Feudalism, venality, and revolution: Provincial assemblies in late-Old Regime France 9781526148384

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Feudalism, venality, and revolution

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY This series aims to publish challenging and innovative research in all areas of early modern continental history. The editors are committed to encouraging work that engages with current historiographical debates, adopts an interdisciplinary approach, or makes an original contribution to our understanding of the period. series editors Joseph Bergin, William G. Naphy, Penny Roberts and Paolo Rossi Also available in the series Jews on trial: the papal inquisition in Modena, 1598-1638  Katherine Aron-Beller Sodomy in early modern Europe  ed. Tom Betteridge College communities abroad: Education, migration and Catholicism in early modern Europe  ed. Liam Chambers and Thomas O’Connor Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries  eds Raymond Fagel, Leonor Álvarez Francés and Beatriz Santiago Belmonte Princely power in the Dutch Republic: patronage andWilliam Frederick of Nassau (1613–64)  Geert H. Janssen, trans. J. C. Grayson Representing the King’s splendour: communication and reception of symbolic forms of power in viceregal Naples  Gabriel Guarino The English Republican tradition and eighteenth-century France: between the ancients and the moderns  Rachel Hammersley Power and reputation at the court of Louis XIII: the career of Charles d’Albert, duc de Luynes (1578–1621)  Sharon Kettering The anxiety of sameness in early modern Spain  Christina H. Lee Feudalism, venality, and revolution  Stephen Miller Absolute monarchy on the frontiers: Louis XIV’s military occupations of Lorraine and Savoy  Phil McCluskey Catholic communities in Protestant states: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720  eds Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, Benjamin Kaplan and Judith Pollman Daum’s boys: Schools and the Republic of Letters in early modern Germany  Alan S.Ross Mary and Philip:The marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain  Alexander Samson Orangism in the Dutch Republic in word and image, 1650–1675  Jill Stern The great favourite: the Duke of Lerma and the court and government of Philip III of Spain, 1598–1621  Patrick Williams Feudalism, venality, and revolution: Provincial assemblies in late-Old Regime France  Stephen Miller Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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Feudalism, venality, and revolution Provincial assemblies in late-Old Regime France STEPHEN MILLER

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Stephen Miller 2020 The right of Stephen Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4837 7 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: ‘Le peuple sous l’ancien regime’, 1815. French Political Cartoon Collection (Library of Congress).

Typeset in 12/13 Perpetua by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

Acknowledgmentspage vi Introduction1 1 The king’s entourage and public clashes over provincial assemblies

14

2 The emergence of anti-noble politics and the provincial assembly of Berry49 3 Bourgeois liberalism and revolutionary politics: the provincial assembly of Lyonnais

75

4 Poitou and the question of feudalism, from the Old Regime to revolution and counterrevolution

105

5 Provincial assemblies and the revolutionary challenge to patrimonialism138 6 Village elections and the development of liberal perspectives on government161 Conclusion185 Bibliography194 Index217

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank two friends, outstanding scholars and great minds, Chris Isett and Paul Cheney, who carefully read and criticized drafts of this book. Feudalism, Venality, and Revolution would never have seen the light of day without their efforts. I hope their suggestions have enabled me to broaden the appeal of this book to a wider range of readers. I would also like to thank Pamela Murray, Harriet Amos Doss, Andrew Keitt, Walter Ward, and Jonathan Wiesen, colleagues in the department of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), for helping me to frame the argument and respond to criticism. Their comments and advice have proved invaluable. John Moore, in UAB’s department of foreign languages, engaged me in encouraging conversations about academic publishing. MA students in UAB’s department of history have studied dozens of books with me in seminars on early modern Europe over the past decade. Eddie Luster and other reference specialists at UAB’s Sterne Library helped me to gather the sources needed to write this book. Jeff Horn showed me the historiography required to frame the introduction and Chapter 3. Anthony Crubaugh provided useful advice on how to improve the writing and argumentation in Chapter 6. I received brilliant observations from Paul Hanson and Michael Fitzsimmons. Friends and historians provided suggestions and encouragement at conferences. They include Jill Walshaw, Henry Heller, Cynthia Bouton, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Gail Bossenga, Lisa Jane Graham, Nina Kushner, Jeffrey Burson, Bill Olejniczak, and Johnson Kent Wright. In the summer of 2005, Michael Kwass showed me crucial files, which I otherwise would have missed, in the National Archives of France. Timothy Tackett, that same summer, gave me the correct advice to include Poitou and thus broaden the range of provinces analyzed in this book. Élie Pélaquier invited me to present research at the Séminaire sur les Assemblées représentatives aux époques moderne et contemporaine, Université Paul-Valéry-Montpellier III. J.B. Shank gave me the opportunity to

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

lecture at the Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota. Both of these talks helped me to hone major sections of this book. Funding for the archival research in this book came from UCLA and the Fulbright program. A grant provided by the American Philosophical Society proved even more useful in supporting my research in French archives. Above all, several grants from the Faculty Development Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham made possible the majority of trips to France required to carry out the archival work in this book. Lastly, I would like to thank Meredith Carroll, the editors of the series Studies in Early Modern European History, Alun Richards, Humairaa Dudhwala, Caroline Richards, Karen Nash and the rest of the staff at Manchester University Press for taking on this book and seeing it to completion. Manchester University Press found the best possible reviewers to provide a critical analysis of the original manuscript. Their comments have helped me to focus my interpretive angle. Note on translation All translations from the French are the author’s own. French terms are italicized the first time they are used in a chapter and thereafter appear in regular font.

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Introduction

Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Régime and the French Revolution has long been the starting point for students of this era. Tocqueville argued that a ­centuries-old process of royal centralization stripped the nobles of any role in the government. Nobles no longer levied taxes, published edicts, or called out the militia to uphold the law. France thus differed from Austria and Prussia, where the coercive aspects of feudalism continued to bind the peasantry to the manor. France also differed from England, where the great landowners administered the country and settled disputes as justices of the peace. In France, the nobles’ defining attributes were ranks, titles, and privileges, which did not create common interests with other royal subjects. Their lack of power made it impossible for them to do anything constructive on behalf of their compatriots, shape public opinion, or lead the rest of society.1 Jonathan Dewald, in a recent essay in the American Historical Review, argues that Tocqueville correctly discerned the nobles’ long-term decline. The nobles’ land rents collapsed after the mid-1600s and stagnated for the next century before finally regaining their former value in the 1770s. At this time, the nobles sold pieces of their estates to commoners, thus reducing their overall share of the land. The nobles’ relationship to the monarchy deteriorated as well. The crown not only forced them to share new taxes with commoners, but also undermined the value of their military and judicial offices. This erosion of the nobles’ standing led them to plan their births, inheritances, and marriages with the aim of ensuring the future of their lineages. The result was a decrease in their numbers from 1.2 percent of the population at the end of the seventeenth century to 0.5 percent at the end of the Old Regime. Following Tocqueville, Dewald argues that the decline the nobility made it possible for commoners to conceive of a society composed of citizens equal in rights, a society without nobles.2 Whereas Dewald argued that the decline of the nobility explains the widespread embrace of the concept of equality before the law, François Furet

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FEUDALISM, VENALITY, AND REVOLUTION

went a step further, using Tocqueville’s thesis to explain the radicalism of the Revolution. Starting from the premise of royal centralization, and the resultant weakening of medieval bonds and lessening of seigneurial burdens, Furet argued that the anti-feudal patriotism of 1789 and the ensuing ideology of the Jacobins did not arise out of iniquities of the Old Regime. Rather, the revolutionary system of ideas and ideals served to integrate a population of atomized individuals deprived of their customary social bonds by the state. Imbued with an ideology of equality, the revolutionaries took a weakened and disorganized nobility, incapable of resistance, and turned it into a monstrous enemy of the people. “The Revolution invented formidable enemies for itself, for every Manichean creed needs to overcome its share of eternal evil. The adjective ‘aristocratic’ brought to the idea of a plot a definition of its content.”3 The argument elaborated in this book contests this idea that the crown stripped the nobles of power. The book instead starts from the premise that the monarchy and nobility formed a social and political configuration – what Perry Anderson labeled “a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal ­domination” – combining hereditary lands, lordships, and offices under the aegis of the king. 4 Royal subjects living under this domination – from the middle classes down through the mass of artisans and peasants – rose up against it in revolution when the crisis of the monarchy afforded the opportunity in 1789. To understand the crisis of the monarchy, one must take note of Tocqueville’s estimation that the French monarchy’s main international rival, England, had already become a “modern nation” in the seventeenth century. England thus succeeded in arresting the French monarchy’s phase of expansion during the wars of the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign. Dewald is thus correct in maintaining that the monarchy no longer sustained the value of the nobles’ military and judicial offices. During the eighteenth century, facing stiff international competition, the monarchy could no longer bring elites into its fold – through tax exemptions and rights to state revenues – like it had in the past.5 The nobles had to manage births, dowries, and inheritances in order to maintain their social standing. Nevertheless, although the wealth and power of the state and nobility no longer expanded as robustly as in the seventeenth century, the essence of their relationship remained. In fact, a series of eighteenth-century reformers identified this relationship as the fundamental weakness of the state. They developed plans for provincial assemblies as a means of inducing the nobles to relinquish their hereditary lordships and offices and instead join the king’s project to rationalize and strengthen the administration and economy. Ultimately, what is at stake here is not any momentous reforms achieved by the provincial assemblies but what they reveal about the nobles’ place

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INTRODUCTION 3

within the monarchy. First, the reformers made clear that the nobles’ spheres of authority embodied the root cause of the monarchy’s problems. They hoped that the king could govern more efficiently through a uniform network of participatory assemblies rather than relying on the willingness of the owners of autonomous jurisdictions. Second, when Louis XVI acted on the reformers’ plans, initially on a limited scale in the provinces of Berry and Haute-Guyenne in 1778 and 1779, and then over the greater part of the realm – the pays d’élection governed directly by the crown where medieval estates, representing the clergy, nobility, and townspeople, no longer existed – in 1787, the nobles declared that the assemblies undermined their rights over commoners. These rights, they maintained, constituted the foundations of the monarchy. Third, the nobles made evident their authority by obstructing the reforms, which the crown pursued through the assemblies. Thus, my primary argument runs counter to Tocqueville and Furet. When studying revolutions, particularly the French exemplar, one does not observe a populace motivated by ideology against imaginary foes. Tocqueville’s historiographical legacy, we have seen, portrays the nobles as shadows of their former feudal selves. A revolution against the nobility would thus amount to unnecessary violence. In this book, by contrast, the reader will see that, in 1789, the people looked up to the nobles’ tangible heritable authority. This authority weighed on royal subjects economically and prevented them from participating in government. My argument owes much to the findings of historians, since the mid1980s, that the monarchy did not correspond to the centralized state depicted by Tocqueville. The king held the realm together by offering loyal nobles lucrative positions at the head of the Church, tribunals, military units, and provincial estates. Elites benefited financially as creditors of the king by placing their wealth in royal treasuries in return for control over municipalities, ­tribunals, and financial administrations.6 Tocqueville was thus right to distinguish France from the serf system upheld by the monarchical regimes of eastern Europe as well as from the parliamentary system controlled by gentry legislators and justices of the peace of England. However, he seems to have been on more dubious grounds when defining the French nobility as a privileged caste shorn of power by the state. The nobles in fact owned positions, mostly on a hereditary basis, at the head of the Church, tribunals, military, and several provincial estates. As Rafe Blaufarb has shown, eighteenth-century critics defined the Old Regime as feudal because of its confusion of property and power.7 The Marxist scholars William Beik and David Parker have portrayed the nobles’ continuing reliance on both landed property and political power as an enduring legacy of feudalism. The property of the English gentry, by contrast,

