. And in the military reforms that the parliamentary armies instituted to shore up their effectiveness in the field, ordinary soldiers, who were often religious sectarians, were brought into new, more politicized relationship to the new brand of military officers who led the New Model Army to victory in the first of the civil wars by 1646 (Gentles 1992). Clearly not everyone was inclined or able to exploit such opportunities, but in the context of the enduring polarization of the political elite, it was a small but well-organized “Puritan” minority rooted in the sectarian or “gathered” churches and well represented in the rank and file of the New Model Army that repeatedly seized the political initiative from more reluctant allies within the political elite, prevented a compromise between the king and his enemies in parliament, and engineered the “radical” revolution of 1648–1649.

To execute the king, to disestablish the Church that he had attempted to use as an instrument of his power, and to abolish the nobility who had been among his most stalwart defenders—all of this was, of course, no mean achievement for the narrow but disciplined and militarily resourceful faction that boldly seized what it considered a providential opportunity to establish a “godly commonwealth.” Today, however, historians are generally inclined to regard the revolutionary climax of 1649 as a military coup d’état—this in implicit opposition to the earlier designation of these events as a modern or social revolution with great significance for the future. To be sure, the revolution of 1649 did in many ways boil down to a military coup, but demystifying the revolution in this way ought not blind us to its political significance. According to Brian Manning, “1649 was the climax of the revolution, but it was also the watershed. Within the first few months of that year, in a series of conflicts, the limits were established beyond which the revolution would not go” (1992: 10). Later, having focused on a series of army mutinies in the course of 1649, Manning concludes, “Military force triumphed over the more radical and populist wing of the revolution. In the late 1640s the army was a revolutionary force, in the 1650s it became a force for order and stability, inhibiting or repressing radical dissent and suppressing popular resistance” (ibid., 215). The defeat, in particular, of the Levellers—the radical or populist wing of the revolutionary coalition of 1649 which had promoted a dramatic displacement of power from the traditional elite at the center to the “middle sort of people” at the community level, not unlike the “republicans” of Naples in 1647—is what makes the English Revolution seem more like a failure than a success when judged by the standards of “modern” revolutions. But the Levellers, or for that matter the religious radicals who did prevail, it must be remembered, represented only a small part of the history of popular political engagement in this complex historical process.^[23]

So what political course did the coup of 1649 chart for the English Revolution? With regard to the core issue of ecclesiastical politics, the Puritans of 1649 did move radically toward the displacement or diffusion of cultural sovereignty by guaranteeing the liberty of religious conscience and treating the “true” Church as a gathering of the “saints” rather than a universal institution embodying the king’s claim to cultural sovereignty. Unfortunately, this very “modern” and tolerant stance earned the leaders of the republican Commonwealth few significant allies; it clearly satisfied no one in the English religious establishment, alienating Episcopalians and Presbyterians alike, plus a goodly number of so-called Independents who nevertheless sought a total reformation of English society. Ironically, then, the English revolutionaries of 1649 appear to have succeeded primarily in charting a constitutional or political course toward an unprecedented degree of territorial state consolidation during the 1650s.^[24] Indeed, one of Oliver Cromwell’s most important successes was the sequential military subjugation of the separatist Confederate and Covenanter regimes in Ireland (1649–1650) and Scotland (1650–1651). Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland is notorious, of course, for its brutality, but his less brutal triumph in Scotland was just as unambiguous a testimony to his determination, not to dismantle, but to reconstruct and even extend the territorial sovereignty that he and his allies had seized from Charles in 1649.

But if 1649 was the climax and the watershed of the English Revolution, it was no more than the declaration of republican regimes in Catalonia and Naples the end of the story of revolutionary conflict in England. By 1653 the so-called Rump Parliament, which had created the republican Commonwealth in 1649, was replaced by the so-called Barebones Parliament, which in the same year was replaced by the Protectorate under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. The Instrument of Government, the unprecedented written constitution that established the Protectorate, called for a single parliament elected by reformed constituencies throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, but Cromwell, who was named protector for life, and the parliament never established a modus vivendi that could ensure the stability of a uniform republican government of the entire composite after Cromwell’s death in 1657. By 1659 the leaderless regime was collapsing of its own weight—especially the weight of the large standing army—and in 1660 the Stuart dynasty was restored to the throne within a composite British state.

