Overcoming the temporal and spatial limitations on trade in Europe was thus the chief achievement of cities and merchants. The subsequent explosion of trade in numerous goods—wool and linens chief among them—led to most of the key changes including the enclosure movement in England, the rapid expansion of cities in modern France, Italy, and Germany, and the eventual schism in the Catholic Church. In France the lord-serf relationship began to disappear in favor of more productive relationships more reminiscent of late Roman times than of the harsh penurious existence enforced on many laypeople during the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties. One facet of this new relationship between the lord and laypeople was the bannum which required all inhabitants, serfs, freemen, and otherwise to use the lord’s mills and granaries, and to pay tolls on the use of public goods like roads and bridges. In exchange the lords were largely responsible for increasing the safety of those public areas and expanding the arable land in the fief. (Constance Bouchard, Rural economy and society. In France in the central Middle Ages: ages 900-1200, edited by M. G. Bull, Oxford, 2002, pg. 92).
The rise in production generally went along with a decrease in serfdom and in increase in wages for those tenant farmers. The increase in wealth had the ultimate effect of increasing the strength of bartered sovereignty from the bottom up. The improvement in production increased territorial consolidation and decreased the need for the lord-vassal relationship. As the number of vassals decreases the principle of bartered sovereignty becomes increasingly incoherent. And in 1075 AD the second significant shift took place. A crisis between King Henry IV of Germany and Pope Gregory VII, known as the Investituture Conflict radically changed the hierarchy within Christendom and ultimately began to undermine the centrality of the Catholic Church in European politics. Kings had long held the right to choose and appoint bishops in their kingdoms. While this right had been uncontroversial prior to this period, Pope Gregory VII had eliminated the right of investiture by papal decree. King Henry IV of Germany had insisted on the right of kings to put bishops into office. Henry’s response essentially called for Gregory to step down as pope. Gregory subsequently excommunicated Henry. This led to the famous and often mythologized event in 1076 at the castle in Canossa near Milan . As the story goes, Henry stood in the snow (perhaps barefoot, perhaps in a hairshirt) for three days seeking absolution. Gaining that Henry was eventually crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The conflict between pope and emperor simmered however and Henry eventually threw Gregory in jail and appointed a new pope. While Gregory’s eventual downfall is significant, equally significant is that this excommunication was taken seriously. The power of the pope to define who existed within and without Christendom had profound consequences for both rulers and laypeople. To be excommunicated essentially excluded that person or that ruler from international society. Certainly, for King Henry, the threat of exclusion was a threat to his current kingdoms. While the Investiture Conflict mainly involved the Holy Roman Empire and England it had profound effects on the Frankish world order. The Crusades had reawakened the linkages of the Charlemagne’s world order which had lain dormant for many centuries. However, the Church reforms—including investiture rights and demands of priestly celibacy—had the effect of limiting the scope of papal power. (H. E. J. Cowdrey, Popes and church reform in the 11th century, 2000).
The ideological subsystem did not collapse, but the secularization of royal power had the long-term effect of isolating the Catholic Church and progressively limiting the geographic scope of the papal hierarchy. Because of these reforms secular kings would inevitably come to replace the ideological subsystem of the church with an ideological hierarchy centered on their own charisma. By 1200 AD the kings were still too weak individually to assert their authority against the church however the new principle dividing secular and ecclesiastic rule provided a jumping off point for further innovations. The role of the church as an ideological subsystem went beyond simply defining the laity, legitimizing the lords and vassals, and extending the ecumene. The church became the protector of extant knowledge with varying degrees of success. In so doing official written law fell under the jurisdiction of the church. This had two main effects. First, God’s word as written in the bible and as interpreted by the church became the first, and universally accepted, source of law in all of Christendom. (Marcus Bull,The Church. Edited by M. Bull, France in the central Middle Ages: ages 900-1200, 2002,135).