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consisted solely of the economic variety, independent of, though protected by, the state. Robert Brenner dated this divergence between the two countries to the social conflicts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the peasants succeeded in establishing heritable plots over much of France. Although the peasants thus limited the resources the nobles could take from the realm and its people, many of the nobles secured compensation in the form of hereditary positions – affording valuable privileges – within the monarchy, as it took shape over the course of the early modern period. 8 This process lasted several centuries. The nobles living through it did not perceive or understand it. Many of them rebelled against what they experienced as dishonor and ruin at the hands of royal absolutism and its wealthy financiers. Dewald, to reiterate, saw the late seventeenth century as a turning point, when the nobles’ situation began to deteriorate, not only in how they perceived it, but in measurable indices. Louis XIV drove the highest magistrates, known as parlementaires, into debt by selling thousands of new offices in an effort to fund the military campaigns of the last decades of his reign. The parlementaires had to purchase the new judgeships in a futile effort to shore up the value of their offices. For the parlementaires, and the thousands of office holders below them, the monetary returns on judicial posts remained poor throughout the eighteenth century. Many elites felt stuck in subordinate undignified ranks.9 But overall, venal offices continued to confer prestige and social standing, which their owner could pass on to descendants. Offices thus regained some of their former value by 1789. Their owners received annual payments from the crown (gages), collected fees from the populace in the exercise of their functions, enjoyed tax exemptions and honors, and, above all, possessed the property value of the offices. All of these advantages, like the heritable jurisdictions of lords, depended on the capacity of the monarchical state, its administration, constabulary, and military, to uphold law and order.10 We will see in Chapter 1 that a series of brilliant reformers portrayed this configuration of property and power as the main weakness of the monarchy. The reformers included René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, author of Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, published posthumously in 1764, though it had already circulated for decades. They included, above all, writers associated with the school of economic thought known as physiocracy, such as Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, author in 1775 of Mémoire sur les municipalité on behalf of the controller general, or the finance minister, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. These writers argued that venal offices and lordships were investments in spheres of governmental authority and that it was only natural for elites to defend the value of their investments. Yet in doing so, they precluded precisely what was necessary

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INTRODUCTION 5

for the revitalization of the monarchy: a degree of public participation in the administration. The reformers settled on provincial assemblies as the medium for such participation. A standardized network of assemblies would allow the landed classes to play a constructive role in government. Assemblies would encourage them to see the universal benefits of administrative and fiscal reforms rather than focus on their particular interests in venal and seigneurial rights. Assemblies, furthermore, would put elites under scrutiny in the public view and thus prod them to work conscientiously for the general interest. With a more reliable administration, the crown would not have to intervene so often in public affairs. The nobles in charge of the venal judiciary would then no longer have the opportunity to defend the people from royal policies and to win their support at the expense of the king. Chapter 1 demonstrates, however, that high nobles of the king’s court in Versailles watered down these plans. They made the same point as the reformers, albeit with opposite goals, that offices and lordships led elites to focus on protecting private jurisdictions. It was this focus, they argued, that permitted the king to maintain absolute power. If royal subjects were to concentrate on common interests, through discussions in provincial assemblies, they might develop a civic program at the expense of the king’s power. To forestall such an outcome, the high nobles used their influence with Louis XVI to ensure that the assemblies did not undermine the time-honored particular rights of the privileged orders. Pierre Renouvin arrived at the same conclusion in a book on the provincial assemblies published in 1921, still the standard work on the subject. He showed, first, that the assemblies did not have much autonomy. Louis XVI appointed the members rather than permit elections. He named high clergymen, nobles, and prominent townspeople, who then selected additional members to found the provincial assemblies. In 1787, the provincial assemblies invited other leaders of the three estates to convoke further elites and, with them, form district assemblies within the provinces. The crown denied the assemblies financial resources and liberty of expression and failed to support them when they took on vested interests. William Doyle maintains that, for these reasons, public opinion favored the revival of provincial estates. Representative estates in the provinces would have more autonomy than would the assemblies and could thus defend the interests of taxpayers.11 Nevertheless, in the eyes of nobles across the country, even provincial assemblies lacking government power seemed subversive. Nobles created obstacles to what they portrayed as a participatory system dangerous to royal authority and to their traditional positions within the regime. Renouvin thus showed, second, that the privileged orders blunted the reformist edge of the

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assemblies. The titled justices of the Parlement of Paris saw the assemblies as a threat to their rank in the monarchy and influenced the king to limit the scope of the reform. The assemblies consequently did not affect the pays d’état such as Brittany and Burgundy, which retained medieval estates. Nor did they affect the pays d’état of Languedoc and Provence, thus leaving much of the south of France unaltered. In the pays d’élection, the crown organized the assemblies in a manner suited to assuage the prejudices of the privileged orders, dividing them according to the traditional estates, with high-­ranking clergymen and nobles in positions of leadership. The assemblies thus did not take on major reforms, infringe upon particular rights, or permit much ­popular participation.12 And yet, scholarly judgments on the provincial assemblies have always been divided. Tocqueville had affirmed back in the 1850s that the assemblies occasioned “one of the greatest upheavals that have ever taken place in the life of a great nation.” Local government, which directly affected the people’s lives and impressed upon them the permanence of the regime, was thrown into turmoil by this sweeping reform.13 Jean Egret, Peter Jones, and Jeff Horn have argued that the crown created the assemblies with the aim of courting the leaders of the Third Estate. The crown summoned the peasants to gather autonomously and elect a syndic and deputies to meet in municipalités (called rural municipalities in this book) with the local priest under the presidency of the parish seigneur. Although the assemblies were composed hierarchically, their members were to be replaced in the coming years through elections from the rural municipalities to the district assemblies, and from these bodies to the provincial assemblies. The king, moreover, asked the three tiers of assemblies to expand participation in government, distribute taxes equitably, and abolish the corvée labor required of rural commoners on the roads. By bringing together royal subjects to deliberate on such issues, the assemblies contained the seeds of constitutional monarchy and enabled the emergence of grievances against privileges.14 In line with these more recent interpretations, I make a second argument, this one about the political consequences of the provincial assemblies. Having just made the case that seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices led their owners to defend traditional rights against reforms, I now want to complicate the point by arguing that the assemblies helped change the perspective of some of these same lords and office holders. One will have occasion to observe in Chapters 5 and 6 that even some members of the Second Estate, by participating in the provincial assemblies, became aware that the sacrifice of privileges could assuage feelings of unfairness and thus allow them to enjoy a more stable form of power. They gained a foretaste of the regimes of notables of the nineteenth century, when the landed elites of the imperial and monarchical

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INTRODUCTION 7

regimes could count on the peasantry as a conservative constituency in spite of occasional rebellions in the countryside.15 Of course, this idea – of the elites of all three estates joining forces in a more rational bureaucratic government for the good of the country – predated the establishment of provincial assemblies. The idea inspired the royal ­reformers, such as François Le Trosne and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who developed the plans for the assemblies. It is also true that a variety of experiences in the months and years following 1787, not solely the assemblies, created a spirit of patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice seigneurial rights and venal offices. In particular, the sight of armed peasants burning chateaux and seigneurial titles in the summer of 1789 spread fear and prompted the deputies of the National Assembly to abolish feudalism on the Night of August 4th in a bid to placate the rural rebels. Yet, one must keep in mind that the decrees of the Night of August 4th maintained most seigneurial dues until the peasants reimbursed, at prohibitive rates, the lords’ right to collect them. If the decrees had solely been intended to pacify a restless countryside, then they surely missed the mark, as the recurring revolts of the ensuing three years attest. What the deputies actually abolished on the Night of August 4th – venal offices, personal and provincial privileges, and court pensions – had little to do with the rural unrest. Thus, the deputies of the National Assembly must have had some additional motive for abolishing them.16 Chapter 5 shows that, over the previous two years, virtually every tribunal of the realm defended its venal jurisdiction from the provincial assemblies and, in doing so, expressed an ideological commitment to the feudal inheritance of property rights over portions of public power. Office holders preferred to serve the king through their traditional jurisdictions rather than through elective or appointive assemblies. Their protests demonstrate that office holders still held governmental responsibilities. Royal centralization had not gone nearly as far in stripping elites of power as Tocqueville theorized. These venal officers’ protests against the provincial assemblies show that these new bodies threatened broad strata of the social elite. The assemblies concerned not only the thousands of clergymen, nobles, and well-to-do townspeople, who met in them on the provincial and district levels, but also the tens of thousands of judges whose spheres of authority were threatened. This dispute over administrative responsibility formed part of the experience of the Third Estate in the National Assembly, the core of which consisted of venal jurists. Something must have changed in their thinking between 1787 and 1788, when they defended venality on principle, and August 4th, 1789, when they abolished it. I submit that the debates occasioned by the assemblies allowed venal jurists to glimpse the possibility of serving the nation in a more