Though their opportunities were much diminished following the revolution of 1649, ordinary people in England nevertheless continued to be important political actors right up to the Restoration. David Underdown writes, for example, that “in every crisis of the Interregnum—in the winter of 1648–9, in 1653, and again in 1659—the revolutionary pressure was generated in the Army, in London and a few other towns, and in the congregations of the gathered churches” (1971: 354). But by the same token, the revolution awakened popular opposition to the Puritan Commonwealth just as parliamentary opposition during the 1640s had served to awaken popular support for the king (Underdown 1985, 1996; Manning 1991). Not surprisingly, throughout the Interregnum the ordinary political subjects of England remained deeply divided on a whole range of political issues, not least of which was the way in which the success of the revolutionaries had seemed to “turn the world upside down”—that is, to invert the most basic assumptions of this deeply partriarchal society. Indeed, Underdown (1996:chap. 5) argues, without a base of both popular and elite royalism, there would have been no Restoration.

On the face of it, then, it was to an elite condominium of power over a relatively consolidated territorial monarchy that England returned in 1660: “The gentry came round to monarchy again because it alone could complete the reunion of the [aristocratic] political nation.…And monarchy alone could guarantee their own kind of liberty: liberty to rule the nation without interference from the Saints, and the counties without interference from Westminster” (Underdown 1971: 359). But the institutional familiarity of the king’s return to power only masks a more fundamental sea change in political culture that entailed not only a growing suspicion among the gentry of independent popular political engagement but also a variety of deep and enduring religious and political divisions among the whole of the political nation that would continue to roil English politics for decades to come (Harris 1987; Harris, Seaward, and Goldie 1990; Underdown 1996). That an analogous form of institutional restoration occurred in Scotland should not be surprising because it is there that Charles II first attempted to restore, by means of compromises his father found unacceptable, his claim to the various pieces of the composite British throne; in Scotland, however, the experience and the memory of the revolutionary years constituted a different political-cultural legacy rooted in a significant degree of local self-regulation especially in matters of religion. By contrast with both England and Scotland, there appears to have been little of the old regime to restore in Ireland in the wake of Cromwell’s conquest; on the contrary, Ireland had effectively become a colony ruled from London through the agency of a dependent new English aristocracy on the ground while the process of Protestant plantation that Cromwell had revived continued apace.^[25]

Returning finally to the broad comparative context of R. B. Merriman’s “contemporaneous revolutions,” we can usefully make two more additions to Merriman’s list: the revolutions in Ireland and Scotland. Though they may be said to be part, along with the much more famous English Revolution, of a larger composite revolution within a composite state, each had its own distinctive dynamics. To highlight their similarities as well as their differences, it may be useful to chart their courses in the same schematic terms we used to compare the cluster of revolutions within the Spanish Habsburg domain (see fig. 10). Two points of convergence stand out: at the point of origin in the late 1630s when escalating conflict between local rulers and princely authorities threatened governmental paralysis in all three kingdoms; and in the period 1649–1651 when the new “Puritan” regime achieved an unprecedented degree of territorial consolidation across the three kingdoms. Their points of divergence are equally visible: in the period 1640–1642, revolutionary coalitions in Scotland and Ireland effectively established independent regimes on the periphery while the revolutionary coalition in England was plunged into a civil war with a remarkably resilient princely core;^[26] by 1660 both England and Scotland had not only restored their monarch but also reinstituted relatively mediated forms of rule in a familiar pattern of elite consolidation while in Ireland local rulers looked ever more like the agents rather than the competitors of a consolidated princely regime. More broadly, however, it seems obvious from the composite experience of these closely related revolutions that, despite the salience of ecclesiastical issues and the importance of religious affiliation as a marker of political difference, the dynamics of revolutionary conflict in the British Isles were comparable to those in the Habsburg Mediterranean where the politics of religious authority were not explicitly at stake.

Revolution and Civil War in the French Fronde

Following the trail of R. B. Merriman’s six contemporaneous revolutions, we have—with the additions of Sicily, Scotland, and Ireland—thus far reviewed seven revolutionary conflicts, divided clearly into two discrete clusters within two of Europe’s most prominent composite states. Though we have observed some important structural similarities in the dynamics of revolutionary conflict, especially on the peripheries of the Spanish-Habsburg and Stuart composites, it is clear that popular political actors enjoyed extremely variable opportunities to exploit the latent tensions between local rulers and their princely overlords, even within the same composite state. Nevertheless popular political action, with or without strong support from dissident elites, was critical in initiating and sustaining revolutionary political challenges to both the cultural and the fiscal demands of aggressive princes. In the long run the challengers failed to maintain their revolutionary regimes except in Portugal, but even political and military defeat came in different guises, ranging from Catalonia’s golden age of provincial autonomy to Ireland’s direct colonization. Turning our attention, finally, to the Fronde in France, we will find still more variations on these now-familiar revolutionary themes.

