Six
The Limits of Reform

Believing common rights to be harmful to agriculture, the central government issued edicts beginning in the 1760s that allowed landowners to challenge these rights. Liberal historians of the French Revolution cite the edicts to argue that the state was an agent of modernization and liberal reform. Historians with a socialist orientation cite the same edicts to demonstrate that the state was collaborating with wealthy peasants and aristocrats to promote capitalism by crushing the old peasant communities. Both of these groups link increased state power with the forces of historical progress, modernization, and capitalist expansion. In focusing on what the state hoped to accomplish via royal legislation, both liberal and socialist historians have ignored a very important point.

Far from enforcing the edicts, the royal representatives in the provinces—the intendants—actually aided communities in preserving communal rights. The intendants restricted the sale of communal properties, discouraged communities from attempting enclosure, and regularly found reasons to prevent the partitioning of common lands. The bureaucrats also intervened to defend the equal distribution of firewood from village forests. When orders were issued from Paris requiring that communal firewood be distributed according to tax payments, the bureaucracy instead helped communities maintain the allotment of

equal portions. Likewise, while the King's Council was calling for the curtailment of gleaning rights, the king's provincial administrators protected the right of the poor to collect the stubble on the harvested fields. Yet these administrators were not representatives of local interests who had drifted away from royal control; they were members of the same King's Council that issued the orders for restructuring agriculture. The intendants had been sent to the provinces to represent the king and were responsible to him alone.

Constraints Imposed by Medieval State Building

First we will analyze the process by which the kings of France tried to transform a mosaic French state into a uniform nation to understand why, in the eighteenth century, policy set in Paris had come to be very different from that implemented in the provinces. The politics of early state building led the crown into institutional commitments that were to restrict the choices available in the eighteenth century. We will see that in attempting to establish a relationship with the village, the crown was responding to political imperatives that had arisen quite independently of the pressures for agrarian individualism. The crown's first efforts to establish a relationship with the communities were part of the efforts of the Capetian monarchs to overcome the fragmentation of political power and to unify the nation. The crown called upon the communities to assist it in building a centralized state. In the long run, the king needed to link up with a local body in order to bypass the jurisdiction of the lords. The crown's initial gains were in the areas of justice and finance, which became the pillars of the early modern state.

To win the loyalty of their peasant subjects, the kings of France during the Middle Ages began to establish a system of royal courts that would be superior to the local seigneurial courts. The royal courts took over many areas of jurisdiction where seigneurial courts had not been effective. Next, the monarchy developed special procedures by which litigants could bypass the seigneurial courts and go directly to a royal court. The dictum that all rights of justice originated as a grant from or a

confirmation by the king provided the royal courts with a justification for taking precedence over all other courts in the realm.

The royal courts gradually recognized the communities as proper litigants and thus conferred a legal identity upon them. In the jurisprudence of these courts, village assemblies could make a contract, authorize expenditures, and even sue the local seigneur. The assemblies were also authorized to engage in common business transactions and to initiate lawsuits in defending those transactions. The courts recognized that villages could own property collectively, as corporations, and could elect representatives if the plus saine et majeure partie participated, that is, by majority decision. Collective ownership of property was permitted to all bodies defined as universitates, which included monasteries, religious orders, and guilds as well as villages. The definition of the term universitas was suitably loose^[1] —it is unlikely that royal authorities wanted it to have too precise a meaning. The vagueness permitted individual officials to apply it as they saw fit. By the fourteenth century, communities were legally defined as corporations and entered the mainstream of administrative law. In acknowledging the communities' corporate identity, the crown may have done nothing more than officially recognize the relationships and procedures that already had a de facto local significance, for they had been established in the community's relationship with the seigneur.

To justify extending fiscal authority over the peasantry, the crown again asserted its supremacy in the feudal chain of command by claiming that the right of lords to collect various dues or banalités was a privilege granted by the monarchy. According to this view, seigneurs were collecting funds as the king's surrogates. But it was not until the end of the Hundred Years' War that the Estates General confirmed that the crown could tax the peasantry directly, at least until the English were driven from French soil. The crown never surrendered that prerogative.

The king did not develop mechanisms to tax peasants as individuals, however. Such mechanisms would have required the establishment and maintenance of a large body of accountable officials at the local level, which was too expensive. Moreover, it was

[1] Pierre Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: Expressions du mouvement communautaire dans le moyen âge latin (Paris, 1970).

easier to assess the peasant community and to hold it collectively responsible for its individual members, especially since the habits of collective responsibility had already been formed. Seigneurs had earlier found it more convenient to hold the community responsible for the sums owed by its individual members. Should the community refuse to honor its obligations, the property of the wealthiest members of that community could be impounded by the seigneur. The wealthy inhabitants would then have to find some way of recovering their losses from the community. The seigneur's agent had enforced this practice, called contrainte solidaire, to ensure that the seigneur's dues were paid.

Asserting the priority of the king's fiscal prerogatives, his officials insisted on the community's freedom from seigneurial supervision in matters concerning royal taxation. Theoretically, communities could assemble without the lord's permission to discuss such matters. However, it is probable that meetings of the village assembly, for whatever purpose, were supervised by seigneurial agents. The crown's assertion of the village's independence in fiscal matters may at first have been no more than a claim, but its significance was that later, the crown could assert the village's fiscal independence of the seigneurie to justify extending royal authority over the village.

Thus, the medieval kings of France took some important steps toward asserting the crown's authority over matters pertaining to both national and local policymaking. However, during the Middle Ages the local authority of the king's officials never infringed on the lord's jurisdiction over communities. Seigneurial agents continued to audit all details of village administration, and this function remained the basis of seigneurial authority. Although the central authority had made much progress in the areas of finance and justice, not until the late seventeenth century did the crown begin to compete with the lord for administrative leadership of the communities.