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FEUDALISM, VENALITY, AND REVOLUTION

dignified fashion, out from under the crown and nobility, in a bureaucratic system based on experience and merit rather than on heritable offices. As for the actual participants in the assemblies, one might imagine that one month-long meeting in the fall of 1787 did not have major consequences. Yet each of the twenty-two provincial assemblies, as well as the five to twelve district assemblies within each one of these provinces, left hundreds of pages of notes attesting to countless hours dedicated to public affairs. The members, moreover, selected a group of their fellow participants to gather permanently, in what were called intermediary commissions, with the purpose of implementing their resolutions. Many of them indisputably showed concern about improving their provinces and districts. We will see in Chapter 6 that this interest in reform modified the outlook of a minority of the Second Estate. From the autumn of 1787 through the summer of 1788, the nobles, who met in the provincial and district assemblies, invoked their feudal rights to authority over the countryside and unanimously objected to peasant participation in the rural municipalities. Yet in the autumn of 1788 and the spring of 1789, many of these same nobles expressed an appreciation of the benefits of the peasants’ presence in local government. Through the assemblies, these nobles perceived, in contrast to other lords lacking this governmental experience, that they could lead more assuredly with the consent of the peasants by renouncing their seigneurial authority. These nobles hoped to bring leading clergymen and townspeople into an alliance against the crown by renouncing tax exemptions and expanding the political influence of the Third Estate. They expected that elites of all three estates would then govern the provinces.17 Accordingly, this book contributes to the growing body of research on contingent events in the origins of the French Revolution. Whereas historians previously had emphasized divergent forms of wealth, investment, and career advancement pitting the leaders of the Third Estate against the privileged orders, today they draw attention to individual decisions and unforeseen occurrences, which could have turned out differently. The eighteenth century was no doubt a time of cultural change, as commerce and consumerism spread through the fabric of urban life, and predisposed people to a regime of individual rights and civic equality.18 Nevertheless, such change affected the general population, or at least the educated stratum, and does not explain why one segment of this stratum came into conflict against another: the Third Estate against the nobility. To explain this conflict, historians call attention to the fortuitous circumstances that prompted people to take actions hardly imaginable before the 1780s. Who could have imagined that the controller general Charles Alexandre de Calonne would seek to resolve the budgetary crisis by convoking the highest

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INTRODUCTION 9

prelates and nobles to an Assembly of Notables for the first time since 1626? When Louis XVI went forward with the proposal, the Notables unexpectedly roused a national movement against additional taxes and in favor of representative government. Debate continues over whether the Notables embraced the new spirit of this movement, or whether their language expressed the traditions of former centuries. However, the fact remains that they created a public forum for opponents of the regime and demanded a meeting of the Estates General.19 People suddenly glimpsed the possibility of remaking the country and righting the abuses decried for decades.20 The elections to the Estates General swept the country up in debate, in the spring of 1789, over whether the three orders should each have a single vote or whether all of the deputies should meet together and votes should be counted by head. Once assembled in Versailles, the bold speeches, the passions of the spectators, and the uncertainties over what the royal court might do propelled the deputies to call themselves the National Assembly and take other daring actions they could hardly have imagined months earlier. The peasants, for their part, had an array of grievances, especially against taxation. What inspired them to act against the lords, ransack chateaux, and destroy feudal documents were the circumstances of the summer of 1789, namely the opening created by divisions within the National Assembly over the seigneurial regime.21 The current book does not demonstrate that the provincial assemblies amounted to a decisive event or circumstance of these years. The assemblies had few consequences apart from the change in attitudes, described above, among certain seigneurs who took part in them and among venal jurists throughout the country. As stated above, the primary argument of this book is what the assemblies bring to light. They reveal the nobles’ persistent feudal authority over commoners. The frustration of living under the nobles’ authority – rather than an ideology obscuring the social relations of the time, as historians influenced by Tocqueville suppose – shaped the people’s interpretation of the events of 1787–89. The Assembly of Notables and the Estates General had sweeping consequences because of the people’s hopes to abolish feudalism and participate in government.22 To explain these hopes, Chapters 2 through 4, archival studies on the Assemblies of Berry, Lyonnais, and Poitou, probe into the political and social structures of daily life at the end of the Old Regime. I selected these provinces because of their different economic and political conditions. Lyonnais had commercial and manufacturing areas, whereas Berry and Poitou had agricultural expanses and subsistence farming cut off from the commercial cities. Berry remained loyal to the Revolution through the radicalization of 1793 and 1794, Lyonnais resisted in the name of moderate republicanism, and much of

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the west and Poitou fought for throne and altar against the Republic. These provinces thus provide a cross-section of France as a whole. Chapter 3 shows how the proliferation of workshops and expansion of trade put the liberalism of the members of the Assembly of Lyonnais to the test, as their hopes for economic growth confronted the vested interests bound up with the commercial monopolies and indirect tax farms of the province. Chapters 2 and 4 present evidence that enduring feudal structures in rural Berry and Poitou impeded the assemblies from working with peasant representatives to enact reforms beneficial to the rural inhabitants. Indeed, we will see in Chapter 4, on the provincial and district assemblies in Poitou, that the persistence of feudal routines prepared the ground for the counterrevolutionary War of the Vendée against the Republic in 1793. In spite of these differences, one will have the chance to observe that in all three provinces, well-to-do commoners, as well as many clergymen and nobles, embraced the assemblies as a chance for elites of all ranks to put aside particular privileges and come together for the public good. But, as the sessions of the provincial and district assemblies unfolded, it became apparent that the interest of the high clergy and nobility in reform only went so far. These elites, in charge of the deliberations, focused the attention of the assemblies on privileges belonging to the upper strata of the Third Estate. The high clergy and nobility put forward policies to diminish the tax exemptions of townspeople, the advantages enjoyed by parish priests, and the jurisdictions of the plethora of lower-level courts. Yet they did not act on the fiscal privileges of the nobles, the powers of the high tribunals, or the rights of the seigneurs. The assemblies ultimately became another frustrating experience, common to royal subjects under the Old Regime, which motived them to take revolutionary actions against the nobles with the aim of establishing legal equality. Before going over these revolutionary actions, let us now open Chapter 1 with the projects of Argenson, du Pont de Nemours, and other royal reformers for assemblies to administer the provinces. These projects, we will see, were warped by nobles of the royal entourage accustomed to distributing the king’s domains, pensions, and offices as patronage to enhance support for their court factions in Versailles. They argued, against the reformers, that participatory assemblies undermined the absolute power of the king. What I emphasize is that they did not portray absolutism as a rational bureaucratic assertion of central authority. Court nobles argued, rather, that royal sovereignty depended on the time-honored privileges of the monarchy. Such privileges attached elites to particular rights and weakened any sense of common aspirations opposed to royal absolutism. The attachment of elites to their jurisdictional rights made them more concerned about defending their spheres of authority against possible encroachments of other lords and office holders, or against

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INTRODUCTION 11

unrest among the subject population, than about universal rights that might bring them together with fellow citizens to limit royal authority. Indeed, lords and office holders would support royal authority as a means of maintaining the value of their venal posts and seigneurial rights. Understanding the court nobles’ defense of privileges as the bases of royal absolutism is essential to the intervention of this book. That is to say, when Louis XVI introduced provincial assemblies, the precise nature of these privileges came to the fore. Lords and office holders protested that the assemblies threatened their heritable spheres of authority. The nobles’ defense of their privileges did not mean that royal centralization had shorn them of their former feudal power, as Tocqueville reasoned, but that they wanted the king to rule appropriately and uphold their power, not undermine it by creating assemblies. Moreover, when royal subjects took advantage of the crisis of the monarchy in 1789 to participate in a movement for equality against the nobles, they were not blinded by ideology to the disorganization, weakness, and impoverishment of the nobility at the hands of the absolute state, as Furet contended. Rather, their lives entailed countless experiences of subordination and stifled opportunities attributable to the nobles’ hereditary rights within the regime, and so commoners joined forces to eradicate the nobles’ privileges in the French Revolution. Notes   1 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 22, 26–7, 49, 53, 58, 78, 121, 142, 201–4.   2 Jonathan Dewald, “Rethinking the 1 Percent: The Failure of the Nobility in Old Regime France,” American Historical Review 124, 3 (2019), 920–1, 926–7, 931–2.   3 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 54. See also pp. 25, 33–5, 97, 99.   4 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 18.  5 Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, 18–19; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 106. This trajectory of the monarchy and offices is documented in Martine Bennini and Robert Descimon, “Économie politique de l’office vénal anoblissant” and Robert Descimon, “Conclusion: nobles de lignage et noblesse de service: sociogenèses comparées de l’épée et de la robe, XVe–XVIIIe siècle,” both in Épreuves de Noblesse: les expériences nobiliaires de la haute robe parisienne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Robert Descimon and Élie Haddad (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010), 36–8, 299–300.   6 Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 54, 152, 157, 176, 225; Robert Descimon and Christian Jouhaud, La France du premier XVIIe siècle 1594–1661 (Paris: Éditions Belin, 1996), 27, 189–90; Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996), 276, 279, 299, 304; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 24, 276, 409.   7 Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8–10.

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  8 Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 243, 247, 290–1, 298, 312; William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10, 13, 27, 29, 67, 98, 121, 304, 311, 335–6; David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996), 14, 45, 73–4, 93, 103, 112, 132, 175–6, 178–80, 193, 263–5; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 17, 33, 35.   9 John Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 12, 183, 189; William Doyle, Officers, Nobles and Revolutionaries: Essays on Eighteenth-Century France (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 108–9; Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 19, 33, 44; Beik, Absolutism and Society, 84–5; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 19–20, 47, 53–5. 10 David Bien, “Offices Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Régime,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of a Modern Political Culture, vol. 1, The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987), 92, 94, 97; Doyle, Officers, Nobles and Revolutionaries, 133, 135; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 52. 11 Pierre Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, resultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921), 68, 70, 72–3, 78–80; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 93, 141. 12 Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales, 57–8, 78–80, 158–60, 276–7, 393. 13 Quote on page 201 of Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution. See also pp. 194, 202–3. 14 Peter Jones, Liberty and Locality in Revolutionary France: Six Villages Compared, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 90; Peter Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–9, 39, 41, 60, 144, 146, 155–6, 175–6; Jeff Horn, Qui parle pour la nation?: les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765–1830 (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2004), 45, 49, 54; Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution 1787–1788, trans. Wesley Camp (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), 68. 15 For the regimes of the nineteenth century see Louis Bergeron, France under Napoleon, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; original French version 1972), 126, 135, 138; André-Jean Tudesq, Les grands notables en France (1840–1849). Etude historique d’une psychologie sociale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), 197; Adéline Daumard, “Caractères de la société bourgeoise,” in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, ed. Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), 3:893, 933, 950; Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London: Verso, 2010, originally published 1981), 9, 13, 77. The peasant rebellions of the nineteenth century comprise a vast literature. Two works on the subject are Edward Berenson, Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); John Merriman, “The Demoiselles of the Ariège, 1829–1831,” in 1830 in France, ed. John Merriman (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975). 16 Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation, 50. 17 Kenneth Margerison calls this program “the union of the orders.” Pamphlets & Public Opinion: The Campaign for a Union of Orders in the Early French Revolution (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1998), 42–3. 18 The scholarship on this change is vast. A few examples, not at all a comprehensive list, include books focused on culture: Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); and others on the economic dynamics behind cultural change: Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur

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Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin, 2002); David Garrioch, The Making of Revolutionary Paris (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004); William Sewell, “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France,” Critical Historical Studies 1 (2014), 5–46. Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 157, 310–11; John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 52, 136–7, 280. Two recent works that stress unpredictable unplanned events in the origins of the Revolution are William Doyle, France and the Age of Revolution: Regimes Old and New from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 95–98, and Peter Campbell, “Rethinking the Origins of the French Revolution,” in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 4, 7, 15, 18. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 14, 75–6, 91–2, 94, 151, 174, 307–8; John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 237–8, 267–8. Similar to this argument, Tackett makes the case that the social contours of people’s lives under the Old Regime shaped their understanding of the circumstances and events of 1789. Becoming a Revolutionary, 40–1, 91, 108.