Historians have, for good reason, had considerable difficulty constructing coherent narratives of the French conflicts between 1648 and 1653: “Virtually every kind of protest and disobedience,” Robin Briggs suggests, “occurred simultaneously during the Fronde, only to demonstrate once again that they were incapable of coalescing into a real challenge to the government” (1989: 176–177). If we recall, however, the origins of the French monarchy as a dynastic construction from a variety of preexisting pieces of political sovereignty and its even more recent disintegration during the civil wars, the lack of coalescence may not seem so surprising. On the contrary, the very different conflicts that together made up the crisis of the Fronde serve to underscore the important sense in which Henry IV’s reconstruction of the French monarchy had by no means obliterated its compositeness. To be sure, his skillful alignment with the former Huguenot rebels as their protector and with the remnants of the Catholic League as their patron established the basis for a new kind of territorial consolidation in the seventeenth century, but at bottom the France whose princely sovereignty Louis XIV inherited in 1643 was still a patchwork quilt of jurisdictions overlaid by the fundamental distinction between the pays d’état, which enjoyed a good deal of provincial self-government through their estates, and the pays d’élection, which were more directly under the fiscal administration of the king. Thus, although the kingdom of France was a different sort of composite state than the “multiple kingdoms” of Iberia and the British Isles, it is important to situate the various conflicts, and in particular the popular interventions that were an essential part of the Fronde, in appropriate political arenas and within them to discern both the political alignments and the (transient) outcomes that they entailed. Here, I use the revolutionary conflict in Paris and Bordeaux to illustrate both the complexities and the peculiarities of the Fronde from the perspective of popular political actors.

Although it is conventional to suggest that the Fronde—the name derives from the playful but destructive slingshots of young boys—began in Paris and spread to the provinces, James B. Collins (1995: 68) argues that it was more clearly “a case of the discontent of the provinces spreading at last to Paris.” Indeed, as we saw earlier, French involvement in the Thirty Years’ War had occasioned a rising tide of political discontent over the rapidly escalating demands of the royal government—both for more money and for more direct control of the extractive apparatus. In the provinces these oppositions, as the regional revolts of the late 1630s demonstrated, could result in politically potent alignments between ordinary people, concerned especially with rising taxes, and local rulers, whose authority was being compromised by the king’s attempts to create new élections (tax districts controlled by royal officials called élus) in the pays d’état and to send intendants to oversee the process.^[27] The essential fragility of royal authority was only exacerbated by the nearly simultaneous deaths of Louis XIII (May 1643) and his dedicated minister, Cardinal Richelieu (December 1642); predictably, the regency of Anne of Austria, mother of the young Louis XIV, was immediately beset by a host of grandees competing for control of national policy during the interregnum. Amid popular protest and increasing political uncertainty, then, even royal tax officials began exhibiting what Orest Ranum describes as a “lack of zeal” in prosecuting lawbreakers:

Tax officials reported to Paris that peasants simply would not pay taxes, and that in many instances they could not do so. Occasional reports of peasants breaking into tax offices and destroying records, setting fire to houses in which tax officials lived, or physically intimidating or accosting those officials were all part of the routine of seventeenth-century government. Without a company or two of soldiers to support his efforts to raise taxes by confiscating property for non-payment, the tax collector could do little but wring his hands and inform Paris that tax revenues in his district had dried up. (1993: 6)

It was in this general atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty that the Fronde finally spread to Paris as the officers of the “sovereign” royal courts,^[28] led by the Parlement of Paris, broke with the government of the regent and her chief adviser, Cardinal Mazarin, in early 1648.

The officers of the sovereign royal courts were especially concerned to protect the noble privileges that attached to their offices as well as to ensure the security of their heavy investments in government obligations. But when they boldly squared off against the Council of State, dominated by Mazarin, they began deliberately to champion a whole range of popular grievances as well. Thus, meeting in a special combined session called the Chambre St. Louis, they drew up a list of twenty-nine specific grievances that included firmer controls on tax farming (the system by which private entrepreneurs collected taxes in return for a negotiated payment to the royal fisc), a 25 percent reduction in direct taxes, the abolition of the intendants, and the release of political prisoners. At first the Council of State temporized, but when it arrested leaders of the Parlement of Paris, massive popular mobilizations in defense of the defiant officials including the systematic erection of barricades to prevent armed repression—the Day of the Barricades, August 26, 1648—forced the royal council to accede to the judges’ demands. In October another round of confrontation again forced the government to accept all of the opposition’s demands, but in January 1649 the situation in Paris was still so volatile that the king, his regent mother, and Mazarin actually fled the city, and civil war broke out between the city of Paris and the regency government. As royal mercenaries encircled the city in an attempt to cut off its food supply, a heroic popular mobilization in the winter months of 1649 proved to be largely ineffectual militarily, but the tenacity of the rebels was nevertheless rewarded by a “compromise” in March by which the royal council formally confirmed the concessions they had made in earlier rounds in this “negotiation.” ^[29]