In disputes among the various elites the logic of argumentation often followed from quite carefully and precisely from various interpretations of the bible. Second, the interpretations of other sources of law that were commonly used, chiefly Roman law, were always consonant with biblical law. God was the lawgiver and his universe was arranged according to an unknowable set of laws, but a set of laws that was surely perfect. The Investiture Conflict cut to the very heart of this issue. But it did so unevenly. By the end of the Investiture Conflict—resolved in the Concordants of London and Worms—England and Germany established principles by which they could flout, or at least subvert, the will of the pope in the appointment of bishops and other members of the ecumene. (See also Uta-Renate Blumenthal,The investiture controversy: church and monarchy from the ninth to the twelfth century, 1988; Frederick Karl Morrison, The investiture controversy; issues, ideas, and results. 1971).
These negotiations reinforce the notion that bartered sovereignty was still the dominant principle at the same time that the church was in a relatively weaker position to theroyalty The conflict left France rather unscathed, but the last remaining vestige of the Frankish world order had begun to crumble. The ideological subsystem became smaller, more isolated, and more particular. France became one of the first areas loosed from the bonds of Christendom. The politics of the Holy Roman Empire became the chief occupation of the popes in the central Middle Ages. The Chronicle of the Abbey of Morigny shows how the abbot was engaged in negotiations with kings and lords to secure church lands. (See also Richard Cusimano and Morigny A translation of the Chronicle of the abbey of Morigny, France, c. 1100-1150, 2003).
Until the Avignon papacy during the Hundred Years War, France pursued its own development rather than the arcane politics of the papacy. The decline of Christendom hastened the decline of the Frankish world order, but bore in the seeds of a resplendent French world order. The church found its power over the laity severely circumscribed over time. In its place grew the secular authority of kings, nobles, and merchants. The puzzle that has challenged other systems change theories and which is still perplexing is simply this: if the decline of feudalism began around 1000 AD as agricultural practices began to improve and the secular power of kings began to assert itself how come it took another 600 years for the absolutist state to fully emerge? Early in the second millennium AD we do see improvements in the ability of the French to support themselves. However, this did not coincide with French kings exerting themselves upon the lesser lords in any cohesive and meaningful way. It took quite some time for war to approach the Clausewitzian ideal of organized armies dedicated to organized political outcomes for extended periods of time. Even the Crusades followed a feudal logic of organization rather than any specific raison d’état.
Thus while the hierarchies which it had traditionally defined were becoming more marginal, the trade subsystem on the other hand was resurgent and though plagues and famines would continue to limit the rate of growth the direction of growth was undeniable. (Michael Jones, The crown and the provinces in the fourteenth century. In France in the later Middle Ages, 1200-1500, edited by D. Potter, Oxford , 2003).
The meager existence
that the early Middle Ages provided was slowly being replaced by a better,
more stable existence. Yet bartered sovereignty continued to structure
the world order. Interpersonal bonds of fealty continued to be the medium
through which politics at every level occurred. It is thus significant
that none of these changes were the proximate causes of the rise of administrative
sovereignty. The birth of the absolutist state in the late 16th century
was foretold by the changes occurring in the 11th and 12th centuries, but
it was not predicated by them. (David Parker, The making of French absolutism,
1983).
At this point
little has been said about changes to the security subsystem and this is
because little did change during this period. However, during the subsequent
period of the Avignon papacy and the Hundred Years War the security subsystem
changed in significant ways soon followed, by the hundred years War.
The Île de France—that central part of France incorporating Paris and the outlying valleys—was particularly well-suited to the growth of Western Europe because it was situated near many waterways and other transportation routes. In the period following the Investiture Conflict Philip II (Philip Augustus) engaged in numerous wars and diplomatic engagements that expanded the French sphere of influence and, by proxy, the French state. Territorial consolidation at the local level solidified the hierarchy among the king and the princes. However, territorial demarcation was still absent from the picture.204 The common ideas that one holds for a French state still did not exist to this point. There was not a common language in the territories we now consider France . The modern French language is derived from the dialect, langue d’oil spoken around the Île de France. In all of France , particularly the south (Languedoc ) vassalage continued to characterize numerous elite relationships negotiated and renegotiated constantly. The period of the 12th and 13th centuries was one of the first eras of rebirth, but did not correspond in any respect to the consolidation of the French kingdom. There was no France to speak of in any cohesive sense though the core of it would grow out of the kingdom of Western Francia under the leadership of the Capetian kings. (Roger Price, A concise history of France , Cambridge 2005, pg. 26).