Absolutism and State Finance During the Reign of Louis XIV

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the rapid extension of royal authority throughout France. The corporate rights and responsibilities of villages (such as ownership of common

lands, common-use rights with regard to private lands, and collective responsibility for taxes) also received their most complete elaboration in royal jurisprudence during this period. Citing medieval precedents, royal policymakers designed a complex legal and administrative system to ensure that the village's corporate responsibilities and properties would come under direct royal supervision. The impetus for increasing supervision over taxpayers was changing military technology: the need to create, discipline, and maintain standing armies had greatly increased the costs of war to the state.^[2] By taxing the resources of its citizens, French kings could finance and field the largest army in Europe. The key to that power lay in state finance, which Louis XIV spoke of in his mémoires as "that which moves and activates the whole great body of the monarchy." In 1661, however, when Louis began his personal reign, that "great body" was moribund; the crown was on the verge of bankruptcy. Many advised against raising the taxes levied on the peasants on the grounds that, thanks to Louis's predecessors, they were already paying enough. The tax increases imposed by Richelieu and Mazarin had often unleashed rebellions so severe that, despite social divisions, entire provinces had united against the king. Wishing to avoid a renewal of such opposition, Louis embarked on another course. By offering lower interest rates on future

[2] One solution was to raise revenues to pay for mercenary troops and supplies. This could be done in Western Europe but not in Eastern Europe. In the absence of mobile urban wealth and lacking an internally developed market economy that could generate substantial funds for the state, rulers in Eastern Europe could not expand their fiscal capabilities sufficiently. Therefore, they redefined the social and economic obligations of their subjects. Consider the two states that were to become the great powers of the East: the Russian and Prussian states. Both increased the services required of the nobility and the peasantry. The lords were committed to state service and peasants were tied to the land. The nobility was thus militarized and peasant serfdom was reinforced. Unpaid military service was demanded of each peasant, in addition to laboring on the lord's estate. The lords acted as both estate managers and military chiefs. Unlike the states of Eastern Europe, France had other options. Neither lords nor peasants had to be compelled to serve in the military, for the French state could raise funds for an army by drawing on the kingdom's abundant mercantile and urban wealth. The highly developed market economy had put a great deal of that wealth into circulation. Even the peasants were governed by the market, where they bought and sold food and labor services. See George Clark, The Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1947; reprint 1970), p. 98. See also Michael Roberts, "The Military Revolution, 1560–1660," in Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), pp. 195–226; and David Bien, "Uselessness, Survival, and the State: A Problem in Comparative Perspective" (manuscript).

loans and restructuring the tax farms, the crown achieved substantial savings. The king even repudiated part of the existing debt by reducing interest rates on loans already contracted.

The most important action to increase royal revenues was carried out not in Paris but at the level of the village. Louis XIV appointed commissioners—the intendants—to regulate village finance and to ensure that the crown received a larger portion of what the village produced. He also attempted to diminish those charges on the village whose effect was to divert surplus from the land to creditors other than the state. During the preceding century, villages had contracted extensive debts to private creditors. This made tax collection more difficult, and it meant that the king was getting a smaller portion of the village's surplus income. The problem was particularly evident in Burgundy. A century of warfare (1550–1650) and pillage by mercenary armies that lived off the land had left Burgundian communities deep in debt, their communal properties sold or mortgaged, and their finances in disorder. The loss of communal properties that could be used as collateral made it more difficult for communities to borrow funds to meet internal village expenses. Consequently, villages had to levy taxes to defray those expenses, with the result that less was left for the royal tax collectors.

By 1672, the king's foreign adventures were requiring additional funds. Because the crown was determined not to increase direct taxes on the peasantry, and because seigneurs and townspeople were exempt from taxes, borrowing and higher indirect taxes were necessary. Taxing the nobility or the merchants as individuals without making political concessions would have fomented revolts by those groups. Since these men of wealth could not be taxed directly, their resources were borrowed instead. The increased borrowing had important implications for communities, for to attract investors the crown had to provide guarantees that villages would be solvent. The financiers (especially the receveurs généraux )^[3] who collected the direct taxes needed assurances of village solvency to raise credit from their network of investors. Moreover, the crown depended on taxes from the villages to pay the interest on the

[3] See Daniel Dessert, "Finances et société au XVIIe siècle: A propos de la Chambre de Justice de 1661," Annales E.S.C. 29 (July–Aug. 1974):847–81.

growing state debt. After the 1670s, then, protecting village resources was no longer simply a question of efficient tax collection. Village solvency became the basis of royal credit.

The credit arrangements that were necessary for the crown to keep its financial commitments and that made France's bid for European hegemony possible required extending the authority of the king's ministers into areas that had never before fallen under royal control. These extensions of bureaucratic authority were to have dramatic long-term consequences, many of which could not have been foreseen. The measures that increased the intendant's supervision over village finance were developed on an ad hoc basis as required by the financial needs of the state. When the nation's survival depended on its ability to field an army or secure the frontier for the next war, rulers could not pause to consider theories or systems for transforming the society, nor to ponder whether emergency measures taken to secure needed troops, supplies, and administrative personnel might turn out to be fundamental reforms.^[4]

Thus, historians of the reign of Louis XIV who have claimed that he had a deliberate, rational, systematic, and long-term plan for restructuring society might be mistaken. Hindsight leads one to conclude that there was a consistency to the Ludovican re-

[4] Even though France was the most populous, the wealthiest, and the most geographically compact of the Continental powers, it was not free from the pressures felt by all other European states. France, it must be remembered, had been a battlefield during the previous century, and maintenance of French military leadership was necessary to keep European wars from being fought on French soil. Furthermore, in any full-scale European war, France would have to fight on several fronts at once. Consequently, France had to be as strong as all the rest of Europe combined. Even when national survival was not being threatened, invasion was to be avoided at all costs. On this point Louis XIV wrote in his memoirs: "The smallest army that might invade our lands takes more from us in one day than it would have cost us to maintain favorable diplomatic contact for ten years, and the reckless administrators who do not understand these maxims sooner or later find punishment for their miserly behavior in the devastation of their treasures, the desertion of their allies, the scorn and aversion of their people." A devastated countryside could not pay taxes. Louis XIV, Mémoires de Louis XIV, ed. Jean Lognon (Paris, 1927), p. 181. Louis XIV expressed his concern with keeping enemy troops off French soil in the negotiations during the Nine Years' War, when it was suggested that he should give up the gains of the Treaty of Westphalia. "What!!" Louis exclaimed. "Am I to sacrifice the work of thirty years—I who have struggled so hard lest my enemies shall come into my house? Rather war for ten years more." Srbik, Wien und Versailles, pp. 105, 204. Cited in R. M. Hatton, "Louis XIV and His Fellow Monarchs," in R. M. Hatton, ed., Louis XIV and Europe (Columbus, Ohio, 1976).