In this way the people of Paris, like the people of London at almost the same time, became directly involved in a struggle for control of a national political space. Theirs was very much a classic local mobilization within and in defense of their urban community, and much of the discipline and determination that characterized their actions at critical moments like the Day of the Barricades was due to the organizational framework of the civic militia, which could bring thousands of bourgeois—well-integrated members of the urban community such as merchants and artisans—into collective action through district- and ward-level structures. Though the scale and character of popular political action might not be appreciably different from what occurred in other French cities—or, for that matter, in Naples or Palermo—its location at the core of a large composite monarchy gave it special significance. Indeed, where there is no clear distinction between local rulers and national claimants to power as in both London and Paris—where the consolidation of territorial sovereignty had gone a long way toward replacing local self-regulation with direction from the center—temporary coalitions between elite political factions and massively mobilized political subjects are often said, in retrospect, to have had a “national” significance even though the claims of the transient victors were not necessarily enforceable on a national scale. Such coalitions could appear to be so dramatic and decisive in the resolution of short-term “national” crises that during the Fronde political elites frequently sought to create the illusion of crisis and thus to appeal for popular political intervention to seek short-term advantage against their opponents (Descimon and Jouhaud 1985; Ranum 1993). That many more of these apparently cynical attempts to exploit—and on occasion to buy—popular political activism failed than succeeded in the seemingly endless conflicts following the Day of the Barricades in 1648 belies the assumption of these factional leaders—and in many cases, their retrospective claims—that popular political action could be easily or simply manipulated by political elites. For their part, most of the citizens of Paris, having achieved significant (though in retrospect, short-term) concessions from the Council of State in 1648 and 1649, were apparently reluctant to identify their long-term collective interests with the ever-changing and obviously self-promoting factions that characterized elite struggles for control of the monarchy throughout the king’s minority.

In the French southwest, the port city of Bordeaux and the province of Guyenne, of which Bordeaux was the political center, had a long and more continuous history of opposition to the exactions of outsiders, especially royal tax officials and marauding armies.^[30] In 1528, for example, the citizens of Bordeaux had revolted against a new excise tax on wine, and in 1548 the city had joined major portions of the province in revolt against the gabelle, the royal tax on salt (cf. Heller 1991: 42–44). During the sixteenth-century civil wars Bordeaux was neither a center of Huguenot dissent nor a stronghold of the Catholic League, but Guyenne more generally was at the heart of the massive rural mobilizations of the Tard-Avisés or Croquants who opposed equally the plunder and pillage of all the warring parties and helped to bring the factional leaders in the contest for national power to the peace table (see chap. 3 above). Under Henry IV, Guyenne lost a measure of its provincial self-regulation and was forced to accept the more direct administration of élus and intendants as agents of the royal government,^[31] but this did little to temper its opposition to the new forms of taxation that were required to sustain the war against Spain after 1635. In fact, Bordeaux led a new series of very explosive demonstrations and tax protests that virtually halted the flow of royal tax revenues altogether. As Robin Briggs suggests, “this was a fiscal débâcle on a disastrous scale, and the rebels had achieved a great deal at relatively little cost to themselves. The weakness of the authorities had been starkly revealed, together with the unwillingness of the local élites, nobles and bourgeois alike, to protect the tax officials and agents, widely seen as traitors to their region” (1989: 136). Thus, as in many other parts of rural France, tax collection in Guyenne was, on the eve of the Fronde, an increasingly difficult, even risky venture amid an entirely predictable tide of noncompliance and popular protest.

As for Bordeaux, the city retained most of its traditional self-government—its historic “privileges”—and despite a number of extraordinary exactions in the 1630s and 1640s remained one of the most lightly taxed jurisdictions in the realm. As was so often the case in early modern cities, these political and fiscal privileges can be seen as the fruit of an informal, almost natural alliance between the local magistracy—the jurade—and the bourgeois, or propertied, citizens. Though the magistrates routinely pledged their allegiance to the king, they also routinely opposed new royal taxation on behalf of their subjects, whose support and approval made daily governance possible. When their appeals to abolish new taxes altogether were unsuccessful, the jurade typically bought out the new tax with a negotiated lump-sum payment, thereby acceding to intermittent royal extortions rather than putting themselves in the position of having to collect unpopular royal taxes on a regular basis (Ranum 1993). In short, on the southwestern periphery of France local rulers in informal alliance with popular political actors proved to be a remarkably successful brake on the extension of royal administration and taxation. This put the privileged officers of the Parlement of Bordeaux—a sovereign royal court with jurisdiction in much of southwestern France—in a particularly awkward position: they were at once the most prominent members of the local political elite and obliged officially to enforce royal edicts and protect tax collectors, the hated gabelleurs. But when push came to shove repeatedly in the 1630s and 1640s, the parlementaires generally sided with the local coalition rather than with the king’s tax agents by refusing to register new tax edicts and by failing to prosecute tax resisters. During the regency, however, the duke of Épernon—royal governor of Guyenne, a staunch ally of Mazarin, and a personal enemy of many parlementaires—gladly exploited the Parlement’s failure to stem (much less to quell) the rising tide of popular tax protests in his own attempt to gain more direct control of Bordeaux’s local administration.