As late as the
15th century the Dauphiné was bound to the king of France , but not as
a French territory. By the early 14th century economic growth has seized
much of Europe . Philip Augustus founded the University of Paris . Flanders
, still an independent territory, burgeoned as a site of wool production.
Trade routes across Europe became increasingly dense and vibrant. This
was in part due to the Crusades, but equally due to a relative period of
peace. Warfare was still endemic to the period and we must therefore understand
this period of peace in its proper context. By 1312, “population densities
were higher than they would again be before the eighteenth century.”
(R. J. Knecht, The rise and fall of Renaissance France, 1483-1610, Cambridge,
2001).
During this
period the power of the church continued to wane and changes in the security
subsystem were minimal. The art of war did not change substantially either
it was a period more defined by ongoing changes to the trade subsystem.
Coinage and contract labor began to reemerge. Soldiers, for example, could
expect to be paid a consistent wage. Looting and pillage remained central
parts of warfare, but wage soldiery generally stabilized the relationship
of king to army. (C. T. Allmand, Society at war: the experience of England
and France during the Hundred Years War, 1998).
Similarly, peasants that had been made serfs began to reassert their independence to local lords. However, the governments themselves remained rather weak, both in terms of taxation and force. The ability of the king to collect taxes and exert control over distant territories remained weak. It led to a brief, but highly unstable period. The principle of bartered sovereignty remained stable, while the relative subsystems around it changed rapidly. This was exacerbated by the Avignon Papacy during the years of 1305 – 1378. Under Pope Clement V—partly because of a conflict with Philip IV (Philip the Fair) and partly because of wars threatening Rome —the papal seat was relocated to the papal estates in Avignon. This had two major effects on the feudal arrangements in France and Europe at the time. First, France gained considerable power over the church and thus was able to consolidate its own power.
During the Avignon papacy every pope elected (seven of them) was French. (P. S. Lewis, Essays in later medieval French history, 1985).
French kings benefited from having the pope in France. With the College of Cardinals electing French popes the French kings were able to pursue an agenda almost wholly to their own liking.
Second, the pope began the practice of simony and selling indulgences while in France. This had the famous effect of creating the basis for the two schisms, the Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation, which would follow. So instead of the church holding captive the whole of Christendom under its dual powers of excommunication and the power to crown kings we see this power inverted. The church, for purposes of taxation and increasing wealth, became captive to the whims of merchants and lords capable of filling church coffers. Meanwhile Philip IV and subsequent French kings used their power to essentially approve or disapprove of the decisions of the College of Cardinals.
This sequence of events would shortly lead England and France towards the Hundreds Years War. Some such as Strayer disagree with this basic notion pointing out that while the Popes were French their policies remained focused on increasing papal authority. Ironically, their actions mattered little; it was the appearance of impropriety that ultimately undermined the Pope and the Church. Strayer. The war, which began in 1336, had at its core a number of causes. One was primarily financial; after confiscating the property of the Jews and Knight Templar to pay for his armies and his wars Philip IV was left with little else to do, except to increase taxation. This came mainly in the form of taille—“a direct tax on persons and property.” (Koenigsberger, Mosse, and Bowler. Pg. 282).
This worked
well enough, but Philip IV had two fatal flaws: he was mortal and his heirs
didn’t live long. Shortly after his death the Capetian line itself ended
with the death of his son Charles IV. Reverting to Salic law there was
some dispute over who would inherit the French crown with equal claims
made by Edward III, king of England , and Philip of Valois, a nephew to
Charles. With French control of the papacy there was little doubt that
the French claim would triumph. However, France ’s increased need for
revenues did not decrease during this time and Philip’s (now Philip VI)
eyes turned towards Flanders.
French control
over Flanders was unacceptable to the English given English reliance on
the fleece trade that fueled Flanders’ looms and England ’s wealth.
Thus began the Hundred Years War. It continued as many wars of this period
did: it was long and bloody and the peasants bore the brunt of the cost
and carnage. (Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: the Hundred Years
War in the French countryside, Warfare in history, Rochester 1998).
It was significant
to the security subsystem for a number of reasons. One of the more notable
changes was the shift from cavalry to infantry as the central unit of warfare.