forms. Those reforms that were issued as laws in the form of edicts appear to have been particularly deliberate. Edicts required elaborate justification and were headed by lengthy preambles. Once they had been registered by parlement (a complex and sometimes lengthy process), the edicts became part of the permanent body of royal jurisprudence. An edict of the seventeenth century could be cited in litigation of the late eighteenth century. When financial matters were at issue, the crown used edicts; they had credibility because they gave the impression of having provincial consent. Fiscal edicts constituted the juridical authority for the new tax contracts. Registration of such edicts could mitigate public disquiet, making it easier to collect the new tax. Because Colbert's reforms were issued as edicts, they seem more rational and systematic than they in fact were. The quest for strategic advantage in the international arena often prompted the measures and explain their timing. Neither Colbert nor Louis foresaw the far-reaching importance their reforms would have for France's subsequent social and economic development.

Let us consider how the new fiscal arrangements influenced the relationship between lords and peasants. Although the intendant's legal authority over the village was essentially that of a fiscal agent, there was no real limitation since almost every decision made by the village government (with the exclusion of harvest regulation) concerned finance. Even nominating a village syndic was deemed a financial matter, since he maintained village accounts. Matters as routine as hiring a village shepherd or schoolteacher, acquiring or maintaining a bull for the village herd, and repairing fountains or church walls involved finance and hence came under the intendant's supervision. Eventually the intendant's jurisdiction became so extensive that the seigneur's traditional role of village leader was challenged.

It is unlikely that Louis XIV hoped that village insolvency would provide royal administrators with the opportunity and the justification to replace the seigneur in his administrative leadership of the village. The king probably considered the seigneur's control over the village necessary for maintaining social order. Far from seeking to undermine that order, he wished to impress tax farmers with his state's competence and resolve. In the eigh-

teenth century, however, the situation changed as the intendants became more expert in implementing the functions assigned by the Ludovican edicts. One hundred years after the issuance of the edicts, and only then, were intendants able to challenge seigneurial administration. The most important new piece in the machinery that made it possible to mount this challenge was the expanding system of subdelegates. Even though the crown did not issue new edicts that explicitly extended the intendant's authority, the seigneurs found their own authority being gradually eroded and were ultimately forced to abandon many of their long-held administrative rights over the village. The turning point occurred in the 1750s, when seigneurs were replaced by subdelegates in presiding over meetings of the village assembly. This contributed to tensions between lord and peasant.

The continual erosion of their administrative functions meant that the feudal lords were being reduced to the status of private individuals. Nevertheless, seigneurial dues remained intact. Peasants, though subject to increased royal taxation and surveillance, did not receive relief from feudal obligations. Royal administrators might not have perceived the dangers implicit in the fact that feudal dues had survived whereas the seigneur's governing functions were disappearing. The crown's officials encouraged communities to challenge and to verify seigneurial dues and exactions that competed with royal taxes, thus inviting peasant litigation against the seigneurs. But the communities' lack of success in such litigation heightened peasant frustrations and united communities in opposition to the lords.

The bureaucrats were disrupting the traditional relationships between lord and peasant, but intendants cannot be accurately described as having modernizing or revolutionary aims, for they often protected and preserved age-old habits and routines. We have seen how they insisted on full participation in village assemblies, attempted to protect collective agriculture, and supported common grazing and gleaning rights; all were conservative positions in the eighteenth century. They insisted, as well, that the practice of contrainte solidaire be continued in order to guarantee the payment of royal taxes. The intendants even renewed many of the ties and reconstructed many of the struc-

tures that had earlier characterized the communities' relationship with the seigneurie. In this sense, the bureaucrats, and not the seigneur, can be described as the conservers of traditional forms and practices in the eighteenth century.

The Obstacles to Agricultural Expansion

The crown's administrative tutelle over communities was to have long-term economic implications as dramatic as the political consequences just discussed. Louis's seventeenth-century administrative policies retarded developments that seemed to have been on the verge of transforming the social and economic structure of the village.

In 1786 the intendant sent printed questionnaires on agricultural conditions to the parish priests of Burgundy. The 126 surviving responses indicate that new methods and crops had made little progress.^[5] In the southeast and in Bresse, some farmers had experimented with American corn. Onions were introduced in the area around Auxonne, and in the Morvan some innovative farmers were growing potatoes. Attempts to find new ways to support livestock without utilizing the arable land were unsuccessful, however. A significant breakthrough would have been the planting of turnips or grasses on the fallow land that would enrich the soil and feed livestock. However, such methods were not discussed. The responses with regard to capital improvements were also disappointing. Capital improvements such as enclosure, drainage, and artificial meadows were not mentioned in the reports.^[6]

Arthur Young, an English agronomist, observed that agriculture in France had not changed since the tenth century. Contemporaries would have agreed; they believed that the peasantry's

[5] AD, C-15: "Dépêche de M. de Calonne qui l'accompagne, et réponses faites par les curés de 126 paroisses de la généralité au questionnaire qui leur avait été envoyé sur la situation de l'agriculture dans leurs contrées."

[6] Ibid. Perhaps the curés were the wrong people to ask for general comments; they seemed more concerned with preserving the sanctity of the village cemetery. If it were not enclosed, village livestock would be free "to soil the souls of the dead." The curés had been asked to report on agriculture, but it was in discussing the drinking habits of their parishioners that they waxed eloquent.

unwillingness to innovate was rooted in their stubborn and irrational nature. Historians since then have generally focused on the ethos of the ruling elites. According to this interpretation, seigneurs thought not of capital investments but of squeezing as much as possible from their estates, so that they could live a life of luxury in the towns. The seigneurs, we are told, were constantly seeking ways to minimize expenses and maximize income. This meant strict estate management and forceful assertion of seigneurial rights. Why bother with capital investments when rents had increased during most of the century and, because of the hunger for land, could be expected to continue rising? By midcentury, as the land shortage spread, it was uncommon to find calamity insurance for tenants, whereas earlier they could at least count on rent reductions. Instead of offering tenants inducements to improve (such as rebates or conditions for sharing the costs of improvements), it seemed to make sense to "squeeze" them for all they were worth. The leases of the late eighteenth century attest to this apparent lack of seigneurial interest in capital improvements. From this evidence, historians have concluded that landlords did not care enough to protect even their most enterprising tenants. Such tenants were fleeced since others could easily be found to take their place.