The predictable consequence of this complex interaction among local rulers, ordinary political subjects, and national claimants to power was a classic and largely successful coalition in defense of the local community during the initial phase of the Fronde. This took especially the form of a massive armed mobilization of the city’s population—an expansion of the number of militia companies from twelve to thirty-six—in the face of a military buildup and an attempted blockade of the city by the royal governor in 1648. The general armament of the populace was controversial because it threatened to dilute the political elite’s control of the civic militia, but it appeared dramatically to bear fruit when, in 1649, the militia attacked and dismantled one of the governor’s most important fortifications within the city, the Château Trompette. Thus the alliance of municipal authorities and parlementaires with popular political actors in Bordeaux produced a compromise agreement—the rebels were granted an amnesty and promised the destruction of the royal governor’s fortification at Libourne—that could be interpreted as an important victory. In this case it was not a “national” victory over arbitrary government and excessive taxation as the Frondeurs in Paris might claim but a decidedly local victory in defense of a privileged, self-regulating urban community.

There are some similarities or parallels between the early phases of the Fronde in Paris and in Bordeaux. The most obvious is a coalition between the privileged officers of sovereign royal courts—led by the parlements—and massive mobilizations of ordinary people—led by civic militias—in defense of the local community and in opposition to the regency government (or its agents). Indeed, in both cases this formidable alliance, which emerged full-blown in the course of 1648, forced the Council of State to make significant concessions in the course of 1649, and their coincidence in time surely underscored the fragility of the regency government. Still, it is clear that these conflicts were moving in different directions that reflected structural differences relating to the geography of power within composite states and the correspondingly variable opportunities open to popular political actors. Whereas elite factionalism and the collapse of royal authority afforded popular political actors in Paris the unique opportunity to affect short-term “national” crises directly and immediately, popular political actors in Bordeaux were given the opportunity to chart a far more independent course of action that culminated in the revolutionary regime of the Ormée in 1652.

Besides offering liberal pensions to former or potential competitors in the political elite, the Council of State set about reconstructing royal power on behalf of the young king Louis XIV by formally visiting some of the centers of the rebellion. The king’s return to Paris and official visits to Rouen and Dijon appeared to be quite successful as elaborate displays of royal authority and popular affection, but the city of Bordeaux refused at first to give him entrance in August 1650 amid a new round of open warfare between Governor Épernon and his many enemies in the region. Many members of the Parlement wanted to open the city’s gates to the king, but the leaders of the popular movement, especially those who had assumed new positions of militia leadership, were deeply suspicious of this kind of formal and ostentatious display of the king’s claims to sovereign authority within their community. As the grape harvest neared in September, they reluctantly agreed to the king’s visit, but instead of being allowed to arrive by land at the head of his army like a conqueror, Louis XIV arrived via the Garonne on board a magnificent, but militarily insignificant, galley. By the summer of 1651 the magistrates of Bordeaux found themselves under renewed popular pressure to shore up the city’s defenses against royal encroachment, and when the jurade excluded this collection of merchants and artisans from official meetings, the leaders of the popular movement began holding their own meetings outside under a magnificent grove of elm trees, from which they adopted the name for their movement: the Ormée.

The extralegal meetings of the Ormée to discuss political issues normally reserved for the officers of the municipality opened up a second phase of the Fronde in Bordeaux that exposed deep rifts within the local political elite. Though the Parlement strictly forbade the extraordinary political meetings, the merchants and artisans of the Ormée were still allied with a significant segment of the deeply divided local political elite. The Ormée nevertheless began making fundamentally revolutionary demands—one of their manifestos even announced that they had constituted themselves as a “republic”—that would have radically transformed the political position of both the local magistrates and the royal government.^[32] By the summer of 1652, the Ormée had invaded the Hôtel de Ville and effectively taken over the administration of local affairs, and to shore up their position they began forcibly exiling leaders of the old political elite who had not already fled. In this new round of struggle with many of their former allies within the local political establishment, the leaders of the Ormée found willing allies among the agents of the Prince of Condé, who in 1649 had saved the monarchy from its enemies but had subsequently been arrested under order from Mazarin. The city of Bordeaux’s formal protection of the Princess of Condé had been an essential part of its ongoing defiance in 1650, and having finally been released from prison, Condé was now openly waging a military campaign against Mazarin and the Council of State. When this national struggle for power ended in the defeat of Condé’s armies, the rebels of Bordeaux saw little chance for survival and eventually surrendered the city with relatively little resistance in 1653. In the aftermath the authority and privileges of the Parlement of Bordeaux were restored along with the king’s sovereignty, but the leaders of the Ormée were tried and executed.