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1 The king’s entourage and public clashes over provincial assemblies

The marquis d’Argenson, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, Jacques Necker, and other statesmen made the case that provincial assemblies would allow the king to streamline the administration and prevail upon the privileged orders to help fund the government. Yet, as we will see, powerful nobles close to the king persuaded him to make the assemblies more aristocratic than the reformist political leaders had envisaged. By examining this distortion of the original plans, I explore basic questions about the monarchy. What role did the nobles of the royal court and councils of state play in the elaboration of policy? What sort of influence did they have in the provinces and in what ways did they use it to pursue their goals in Versailles? In addition, what sort of language did they employ to advance their political claims? In answering these questions, I argue that reformers devised the provincial assemblies as a means of dismantling the feudal structures of the monarchy. The possession of autonomous jurisdictions as family property represented a legacy from the feudal past. The plans for assemblies identified the hereditable authority of lords and officers as the principal weakness of the monarchy. The problem for the king, once he adopted the plans, was that high nobles, in his court and councils of state, made use of seigneurial rights and privileged groups both in their rivalries for influence in Versailles and in the enactment of policy. Court nobles thus displayed the advantages of historic rights, and galvanized resistance within the First and Second Estates to the goals set for the assemblies of expanding participation in government and diminishing tax exemptions. Government ministers, court nobles, landowners, and other royal subjects had no means other than the extent of language to forge alliances for or against the provincial assemblies. According to the theory of Keith Baker and Dale Van Kley, three discourses, recurrently employed after 1750, elaborated the language later used in the French Revolution. Certain written communications claimed the mantle of justice, representing the monarchy as the arbiter of rival claims to historic rights. A second discourse, often used

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by royal ministers, presented the crown as the embodiment of reason and the mobilizing force for public welfare, universal taxes, and laws applicable to all property owners. A third discourse expressed the king’s will or authority to command the disparate laws and institutions of the monarchy. More radical theorists could adopt this form of communication to set forth the citizenry, rather than the king, as sovereign. Baker maintains that writers used these discourses as ideological constructs bereft of social purpose.1 In this chapter, I confirm the insight of Baker and Van Kley about the prevalence of the three discourses. I show, however, that people assimilated and used the language to explain the social contours of their lives. They used it to protect privileges, strive for political and economic power, or challenge feudal structures impeding participation in the government. In making these arguments – that the plans to replace the feudal structures of the monarchy with provincial assemblies foundered on account of the maneuvers of court nobles and that these Versailles elites, as well as subordinate groups, used language for socially identifiable ends – I first consider the writings of royal reformers such as the marquis de Mirabeau and Guillaume François Le Trosne. Provincial assemblies, they argued, would rally the dominant classes to the regime, revitalize the state, and enhance its fiscal capacity. I then show that the king and his ministers, facing the tangible issues involved in implementing the assemblies, ignored these plans for broadening participation in government, used the assemblies solely to extract taxes, and thus made the regime seem despotic. The following part of this chapter covers the opposition to the assemblies in the royal court, where nobles made use of feudal rights and privileged groups in palace maneuvers and political strategies. They argued that the attachment of the privileged orders to their particular jurisdictions, lordships, and offices allowed the king to maintain absolute power. Assemblies, by contrast, would lead them to discuss general interests and develop common programs at the expense of royal rule. These high nobles advanced arguments in favor of the historic status of the clergy and nobility and, as we will see in the next section, helped the crown in 1787 and 1788 to accommodate protests against the subjection of the assemblies to the intendants appointed to oversee the administration of the provinces. I then show that while the nobles of the royal court and councils facilitated dialogue over status disputes, they impeded dialogue over fiscal reforms, because their privileges appeared unfair to provincial elites asked to shoulder additional taxes. Lastly, I make evident that the lower clergy, office holders, jurists, merchants, and even artisans and peasants used discourses favorable to national sovereignty to oppose the feudal structures of the monarchy. In the years prior to 1789, they protested against the upper clergy and nobility for stifling the political initiatives of commoners.

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The reformist ideas behind the provincial assemblies Seeing the relative decline and financial difficulty of the monarchy, royal reformers developed plans for provincial assemblies as a means of bringing elites into the administration and thus encouraging them to identify with the regime and to surrender their privileges to its general interests. To be sure, the state had long sought to make elites surrender privileges. Decades earlier, Louis XIV had ruined noble justices of the Parlement of Paris, the highest tribunal of the realm, by extracting funds needed for the incessant wars of the latter part of his reign. Intendants took advantage of the rivalries among nobles and magistrates in charge of law courts and municipalities to shape institutions in ways that enhanced the central authority and placed some of the financial burden of war on local elites. These policies, in contrast to those that created the assemblies over seventy years later, evolved out of financial emergencies rather than plans for bureaucratic rationalization. Their success often required the collaboration of local elites. Nobles and magistrates, by working with the intendants, moderated their debilitating disputes over jurisdictions and honors and tightened their grip on local government.2 Over the course of the eighteenth century, the crown continued to make policy in an ad hoc fashion to collect revenue and cover the costs of wars. It is, no doubt, for this reason that the monarchy collected less revenue per capita and relative to gross domestic product than did the English state. Taxable wealth grew more rapidly in England as a result of the agricultural revolution and early development of manufacturing. In France, the royal treasury came to depend more on indirect sales taxes on consumers, though less than did the English government. Indirect taxes were even more regressive then than they are today, as some French nobles enjoyed rights to salt and wine free of fiscal charges. Direct taxes made up relatively less of royal revenue, and among the direct taxes, the taille, levied on commoners, diminished in relation to the capitation and vingtièmes levied on nobles and commoners alike. Of course, the monarchy added these taxes to the rolls of the taille and permitted nobles to make voluntary declarations of income, which by all accounts reduced their portion. The nobles may not have benefited as much from their legal exemptions as they did from their status and clout, their ability to persuade and rebuff collectors, and escape taxes outright or at least reduce their assessments.3 The crown augmented the vingtièmes in the 1770s, not through the usual manner of disproportionately adding to the taxes on commoners, but through investigations of incomes. Royal agents scrutinized the assets of as many as a fifth of the proprietors of some provinces and occasionally raised taxes to over a tenth of the nobles’ landed income. These investigations involved modern

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bureaucrats at the cutting edge of the administration. The problem for the crown was that they provoked politically charged and disruptive opposition.4 Be that as it may, John Bosher argued decades ago that the revenue crisis of Louis XVI did not result from insufficient resources and inappropriate taxes as much as from non-bureaucratic practices, namely private ownership and management of royal funds. Since the country did not have a national treasury, the king could only raise loans by turning to the credit of independent privileged groups of tax farmers, provincial estates, and municipalities such as the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. Investors demanded higher rates of interest of an arbitrary regime, funded by autonomous institutions, than they did of the government of England, where loans were backed by the representatives of the landed classes.5 Around 1700, when the Wars of the League of Augsburg  and of the Spanish Succession revealed the limits of the monarchy’s power, reformers began to develop plans for provincial assemblies to resolve the foregoing problems. Assemblies would replace the illogic of a regime in which the independent influence of elites allowed them to avoid fiscal burdens, with the logic of one in which landowners enjoyed standardized forms of representation, imbued taxation with collective scrutiny and legitimacy, and inspired confidence in royal finances. In 1750, Mirabeau’s Mémoire sur l’utilité des Etats provinciaux advanced ideas raised in 1711 in the entourage of the duc de Bourgogne. People accustomed to free discussion understood their duties to the king, whereas subjects blindly following orders stood on the brink of revolt. Mirabeau thus called for clergymen, nobles, and municipal magistrates to meet in representative estates in provinces across the realm. Estates could replace indirect taxes with levies on the land raised in line with property valuations recorded in cadasters. Chaumont de la Galaizière, the intendant of Lorraine and a regular presence in noble circles in Paris, reported to the crown about the hostility felt for the king’s commissioners because of the existing arbitrary way of distributing taxes. To remedy this problem, assemblies of taxpayers could allot taxes and hear the complaints of royal subjects. In 1756, François de Labat de Vivens, a lineage noble and proprietor of a domain in the Southwest, wrote observations on agriculture in which he contrasted the dues-collecting French lords, all town residents, with the English landowners attentive to the farming on their estates year round, except for when they went to Parliament to legislate.6 René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, a descendant of a long line of royal ministers and intendants, combined the foregoing reflections in Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, which circulated for decades prior to posthumous publication in 1764. Argenson depicted “all inherited power” apart from the king’s as “defective and worthy

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of condemnation.”7 One form of inherited power were fiefs, which originated in the feudal period and had since been usurped by royal vassals. The king had no choice but to accept the transmission of fiefs as family property, generation after generation, until the eighteenth century, when seigneurial rights still burdened the public. Argenson referred specifically to hunting rights on the peasants’ lands, dues on successions, and transfer fees collected on property sales. Grasping jurists ran local courts in the lord’s name, researched old documents for forgotten rights, and ruined simple people by instigating litigation. The “odious servitude of one land to another” prevented badly administered farms from becoming the property of agriculturalists interested in better husbandry. It encumbered farmers, limited production, and prevented the countryside from prospering.8 Argenson held the monarchy partly responsible. The king’s chancellor “adopted … the detestable maxim … no lands without a lord” in the early sixteenth century. Additionally, “the crown’s domanial titles nourished a multitude of officers … interested in tormenting the neighboring patrimonies” through research into feudal documents. Bold and just laws “should render liberty to properties … The king ought to give the first example … by authorizing the forced buyback of all [his] rights of suzerainty, of obligations burdening the land, feudal rents, and hunting rights.”9 A second, even worse, form of inherited power resulted from venality of office. The king’s inability to tax the privileged orders led to this convoluted manner of taking revenue from them, a manner that further debilitated the state. “Everything I said about the iniquity resulting from the usurpation of fiefs is nothing in comparison to the bad effects of venality of offices … a sort of government unknown to the elders and reserved for us in exchange for the monstrous feudal government … The alienation of authority is no less in this sort of government than in the feudal.” Judges recuperated the unpaid interest on the money given to the king for their offices by collecting fees from litigants. Moreover, because of the alienation of governmental functions, the number of people interested in preventing political participation “has been multiplied to infinity … The first goal of a patrimonial title-holder … is to attribute to his office all the power and prerogatives to which it may be entitled.”10 Argenson argued that, unaccustomed to participate in government, royal subjects grew lazy, stupid, and miserable, whereas liberty would bring a spirit of independence and competence to public duties. The more people felt represented, the more they respected the law. Representatives, unlike venal officers, would know the people’s interests. Surprisingly, in spite of this incisive criticism of seigneurial and venal authority, Argenson’s actual proposals for replacing them seem limited to say the least. He argued that administrators elected by rural communities would assimilate a sense of their