But to attribute this failure to encourage agricultural improvements to peasant mentality or to seigneurial life-styles is to ignore what the contemporary spokesmen for agricultural reform were saying. Agronomists, estates, and parlements all insisted that capital improvements would not occur until common rights to the land were abolished. Holders of capital needed greater incentives, including the guarantee of reaping benefits, if they were to risk investments. In other words, agricultural reformers were attacking communal grazing rights, not the attitudes of seigneurs. Behavior would not change until the laws, the customs, and the institutional framework of agriculture were altered. Actually, there was no lack of interest in agricultural improvements among the elites. The subject of how to improve agriculture was discussed both in Paris and in the provinces. Even such literary societies as the Academy of Dijon were offering prizes for essays on agriculture. But ideas for reform were not put into practice, because practice, it was held, was

governed by the medieval regulations of open-field agriculture. Neither learned treatises nor royal legislation could overcome the inertia caused by communal traditions.

In the long run, the failure of the crown's edicts to reform agriculture can be attributed to the success of earlier royal policies encouraging the preservation of communal rights and properties. Although the documents reveal few examples of communities actually recovering the lands they had lost, the monarchy's seventeenth-century campaign to liquidate communal debts and to preserve communal property had a tremendous impact on rural society. Few examples can be found of villages losing communal properties to creditors after 1670. By preventing communities from using their properties as collateral for loans, the king's policies terminated a process of communal indebtedness, bankruptcy, and foreclosure. But for the crown's intervention, rural society might have been transformed; in a few more generations an entire social group that depended on communal rights for its survival might have been eliminated.

This group, the smallholders, was most threatened by the loss of the commons, although it benefited least from their preservation. That is why smallholders generally supported dividing the commons equally among the inhabitants. But the intendants feared that insolvent smallholders would eventually lose the partitioned parcels to wealthy inhabitants and that the well-to-do would benefit in the long term from partition. To discourage partition, the intendants argued that the preservation of communal rights and practices enabled smallholders to pasture a few cows or sheep on the commons and thus gain the extra capital needed to rent land or to pay taxes. Without the commons, this group would have been forced to join the ranks of the rural proletariat and to earn their living by working for wealthier neighbors. Worse, bankruptcy might have forced many to leave the village and to become itinerant laborers.

The crown took another step to preserve traditional agriculture by helping smallholders. Louis XIV declared it illegal for creditors to seize peasant livestock in payment for debt. In the late seventeenth century, the lifetime savings of a day laborer may not have been enough to purchase a single cow. Since smallholders could

not easily replace livestock once lost, the royal legislation provided them with a critical threshold of security.

As noted, the elimination of smallholders would not have led to the transformation of agriculture the agronomists were seeking because the end of collective grazing and the elimination of the fallow land would not have been achieved by the decline of the small holding. Both rich and poor strove to preserve common rights and properties, though for different reasons. The poor were more interested than the wealthy in partitioning the common lands, which was permitted by royal edicts. But the poor were not motivated by a desire to enclose and to improve the land; rather, they wanted to occupy land, any kind of land, in any possible way. Moreover, the poor often supported partitioning the commons to defend them from being usurped by the wealthy. Even if the commons were partitioned, the poor did not have the capital to build fences or hedges. The wealthy, on the other hand, did not favor partitioning, since they already dominated the commons with their larger herds. For the same reason, they did not favor curtailment of collective grazing rights (from which they benefited most) or enclosing their properties, since they did not pay for these rights. Nor did the wealthy envision that, by eliminating common rights and properties, they could eliminate the smallholders, whose continued existence was an obstacle to improvement and to the development of capital-intensive agriculture.

In ways the crown did not foresee, its fiscal policies prevented the alignment of forces in the village that might have led to improvements in agrarian organization and techniques. Instead, the royal policies gave the village an enemy against whom it had to struggle to protect its heritage of communal rights and properties. The community was most concerned with preventing the seigneur from usurping communal lands. This threat united the village in defense of its open-field tradition.^[7]

[7] One region in Burgundy where pressures for enclosure were developing was the Brionnais, whose soil was poor and best suited for grazing. Proximity to the Lyon market meant that even poor inhabitants might be able to live by specializing in livestock husbandry. Some progress was made toward enclosure and improved husbandry in this region during the eighteenth century.

In short, it was because of the policies initiated by Louis XIV that Burgundy remained a province of free peasant smallholders who owned much of the land and who, on account of collective grazing rights, controlled the use of lands they did not own individually. The crown's seventeenth-century policies, which preserved common lands and rights, contributed to a continuation of the subdivision of holdings and the open-field system. Agricultural change did not occur because, in protecting communal properties, the crown had arrested the forces that would have weakened the communal system.

Although royal policies reconciled common rights with commercial farming, the persistence of those rights prevented the application of more productive techniques. Capital accumulation occurred within the framework of communal agriculture; yet agriculture did not achieve its peak output. Wealthy inhabitants used the communal system to increase personal fortunes without making technological changes that would increase overall productivity. Common-field agriculture did serve to redistribute income but in a way that did not necessarily serve the interests of the poor.

The stagnation of agriculture in Burgundy is an example of what happens when fiscal policies determine social and economic development. Since the community's capacity to meet its fiscal obligations depended upon its possession of common fields and rights, the maintenance of the traditional communal agricultural system was consistent with the state's fiscal and administrative aims. Agricultural technology in Burgundy stagnated because of the way the peasant community was fiscally and politically integrated into the structure of the absolutist state.