Though they were thus defeated militarily, the Ormée had nevertheless transformed the political landscape of the city of Bordeaux and, by extension, the kingdom of France. In the course of several years of escalating struggle, the leaders of the Ormée, an amalgam of fringe members of the local political elite, merchants, and artisans, demonstrated that they could use existing organizations like guilds and the expanded militia units to mobilize a broad base of political support and to dominate the local political arena; at the same time they showed considerable political independence by rejecting their erstwhile allies at home (see fig. 2a) in favor of an alliance with the Prince of Condé, a formidable claimant to national power (see fig. 2c). How well this new coalition might have held up in the event of a rebel victory against Mazarin is difficult to say, but it surely would have resulted in a very different path of political development, not only for Bordeaux, but possibly for the whole of the kingdom. As it happened, the numerical strength and stubborn tenacity of the Ormée—the very qualities that allowed them to dominate the municipal arena—had the unintended consequence of driving the local political elite into the direction of the king who, in exchange for their loyalty, guaranteed their offices and their privileges against attack from below. In this sense, the political outcome of the Fronde in Bordeaux is an especially vivid illustration of the political consequences that Charles Tilly describes for France as a whole: “Quelling the Fronde did not eliminate resistance to royal demands; it displaced and fragmented that resistance. Alliances between ordinary people (typically aggrieved by taxation or other forms of extraction) and important nobles (typically aggrieved by checks to their power) became both less likely and less effective” (1986: 242).

In other words, the monarchy’s ability variously to defeat, to co-opt, or to bribe its many enemies, one by one, entailed a significant political realignment and underwrote a pattern of political development that belies the inflated rhetorical claims of all parties during the conflict: a general consolidation of elite power in terms of noble privilege vis-à-vis both ordinary political subjects and the “sovereign” prince (see fig. 2b). This thoroughly unintended and ambiguous outcome, which became deeply embedded in the political culture of the resurgent French regime of the 1660s, would remain an important brake on future attempts to “reform” French politics and to assert a more uniform and unlimited territorial sovereignty in the kingdom as a whole.

Yet the diminished likelihood of a comprehensive opposition had different political implications under different circumstances. Using the analytic framework of our more general comparisons of composite revolutions, it is also important to underscore more specific differences in both the dynamic process of revolutionary conflict and its long-term political consequences in Paris and Bordeaux. Figure 11 suggests how we might describe and account for these differences in terms of the proximity/integration of princely authority and the changing character of the local revolutionary coalitions.

At the core of the reconstructed French monarchy, the ordinary political subjects of Paris quickly discovered that the political confrontation and paralysis of the 1640s led not only to what Orest Ranum (1993) describes as the heady albeit transient “joy of revolution” in 1648 but also to the ongoing depredations of a five-year civil war. The tax relief they had demanded and actually been promised proved to be short-lived while the outcome of the civil wars—the survival of both the dynastic prince and his somewhat chastened sovereign courts—was predicated on the king’s ability to reestablish unmediated administrative control of his capital, even though for the bulk of his long reign Louis XIV, having fled the symbolic center of his kingdom during the Fronde, chose to reside elsewhere. By contrast, on the southwestern periphery of the same monarchy, the ordinary people of Bordeaux discovered that the political confrontation and paralysis of the 1640s led directly to intermittent civil war and only indirectly to the heady but equally transient experience of revolution. The local self-regulation that they championed turned out to be more contentious and divisive than they imagined while the “survival” of royal sovereignty over their city was predicated on the destruction of their long-standing and largely successful alliance with local rulers in opposition to the exactions of a distant monarch. In short, the microgeography of composite state formation remained a salient feature of the political experience of the ordinary political subjects of Paris and Bordeaux, not only in terms of the taxes they paid but also in the political experiences they remembered and the reconfigured range of opportunities available to them.

Composite Revolutions and State Power

In the context of the French Fronde and the multiple revolutions in Iberia and the British Isles, R. B. Merriman’s inclusion of the “Revolution” in the northern Netherlands in his list of contemporaneous revolutions may seem curious, if not fundamentally mistaken. In fact, Herbert H. Rowen (1972) has aptly termed it “the revolution that wasn’t.” ^[33] For our purposes, Merriman’s apparent mistake may be a particularly creative one because it encourages us to clarify what was distinctive—or at least not revolutionary—about political conflict in the Dutch Republic at the end of its long war of independence. This will allow us, in turn, a useful perspective from which to reflect more generally on the nature of composite revolutions and their relationship to the consolidation of sovereign authority over ordinary political subjects.