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public duties, and avoid the excesses of both submission to elites and insolence to the authorities. They should solely have jurisdiction over policing and finance in their communities, but not over litigation, which would remain with ordinary royal or seigneurial judges knowledgeable about the laws. The peasant magistrates required the protection of the intendants in order to act in the name of royal authority, and thus to avoid the power of seigneurs and the brutality of lineage nobles. Argenson thus assumed that these traditional authorities would remain.11 Whatever the limitations of Argenson’s proposals, once the defeats of the Seven Years’ War confirmed his analysis of the monarchy’s weaknesses, reformers tried more insistently to convince the king to implement government representation as a remedy. In the early 1760s, the royal minister Lefèvre d’Ormesson, and a group of sympathetic intendants, such as FrançoisJean Orceau de Fontette, the royal commissioner of Lower Normandy, advocated elections in rural communities so peasant representatives could help the intendants substitute equitable and binding fiscal evaluations of property for the arbitrary ones favorable to privileged groups. A few years later, the controller general Clément Charles François de Laverdy helped found the Journal of Commerce, Agriculture and Finances to promote a free exchange of ideas. He aimed to encourage elites and diverse interest groups to offer their opinions and thus to build consensus around his policy of economic liberalization.12 One of the results of these efforts was the emergence of the économistes, known today as Physiocrats, who depicted the corporate structure of the monarchy as the fundamental obstacle to reform of its political economy. Mirabeau, under the tutelage François Quesnay, the founding thinker of Physiocracy, abandoned his former sympathy for the customary institutions of the nobility. In articles in the physiocrat journal Les Éphémérides du citoyen, he argued that royal subjects should no longer belong to separate estates of clergyman, nobles, and commoners. Instead, the value of each individual’s landed property should form the basis of representation. Assemblies of proprietors would assess the annual productivity and revenue of the land, and convey the taxes to the royal treasury without the abusive profits of financiers.13 Louis XVI, upon acceding to the throne in 1774, appointed Anne Robert Jacques Turgot as the controller general. Turgot gave Du Pont de Nemours instructions to compose a plan for an overhaul of the administration. The resulting work, an Essay on the Municipalities, put the physiocratic ideas of Mirabeau into systematic form and laid the basis for all subsequent projects for provincial assemblies. Making no mention of feudalism, venality, or any other historic rights, Du Pont simply stated that existing laws, written in the eras of ignorance and barbarism, made “each person focus solely on his particular ­interest … One part of the subjects vexes the other through

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exclusive privileges.” The people therefore did not regard the administration as ­representative of the general interest and resisted its fiscal demands.14 Du Pont’s solution drew on the ideas of Argenson about the salutary effects of representative institutions but did not share his assumption about the continued existence of traditional magistrates, lords, and nobles. Du Pont explicitly stated his wish to avoid the confusion, intrigues, esprit de corps, animosities, and prejudices resulting from the time-honored estates. A graduated system of parish, district, and provincial assemblies would instead represent royal subjects in proportion to the value of their landed property. These assemblies would distribute taxes, make recommendations for public works, and see to poor relief. They would also send representatives to a national body to advise the king. The people would then no longer regard the regime as a superior power, armed with the capacity to extract taxes from them, but rather as their own government inviting cooperation with policies recognizably in the common interest. The king “could then govern like God thorough general laws, as the component parts of [his] empire would have a regular organization and known relations to one another.”15 The fiscal resources at his disposal would increase, since they would be based on the revenue of private individuals and would “grow through the cares of a good administration.”16 Jacques Necker, the director general of finances from 1771 to 1781, acted on these proposals. Without using the word “venality,” he wrote, in an essay intended solely for the king in 1778, that the inhabitants of the countryside lived under the yoke of directors and receivers of the vingtièmes, judges of the élections (district fiscal courts), gabelle (salt tax) collectors, bailiffs, and sundry other office holders. Each one of them subjected the people to their particular jurisdiction. Royal subjects turned to the parlements for protection, and these tribunals could thus intervene and win the people’s support at the expense of the king. Six years later, in his work on the administration of finances, Necker criticized the office holders in charge of the direct taxes (receveurs généraux). These officials contracted with the king to grant him a fixed sum from a particular province. The officials then ran taxation as a personal concern, profiting from proceeds collected beyond what they agreed to give the king. Necker thought this system ran counter to bureaucratic rationality. “There is a great difference between a scattered and divided administration and one which gathers under the eyes of the financial director a simple chart with no suspicious details.”17 In contrast to the private jurisdictions integral to the Old Regime, Necker argued that provincial assemblies united men to the needs of their state and province, instilled a spirit of community, and thus prompted them to make sacrifices for the public good. He especially believed in the publication

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of the assemblies’ activities to build the civic support needed to carry out constructive projects at odds with customary practices. Public scrutiny forced the uninterested members to step aside and permitted the diligent ones to come to the fore.18 Necker, however, relied on the support of aristocrats, such as the marquis de Castries, in the royal court and king’s councils. When he oversaw the establishment of assemblies, at the head of Berry in 1778 and Haute-Guyenne in 1779, he accorded the presidency to members of the high clergy. Necker had the king appoint the initial sixteen deputies, and these men a further thirty-two, divided the assemblies into the traditional estates, and ignored Du Pont’s proposals for assemblies in the districts and for elections to village councils.19 Upon seeing Necker’s assemblies, the marquis de Condorcet wrote that ones “without distinctions of orders, having no interests apart from the nation, would not have introduced an anarchic regime composed of small separate aristocracies governed by courtiers whose suffrages must be bought and intrigues repressed.” Necker’s assemblies spread another oppressive layer of authority over the people. Condorcet especially lamented that elections never took place in the villages. The traditional syndics did not stand up for rural inhabitants against the exactions of the towns. Elected representatives, by contrast, “would have defended themselves against the usurpations of ecclesiastics and nobles, against the avidity of judges.” Seigneurs and ecclesiastics might then have preferred the honor of serving their rural districts to the vanity of enforcing rights hated by the people.20 Like Condorcet, Le Trosne embraced the physiocratic ideas of Mirabeau, Du Pont, and Turgot and planned for assemblies shorn of the traditional ranks. Le Trosne worked as a minor magistrate in Orléans before seeing his book, De L’Administration provinciale et de la réforme de l’impôt, published in 1779. This book explicitly referred to seigneurial rights and venality of office. Le Trosne wrote that the multiplication of offices turned wealth away from productive investments and augmented the number of privileged persons. It created additional burdens on royal subjects in the form of the taxes required for the annual payments (gages) to the titleholders and in the form of the spheres of authority, which the officers always sought to enlarge and which permitted them to collect fees from people in need of their services.21 Le Trosne lamented that “feudalism still formed an essential part of public law.” The principle of “to the king belongs la directe universelle” (seigneurial rights over all properties) extended feudalism across the country. Customary law admitted the principle of “no land without a seigneur.”22 Hunting rights persisted because of long usage, of mores, and of the feeling of honor gained from standing above the subject population. Looked at coldly,

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they undermined the property rights of others, led to the proliferation of game harmful to farming, and fostered a disdain for the complaints of people seeking merely to cultivate the soil. Experts in historic titles, notaries, prosecutors, stewards, bailiffs, and collectors all had an interest in the multiplication of the legal acts authorized by “feudalism.”23 These figures ensnared proprietors in litigation and extracted payments from them.24 Although Le Trosne repeated many of Argenson’s criticisms of the alienation of state authority to lords and office holders, he went beyond Argenson by elaborating a far-reaching plan to replace them. According to L’Administration provinciale, assemblies in the provinces would see to the governmental tasks of venal offices, render them superfluous, and oversee their liquidation. The enlightened choice of voters would distinguish the most meritorious public servants. Rather than purchase and inheritance, Le Trosne proposed tests and competitions, as well as professional experience in the courts, as the proper criteria for distinguishing the best judges. As for the seigneurial regime, responsibility fell to the king to renounce his seigneurial rights in order to force lords to do the same. The establishment of provincial administrations, Le Trosne argued, was a means of putting an end to feudalism. Then, once the jurisdictions of lords and office holders no longer obstructed the administration, the monarchy could replace the tax farms and the taille with a tax proportionate to landed revenues.25 Career administrators and assemblies focused solely on taxation Taking all of these writings as a whole, it is clear that royal reformers sought to rid the monarchy of the politically constituted private property sustaining the class relations of the Old Regime. Tocqueville argued that the reformers’ ideas permeated the government and prompted it to introduce the provincial assemblies “everywhere simultaneously and under practically the same form … without the least respect for ancient customs, local usages, or … particular conditions … The abrupt wholesale remodeling of the entire administration which preceded the political revolution had already caused one of the greatest upheavals that have ever taken place.”26 Tocqueville no doubt exaggerated. Necker, we have seen, respected the traditional estates and preserved the crown’s authority to appoint the initial members of the assemblies of Berry and Haute-Guyenne in 1778–79. In 1787, when Louis XVI extended the reform to the rest of the pays d’élection, he maintained the policy of appointment to provincial assemblies divided into the three estates. Yet even while showing respect for customary