Why Louis XIV's Reforms were so Difficult to Overcome

Louis XIV's fiscal reforms not only determined the course of economic development but fixed the style and defined the scope of bureaucratic authority. The necessity of financing the king's wars had been the principal stimulus and justification for the expansion of central authority. The institutions of central authority developed as a result of the crown's efforts to increase its

fiscal prerogatives in order to ensure the state's financial stability and access to credit. The contrôleur général became the king's principal minister and assumed authority over many other branches of government. The intendants were above all fiscal agents; they reported to the contrôleur général .^[8] The establishment in the seventeenth century of a strong central government with emphasis on the Ministry of Finance was the cause of the state's failure in the eighteenth century to restructure society and to transform the economy.

The development of administrative structures and law that stabilized and coordinated state finance was one of the strengths of the Ludovican state. Coordination of fiscal and bureaucratic procedures provided the monarchy with the financial resources to make its bid for European hegemony without changing the kingdom's political structure. Unlike Frederick in Prussia or Peter in Russia, Louis XIV did not have to impose mandatory state or military service on the nobility, or forced labor on the peasantry. Moreover, Louis XIV did not have to consult with a national representative body to increase royal revenues; therefore, such an increase did not raise constitutional issues as it did in England. The French king was more fortunate than most other European monarchs; he could finance the new military and administrative structures without fomenting revolution from above or, so it seemed, from below. He could fortify France's vast frontiers and develop an elaborate system of military supplies around Vauban's fortifications by making traditional corporate groups such as guilds and villages pay the state to protect their privileges.

The reforms of Louis XIV, unlike those of the Prussian rulers or Peter the Great, preserved many traditional liberties. The implementation of royal policy depended upon accommodating local groups, even though the monarchy continually came into conflict with pluralistic sources of provincial authority, such as the parlements. Unlike the autocrats of the East, the French king could tap local resources only by negotiating with, and recognizing the prerogatives of, these intermediary bodies. They

[8] In the late eighteenth century, the intendants still defined themselves as "commissaires députés par sa Majesté pour la vérification des dettes et affaires des communautés en Bourgogne."

were perhaps less independent than they had been, but they were not eliminated. In some ways, such groups as the guilds, the communities, and perhaps even the provincial estates may have actually become stronger as a result of Louis XIV's reforms. The Old Regime state in France was "absolute" in only one sense: The state's most important representatives were empowered by orders issued by the crown that were not subject to provincial custom or law. These orders, called arréts, reflect another basic characteristic of the early modern state—its military orientation. The powers accorded to the intendants were similar to those accorded the military commissioners who, under the pressures of wartime, took over the functions of civil government.^[9] In this sense, French "absolutism" was the extension of wartime practices to peacetime.

By 1750, both the domestic and the international situations were changing, and the policies that had made Louis XIV's France the pacesetter in Europe were encountering opposition by groups that wanted greater economic individualism and political liberty. France's competition with England for a share of the world empire meant that, given France's traditional desire to maintain the Continental supremacy of its armies, its fiscal resources were strained. By 1763 England had in effect defeated France in the Seven Years' War. The defeat by a nation that enjoyed both parliamentary government and agricultural reform raised doubts about the monarchy's administrative traditions and strengthened those voices in France demanding political and economic liberty. The call for such reforms was not prompted by a desire to imitate England, for similar ideas had long circulated in France and had precedents in French traditions.

By the late 1760s, policymakers within the King's Council were seeking ways to legislate those demands for greater freedom. There were several reasons for their attempts. The ideas were popular, and the crown feared that an ideological front might develop uniting the kingdom's discontented elites in opposition to the bureaucracy's support of corporate traditions. The crown feared, as well, that the circulation of ideas encour-

[9] See Gabriel Hanotaux, "Etat et commissaires: Recherches sur la création des intendants des provinces, de 1635 à 1648," in Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung: Festgabe für Fritz Hartung (Berlin, 1956).

aging the abolition of guilds, of collective rights in agriculture, and of controlled grain prices might give a common purpose to groups with basically divergent outlooks and interests.

The policymakers also believed that greater economic freedom, and the encouragement of individual wealth, might create a stronger state. Many members of the King's Council shared the idea of those outside the government that producers needed incentives based on self-interest. By embracing economic individualism, and by collaborating with capitalist entrepreneurs, royal policymakers sought to encourage private citizens to finance industrial and agricultural development on the basis of self-interest. In attempting to coordinate public policy with private interests, policymakers hoped that as private wealth grew, so would total tax receipts. There is no reason to assume that in thinking more about economic growth, the ministers of Louis XV thought less than their seventeenth-century counterparts had about military victory or global hegemony. On the contrary, increasing the gross national product seemed a way to increase the tax base and thus to achieve France's military and colonial goals.

Finally, espousing the liberal policies was one way for the government to win the support of the parlements and the estates, both of which were among the prime movers for liberal programs. Both groups were essential to the functioning of the state's financial system. The support of the parlements was needed to register the loans and other fiscal devices. Creditors were more likely to loan once a measure had received parlementary approval. The estates' role, on the other hand, was primary. They were needed both for ordinary tax collection and assessment, and for credit operations such as floating loans. Both petitioned the crown for legislation that would permit agrarian individualism and terminate contrainte solidaire . Many of the edicts of reform that were finally issued by the monarchy utilized the same language found in petitions from those two bodies.

Not all ministers in the king's service supported the reform legislation, however. Contrainte solidaire was one of the issues over which policymakers in the King's Council clashed with the Burgundian intendants. In 1775 the controller general, Turgot, issued an arrêt abolishing contrainte solidaire . Turgot wrote to the Burgundian intendant, Dupleix, explaining his position. "It

is not possible to conceal from oneself the injustice and the inconveniences that result from these contraintes solidaires, " he said. "Certainly you are, more than anyone else, in a better position to appreciate the advantages that the taxpayers must expect from abolishing this kind of prosecution." Interestingly, Turgot argued that the practice "spreads alarm in the communities and brings about disruption and disorder in the affairs of those taxpayers who merit most, by their good behavior, the protection of the government." He was referring to the principaux contribuables, those inhabitants who were the most common victims of contrainte solidaire . Turgot wanted to protect the prosperous larger landowners because he considered them the most important source of wealth and industry in the kingdom. In the long run, he argued, abolition of contrainte solidaire, by encouraging the increased productivity of the wealthier peasants, would result in higher tax yields. In general, Turgot believed that successful producers should be given incentives to produce more. His ideas clearly represented what historians identify as the most liberal and progressive intellectual tendencies of his era.