The French victory in the Hundred Years War is perhaps surprising given their general incompetence in many of the major battles including Poitiers , Crecy , and Agincourt. In each of those battles English infantry and artillery (longbow-men and cannon) provided the decisive advantage in the battle. Superior logistics in the end trumped superior tactics, but the message was sent to all of Europe nonetheless. The day of the knight was coming to an end. Given the importance of infantry, the onus of defense now began to fall upon the king. This fundamentally changed the role structures that necessitated bartered sovereignty vis-à-vis the security subsystem.
From this point forward kings would begin to build centralized armies in lieu of relying of feudal obligations of lords and their manors. Expanding from the Île de France the new security subsystem began to grow outwards into the rest of France.
We may summarize
by saying that there are three significant issues that arise from this
chapter in French history. First, it results in the English expulsion from
the mainland leaving the French kings to consolidate the territories to
their north. Second, the carnage of the war combined with the Black Death—which
swept out of the Gobi Desert and arrived in 1347—severely undermined
the position of the church. The church was unable to explain the plague
in religious terms and unable to provide sacraments to the dying and this
disillusioned much of laity. Lastly the requirements of self-defense and
the increasing costs of war consolidated and strengthened the French bureaucracy
and thus the French king. As the line goes, ‘war made the state.’ There
is some disagreement as to how to interpret this period of French history.
For some, the period of growth beginning with Philip Augustus continuing
through Saint Louis and Philip IV represents the beginning of the French
state. The consolidation of territories and the growth of a central bureaucracy
designed to levy taxes did begin during this period. The question that
one ought to pose then is under what set of principles did this emerge?
For this we find fairly strong evidence that this period of consolidation
was still marked by a basic principle of bartered sovereignty. While the
king was able to subject larger territories under his immediate control
his power to tax those territories was still severely limited. (Elizabeth
A. R. Brown, Customary aids and royal finance in Capetian France : the
marriage
aid of Philip
the Fair, Cambridge, 1992).
The king’s bureaucracy was small. In order to tax the peasants most often the king had to agree not to tax the nobles. Taxation of the nobles, or the lack thereof, would continue to be a defining characteristic of this period and indeed, as I shall show later, we can use that taxation of the nobles as something of a benchmark for the rise of administrative sovereignty, and later absolute sovereignty. One might point to Saint Louis ’s use of Parlément and the Estates General to resolve conflicts and establish the legal basis of kingly right as another starting point for a new sovereign principle. Certainly these institutions look remarkably like state institutions, but they were far more charismatic than they were legalistic.
Subsequent kings consulted these bodies only intermittently and largely to give the appearance of being magnanimous. Lewis points out, “No king could act alone: he had his entourage, his counsellors, his ‘favourites’; he had his civil servants. In this welter of governance the individual will of the king might be hard to identify.” Thus not only did the king use representative bodies intermittently, his own agenda was coopted and compromised by those surrounding him. The actual negotiations between the three estates—the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners—were still highly interpersonal and random. Some institutions that would prove useful to the state did rise in this period, but one in better off understanding this period for the rebirth of industry and as the high-water mark of the Catholic Church.
The Hundred
Years War, which ended in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon, devastated the
population, but strengthened industry and the bureaucracy. The Great Schism
which had at one point given the people three separate popes ushered in
a period of mysticism and religious innovation among the laity and a profound
period of questioning among all involved. In the course of the Hundred
Years War the two great social systems—the fief and the church—that
had stabilized Europe through the Middle Ages began to crumble. Time and
again the knight on horseback was defeated by infantry and cannon. While
the church found itself making one mistake after another. The principle
of diffuse hierarchy that had characterized the security system began to
change rapidly—though the resulting scope of that system would take some
time to change. The totalitizing capacity on the ideological system became
more or less bankrupt—Christendom was coming apart at the seams. Yet
France found itself on the fringes of the growing ‘heresy’ of the Reformation.
The stage
was thus set
for a rapid growth of the economy. While other wars did follow in the immediate
aftermath—particularly the French-Italian wars under Charles VIII, Louis
XII, and Francis I—the development of France in this period is best understood
by the peaceful growth within the burgeoning territory.(David Potter, A
history of France, 1460-1560: the emergence of a nation state, 1995).
In the middle of this Louis XI (The Spider King) found grist for consolidating unprecedented power. One could argue that the beginnings of absolutism, but while he made the claim for absolutism and did away with the Estates General for the most part Louis still never quite threw out the status quo of bartered sovereignty.