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rights, ministers of state devoted to an administrative monarchy used the assemblies to impose taxes on the privileged orders. They had recently subjected the landed classes of Paris to taxes in ten separate court cases of the 1780s. Specifically, the royal council accepted the appeals of peasant communities of the Île-de-France and quashed rulings, which the cour des aides – sovereign court comprised of titled justices responsible for fiscal lawsuits – had made in support of privileged proprietors. In one of these cases, the royal council favorably received the appeal of the inhabitants of Auvers in the district of Pontoise in 1786, quashed a ruling of the cour des aides, and ordered the sieurs (title for a man of rank) Delespine and Lescourion, landowners of Paris, to pay the taille for the château of Leyret and enclosed land acquired from the Prince de Conti. In their appeal, the residents of Auvers invoked “the most legitimate interest … of making … each tax payer … liable according to his faculties.”27 The royal ruling stated that the cour des aides flouted regulations and precedents and thus overcharged the other inhabitants to make up for the exemptions.28 In the same way, the assessor for Villefranche in Haute-Guyenne removed the sieur de Colonges, whose family had long held the presidency of the district fiscal tribunal, from the rolls of the capitation for the nobles and office holders and placed him in the rolls for commoners, assessed at a rate about twenty times higher. Colonges appealed to the Assembly of Haute-Guyenne that the assessor had altered the century-old practice of levying his taxes with the lineage nobles. The Assembly then issued an ordinance removing the fiscal valuation from the common tax rolls in 1785. But the intendant argued against the ordinance, the royal council quashed it, and the assessment remained in the rolls of the parish’s roturier land.29 Several administrators in the central government saw the extension of the provincial assemblies in 1787 to the rest of the pays d’élection as a chance to move beyond such piecemeal actions to broad plans for fiscal leveling. A report written in the controller general’s bureau in August 1788, about the assemblies and taxes, authorized a plan for reform to be submitted in the essay competition of the Royal Society of Agriculture of Orléans. The plan advocated a new tax to replace the many existing ones and lighten the burden on rural inhabitants. The assemblies would impose the tax on pensions, tax farms, property, seigneurial dues, and venal offices, and would spare royal subjects the interest payments made to tax receivers for the sums advanced to the king in anticipation of the fiscal proceeds. The publicity of this plan should not cause alarm, the report stated, because the new tax proposed in it would resolve many of the problems of the vingtièmes. The report affirmed that though the vingtièmes were intended to apply to all inhabitants, they had in fact become extra burdens on commoners. The new

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tax would also render mute the recurrent objections to the vingtièmes made by the tribunals.30 In this way, officials at the highest levels of the state saw the provincial assemblies as a benevolent reform designed to defend the poor from unjust burdens. They wrote a response in November 1787 to a remonstrance of the Parlement of Bordeaux, which had prohibited the assemblies to meet within its jurisdiction. “The King’s justice can no longer tolerate that royal taxes weigh unequally on his subjects and more rigorously on the poorer portion of them the closest to his heart. The magistrates must observe that several powerful proprietors of their jurisdiction are taxed on a distinct roll whose sum is obviously inferior to their means.” The royal response contended that the assemblies would facilitate fiscal reform and that it was “an abuse of the ordinances prohibiting illicit assemblies to apply these ordinances to the assemblies formed by the king’s orders.”31 The marquis d’Ormesson, a state councilor on the king’s legal committee on finances – whose father, in the 1760s, had sought to have village representatives work with the intendants to tax the nobility – disapproved of the provincial assemblies established under Necker in 1778 and 1779. He attempted to return to the intendant the administration of public works accorded to the Assembly of Berry. In August 1787, d’Ormesson composed observations about the assemblies for the controller general. He remarked that the elected rural administrations in the villages (municipalités), created along with the provincial and district assemblies in 1787, should solicit the input of common subjects to accurately assess the nobles’ wealth, yet should remain under the intendants’ supervision and accord the intendants a predominant voice in the preparation of the tax rolls.32 D’Ormesson’s ambivalence about political participation was shared by an administrator in the controller general’s office – the author, in April 1788, of a report on the request of the Assemblies of Haute-Guyenne, Gascogne, Champagne, Orléanais, Soissonnais, and Alsace to maintain agents in Versailles for the purpose of pressing their cases on various issues. It was precisely to avoid this sort of request that Turgot decided not to present Du Pont’s Essay on the Municipalities to Louis XVI in the mid-1770s. Turgot had forebodings that the assemblies might join forces at the expense of royal sovereignty. This 1788 report expressed the same misgivings felt by Turgot, that the agents of the assemblies might confer with one another, gain information they should not have, and make public comments troubling to the monarchy. The agents might use information obtained in the ministries to incite complaints and indiscreet criticisms.33

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Feudalism, privilege, and opposition to provincial assemblies in Versailles The foregoing authors and statesmen used the discourse of reason to depict the state as a source of rational reform – of administration in accordance with real property rather than factitious rights – and to propose provincial assemblies as a means of diminishing privileges. Yet if one takes the royal court and councils as a whole, it is clear that the regime disseminated a different set of arguments. In the last decades of Louis XV’s reign, the grand seigneurs and military commanders gained access to the king’s inner circle and lobbied for an aristocratic, decentralized, and so-called historic constitution of the realm.34 These high nobles routinely used patronage to garner support within the administration, judiciary, and even public opinion with the aim of enhancing their value to the king. Ministers in charge of the branches of government vied with one another for royal favor rather than pursue coherent policies. The disarray worsened under Louis XVI, when the impression took hold that he did not have preferred ministers or policies and that any course of action or advisor could be contested. Intrigue pervaded Versailles, as court factions competed for honors, pensions, promotions, bishoprics, governorships, and military commands worth hundreds of thousands of livres to nobles with connections in the royal councils, such as the princes de Condé and de Conti, and the duc de Fitz-James.35 Argenson and Le Trosne had pinpointed one of the reasons why the historic constitution formed part of the lexicon of these high nobles. The different legal systems in the provinces secured the king’s own properties and rights. Louis XVI routinely ceded portions of these holdings as appanages to members of his family with the purpose of sustaining the prestige of his lineage. Thus, the duc d’Orléans, a cousin of the king,  enjoyed an annual income of seven million livres, the highest in the realm, most of which came from his appanage.36 In 1786, the Parlement of Paris registered royal letters patent authorizing the exchange of various royal domains to the count d’Eu, a member of the Orléans family, in return for the principality of Dombes, as well as earldoms, domains, lands, forests, and seigneurial jurisdictions, mainly in the province of Languedoc. The king then sold the use of many of these feudal holdings to local elites and entrusted others to loyal nobles.37 The exchanges of the king’s lands and lordship for the benefit of the ascendant faction at court reached its apogee from 1783 to 1786, during Charles Alexandre de Calonne’s tenure as controller general.38 The royal council ruled in 1783, for instance, to uphold the verdicts of local tribunals and enforce the claim of the duc de Polignac, whose wife was the queen’s closest friend, to the fief of Puypaulin entitling him to 12.5 percent of the sales

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of corporations of merchants and fishers in Bayonne, Bordeaux, and other communities of the Southwest. Polignac had obtained the fief from the duc de Nevers, a high-ranking nobleman and former royal ambassador, who had in turn secured it from the royal domains in 1722.39 Factional struggle at court over rewards of this sort undercut Necker’s efforts to extend the assemblies from Berry and Haute-Guyenne to other provinces in the early 1780s. The comte de Vergennes, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, had aligned with the previous ministry of Turgot and saw Necker as a rival for influence in the royal council. He also opposed what he saw as the Enlightenment innovatory spirit behind the provincial assemblies. In 1781, in opposing Necker’s assemblies, Vergennes wrote to Louis XVI that the state comprised a “governing class” of the king, the royal family, the grandees, and the clergy. The king honored the high tribunals with his confidence and granted them the authority to mete out justice to his subjects. The families of the superior magistrates, of the financial officers, and of the chief administrators of the departments of state had long provided the king with counsel, served his regime with talent and virtue, and seen to the glory and prosperity of the kingdom. Vergennes argued that the assemblies would invert the “governing class” and the people. Necker’s published justification of his tenure in office, Vergennes claimed, amounted to a crude appeal to the masses. Vergennes concluded that Necker’s policies weakened royal authority.40 The duc de Nivernais – a former military officer, a member of the Assembly of Notables (high-ranking nobles, ecclesiastics, and state functionaries convened by Louis XVI to support reforms at the beginning of 1787), and minister in the royal council – had written to the attorney general (procureur général) of the Parlement in 1780 that while he supported d’Ormesson’s plan for elective councils to advise the intendants, he opposed what he portrayed as Necker’s intent to grant the provincial assemblies executive authority. In 1787 and 1788, Nivernais used his influence in Versailles to delay the opening of the assemblies in the généralité (administrative province) of Moulins for nearly a year after they had opened elsewhere. Nivernais also used his influence to have Moulins divided in two, with an assembly in Nivernais and another in Bourbonnais. The duc de Nivernais paid about 4,000 livres of vingtièmes for a lordship generating about 350,000 a year. Had a single assembly incorporated both Nivernais and Bourbonnais, the deputies of Bourbonnais might not have felt inclined to defer to this grandee and respect his exemptions. In a smaller assembly, he could place his supporters and defend his privileges. The duc de Nivernais consulted the controller general on the type of regime to adopt, and it is certain that this action proved decisive.41 When Calonne presented the plan for provincial assemblies to the Notables in 1787, he and Vergennes gained the support of the comte d’Artois’s

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(Louis XVI’s brother) faction at court by offering this grandee millions to cover expenses. Artois’s household, however, comprised hundreds of office holders and clients interested in his seigneurial rights. They were no doubt responsible for the “Essay” presented to the controller general, “on the Distinction Suitable and Just to Accord his Highness Comte d’Artois in the Provincial Assemblies in his Appanages.” Artois, the essay stated, had vast domains and could not attend all of the rural municipalities slated to meet in the villages. His representatives did not have the title of lord required to preside over the rural municipalities and would refuse a rank inferior to the peasants’ elected syndic. It offended their dignity to sit below syndics whom they hired for vile wage work: In the appanages, there is a type of property which belongs most commonly to the princes such as the rights of mouvances, terrage, woods, fishing rights, tolls, minage, etc., sometimes the rights to taxes on drinks; royal domains given as appanages consist principally of this type of income, and this class of property rarely belongs to individual lords or only in small quantities … The deputies to the assemblies will have an interest in putting a strain on a type of property which is alien to them and by this surcharge lighten the taxes which apply to the property in which they have the most interest.42