Intendant Dupleix was sympathetic. He wrote to Turgot that "at first glance, nothing seems more just than the suppression of these prosecutions against the principal taxpayers." Referring to his experience as intendant of Burgundy and to that of his predecessors, Dupleix said that he found Turgot's program impractical, however, because as intendant, he was concerned with the day-to-day problems of collecting the taille, maintaining communal financial stability, and ensuring that communal legal expenses were paid. Since the community's most important financial obligations were collective, some corporate mechanism of coercion was necessary. In his experience, the intendant had found that the mere threat of applying contrainte solidaire was often sufficient. The alternative (liability of each individual to creditors or to tax collectors) seemed impractical—a goal, perhaps, for the future. Moreover, Dupleix did not want communities to fall back upon the mortgaging or selling of communal properties. To ensure the community's access to credit, the intendant could propose nothing more effective than contrainte

solidaire . These were the practical reasons that led Dupleix to oppose Turgot: "All that is odious about this kind of prosecution disappears; one sees only an efficient means of preventing most of the taxpayers from being overwhelmed by considerable charges from one year to another."^[10] Dupleix was not alone in believing that abolishing contrainte solidaire would weaken the foundations of bureaucratic power; no Burgundian intendant complied with the order to abolish contrainte solidaire . In the decade before the Revolution, both the Parlement of Dijon and the Estates of Burgundy sent petitions to the king stating their regret that the intendant and his agents still regularly employed contrainte solidaire .^[11]

Turgot wanted to abolish contrainte solidaire for the same reason that he wanted to free the grain trade from consumer-oriented government regulation: to permit the enclosure of private property and to partition common lands. In his view, these moves would stimulate economic and social development by encouraging individual initiative. He was ready to sacrifice the peasants' common rights to the farmers' private interests in order to increase agrarian productivity. The intendant's correspondence suggests that he, too, supported the goal of increasing the gross national product. He expressed no doubts that the reforms were necessary to achieve long-term growth. But his primary concern was that the province pay its annual taxes. Contrainte solidaire was only one economic issue over which the intendant and King's Council clashed. Intendants helped peasants evade royal legislation that authorized enclosures and partitions, and also helped the communities preserve the custom of equal division of timber from communal woods. Moreover, they supported the preservation of gleaning rights, which the King's Council, along with the estates and the parlement, wanted to curtail. In addition to resisting these pressures from on high, the intendants opposed requests from the local level;

[10] AD, C-5085: Correspondence between Contrôleur Général Turgot and Intendant Dupleix, 22 Nov. 1775.

[11] AD, C-3335: Cahier des remontrances of 1785 of the Estates of Burgundy. Mention is made of the parlement's earlier remonstrances against contrainte solidaire . The Elus, like the intendant, wanted to continue contrainte solidaire .

wealthy peasants were petitioning for the abolition of the age-old village assemblies.^[12]

The intendant's opposition to abolishing contrainte solidaire and the various collective agricultural practices of communities reflects his concern that the reforms would make taxes harder to collect. Reforms of the village's corporate institutions would cause communal financial instability, thus making it more difficult for the receveurs généraux to collect the direct taxes and also to get the credits and investments they needed from their networks of investors.

With the exception of the period 1735–1740, state expenditures exceeded revenues during the eighteenth century—especially after 1760. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, servicing the debt consumed nearly 60 percent of the yearly intake.^[13] After 1770, it was harder for the peasants to pay their taxes because of an economic recession. In view of such pressures, the intendants thought it better to utilize known methods than to experiment with untried ones. Their loyalty to established routine was more a matter of convenience than of ideology. The intendants, as the link between the village and the world of high finance, were caught up in the reality of tax collection. The agrarian reformers and the parlementaires were free to absorb and to promote the new ideas. They did not consider that abolishing the corporate institutions of the village would disrupt the routines of tax collection upon which the state's credit rested; they thought that the agricultural system could be changed only by risking the loss of short-term tax revenues. Those closer to state finance knew this and knew as well that the state was living a hand-to-mouth existence. The king's officials did not want to risk the loss of short-term revenues for long-term gains in productivity that might, in the future, increase tax yields. A national financial setback could lead

[12] The position of the King's Council on abolishing Burgundy's village assemblies in favor of councils is not clear, but the crown encouraged the creation of such councils in neighboring Champagne. The municipal reform bill of 1787 created Councils of Notables in many of the provinces. However, for reasons discussed in Chapter 3, Burgundy was excluded.

[13] M. Morineau, "Budgets de l'Etat et gestion des finances royales en France au dix-huitième siècle," Revue historique 239 (Oct.–Dec. 1980), pp. 289–337.

to bankruptcy, defeat of French troops in the American Revolution, and humiliation at home and abroad.

In summary, the intendants blocked the reforms of the village's corporate institutions because they did not want to risk losing the yearly revenues from the village. They knew that the entire system of credit depended on village solvency, since interest on the debt could be paid only from the proceeds of the taxes. In the 1780s just as in the 1680s, the crown needed to guarantee the solvency of the village to secure advances from financiers. The Ludovican reforms became permanent because the deficit became permanent. The community and its corporate traditions survived because of the way the crown managed to meet the financial needs of the seventeenth-century military revolution. The crown's financiers unwittingly underwrote the survival of the corporate village and its collective system of agriculture. High finance, ironically, kept medieval corporate forms alive.

The Burgundian intendants, usually viewed as the agents of modernization, did all within their power to block the implementation of programs that were inspired by the ideals of individual liberty. Even though the intellectual and social evolution of the eighteenth century repudiated the corporate traditions upon which bureaucratic powers depended, Burgundian intendants refused to yield. Their most important administrative and political powers derived from their role as guardians of the communities' collective identity. The abolition of corporate institutions would have hampered the bureaucracy's performance of routine functions such as collecting taxes. As political functionaries, their authority had come to depend on the preservation of the community's corporate identity. To maintain their authority, they preserved the traditional communal institutions, and blocked agricultural reform.

