France: The Rise of Absolutism

The French nobility was confronted with the problem of declining rents from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards. Peasants enjoyed significant success in struggles over the distribution of output and over access to common woods, pastures, and fisheries; the result was shrinking seigneurial incomes. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, village communities won a corporative status that enabled them to defend their rights. Under conditions of expanding agricultural markets, improved prices for farm products, and a relaxation in the burden of the taille, a stratum of middling peasants emerged who reaped the benefits of prosperity.^[37]

In order to counteract these trends, during the second half of the fifteenth century the French nobility launched a localized offensive which picked up steam throughout the sixteenth century. In many parts of France, customary grazing rights came under attack. In response to this offensive and to the growth of rural poverty, peasants erupted episodically during the 1540s into resistance they directed especially against various forms of royal taxation. The drift towards anarchy throughout the course of the religious wars was punctuated by major peasant risings between 1578 and 1580. In the midst of widespread famine and economic crisis during the 1590s, massive peasant rebellions shook the social structure of sixteenth-century France. The scale of these uprisings forced the landed ruling class to put its internal differences behind it and to unite against the threat from below. The result was a decisive shift in the direction of monarchical absolutism.^[38] Absolutism thus represented, as Perry Anderson has written, "a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position."^[39] Unable to break peasant resistance and to raise levies at the local level, the lords turned to the concentrated power of the centralized state.

Once the absolutist state was set on a secure footing following the civil wars and peasant revolts of the sixteenth century, the political and military weight of a centralized administrative machine was capable of ensuring a substantially increased level of peasant exploita-

tion. Between 1610 and 1644, for example, state exactions from the taille rose from 17 million to 44 million livres. Total taxation quadrupled in the decade after 1630. These increases represented a rise in the real level of exactions as grain prices stagnated during this period. By 1628, in fact, Normandy alone was providing Louis XIII with revenues equal to all those raised by Charles I in England. By the time of Louis XIV's first war (1667–1668), the French Crown was raising 60 million livres in revenue; no other European power, except Holland, could count on an income a quarter of that amount.^[40] However, though absolutism preserved the social relations of feudal exploitation, it did so in a fashion which created new social conflicts and constructed major obstacles to economic development.

The most obvious conflict engendered by absolutism was that between the surplus-extractive demands of the local lords and those of the state. Inherent in the distribution of the surplus product was a conflict between rent and taxes, the latter a "centralized feudal rent" drawn from the seigneurie of the whole realm. Especially in bad years, state exactions could entirely eliminate seigneurial rents. As a result, lords often encouraged peasant resistance directed against tax collectors or their agents.^[41]

In order to avoid a full-scale confrontation between the aristocracy and the absolutist state, the Crown strove to integrate sections of the ruling class into the machinery of taxation. The most effective means of doing so was through the sale of offices, which would give their owners a share of the centralized feudal rent exacted by the state. These officiers of the state would thus come to identify with the tax system as an important source of their personal wealth. Through the sale of offices the absolutist state provided itself with a measure of stability, since "it could absorb into state office many of those very same lords who were the casualties of the erosion of the seigneurial system."^[42] The sale of offices also had another significant effect for the Crown: it provided the state with a source of wealth separate from the surplus product of the peasantry and thus—at least in principle—lessened the direct conflict between rent collection and taxation. Moreover, to the extent to which bourgeois wealth was drawn into the purchase of offices, the Crown was able to tap a financial source largely independent of feudal exploitation.

The sale of offices served as a short-term solution to the basic structural problem of French absolutism. The absolutist state was

plagued throughout its history by a chronic inability to raise revenues sufficient to pay its basic costs—especially the costs of war. War forced the state to resort to even more extraordinary measures in an effort to meet its expenses; it relied increasingly on loans. In receiving loans from financiers and wealthy nobles, the Crown agreed in turn to alienate specific revenues from the tax system. While the system of loans enabled the monarchy to meet pressing expenses, its longer term effect undermined the financial strength of the state. The result was that absolutism experienced a sharp conflict between the Crown and those officeholders who claimed a share of royal revenues. So desperate became the situation of the Crown that it often sold fraudulent rights or imaginary supplements to the salaries of officiers . And so intense did the conflict between officiers and the Crown become that it at times erupted into open insurrection.^[43]

A basic contradiction thus ran through the structure of French absolutism: the conflict between Crown and officiers . It was a conflict which could not be resolved. On the one hand, the monarchy needed a stratum of nobles and bourgeois whose private wealth it could tap. On the other hand, however serious their grievances, the officiers could not fundamentally challenge the absolutist régime; to do so would have deprived them of access to the potential fortunes to be made through participation in the fiscal apparatus of the state. On its own, perhaps, this basic contradiction could have been tolerated. In the long run, however, the extraordinary financial machine of French absolutism siphoned enormous amounts of wealth out of productive activity and into the purely speculative area of state investments. In so doing, the fiscal machine erected an insurmountable obstacle to revitalization of the French economy.