For the Dutch Republic the ratification of a permanent peace with Spain in 1648 was a moment of general relief and celebration, but it also opened up many of the political wounds that had been so inflamed during the temporary truce with Spain some forty years earlier. As in 1609, the political leaders of the province of Holland, and the city of Amsterdam in particular, had been the most forceful advocates of peace negotiations, while the Prince of Orange, William II, who succeeded Frederik Hendrik in 1647, was intent on pursuing the war with Spain in concert with France and with an eye toward the division of the southern Netherlands between the republic and France. After he failed to sidetrack the peace, William’s conflict with the powerful regents of Holland only escalated as the regents pushed hard to scale back the size of the army—their specific proposal was to eliminate the foreign contingents most loyal to the prince—and by extension to reduce the burdensome taxes that were required to support a large standing army.^[34] In 1650 this fundamental disagreement over defense policy, which was pregnant with constitutional implications for the republic as a whole, culminated in an attempted coup d’état by William II, which proved, in the end, to be “the revolution that wasn’t.”

For young William II, who was deeply concerned about establishing his “glory” as a military leader, peace with Spain came at an inopportune time, and his attempted coup was in many ways a defensive move to prevent further erosion of his leadership position (Rowen 1988). As political appointees, the princes of Orange had only indirect “influence” in the formal structures of republican governance: as captains-general, they commanded the Union’s army and dispensed commissions to subordinate officers; as members of the Council of State, which advised the Estates General, they influenced defense and foreign policy; as provincial stadhouders, they mediated internal disputes and presided over a political patronage network that had been expanded by Maurits and Frederik Hendrik.^[35] In the Dutch republican system, then, the princes of Orange were generals, advisers, and patrons, but not sovereigns; they may be considered national claimants to power only to the extent that they were the brokers of broader political alliances, which might include both regents and ordinary political subjects. More obviously resourceful militarily than politically, William undertook a series of extraordinary moves in the early summer of 1650 that appear to have been carefully planned some time in advance and were intended not simply to resolve the immediate issue of troop levels in his favor but to wrest decision-making authority over defense and foreign policy away from the individually “sovereign” provinces.^[36] First he used the failure of negotiations with the province of Holland over troop levels as the occasion to undertake a series of official visits to the most intransigent cities in Holland—whose narrow majority in the Estates of Holland stood in the way of compromise—to compel them to change their positions. Then, when these well-orchestrated confrontations produced no significant result and the province of Holland took unilateral action to dismiss troops in its pay, he openly countermanded their orders and obtained a vague instruction from the Estates General, over Holland’s objection, to take unspecified measures to ensure public order. Finally, armed with this mandate, at the end of July he simultaneously arrested six prominent regents from the cities of Holland and secretly deployed more than ten thousand troops to the gates of Amsterdam.

Thus the disagreement over troop levels quickly escalated into a military confrontation with Amsterdam, the symbolic center of political opposition to the stadhouder/captain-general. Given the numbers and the apparent loyalty of the troops at his disposal, it is perhaps surprising that William’s bold actions—the combination of symbolic visitations, arrests, and military confrontations are clearly reminiscent of the tactics that Maurits used so successfully against Oldenbarnevelt in the 1610s—produced so little result. When the city mobilized massively in its own defense, William agreed to further negotiations and settled for the resignation of two powerful Amsterdam regents and a vague promise to work out the policy issues peacefully. Though it is conventional to suggest that William’s political failure was accidental—first, because the troops he secretly sent to Amsterdam were reported to the authorities by a post courier who happened to witness their movement, thereby compromising the element of surprise; second, because of the accident of his untimely death a few months later—William more fundamentally failed to re-create the political coalition that his uncle, Maurits, had used to such great advantage.

To be sure, on the policy issues William appears to have enjoyed a fairly solid base of support among the regent elite of all the provinces except Holland, but even in Holland he was supported by nearly half of the enfranchised towns. Rather, the principal difference was his own lack of popular support, which stands in sharp contrast to the robust popular defense of Amsterdam in the face of William’s military challenge. By comparison with Maurits, who built on the prior politicization and mobilization of orthodox Calvinists within religiously divided communities to make “extraordinary” changes in municipal councils (wetsverzettingen), William was unable to generate the kind of popular support necessary to dislodge his opponents at the municipal level—this despite his strenuous assertion that he, too, was defending both the Union and the “true religion.” Thus his monthlong series of theatrical official visits to the most recalcitrant cities of Holland failed to turn any votes in his favor at the provincial Estates, and lacking the authority to make decisions in his own name or to force majority decisions at the Estates General over the objections of Holland especially, he could do little in the face of Amsterdam’s apparently four-square defense but return to the bargaining table.

