Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France 9781501745737

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Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy

Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France

HAROLD A. ELLIS

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright© 1988 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1988 by Cornell University Press. International Standard Book Number o-8014-2130-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-47971 Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. The paper in this book is acidjree and meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents

Preface Abbreviations l.

1X xu

Introduction

2. Early Works: Genealogy and the Problem of French Feudalism Genealogical Consciousness: Family, Noble, and French History The Rehabilitation of French Feudalism

3· Boulainvilliers and the Burgundy Circle The Due de Bourgogne's Entourage and Its Activities The Etat de la France: The Author, His Book, and His Readers

17 17 31 57

ss

64

4· Boulainvilliers and the Due d'Orleans: Toward the Regency The Renunciation Crisis and the Due de Saint-Simon Boulainvilliers' "Reftexions" and the Due d'Orleans Early Memoranda for the Regent: Noblesse and Nation Philip of Spain's Renunciation and the Problems of the Regency

92 94 101 106 112

Contents

5· The Affaire du Bonnet ( 1715-1 716) and Boulainvilliers' Hopes Dynastic Conflict and Aristocratic Constitutionalism The "Lettres sur les parlements": Orleans and the French Nation

119 121 143

6. The Affaire des Princes (1716-1717) and Boulainvilliers' Failure Dynastic Conflict and Aristocratic Constitutionalism Boulainvilliers and the Affaire des Princes After the Affaire des Princes: Valedictory Works

7· Conclusion

169 170 187 192 207

Bibliographical Appendix: Boulainvilliers' Works on French History Bibliography Index

Vlll

215 253 275

Preface

Henri de Boulainvilliers is a familiar figure, if not an endearing one. Historians probably know him best as one of the Old Regime's leading aristocratic reactionaries. And specialists are well acquainted with the controversies about the Frankish Conquest, French feudalism, and the nobility's origins which erupted after his death, when his writings on French history got into print. But virtually no one has asked when and why he wrote those works in the first place, despite some intriguing leads in the work of Franklin Ford, Jean-Dominique Lassaigne, the late JeanPierre Labatut, and Andre Devyver. One aim of this book is to answer those questions by restoring Boulainvilliers and his works to the circumstances in which he wrote them. The result is a book about Boulainvilliers' career-a paradoxical career, perhaps, since he published next to nothing-as a political writer and controversialist at the end of Louis XIV's reign and at the beginning of the due d'Orleans' regency. This book has several goals, but a rehabilitation of Boulainvilliers' reputation will not be among them. It may seem that a full-length work on such a figure should justify itself by justifying him: thus the only modern monograph on him, Renee Simon's Henry de Boulainviller (1941), portrays him as a learned and moderately forward-looking man who might have ranked among the "patriotic" nobles of 1789. In the following pages Boulainvilliers will remain· an aristocratic reactionary. True, the monstrous ideological throwback whom some historians write about will not reappear here. But his invidious and scandalously nobiliaire convictions can be understood only as the convictions of an aristocratic reactionary, and so they shall be understood here. Boulainvilliers will not be relegated to the backwaters of French history, however. Aristocratic reactionaries were not peripheral to the evolving but still monarchical political culture of the Old Regime-a fact lX

Preface appreciated by those historians who seek to discover "constitutionalist" or even "liberal" implications in their thought-and as much may be said of Boulainvilliers. In the following pages the reader will watch him work for princes as he picks his way through thickets of historical and constitutional controversy occasioned by the French monarchy's problems: dynastic problems that led aristocratic elites to fashion competing visions of a French constitution, to engage in public debate about them, and to mobilize historical learning and writing to sustain them. This book, therefore, is not just a study of Boulainvilliers' career. It is also a chapter in the history of Old Regime political culture, designed to examine the by no means unambiguous role played in it by aristocratic ideologies and the historical arguments mobilized on their behalf. In writing this book I have contracted many debts of gratitude. Some are to scholars I do not know or I barely know. Although I dissent from much that Andre Devyver has had to say about Boulainvilliers and the social and ideological contexts to which he may be assigned, I could not have written my book had Devyver not written his own massive and learned study of noble "race consciousness" in the Old Regime. Nor could I have so confidently proceeded with my work on an often rebarbative character such as Boulainvilliers had not Fran