The State and Capitalism

The central government's relationship to Burgundian communities raises serious doubts about the crown's commitment to capitalist expansion. It suggests instead that the bureaucracy's victory over the seigneurie for control of the village set into

motion a political process that allowed communities to defend corporate rights and properties.

Integration into the administrative structure of the absolutist state provided communities with a windfall of political benefits. Foremost among them was a village assembly that was more politically effective. The king's officials could not maintain a constant local presence after seigneurial control had been replaced by royal tutelage of the village. Therefore, they provided the province's more than one thousand villages with rules that were uniform throughout the province. This included standardizing assembly procedures so that each village followed the same formalities when leasing collective properties, contracting public works, or electing village officials. Although it may not have been the bureaucracy's intention, the village could then more effectively pursue interests that had separated it from the seigneurie.

In addition to introducing policies that made village assemblies more capable of independent action, intendants strengthened such legal mechanisms as contrainte solidaire, which held all inhabitants personally responsible for decisions made by the assembly. The advantage to the crown was that a village would have to answer to the intendant directly when it reneged on an obligation. With enforcement of contrainte solidaire, village financial commitments gained credibility. If the village failed to honor a contract, a creditor could turn to the intendant who, if all else failed, could seize the property of the wealthiest inhabitants as payment. The intendants could apply administrative law to settle disputes that arose between the village and its creditors, thus entirely circumventing the slow process of parlementary law. In this way, the administration could more firmly guarantee that a village would live up to its obligations. An additional reason for insisting on collective liability was that transacting business with the community was less expensive than with the peasants as individuals. Courts, creditors, or building contractors could find information about communities more cheaply than they could about individual peasants. The crown gained from these policies, but there were also long-term, if less obvious, advantages for the community. Because the will of the assembly was recognized by administrative law, communities

could conduct collective business more effectively than before. Since it was less of a credit risk, the village could more easily summon the necessary resources when it wanted to sue. Therefore, the policies that intensified collective restraints strengthened communities.

Peasants who wanted to preserve their traditional communal rights of fishing, pasturing, and wood gathering found that they had an ally in the intendant. They counted on him to hear, and to approve, statements of village efforts to maintain common rights. He also alerted communities to possible violations of their rights and assisted the inhabitants in formulating their grievances. In court, the peasants did not always succeed in preventing seigneurs from seizing forests, usurping common lands, enclosing fields, or depriving the village of its rights to use the common lands. Nevertheless, the increase in litigation had a fundamental impact on the protocol of popular resistance. Instead of expressing their discontent in cathartic and dramatic outbursts that included rioting and looting, peasants took their grievances to court, hiring lawyers to hammer away at the theoretical presuppositions of feudal rights. The increase in communal litigation marked a distinct stage in the history of peasant contention. The disputes fostered a legal discourse whose concepts would be used during the Revolution to dismantle feudal property.

The increased effectiveness of assemblies also had significant economic consequences because those institutions controlled local agricultural production. The assembly regulated crop rotations and the timing of postharvest grazing on the stubble; it also governed the use of fallow land. Spokesmen for agrarian interests had hoped that abolishing the assemblies and permitting wealthy inhabitants to form village councils would be a way to overcome collective control. They anticipated that the wealthy council members would behave rationally and would recognize that their long-term interests would best be served by the elimination of collective practices. But the intendants in Burgundy blocked all efforts by the village notables to create such councils. Instead, the bureaucracy insisted that all the villagers attend and participate in the assemblies and fined inhabitants who did not. The control exercised by this bedrock

unit of local administration generally discouraged private initiative. In full meetings of the village assembly, the protection of most common-use rights was usually a foregone conclusion. The continued authority of the village assemblies to allocate communal grazing rights created a disincentive to invest in the costly surveys, new roads, fencing, walls, and drainage systems often required by enclosure.

State making strengthened communal rights in yet another way. Government policies did not separate the interests of potential rural leaders—the wealthy farmers—from those of the community. The crown's policies, by giving wealthy peasant elites advantageous access to communal rights, in effect made them defenders of communal properties. Corporate rights had powerful support within the village and were defended by the village precisely because the wealthy peasants profited most from their preservation. The social inequality existing in the village worked to protect common fields, wastelands, pasture, and meadows. The poor often wanted to partition those properties equally but were opposed by the rich, who monopolized the commons without paying for their use. This monopoly also gave wealthy peasants a reason to commit resources and energy to defending communal fields and rights from landlords, feudistes, fermiers, notaries, and townspeople.

The monarchy, then, cannot be held responsible for providing the prerequisites of capitalist expansion. By reinforcing communal agricultural practices, royal officials drove the moneyed classes to become involved in state finance, where quick, short-term profits were available. The physiocrats eloquently insisted that investments aimed at eliminating the state's debts siphoned off the funds needed for the regeneration of the agrarian economy. Such investments, they warned, were made at the expense of capital improvements in agriculture. For the physiocrats, the notion of fiscal capitalism was a contradiction in terms.

A number of historians have argued that the absolutist state collaborated with the kingdom's elites by sharing the spoils of surplus peasant production. According to this interpretation, absolutism was a system of centralized surplus extraction in which political exploitation substituted for direct economic extraction. Absolutism permitted surplus extraction by means of political exploitation and allowed the French ruling class to re-

compose on a stronger basis. The spoils of class exploitation were redistributed to the elites in the form of offices and interest payments. In support of this view, Pierre Goubert has written that the elites' involvement in state finance allowed them "to participate in the general pillage of the kingdom."^[14]

