Privilege and Revolution

The economic theorists of the eighteenth century recognized the enormous burden the proliferation of privilege placed on the state. But programs for reform never enjoyed wide support within the elites because the beneficiaries of the monopolies had no common spokesperson. Another fundamental problem was that no institution existed in which privileged groups could negotiate with one another or with the groups excluded from power. Elias explains that the leading groups or monopoly elites of the regime had become imprisoned by the institutions that maintained their privileged positions. "Their incapacity to look at their own dysfunction, along with

[51] Elias, Société de cour, 52.

their inflexible sources of income, prevented a nonviolent transformation of the institutions by the voluntary limitation of privileges."^[52]

In Old Regime France, no two industries or imports were taxed the same way, no two provinces or social groups paid the same taxes or held the same privileges. Residents of Paris had privileges in relationship to residents of other cities; the bourgeoisie of La Rochelle had little in common with the bourgeoisie of Toulouse. David Bien has suggested that differences among members of the nobility may have been more intense than those between the nobility and other social groups.^[53] Since "differentiation had taken place within each of these three classes, with the result that each was split up into a number of small groups almost completely shut off from each other, the inevitable consequence was that, though the nation came to seem a homogeneous whole, its parts no longer held together," Tocqueville notes.^[54] In his memoir Sur les administrations provinciales, published posthumously in 1787, Turgot commented on the consequences of this atomization of society into self-regarding clans:

The cause of the evil, sire, stems from the fact that your nation has no constitution. It is a society composed of different orders badly united, and of a people among whose members there are but very few social ties. In consequence, each individual is occupied only with his own particular, exclusive interest; and almost no one bothers to fulfill his duties or to know his relationship to others. As a result, there is a perpetual war of claims and counterclaims, which reason and mutual understanding have never regulated, in which Your Majesty is obliged to decide everything personally or through your agents. Everyone insists on your special orders to contribute to the public good, to respect the rights of others, sometimes even to make use of his own rights. You are forced to decree on everything, in most cases by particular acts of will, whereas you could govern like God by general laws if the various parts composing your realm had a regular organization and clearly established relationship.^[55]

[52] Ibid., 316. One difficulty was that the various privileged orders possessed assets in the form of offices and fiscal privileges that could not easily be negotiated in a new order.

[53] See David Bien, "La Réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L'Exemple de l'armée," Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34, and "The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution," Past and Present 85 (November 1979): 68–98.

[54] Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 137.

[55] Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres posthumes de M. Turgot, ou Memoir de M. Turgot sur les administrations provinciales (Lausanne, 1787), 9; reprinted in Pierre-Samuel du Pont de Nemours, Oeuvres politiques et économiques (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1979), 4:159.

Turgot's testimony can be explained by the fact that in a centralized, autocratic regime, strategic or cooperative interactions are not observed among different social groups, because no one finds that his own interests or choices depend on the choices of any other individual or group. No group in Old Regime France had an incentive to bargain with other groups. One consequence of the absence of strategic interaction was that no group had a coherent vision of the distributional system of which it was a part. Instead, the relationship among the different groups was governed by resentment of one another's privileges, while each jealously guarded its own. Norms and networks of civic engagement between and among members of the various elites were shattered during the process by which the Crown became the guarantor of civic order. The vote by the third estate of Brittany against the vingtième (a tax on all individuals regardless of status) in 1752 was an example of the inability to cooperate to achieve long-term goals. Just like the first and the second, the third order voted against the tax, fearing an increase in its taxes, thinking only in terms of protecting its own privileges. No leader emerged within Brittany's third estate with the foresight to realize that it would be beneficial to the group if the vingtième was approved, because it would mean submitting the privileged first and second estates to the same taxes as the third.

The economic expansion of the eighteenth century further contributed to the tension. Mobility certainly increased during the century, especially at the very top of the social hierarchy, where wealthy financiers intermarried with members of the old aristocracy.^[56] Nevertheless, the groups excluded from the power monopoly also grew in strength during the Old Regime. Despite the accession of newcomers, the growing demand for privilege created by the century's rapid economic expansion was not met.^[57] The demands of peasants for access to the surpluses generated by markets were unsatisfied. The formal sector could not grow fast enough to absorb the growing informal sector. One barrier to reform came from the existence of property rights that had reinforced the power of corporate groups. Because of the Crown's support of the guilds, the new proto-industrial

[56] Brugière cautions that the majority of the children of financiers did not conclude prestigious marriages with the old nobility; most married in their milieu of origin. Only the children of several very significant financiers were able to marry into the upper aristocracy, but those financiers were already in the king's direct service. See Michèle Brugière, "L'Aristocratique Descendance des affairistes de la Révolution," in Pour une renaissance de l'histoire financièreXVIII –XX siècles (Comité pour l'histoire econornique et financière de la France, 1991), 312–25.

[57] See David Bien, "Manufacturing Nobles: The Chancelleries in France to 1789," Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 450–86.

sector was legally isolated and forced to operate informally. Since the administrative structure of the Old Regime had become autonomous, composed of offices that had become private property, which the state could no longer afford to buy back, institutional gridlock resulted.

Mancur Olson has studied the effects of distributional coalitions on political life. As groups begin to distinguish themselves from one another by highly nuanced codes of behavior, they become increasingly castelike, and political life becomes increasingly divisive.^[58] Louis XIV's legacy to the eighteenth century was a society in which privilege incited social disintegration. The status quo established by the Sun King's reforms still reigned on the eve of the Revolution. Each group was willing to support limits on the privileges of the others, while unwilling to be dominated or lose place to some other social subset. Groups would not tolerate the loss of even a ceremonial privilege and were too preoccupied with their own particular privileges to speak for the regime when it was in trouble. Ties of collaboration within and among the social orders were ruptured; civic solidarity was fractured. Groups that viewed each other as adversaries could not represent the nation, since efforts at reform were viewed as a challenge to social equilibrium. No one branch of the government was strong enough to impose reforms on any other branch, and the king was no longer in a position to risk losing the support of a group like the clergy or the nobility by hazarding radical change. "Like boxers frozen in a stand-off, none of the privileged groups dared change position for fear that the slightest change in attitude would compromise its privileges or benefit its rivals," Elias writes. "Unlike a boxing match, however, there was no referee who could separate the boxers in order to continue the match."^[59]

In its hour of need, the Old Regime could find few defenders. "Nowhere else in the world were citizens less inclined to join forces and stand by each other in emergencies," Tocqueville observes.^[60] Instead of uniting to defend the structure that provided their rents and privileges, the elites of Old Regime France regarded the privileges of adjacent groups with resentment. Each group came to the Estates General in 1789 with the goal of defending its exemptions from unreimbursed loss, but no group was prepared to defend the system itself. In other words, the elites who benefited from the redistributional game did not enjoy the blessings of class consciousness.

[58] Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 47–53.

[59] Elias, Société de cour, 314–15.

[60] Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 77.

They did not identify the Crown or its government with any broader public interest that was worth defending. Once assembled, the national community did not view the regime as having something greater than the sum of individual interests to offer. So it was that what had taken the kings of France so many generations to build could disappear in the twinkling of an eye.