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 The king's officials could not maintain a constant local presence after seigneurial control had been replaced by royal tutelage of the village.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.