The main focus of bourgeois investment in the eighteenth century was what George Taylor has called "court capitalism," which term refers to "the exploitation by individuals and syndicates of government farms, state loans, and joint-stock flotations and speculations."^[44] "Court capitalism" revolved around the speculative activities of financiers, those who were private agents in the collection of state revenues as farmers general, treasurers, and receivers general of finance in the provinces and those who advanced loans to the Crown in exchange for office and rentes . In reality, the term is a misnomer. Porshnev's notion of a "feudalization" of the French bourgeoisie is more accurate. In one form or another, through loans either to nobles

or to the state, enormous amounts of bourgeois wealth were advanced to the traditional ruling class in exchange for a share of feudal dues from either the local or central level. These feudal dues became a form of interest payment on capital advanced as credit. In this way, bourgeois incomes became dependent upon the system of feudal surplus extraction. Without doubt, the greatest fortunes were to be made through investments in the fiscal machine. In addition, the purchase of venal office could provide noble status while further investments could acquire fiscal exemption and seigneurial rights. The speculative fortunes to be made from lending to the Crown or participating in joint-stock enterprises were immense and stimulated an intricate network of intrigue and influence peddling; state-related investments thus dominated bourgeois pursuit of wealth and status. Consequently, commercial wealth did not flow into productive investments in agriculture and industry, since "the most spectacular operations of old regime capitalism were made possible by royal finance and political manipulation rather than industrial or maritime enterprise."^[45]

But perhaps the major obstacle to economic development posed by absolutism had to do with its effects upon the peasantry and the system of agriculture. As in England, significant social differentiation did occur in the ranks of the peasantry during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Unlike England, however, this differentiation did not in France proceed to the point at which a yeoman stratum emerged from the ranks of the peasantry and undertook a form of petty commodity production. The reason for this seems clear: the consolidation of absolutism enabled the state to significantly increase the level of exploitation of the peasants. By raising the level of exploitation, the royal power prevented peasants with larger holdings from amassing surpluses sufficient to improve the productivity of the land, to expand their holdings, and to set in motion the bare beginnings of a genuine agricultural revolution.

Just as absolutism tended to block the emergence of a commodity-producing stratum of rich peasants, so it tended to close off the possibility of lords enclosing land and moving in the direction of agrarian capitalism. Absolutism heightened peasant exploitation; at the same time it also buttressed peasants' rights to property and defended the peasantry against excessive exaction by local lords. The Crown saw clearly that marked rises in rents would prevent full pay-

ment of taxes. Furthermore, since the nobility was exempt from taxation, the Crown had a direct interest in the preservation of the peasantry—its primary tax base. As a result, peasants generally received support from the monarchy and especially from its local representatives, the intendants, in their campaigns against enclosures by landlords. For this reason, according to Bloch, "the victory of the absolute monarchy kept the 'feudal reaction' within bounds."^[46] Absolutism thus defended the property rights of the peasantry while it heightened exploitation of peasants; and while it blocked the emergence of a prosperous stratum from the ranks of the peasantry, it put major obstacles in the way of agricultural improvement and enclosures by landlords.

Nobles did attempt to enclose, consolidate, and undermine the traditional rights of the peasantry. And in some cases they did demonstrate an orientation to commercial farming.^[47] But none of these movements succeeded in transforming France's rural social structure—nor could they have, given the nature of feudal absolutism. Unable to change the social relations of agricultural production, through primitive accumulation, and thereby to boost surplus product with innovations designed to maximize output, the French nobility were left with no real option but to squeeze a greater surplus from essentially unchanged levels of peasant output.

Thus, while absolutism preserved the power of the nobility—in a dramatically altered form—it also undermined the long-term strength of the economy upon which that power rested. The result was that peasants failed to meet the requirements of simple reproduction, to replace the seed, tools, livestock, and labour necessary to sustain a standard level of productivity; and the vitality of the economy was sapped. Consequently, the productivity of the land declined. At the same time, rural poverty blocked the development of a growing home market for domestic manufactures. The maintenance of a mass of small peasant holdings thus guaranteed that absolutist France would not make a breakthrough to self-sustaining economic growth. The sapping of economic vitality also undermined the power of the absolutist state. An impoverished peasantry could not endlessly provide the revenues necessary for a massive, centralized state. Periodic crises, which became endemic by the 1690s, forced the monarchy to tax noble wealth. Yet in so doing the Crown threatened its own often tenuous base of support in the ruling class. The eco-

nomic and fiscal structure of absolutism thus generated a series of economic and political contradictions, all of which conspired to prevent a capitalist transformation of the agrarian sector and thereby to block a breakthrough to self-sustaining economic growth. In this way, economic crisis sowed the seeds of political crisis.

In 1758—when the physiocratic school first rose to prominence—France was facing a threefold crisis. Her armies were reeling under a series of defeats that were to result in the loss of the Seven Years' War. Foreign trade was ruined and the financial crisis reached alarming heights. Payment of inscriptions was suspended, salaries were stopped, and people were urged to bring in their gold and silver ornaments for minting. By this point, absolutism had run its course. The economy was impoverished, the state effectively bankrupt. Theorists like the Physiocrats saw one way and one way alone out of the crisis: an English-style capitalist transformation of the agricultural sector. The physiocratic revolution was not to be, however. The result was that the monarchy stumbled from one crisis to another. By 1789, the annual deficit equaled one-fifth of the state budget while interest payments on the national debt rose to more than half of annual government expenditures.^[48] Inability to solve these economic dilemmas of absolutism sealed the fate of the régime, contributing powerfully to the revolutionary crisis of 1789. However, the failure of agrarian revolution continued to haunt the French economy long after absolutism had been laid to rest.