For Louis absolutism was a bargaining position, not an entirely new principle. His nickname by itself may evidence enough of this; he was the Spider King constantly weaving and trapping people in his web. Every claim was a ploy and a trap, not a new sovereign principle. It is important to distinguish between absolutism, which could be said to be a sign of administrative sovereignty, and absolute sovereignty, which is characterized by a heretofore absent control of ideology by the state. (David Potter, A history of France, 1460-1560: the emergence of a nation state, 1995).
The state of affairs that France found itself in during this period brought the Renaissance to France , filled its coffers, and increased the well-being of its entire people. When Martin Luther’s theses first arrived in Paris in 1521 they didn’t have nearly the effect that they had had in other parts of Europe . They were proclaimed heretical rather quickly and they were fairly easy to suppress and control in the beginning. Nonetheless, among townspeople (particularly artisans) and disempowered nobility they gained a distinct following. This was accelerated and strengthened by the writings of Calvin beginning to appear in France in 1535. (R. J. Knecht, The French wars of religion, 1559-1598, 1996, pg. 50).
By 1562 attempts at negotiated peace and reconciliation had failed and the first of the French Civil Wars began. The resolution to the civil wars was quite surprising. Henry of Navarre—descended from the powerful Bourbon line of Capetian kings— was named king following the death of Henry III. Though he might have been king he could not be crowned; he could not enter Paris. Henry of Navarre was a Huguenot and the Catholic League held Paris. He was able to secure territories in the south of France for himself, but he remained unable to retake Paris. In what was one of the more savvy moves in French political history he converted to Catholicism and was subsequently crowned Henry IV in Chartres in 1594.The period between 1453 and 1594 was characterized by the increasing inefficiency of bartered sovereignty. Cities, trade, education, and population grew rapidly through this period. (S. Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the towns : the pursuit of legitimacy in French urban society, 1589-1610, 1999).
With the increase in wealth came an increase in the number of people who either claimed nobility or could buy the ear of the monarch and his lieges. The infinite complexities of a system of this sort are one thing when the hierarchy is rather straightforward, but as lineages and claims to nobility became increasingly complex the interpersonal nature of the feudal system was pushed to the breaking point. (Mark Greengrass, France in the age of Henri IV: the struggle for stability, 1995).
The Reformation was the actual breaking point. Given the excuse Huguenots and Catholics could create their own exclusive systems of fealty each dependent upon their victory. Meanwhile the religious wars had grown beyond the townspeople who had initially supported them. Now forced to give allegiance to the nobles who would support their victory they were trebly taxed. The state, the war, and their allegiances all conspired to deprive the commoners of their livelihood. By the time Henry had come to power norms entrepreneurs had actively and successfully begun advocating for the absolutist king no longer bound by oaths of fealty, but a leviathan unto himself. Henry was more like his distant predecessor, Charlemagne, than any that had come before him or after him. He actively created a new principle of rule, administrative sovereignty, to replace the increasingly defunct principles of bartered sovereignty. Sully points out the self-evident intentionality of this, “From hence likewise we may perceive the motives for [Henry’s] pursuing a conduct so opposite to anything that had hitherto been undertaken by crowned heads . . . to render France happy forever was his desire; and as she cannot perfectly enjoy this felicity unless all Europe partakes of it, so it was the happiness of Europe in general which he labored to procure.” (James Goldsmith,Lowth Longman. Lordship in France , 1500-1789, 2005).
The collapsing
Frankish world order was thus being explicitly replaced with a French world
order which had at its head a single ruler focused on the administrative
priorities of rule rather than the petty claims of local nobles. Henry
explicitly rejected the centrality of these claims to good or sensible
governance. His most significant act in spelling out this claim was issuing
the Edict of Nantes in 1598 which created the absolute monarch in the French
state. Overtly, the Edict of Nantes guaranteed safe places of worship to
the Huguenots throughout France. (Ragnhild Marie Hatton, Louis XIV and
absolutism, 1976).