The author of the essay therefore asked that the representatives of the princes have precedence in the rural municipalities and that the princes preside over the provincial assemblies. “It is in the interest of a monarchical state that the title of prince apanagé not become a futile title deprived of all prerogatives … A good Frenchman and zealous servant of the king will always see with satisfaction distinctive honors accorded to the maison de France.”43 The comte de Saint-Priest showed as much as anyone in Versailles that rivalries determined political positions as much as convictions did. In a pamphlet published in 1787 entitled “Examination of the Provincial Administrations,” he argued that the deputies of the provincial assemblies were expected to work for the common good and therefore should not be divided into estates. The assemblies ought to consist of representatives of the rural inhabitants, who saw around them, and appreciated, the true wealth of the kingdom and who would distribute taxes equitably. The first two estates, by contrast, enjoyed privileges and could not credibly carry out this task. Saint-Priest claimed that the bishops’ right to preside over the assemblies made talent succumb to jealousy, intrigue, and influence, and stifled the equality necessary for constructive deliberations.44 A year later, in the king’s committee of ministers, Saint-Priest came out in favor of doubling the Third Estate in the Estates General.45 Saint-Priest, however, coveted Vergennes’s post of secretary of state for foreign affairs and was seen by opponents of Calonne in the ministry, seeking a change in foreign policy, as a possible alternative for this post. It is perhaps

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for this reason that Saint-Priest opposed Calonne’s plans in the conclusion of the “Examination” by invoking privileges at cross-purposes with the provincial assemblies. He argued that town dwellers paid indirect taxes and should not be lumped together with commoners subject to taxes on rural property. The prices for the leases of the nobles’ lands reflected their privileges and would become a source of endless dispute if the nobles’ lands were brought under the same fiscal laws as other properties. Given, then, that the assemblies should not carry out the fiscal leveling envisioned for them, their potentially disruptive consequences weighed against their implementation.46 Lefebvre d’Amécourt, a judge in the Parlement, who had obtained a royal pension in 1781 in return for defending the king’s interests in this tribunal, suffered disgrace five years later and joined the baron de Breteuil’s faction against Calonne in the ministry. He supported the provincial assemblies in the Parlement in 1787 but penned at least one of two reports – “Several Observations on the Danger of Raising Questions about Taxable Revenue” and “Dangers of Provincial Estates” – against them. It would be a monstrous thing, Amécourt argued, for forty-eight or sixty people to meet in assemblies. “Such an establishment would … make the nobility grapple with the townspeople, confound the classes, subject the nobles to the … extravagant opinions of the people, and only permit one to foresee a deliberate plan to make taxes equal. The project is frightening.”47 Ministerial rivals likely were also responsible for the anonymous “Reflections,” written in Versailles for the consideration of the king’s councilors. According to the author, the intendants represent the king’s power in the provinces, the king accords the parlements the customary right to give official recognition to his wishes, the district fiscal courts and the cour des aides have received the customary right to judge litigation arising out of taxation, the chambres des comptes are entrusted with rigorously seeing that there is no misdirection of the tax revenue. It is essential that all of these tribunals be conserved and very dangerous to pass to, or bring together in, other hands the exercise of their functions or their authority.

The chambres des comptes and cours des aides ensured the king’s authority over the tax collectors and receivers, whereas assemblies would weaken and divide his authority. The author concluded that “authority must solely exist in … the king … To extend it … to all of France organized in provincial assemblies would threaten … distressing risks … Changing the constitution of realms has … often sown the seeds of revolutions.”48 Ministerial opponents drafted another anonymous report for the king’s consideration, “Reflections on this Point in History.” The author argued that

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the provinces would object to a government of assemblies identical in all parts of the realm. The provinces had distinct customs, and the sovereign must be able to run each according to its particular regime. A uniform administration of provincial assemblies would upset the traditional bases of royal authority. Representative bodies, the author noted, often caused problems for the monarchy.49 The forgoing writings, penned by proponents of royal authority, used the discourse of justice to argue that the king’s power was best served by bolstering the historic constitution rather than by diminishing the privileges of the upper clergy and nobles. These privileges gave the first two estates a stake in the regime, attentiveness to particular rights rather than to national interests, and reason to uphold a central power capable of assuring each his due. Royal ministers assimilated this discourse not only because of its logical consistency, and not only because it afforded the seigneurial rights that could be used to build support for their factions in Versailles, but also because of their tendency to make use of privileges in the enactment of policy. This use of the historic constitution came across in the king’s reaction to a request, made in 1785 by the priests of the diocese of Auch to the assembly of the clergy, for the withdrawal of an edict adding to their liability for vicars. Priests and bishops could remove vicars or hinder their clerical careers. Whoever controlled the ecclesiastic revenue of a parish, the non-resident tithe-owner (gros décimateurs) or the priest, paid the vicar’s salary. In the diocese of Auch, the priests had complained since the 1760s that the non-resident tithe-owners took over this revenue and left them on the salary known as the portion congrue. Peasant communities complained about arbitrary increases of the tithes, as well as about abuses perpetrated by the non-resident tithe-­ owners’ assistants and sub-leasers. The archbishop and the cathedral chapter had to finance 600 lawsuits fending off such complaints in the last years of the Old Regime.50 In this 1785 request, the priests of Auch, anticipating the rhetoric of the spring of 1789, alleged their poverty and utility in contrast to the ecclesiastics who benefited from the tithes and who devoured the substance of the church while living in shameful indolence. The priests argued that the church might no longer find people to teach the holy maxims if it continued to look after its parasites at the expense of its workers. The priests inspired the taste for labor and the courage to cultivate the land. The growth of the population, they claimed, went hand in hand with the progress of agriculture and added to the church’s sphere of activity. The priests should therefore receive extra remuneration rather than the burden of additional payments to the vicars.51 The king rejected this request in 1786. The royal council sent a ruling to

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the Parlement of Paris, duly registered by the judges, that the priests of Auch had made an illegal request and should not instigate or publish such comments in the future.52 Doubtless the monarchy made this ruling in a bid to win the favor of the upper clergy. The king and his ministers urgently needed revenue and knew that they would soon ask the upper clergy, in control of the assembly of the First Estate, for a subvention (don gratuit) and that favorable treatment in this dispute with the priests might loosen the clergy’s purse strings.53 The king’s reliance on autonomous privileged groups for funds may also explain why he ultimately divided provincial assemblies according to the traditional estates with grand seigneurs and bishops as the presidents. The king staffed the assemblies with the high clergy and nobility. He named knights, owners of lordships, and office holders in seigneurial courts to represent the Third Estate. The original plans of Turgot, Du Pont, and Calonne had called for assemblies of landowners with membership based on tax payments. But the monarchy faced a severe financial crisis and intended to ask the assemblies for infusions of funds in return for ceding control over direct taxation to them. It is likely that the crown sought to flatter the privileged orders in the assemblies in the hope of getting them to agree to timely subsidies.54 In short, the routine practices – of distributing lordships as patronage to bolster court factions and of using privileged groups to raise revenue for the crown – led the high nobles of the royal court and councils of state to assimilate the language of justice. Their concern for historic rights came across in an anonymous report written in 1787 against the proposals of Lamoignon and d’Ormesson to have the intendants review the minutes of the provincial assemblies prior to publication. The author agreed that the minutes ought to be examined prior to publication but argued that the intendants might not be suited to the task. The minutes might contain fierce heated expressions against some deputies … [and] indiscreet claims against the parlements and cours des aides … The intendants … may be … indifferent to the wrangles, which arise between the various deputies, or their constituents, and may thus allow to escape expressions liable to cause trouble and internal divisions in the assemblies … and … the minutes … might then result in power struggles and ferment embarrassing for the government.55

The report reveals the reasoning, prevalent in Versailles, that the king need not impose his power through the intendants but rather manage the claims of influential personages and tribunals in the provinces and present a common front with them. Royal power rested on the good standing of the historically privileged groups and thus had to defend the old nobility.56

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The royal court and status issues in the provincial assemblies Members of the king’s court and councils, who represented royal power in these terms, helped put powerful lords and clergymen in control of the provincial assemblies. Of course, as we have seen, the monarchy also comprised defenders of an administrative monarchy interested in using the provincial assemblies to impose taxes on the privileged orders. At the beginning of 1787, the Assembly of Notables sparked a national movement against these ministers’ heavy-handed refusal to share power. Members of the Assembly such as Loménie de Brienne, the archbishop of Toulouse, asked the crown to loosen the intendants’ grip on the provinces and grant the assemblies autonomous responsibilities.57 The bureau of the comte d’Artois, one of seven into which the Notables were divided, each under the presidency of a member of the royal family, protested that the rules for the assemblies, especially the intendants’ right to evaluate their spending, made it impossible for them to play a c­ onstructive role in government.58 Several months later, the bishop of Nancy, president of the Assembly of Lorraine, stated that the rights of the assemblies ought to go beyond the arbitration of disputes to encompass binding resolutions not amenable to overruling by the royal council. The duc de Praslin (president of the Assembly of Anjou), the vicomte de Beaune (president of the Assembly of Auvergne), the Assemblies of Dauphiné, Champagne, and Alsace, the nobility of Bordeaux, and the cour des aides of Paris all protested against the subordination of the assemblies to the intendants.59 The duc d’Ayen, president of the Assembly of Limousin, wrote to the controller general in October 1787 that he could not overstate … the disgust and consternation of the members of the assemblies caused by the regulations and how much the regulations would dampen the desire to attend and the zeal of all the good citizens who foresaw in the assemblies a thriving administration so necessary in the current circumstances. The intendants, who may have solicited or contributed to the regulations, more jealous … of their all-but arbitrary power than of the good of the country they administer, have surely planned to stifle the provincial assemblies at the moment of their birth.60

The Assembly of Touraine protested to the controller general in 1787 that the rules granting the intendant precedence, in deliberations over the distribution of royal funds, were “shocking and might … serve as a pretext for removing … the presidents of the … [assemblies]; as we are persuaded that there are not many who would consent to a subaltern role.” The “distinction accorded to … the royal commissioners” appeared “exorbitant … The maîtres des requêtes [elite privileged group from which the king selected the intendants]

