FRANCE IN CRISIS, 1620-1675 FRANCE IN CRISIS 1620-1675 Selected, translated and introduced by P. J. COVENEY Lecturer in European History University of Nottingham Selection. introduction. editorial matter and translation © P. J. Coveney 1977 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1977 978-0-333-10071-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted. in any form or by any means. without permission First published 1977 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LID London and Basingstoke. Associated companies in New York Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras ISBN 978-0-333-21218-9 ISBN 978-1-349-86207-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-86207-8 The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade or otherwise. be lent. resold. hired out. or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent. in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the. Net Book Agreement Contents ~" ~ Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: France in Crisis, 1620-1675 1 P. J. Coveney 2 A Century of Conflict: the Economic and Social Disorders of the 'Grand Siecle' 64- H. Methivier 3 Popular Uprisings in France before the Fronde, 1623-1648 78 B. Porshnev 4 The Bourgeoisie and Feudal-Absolutism in Seventeenth- Century France 103 B. Porshnev 5 Research into the Popular Uprisings in France before the Fronde 136 R. Mousnier 6 Some Reasons for the Fronde: the Revolutionary Days in Paris in 1648 169 R. Mousnier 7 The Financial Officiers during the Fronde 201 R. Mousnier 8 The French Nobility and Absolute Monarchy in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century 231 P. Deyon Glossary 247 Select Bibliography 255 Index 263 Preface The aim has been to make available in English major contributions to the historiography of seventeenth-century France, and to provide, in an in troductory chapter, the general context of discussion within which they may be studied. The decision to include this article and to exclude that was not an easy one. From the outset, I decided that it was preferable to present a limited number of articles intact, and fairly extensive extracts from longer works, rather than a larger number of shorter fragments. The basis of my selection was that, taken separately, the articles and extracts should be important in themselves; that, taken together, they should raise, as far as possible, most of the essential considerations involved in the debate on the French seventeenth century which has been in process for over a generation; and that, both separately and together, they should contribute to the general theme of the whole work, which is clearly indicated in its title. I have taken the fifty or so years which fall almost equally on either side of the Fronde as the chronological framework for this study. Every thing suggests, and will I think increasingly suggest, the need to read these years as a continuous period, not divided as they so often have been at 1653 and 1661. The consolidation of the ancien regime in the later seventeenth century stems from the crisis and resolutions of these crucial decades. They are fundamental to the formation of French absolutism. They are by far the most important decades in modern French develop ment before the era of the Revolution and Napoleon. It has given me very great pleasure to translate and prepare these articles and extracts for publication in English. Their publication is of course only made possible by the generous permission given to me to undertake it. I am indeed grateful to Professor Roland Mousnier, Pro fessor Pierre Deyon and M. Hubert MHhivier for their permission to trans late and publish their work; and to Professor Fernand Braudel and Pro fessor Robert Mandrou for their permission to translate and publish extracts from the French edition of Professor Boris Porshnev's work on popular uprisings in France before the Fronde. A major aim of this collec tion has indeed been achieved by my being able to draw together in one publication the work of Roland Mousnier and Boris Porshnev. I wish also to record my thanks to Professor W. R. Fryer, who read an early draft of my introductory chapter and made many valuable com- viii Preface ments upon it. I am grateful too for the awarenesses which have arisen from my teaching and learning from successive classes of final year students reading 'France under Louis XIV' in the History Department of the University of Nottingham. I am grateful to my publishers for their providing me with space to include the authors' notes to their work virtually intact, as collected notes at the end of the chapters. My own interpolated notes, wherever they occur, are clearly indicated as editorial material. I have appended a glossary of French terms which have been left un translated, and whose meaning is not immediately clarified in their con text. Technical terms are always I think best left untranslated, even when they may seem to have approximate equivalents. I do not like rendering bailliage, for example, as 'bailiwick', or officier as 'official'. A word given in the glossary is indicated by the glossary mark (t) on the first occasion when it occurs in any chapter. The bibliography is intended to assist any further reading which this work may encourage. P. J. COVENEY University of Nottingham, July 1976 Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for their permis sion to translate and publish extracts and articles included in this col lection: M. Hubert MHhivier and the Presses Universitaires de France for the extract from M. MHhivier's L'Ancien Regime, 6e edition, Paris, 1974, pp. 63-78; Professor Fernand Braudel and Professor Robert Mandrou and the Centre de Recherches Historiques de la VIe Section de l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes for the extracts from Professor Boris Porshnev's Les a Soulevements populaires en France de 1623 1648, S.E.V.P.E.N., Paris, 1963, pp. 17-44, 539-61 and 574-82; Professor Roland Mousnier and the Revue d'Histoire moderne et contemporaine