The more subtle
effect was to replace the principle of bartered decisionmaking with royal
decree. One significant passage states: In the Houses that are Fiefs, where
those of the said Religion have not high Justice, there the said Exercise
of the Reformed Religion shall not be permitted, save only to their own
Families, yet nevertheless, if other persons, to the number of thirty,
besides their Families, shall be there upon the occasion of Christenings,
Visits of their Friends, or otherwise, our meaning is, that in such case
they shall not be molested: provided also, that the said Houses be not
within Cities,
Burroughs,
or Villages belonging to any Catholick Lord (save to Us) having high Justice,
in which the said Catholick Lords have their Houses. For in such cases,
those of the
said Religion shall not hold the said Exercise in the said Cities, Burroughs,
or Villages, except by permission of the said Lords high Justices. (Roland
Mousnier, The Edict of Nantes Stetson University, 2006, see also: http://www.stetson.edu/~psteeves/classes/edictnantes.html).
This is significant because it emphasizes the will of the king in decisions rather than bonds of fidelity and vassalage. Regardless of the relationship of the king to the nobles, the king asserts his prior right to declare and enforce law. The Edict of Nantes expresses something far more particular and important than the vague absolutism of cuius region eius religio. Henry IV created a principle of absolutism that was far more dominant than other alternatives at the time. It was not the mutual noninterference of the Peaces of Augsburg or Westphalia . It was the king’s right to ignore the claims of the lower nobility.
In general political scientists take the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to be the genesis of the modern principle of sovereignty. Those that don’t will often instead rely upon the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 which first established the principle of cuius regio eius religio. However, both of these treaties were mainly concerned with the Holy Roman Empire which remained fractious for more than a century after both of those treaties. Furthermore, the Peace of Augsburg preceded the first French Civil War by seven years. Clearly the principle established in that peace could be none to relevant to the French view of the state or sovereignty. If that principle had been influential in France then Henry would have been more inclined to cede some land that would be designated Protestant in order to create a lasting peace. Insofar as France is the first modern state we should be concerned with the historical shifts that proved crucial to the formation of French sovereignty instead of merely seeking out benchmarks which are convenient, but not altogether accurate.
In a curious way the revocation of the edict by Louis XIV in 1685 actually strengthened the principles which it had espoused while getting rid of the pretext of religious freedom. The principle of the prince choosing the religion offers the hope that under a different prince a new dominant religion might be possible. In contrast, the principle that the king had the power to determine when and where religious freedom was tolerated creates the very basis of absolutism. The Edict of Nantes, in this regards, reflects the concepts proposed by Jean Bodin in 1576 far more closely and immediately than any subsequent treaties such as Westphalia . The burden of taxes that the commoners suffered under at the end of the Wars of Religion strained the economy.
The state was nearly bankrupt. The commoners were surely taxed, but that revenue never made it back to the central bureaucracy. Henry and his great minister Sully undertook a number of reforms that had the effect of creating the first recognizable French state. Externally Henry was able to secure most of the borders of modern France. He did so with the idea of a nascent French world order as his explicit goal. Additionally, he kept France active in the Age of Exploration. With secured borders and increased revenues he was able to engage in the reforms that were so desperately necessary domestically. By reducing corruption and increasing the flowing of tax revenues directly to the central government Henry was effectively able to co-opt both the security and trade subsystems under the heading of the French state.
His heavy reliance on Sully to administer the domestic reforms began the long tradition of other ministers that would follow including Mazarin and Richelieu. We may speak in this sense of a new principle of administrative sovereignty. National unity was notably absent from France in this period. We may now begin to understand the French state as a thing in itself and not merely the sum of compromises that each individual king had made. Instead of ceding and gaining territory and rights willy-nilly all over Europe , Henry IV sought agreements that would actually stabilize and consolidate a French state.
With this as his birthright Louis XIV (The Sun King) was well-positioned to create absolutism as we actually understand it. There are, of course, the famous innovations that he made during his reign—in particular the courtier system as Versailles —that consolidated his power and severely weakened the position of the nobility. (François Bluche, Louis XIV, 1990).