The present study suggests that those investments in state finance raised issues concerning political participation that ultimately led to the fall of the monarchy. The elites invested in a state they could not control—a state that had a history of fiscal and monetary expediencies designed to minimize debts. Attacks by the controller generals—Terray, Turgot, and Necker—on the financiers recalled the early reign of Louis XIV, when the crown ordered the Chambers of Justice to cancel debts and to forcibly recover sums from the financiers. But now the financiers had more leverage. Because their operations had become national and highly centralized, they knew the king could not declare bankruptcy and hope to find an alternative source of funds. The financiers were able to force the king to remove reformers before their policies could be implemented. Whereas these financiers were able to influence royal policy through personal intrigue, English aristocrats in Parliament consulted openly on fiscal policy. Like their English counterparts, however, the French elites wanted to exercise control over and guarantee elimination of the government debt, but the French king would not even discuss the creation of mechanisms that would bind the crown to policies protective of investors. Instead, the crown persisted in conducting its financial activities under a cloak of secrecy, even refusing to disclose its budget. While refusing accountability to its investors, the crown continued a foreign policy that required additional borrowing and that jeopardized its ability to support the debts it had already contracted. The state's intransigence was costly: due to its creditors' lack of confidence, the crown found it more difficult to borrow, and interest rates soared. But it also paid a political price; its intransigence contributed to mounting dissatisfaction among the elite upon whom it de-

[14] See Pierre Goubert, introduction to Daniel Dessert, "Finances et société au XVIIe siècle: A propos de la Chambre de Justice de 1661," Annales E.S.C. 29 (July–Aug. 1974):847. An argument similar to Goubert's is elaborated by Robert Brenner in "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism," Past and Present 97 (Nov. 1982):16–113.

pended for financial support. The increasing opposition led, eventually, to revolution.

In sum, neither the political events that precipitated the Revolution, nor the institutional structures of the prerevolutionary state, suggest a class alignment of state and capitalist landlords against the peasantry in Burgundy. The crown's officials had created a legal and political environment favorable to communal rights in which communities were better protected from the potentially disruptive elements of a free market economy than they had been in the seventeenth century. The commitment of the king's officials to independent village assemblies provided communities with a means by which to defend collective rights and properties. The policy of insisting on corporate responsibility for taxes penalized enterprising producers. The royal bureaucracy also blocked the program of social transformation advocated by the physiocrats. To prevent the transformation of small producers into a rural proletariat, bureaucrats protected the communal pasture rights that were a prerequisite for the survival of the peasant smallholder. In implementing all these policies, the bureaucracy was using state power to shore up existing agrarian structures.

This was not a reforming state, nor was it a state aligned with the interests of the propertied elite. Property holders would have been better served, economically, by policies that stimulated productive investments in agriculture, and politically, by broader participation in national policymaking. Instead, the state pursued its own particular interests. How did its policies influence the balance of forces among classes? The state is most accurately depicted as an independent interest, for its long-term imperatives had become relatively autonomous. The state's relation to the means of production was distinct from that of any particular group or class.

Of Political Bondage: State Power and the Persistence of Communal Institutions

Social theorists often look back nostalgically to the old rural communities. An extensive literature exists in which communities are described as precursors of socialist traditions, cells of a

primitive communism, whose independence is perhaps reminiscent of the autonomy of the tribe before the conquest of the seigneurie. This interpretation of communal origins has strong appeal because of its relevance to contemporary politics: it can provide a pedigree and a historical justification for socialism. The community existed before the seigneurie and before the state. It, not private individuals, originally owned the earth. The triumph of individualism is an aberration made possible by the relatively recent rise to power of the capitalist class. By usurping state power in the eighteenth century, that class was able to overturn the age-old traditions of collective control.

We are told that in the precapitalist state, the government regulated the economy to protect the local community from the disruptive effects of the free market. Charles Tilly provides a compelling explanation of the precapitalist ideology that rationalized state control. Borrowing E. P. Thompson's suggestive terminology, Tilly describes the state as committed to upholding a "moral economy" in which "the residents of a local community had a prior right to the resources produced by or contained within; the community as such had a prior obligation to aid its weak and resourceless members. The right and the obligation to aid [took] priority over the interests of any particular individual and over any interests outside the community. It even [took] priority over the interests of the Crown, or of the country as a whole."^[15] Tilly asserts that in the eighteenth century, however, the state departed from this tradition of protection; by promoting a rival morality of possessive individualism, it hastened the destruction of the old communities.

The literature on the peasantry and the French Revolution almost uniformly confirms the view that by promoting capitalism, the state brought about the demise of the communities. Furthermore, it generally supports the view that because peasants preferred subsistence and mistrusted the market, state power was essential to compel them into the market. This study suggests a different sequence of events and a different interpretation of the preindustrial peasant mentality. The communities rushed to their demise not when the state was strong, but in the

[15] Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass., 1978), pp. 3–4.

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when it was weak. If villages had been left on their own, individualism might have triumphed without any help from the state. Had the state not intervened to strengthen communal institutions in order to halt their progressive disintegration, communities might have entered the eighteenth century divested of their communal lands, and most certainly the village assembly would have been superseded by Councils of Notables. The rise of the absolutist state prevented both developments from occurring.

The protection and promotion of communal property rights was essential to the crown's fiscal programs; the king's finances depended on village solvency. The intendant defended the communities' patrimony of rights and properties to maintain the financial ties that bound the rural villages to the national financial network. Thus, creation of the national credit network and the promotion of capitalist hegemony were not related. It is when we consider the fate of communal property that the needs of state finance and those of capitalist development seem clearly incompatible. State finance depended on communal property; capitalist development required its elimination. Therefore, the growth of state finance in the eighteenth century should not be viewed as an example of capitalist expansion.

The preservation of communal institutions also served to strengthen the crown's control over rural areas; such institutions suited the needs of bureaucratic surveillance. With its limited administrative capabilities the French state could not supervise individuals; it lacked an elaborate bureaucratic machine and could not afford the costs of direct local administration. Another problem was that it could not find reliable independent collaborators within the local community. Unlike the English monarch, the French king could not trust the local nobility. In fact, the French king had established his local authority by supplanting that of the local seigneur. How much easier it would have been if he could have depended on an unpaid local gentry to perform the tasks of local government and to link nation and village. Not having that option, the French state found collective restraints to be the cheapest and most effective way to supervise the peasantry.

Thus, communal rights and properties and collective respon-

sibility for tax collection were not spontaneous expressions of peasant culture. Both were measures imposed from above to ensure political domination of the agrarian population and to facilitate resource extraction.^[16] This program for political control had economic consequences, however, for it guaranteed the continuation of open-field agriculture.

[16] The most complete statement of the reasons why states create communal institutions can be found in Samuel L. Popkin's pathbreaking study, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979).