for 'Recherches sur les soulevements populaires en France avant la Fronde', Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 1958, pp. 81-113; Professor Roland Mousnier and the Societe d'Etude du XVIIe Siecle for 'Quelques raisons de la Fronde: les causes des journees revolutionnaires parisiennes de 1648', XVIIe Siecle, 1949, pp. 33-78, and for 'Recherches sur les syndicats d'officiers pendant la Fronde: Tresoriers Generaux de France et Elus dans Ia Revolution', XVIle Siecle, 1959, pp. 76-117; and Professor Pierre Deyon and the Presses Universitaires de France for 'A propos des rapports entre la noblesse franl;aise et la monarchie absolue pendant la premiere moitie du XVIIe siecle', Revue Historique, CCXXXI, 1964, pp. 341-56. Introduction: I France in Crisis, I620-1675 P. J. COVENEY The French seventeenth century has been a major interest among Euro pean historians since the Second World War. The reason for this, at least in part, is that the seventeenth century saw the formation of the French ancien regime and occupies therefore a determining position in the transformation of the late-medieval constitution in France into the political society we term absolutism. Much of the history, however, remains controversial. even in its widest and deepest issues. Are we in deed justified in speaking in terms of 'crisis' in relation to any part of the century? Did the economic expansion of the 'long sixteenth century' come to a close in France in the 1630s and 1640s, giving way to a period of economic contraction? What was the relation of the monarchy to the dominant elements within the French state, and what were the relation ships between those elements themselves, especially between 'sword' and 'robe'? What was the nature of the constant popular unrest which disturbed France for so long? Was seventeenth-century France still a 'feudal' society, in which the political state was merely the instrument of a 'feudal' elite in achieving the defeat of the popular masses? Or, conversely, had the monarchy become associated with elements of the bourgeoisie, either through venality or mercantilism, thereby trans forming the late-feudal character of the monarchical state by ending the political monopoly of a traditional feudal class? Was the French seven teenth century a society about which it is possible to talk usefully in terms of modern class-conflict, as Boris Porshnev has, or was it a society still meaningfully contained within the framework of late-medieval 'orders', as Roland Mousnier sees it? These are some of the major issues involved in the modern historiography of seventeenth-century France, and which form the basis of much of the discussion of the various chapters of this work. I have used the word 'crisis' in my title very deliberately, since it still seems to me the word which best approximates to a description of the 2 France in Crisis, 1620-1675 experience through which the French monarchical state passed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century; and I have, equally deliber ately, extended the period of crisis beyond the Fronde, to include the first period of Louis XIV's personal reign itself, since important elements of that crisis continued until well beyond Louis' assumption of personal power in 1661. Royal policy in the crucial period of the early personal reign was largely a response to the mid-century crisis as it had revealed itself in the Fronde, a repetition of which the monarchy was intent at all costs to avoid; not solely by the blunt response of a simplifying 're duction to obedience', in Lavisse's celebrated phrase, but by something altogether more acutely attuned to the nature of the crisis within the monarchical state and to its solution. This, more than anything perhaps, was the major legacy of the Fronde. Students of the early modem period will be well aware of the whole corpus of 'crisis' literature which has grown up since Roland Mousnier's synthesising account of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in 19541 and E. J. Hobsbawm's essay on 'The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century'. which appeared the same year,2 followed by H. ]. Trevor-Roper's 'The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century' some five years later.s Just as they will be aware of the disagreements and caveats expressed by, among others, J. H. EIliott,4 1. SchOffer,5 A. D. Lublinskaya6 and P. Gouberrt regarding the whole concept of seventeenth-century crisis. Some historians have perhaps tended to use the word crisis to suggest explanations where in fact no explanation is, and the word has cer tainly tended to subsume historical phenomena, especially economic, into generalisations which are often highly controversial and conjectural. The idea of 'crisis' has, equally, derived sometimes from a priori assump tions, where the concept anticipates the reasons adduced to explain it, which is a common enough enemy of all historical wisdom. Even so, it would be an arid excursion into the meaning of words to propose that the word crisis should be limited to a strictly medical analogy and therefore to its short-term meaning only; thus denying the historian access to the concept that political societies do indeed experi ence crises, sometimes of fairly long duration. which reach their climax and find resolution only very slowly. Such semantic nicety would much reduce the historian's access to a word which, by figurative extension. has had a long and largely meaningful usage. It does not strain semantic proprieties to propose that the English state was in a condition of crisis in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods until the Civil War and be yond. Spanish history has been usefully written of in terms of 'crisis' at the close of the sixteenth and during the early seventeenth centuries.8 It is a common acceptance that Muscovy succumbed to a period of accumu lating and prolonged crisis following the death of Ivan IV in 1584 until the restoration of stable monarchy from the accession of Michael Romanov