By the time of his death the balance of power between the three estates was effectively defunct. The nobility had been castrated and the church was increasingly irrelevant. The king and commoners were the last ones standing. Louis XIV inherited the throne while still in his minority. Prior to his accession the state was largely run by Richelieu . While Louis was still a youth Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu ’s successor, handled the business of rule in the state. In time Louis would become famous for his own ideas on absolutist rule, but the ministers that oversaw him and the state during his childhood were equally absolutist in philosophy, if not less effective in practice. Mazarin, in particular, through his policies incited a series of minor rebellions among the nobility in the middle of the 17th century. These rebellions, which began shortly after the Peace of Westphalia and were called the Fronde, are notable mainly for their factionalism and general incompetence. (Richard Bonney, The limits of absolutism in ancien régime France, 1995).
Needless to say the Fronde failed. During this period, “The disarmament of noble chateux and of the towns commenced by Richelieu and Mazarin also continued, achieving for the first time an effective monopoly of armed force. In many respects Louis XIV was only operating a system of government created by his predecessors in which the role of the monarch, as the Lord’s anointed, was to serve as the symbol and source of unity.”
Louis’ reign was thus not revolutionary, but merely significant for two key reasons. The first reason was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By the time this happened it was a minor issue. In fact, the insignificance of it is what is notable. By 1685 France was a Catholic country through and through. Whereas prior kingdoms were defined by their faith, in France in this period the faith was dictated by the court. The second innovation was, of course, the construction of Versailles. Louis’ creation of an unarmed palace where service to the king was the only method of advancement subjugated the nobility. It gave the nobility the choice to either fight in the military or to serve him as courtiers. To minimize corruption in the bureaucracy courtiers had little to do with the affairs of state, but all of the courtiers were indebted to the king because of the exorbitant cost of the lifestyle. The cost of life at Versailles was quite expensive. One it tempted to cite Louis XIV and his reign as significant milestones in the development of the state we see rather minor changes to a nascent absolutism which had begun to develop centuries earlier. Absolutism became a popular concept around Europe during this time and the French were the first and most able in ruling according to its principles. However, it was not absolute; its final failing was that while Louis was convinced that the state would continue without him he was nonetheless convinced that the king was the state. As the bloody wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries prove nationalism is a far more compelling type of absolutism. Louis’ reign was the high-water mark of administrative sovereignty.
Versailles, which made much of the internal complacency possible, was simply too expensive to maintain. Furthermore absolutism would prove an easy target for the Enlightenment.
With this sketch of French history we are able to narrow down a period where this shift from bartered to administrative sovereignty actually took place. That enables us to eliminate many of the prior explanations for the development of administrative sovereignty at the same time that it provides some insight into the proximate causes. Having rejected the formation of the state in the 12th – 14th centuries we are able reject the collapse of the church and the rise of towns as proximate causes of the shift in sovereignty. Similarly, the understanding that Louis XIV was none too revolutionary in his development of the absolutist monarchy rejects the relevance of the Peace of Westphalia as a turning point. We are for reasons already described able to focus on the reign of Henry IV as the most consequential norms entrepreneur in this regard. For some historians it is common to focus on the personality of the kings and other leading figures as particularly significant, but while this is appealing it is not all that illuminating. Attributing all the decisions he made to the brilliance of him or his chief counselor, Sully, implies that it was merely their own inventiveness that proved the significant factor. This ignores the decision-making constraints that they operated under. Henry’s conversion to Catholicism and his issuance of the Edict of Nantes were certainly individual decisions, but they were expedient given the circumstances. The Edict of Nantes doesn’t illustrate Henry’s profound decency, but instead illuminates what was efficient for the time. Henry could have continued to fight for his kingship as a Protestant, he could have continued to fight Protestants for dominance in France after his conversion, but neither would have been expedient. Bartered sovereignty was dead by this point. There was no sense in parceling off French territory. He bought loyalty with state funds, crushed rebellions in the name of the state. He lacked the state apparatus of Louis XIV, but the principles of his rule were the same regardless. There was no pervasive ideology tying the state together. The church was compromised, its hierarchy no longer relevant. The Catholic victory in the French Civil Wars was a pyrrhic one. Spanish intervention on behalf of the Catholic League soured so much of France that any loyalties which transcended the raison d’etat were effectively defunct by Henry’s death. Christendom was no longer a compelling ideological subsystem. This is proven conclusively by French involvement in the Thirty Years War on the side of the Protestants. Yet there were no French people yet. The creation of a French people was a project left ultimately to Napoleon. The rise of the cities was paralleled by the development of a centralized French army. While the army at its genesis was a rather pitiful thing it eventually made the feudal arrangement entirely irrelevant. Not only were knights a strategic liability, by the time Henry became king the fiefs by which they kept control of the local peasantry were mostly defunct. The most successful nobles had long abandoned the lord-serf relationship in favor of more efficient farming and production methods.