When the immediate crisis had passed and the troops had been sent away from Amsterdam, William did enjoy some modest success in the promised negotiations over military policy. But his more fundamental inability to transform the structures of sovereign decision-making authority in the Dutch republican state was obvious. Thus, immediately following William’s death from smallpox in October, the regents of Holland summoned an extraordinary Grand Assembly of all the provincial Estates to take measures to prevent similar political crises in the future. Though the Grand Assembly did not agree to Holland’s proposal that henceforth the offices of stadhouder and captain-general should not be united in a single person, it did unequivocally affirm the sovereignty of the constituent provinces—even with regard to troops in their employ—and inaugurate the first stadhouderless period in Dutch republican history.^[37] In this sense, the nonrevolution in the northern Netherlands both highlighted and reinforced the general direction of Dutch political development since the 1580s: the permanent elimination of the dynastic prince and the consequent consolidation of alternative sovereignties, at the provincial and even the municipal level.

All in all, the distinctiveness of the political and constitutional crisis in the Dutch Republic does appear to defy R. B. Merriman’s inclusion of it in his list of contemporaneous revolutions. Still, it can be useful in our broader assessment of the political dynamics of seventeenth-century revolutions. First, it underscores obliquely the sense in which the mid-seventeenth-century political crisis was a crisis of princely power, a crisis brought on by concerted attempts to consolidate the authority—especially fiscal and cultural authority—of dynastic princes within composite states. If nothing else, the crisis in the Dutch Republic, where the dynastic prince had been replaced by a loose condominium of oligarchic regents, suggests a simple proposition: no princely consolidation, no composite revolution.^[38] This is not to say, of course, that in the absence of aggressive princes there will be no political conflict; on the contrary, I want only to suggest that where the dynastic prince had actually been eliminated, where the princely authority had previously been limited, or where the prince had merely been chastened by previous experience, we should expect that political conflict will take different form from that which we have called composite or multiple revolutions. At the same time, to the extent that the Dutch Republic remained a composite of previously constituted political units, William’s failed coup underscores a more general observation that in a composite state military intimidation alone was more likely to awaken local alliances in defense of the self-regulation of the local community than to encourage massive shifts of popular allegiance in favor of a territorial consolidation of power.^[39] In addition, this account of the Dutch crisis reinforces the more general argument of this book that in early modern composite states, popular political actors are essential to any attempt to describe and account for the divergent paths of European political development over the longue durée; the specific corollary suggested by the Dutch “revolution that wasn’t” might read: no popular mobilization, no revolutionary seizure of power.

To return finally to the cluster of composite revolutions we have examined here, we can say once again that ordinary political subjects—far from being hapless victims or passive observers—were active participants in the creation of the new complex of European states that emerged from the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. At the beginning of these revolutionary processes, the stubborn resistance, defiant demonstrations, and occasionally violent insurrections of ordinary political subjects invariably disrupted the relations between local rulers and national claimants to power and thereby occasioned a variety of more general crises of state power. In the middle of these processes, their more massive mobilization through community networks and militia companies, often (though not always) in alliance with a segment of the political elite, opened up a variety of revolutionary situations in which the dynastic prince’s claim to sovereignty was fundamentally shaken—by the threat of either secession at the periphery or replacement by alternative claimants to national power at the center. And at the end of these revolutionary processes, even when the dynastic princes eventually prevailed or their authority was later revived, it was invariably under informal conditions and/or constitutional regulations that betrayed the potency of the comprehensive revolutionary coalitions that were rooted in the intentional engagement and deliberate mobilization of ordinary political subjects.

As in the clusters of Reformation era contention for power we examined in previous chapters, these composite revolutions were far too complex and their outcomes far too ambiguous and transient to be susceptible to a simple tabulation of winners and losers. It is especially important to recognize, however, that the variations we have attempted to describe and account for were not only those that obviously distinguished the composites from one another but also those that were evident within these larger constructs. Indeed, the microgeography of composite state formation remained a defining feature of the new European political landscape for the simple reason that the most obvious cost of princely “survival”—not only in the German-Roman Empire in central Europe but also in the resurgent kingdoms in the west—was some form of agreement on the part of the dynastic prince to accept or even to guarantee the internal boundaries of their composite states. This meant that both the proximity of princely power and the viability of broad political alliances in opposition to them varied considerably while ordinary political subjects remained a salient feature of the complex political relations between local rulers and national claimants to power. In the concluding chapter we will turn our attention to a more global comparison of the variant trajectories of state formation that were the accumulated residue of some one hundred fifty years of religious and political struggle in Europe.

Notes