However, in
contrast to modern Italy and Germany , the cities could not ever effectively
assert their independence contra the strong center of the state. The growth
of the security and trade subsystems occurred at the same time and pace.
Over the period of the two centuries bridging the Hundred Years War these
three subsystems passed each other as strangers in the night. Going downhill
was the ideological subsystem eking out its remaining spheres of influence
against the rising tide of the secular state. Heading uphill were the dominant—and
contradictory—ideologies of secular trade in the cities, and the subjugation
of the nobility to the king. The reign of Henry IV was the key moment when
bartered sovereignty finally failed. What options were left to him at this
point? Given the nature of the growing cities including their Protestantism
and their desire for some meaningful independence hierarchal sovereignty
was out of the question. What submission was there to be gained? Similarly
transborder sovereignty was bound to fail since there was no pervasive
ideology to tie the commoners to the king. Administrative sovereignty,
absolutism, was literally not only the most efficient option, but also
the only one open to Henry and Sully.
For obvious
reasons thus the path of the French state becomes crucial to story of world
history. It was French power that ended the Thirty Years War. It was French
dominance that led other states in the crucial period of the 17th and 18th
centuries to begin to copy their form of absolutism. It was French dominance
on the continent that sent the British, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese
abroad to seek their fortunes.
From the first battle at Poitiers in 732 it was French power that drove the evolution of bartered sovereignty, and later it was French power that drove the shift towards administrative sovereignty. The nascent absolutist was a French innovation that had less to do with the events of the Holy Roman Empire and more to do with the internal development of the French polity. Those who have engaged in analyses of the development and genesis of sovereignty to this point have tended to paint this development in a more internationalist light. Certainly, our broadest tendency is to point to Augsburg and Westphalia and say that the birth of the state took place there.
This is factually untenable; it leads to problematic theories of sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not an original innovation of the period. As a constitutive rule it does not represent something sui generis. This chapter has shown that the development of absolutism was a principle of rule developed in contrast to prior, stable principles of rule. Sovereignty during feudalism was not unheard of, nor fragmented, nor anarchic.
It was organized and well-understood. The fruitful questions must thus focus on why France, why then, why absolutism?
The relative scope of the important subsystems in France was unique to Europe at the time. France ’s development was different than England or Germany . One significant aspect of this difference was that the security subsystem developed coterminous with the trade subsystem. Additionally, France ’s rejection of Catholicism was less absolute and its acceptance of Protestantism was equally less absolute. The ideological subsystem collapsed in the face of this indeterminacy. It was the French rejection of Christendom that was significant. If we are to legitimately accept Augsburg or Westphalia as significant milestones then those dates and events must correspond to the development of absolutism in some logical manner. They fail to do so. The French chronology is far more compelling. From the beginning of the civil war in 1562 to the publication of the Six Books of the Commonwealth in 1576 to the Edict of Nantes in 1598 absolutism was a French solution to French problems. It was a limited solution; it was brilliant and it was effective. Given the nature of development at the time it was also the only stable solution possible.
Separate States, Common Goals in China Today: Case Study P.1:
The first reliable historic period in Chinese history also corresponds with its longest stable dynasty: the Zhou. This period of history has attracted scholars for years. Most recently the attraction, especially for those studying international relations, has been the interesting correlations between the Eastern Zhou period and feudal Europe in central Middle Ages. The Eastern Zhou period is commonly broken up into two separate periods: the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn) period, and the Zhanguo Warring State) period. These two periods spanned roughly from 722 BC to 221 BC.236 Because the Zhou kings lacked a strong centralized authority and ruled with a vassalage system it invites easy comparisons to vassalage system employed in Europe some fifteen hundred years later.
Below, the first partition of Poland by the Eastern European monarchs, who are shown dividing the spoils. This signaled not only by the remaking of Eastern Europe, but also resulted in the wars of Louis XIV, the first world wars of the modern era, imperial and oceanic in their scope.