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no doubt held honorable offices, but we do not believe that these offices must award them any precedence over the other orders of society.” The members of the Assembly stated that the presence of the intendant’s subdelegate in their sessions was “humiliating.”61 These protests could be seen as validation of the theory that the Revolution consisted of competing discourses, one supportive of the lawful liberties and historic rights of the nation against another supportive of the crown as the embodiment of reason and public welfare. It is true that members of the royal councils such as d’Ormesson vaunted the efficacy of the intendants and the benefit of social leveling. Yet as we’ve seen, the king did not have a unified apparatus of state, and many nobles in the highest spheres of government sought to sustain the influence of local magnates as representatives of royal authority in the provinces. “Anonymous Observations,” written in the king’s council, “on the Rules for the New Assemblies,” admitted that the intendants’ right to withhold information from the provincial assemblies had made a great impression. For several years past, the author noted, the public had lost faith in the intendants.62 After consideration of these “Observations,” the king gave the assemblies the right to bypass the intendants and correspond directly with the government. He granted the members a rank equal to the intendants in their meetings. Once these changes were made, many of the bishops and seigneurs, who presided over the assemblies, kept up good relations with the intendants.63 One could also construe the above-mentioned protests not as a rejection of royal absolutism, but as a plea to royal ministers to respect the rank of the high nobility within it. At the beginning of 1787, the Notables had expressed concern about the presence of the uneducated masses in the lowest rung of the assemblies, the elected municipalities in the villages. This prospect of popular participation elicited expressions of disgust and outrage. Notables such as the duc d’Harcourt argued that those who worked their lands, and were subject to them by the laws of the kingdom, should not have power over them and should not apportion their taxes. They refused to take part in provincial assemblies of this sort.64 According to the bureau of the Assembly of Notables, headed by the comte d’Artois, “The great families are at once the support of the people and the bulwark of the monarchy. In France, the presidency of all national assemblies should be reserved for the superior order. They would not take part in assemblies if they risked … granting precedence to citizens of a lower order, for the assemblies would then become riotous.”65 Keith Baker argues that texts written in opposition to the arbitrary authority of the regime used the discourse of justice to reformulate historic rights in the language of the Enlightenment. Yet if one examines the trope of historic rights in texts, which did not claim the mantle of public opinion, but

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which circulated solely within the administration and involved the concrete stakes involved in implementing the assemblies, one notices a language attuned to subjective elements of status and the time-honored value system.66 At least seven provincial assemblies sent letters to the controller general in favor of having the twelve gentilshommes of the nobility pass tests of lineage. According to the Assembly of Auch, The nobility should conserve itself in all its purity: justice requires that genuinely merited distinctions should not be the fruit of fraud and usurpation. The Third Estate no doubt desires to always be headed … by members veritably placed in the nobility by birth … It is for the glory of the assemblies, as in the essence of a monarchy, that the nobility appear unadulterated in them, and in such a manner that one cannot deceive oneself about its splendor.67

The Assembly then demanded that the members of the Second Estate present authentic proofs of four generations and one hundred years of nobility. A royal administrator wrote to the controller general in December 1787 gainsaying this demand on the grounds that it excluded most nobles and created an aristocracy within the Second Estate. In the end, the Assembly of Auch demanded four generations for the deputies of the Second Estate and asked them not to show vanity in demonstrating additional ones so as not to humiliate those with only four.68 Claims of this sort, to heritable ranks within the political hierarchy, arose out of a body of writings in favor of a distinct noble class proper to impart the medieval traditions of honor, generosity, and selflessness and to inspire the patriotic emulation of royal subjects. The count Walsh de Serrant, appointed by the crown to the Second Estate of the Assembly of Anjou, wrote remarks to the duc de Praslin, entitled “Subjects Eligible for Anjou,” in which he proposed M. de la Maurouzière, lord of the villages of Saint-Lambert-le-Poterien and Cumont du Puy, for membership in the Second Estate of the Assembly. Serrant proposed Maurouzière in view of the “consideration” and “confidence” he enjoyed and of his experience with public and particular affairs. Seigneurs such as Maurouzière oversaw the affairs of the region and were always c­ onsulted as a matter of course. Their participation was “the public choice.”69 This expression of the nobles’ time-honored role in public affairs, of the salutary example they offered to royal subjects, was all the more credible in a regime that made use of seigneurial jurisdictions and privileged groups  in its routine procedures. The monarchy was in some sense responsible for the views of nobles, such as the abbot of Lubersac, whose titles were rooted in the provinces and whose residence was in Paris. In 1787, Lubersac wrote a “patriotic” essay describing the rights of the Church, the nobility, and the provinces as imprescriptible articles of the monarchical constitution founded

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on the faith and wishes of the first Christian kings and liable to unravel if even the slightest changes were made. He stated that lineage nobles and holders of benefices should preside over provincial assemblies composed of the leading office holders in the judiciary. A few months later, he asked the controller general for the presidency of the district assembly of Brive in Limousin, “because I occupy the principal royal benefice in Brive, because I am seigneur of the royal collegial church with jurisdiction over the priests of the cathedral chapter, [and] because I hold judicial and feudal rights over a part of the town.”70 Many nobles thus believed in their right to the foremost places in the regime and, as the leading members of the provincial assemblies, composed the district assemblies in a hierarchical manner. The Assembly of Île-de-France named the first 168 deputies of the twelve district assemblies to meet within the province. These initial nominees then named the remaining 168 deputies. As a result of this procedure, abbots, as well as a few priors and grand vicars, filled the eighty-four seats of the First Estate in the district assemblies. The Second Estate comprised the comte de Clermont-Tonnère, the comte de Périgord, the comte de Grasse, the duc de Cossé, and other high nobles. The presidents, appointed by the king, consisted of dukes, barons, and bishops.71 It is difficult to know the composition of the Third Estate, because 58 percent of the deputies appeared in the minutes of the Assembly of the Îlede-France solely by their surname. The other 42 percent included mayors of towns, office holders in the judiciary, seigneurs, a knight of St. Louis, and a squadron leader. It is reasonable to infer that the system of appointment and cooptation from the higher-ranking assemblies downward, and the right of the presidents and then of the first two estates to opine first on issues, led to the nomination of many seigneurial stewards and tenant farmers of abbeys and nobles. Over 20 percent of the Third Estate deputies inserted a “de” before their name. The “de” reveals little about their background but much about the way they wished to be seen. Indeed, when the districts met in November 1787, the Assembly of the Île-de-France had to settle all sorts of conflicting claims to precedence. One reads in the minutes, for example, that M. Fournier, mayor of Beauvais, “raised the pretention of only ceding rank in the order of the Third Estate of the district assembly … to presidents and lieutenant generals of the seneschal courts.”72 In sum, the crown had little trouble handling these sorts of status disputes. It seemed heavy-handed when the intendants controlled provincial affairs and left little room for elites to play prominent roles. Yet the intendants hailed from an elite corps of office holders, and many of them assumed that the nobles set the proper example of distinction for royal subjects. The intendant in Alençon, for instance, wrote to the controller general in February 1788 that with regard to “the presidency of the district assembly of Falaise, the

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local people, having boasted a man of the rank of the viscount La Veneur as the president of the first meeting of their assembly, might be troubled by his successor if he hailed from a less-illustrious birth.”73 Intractable disputes over taxation The nobles in the king’s retinue thus had an appreciation for issues of status, made sure that high clergymen and nobles played a dominant role in the provincial assemblies, and ultimately impeded these bodies from diminishing fiscal privileges. Obstacles emerged when the Assembly of Haute-Guyenne met in 1779. It comprised ten bishops and other ecclesiastics with benefices, sixteen of the wealthiest nobles of Rouergue and Quercy – possessors of manors and at least one hundred years of nobility – and twenty-six deputies of the Third Estate chosen among the great proprietors and magistrates of the province such as the squire Charles-Alexandre de Neirac, lord of Neirac and owner noble lands.74 The vingtièmes of Haute-Guyenne were divided into discrete rolls: the cadaster and the declarations of the owners of noble lands. But in 1777, the crown ruled that all lands would henceforth appear in the cadasters subject to the verifications of the rural communities. Disgruntled nobles mounted lively resistance. When the Assembly met two years later, its members stated their primary intention to “destroy this sort of dependence to which the seigneurs fear being reduced vis-à-vis their vassals” and their aspiration “to maintain the possessors of fiefs in their privileges.”75 The bishop of Rodez, president of the Assembly, used his connections in Versailles to have an edict promulgated in 1781 permitting the Assembly to make annual payments to the crown and administer the vingtièmes itself. The Assembly then put an end to the verifications. Rural communities should not assess the nobles’ taxes, the Assembly stated, because they were motivated by affection, weakness, or hatred, and would provoke cruel divisions that a sage administration should forestall. The Assembly reinstated the former system of declarations, and the owners of noble lands continued to make false ones or none at all. The Assembly did not make any reforms to the vingtièmes before its dissolution in 1790.76 The monarchy ran into the same problem when it extended the provincial assemblies to the rest of the pays d’élection in 1787. The Notables had protested that Calonne’s plan to replace the vingtièmes with a land tax levied equally on all properties by the assemblies would multiply royal agents, burden landowners, and harm agriculture. They proposed to eliminate wasteful expenditures, unauthorized loans, and venal offices in the financial administration as alternative means of redressing the budget deficit. Several Notables

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made use of the discourse of an enlightened administration infused with public reason and disposed to rational decisions. They advocated the creation of a central treasury along rational bureaucratic lines.77 Faced with these protests, the monarchy abandoned the land tax and instead had the Parlement of Paris register edicts for the prolongation of the vingtièmes. The king and his advisors intended to have the newly established assemblies take responsibility for collection and grant the king annual payments. These payments were to be based on the anticipated increase in revenue once landed incomes had been properly assessed. Yet it proved all but impossible for the crown to get additional taxes from the provincial assemblies. The Parlements of Besançon and Bordeaux prevented the crown from introducing assemblies into four pays d’élection within their jurisdictions. Of the nineteen assemblies that came into being, only nine consented to collect the vingtièmes, granted only 84 percent of the sums requested, and made these grants contingent upon unrealistic amendments.78 The Assembly of Alsace, for instance, kept to the Notables’ discourse of bureaucratic absolutism and legal rational authority to inform the crown that foreign princes with feudal rights – and the local lords to whom they ceded these rights – enjoyed exemptions in consequence of the treaties joining Alsace to the realm. The Assembly requested a royal edict authorizing it to prepare a cadaster for the purpose of taxing all lands equally. The king never followed through on this hopelessly ambitious request. It took more than a century for a cadaster to finally come into being even after the Revolution had swept away all of the privileges pervading the legal system. When it came to the feasible issue at hand of the vingtièmes, the Assembly offered a partial augmentation. “The king … has not intended to augment [the vingtième] on those who have acquitted it … but has sought to extend it to his own domains and those of the proprietors claiming privileges … Any augmentation … can only take place … to the extent that a larger number of proprietors will be subject to it.”79 The Assembly had in view the foreign princes, whom the king could not tax without breaking international treaties. By laying down such conditions, the Assembly prevented the king from getting any additional revenue from Alsace.80 The Assembly of Orléans referred to the investigations of landed revenues conducted in the 1770s as “this tiresome inquisition, which never ceases except before the grands Domaines.”81 To remedy this problem, the Assembly offered 400,000 livres of additional vingtièmes to be covered by the duc d’Orléans’s appanage and the king’s domain of Rambouillet. The Assembly demanded that its offer last twenty years and diminish in proportion to the expiration of the vingtièmes. The king demurred, but the Assembly of Orléans insisted, and the king faced such pressing need for funds that he acquiesced.

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The Assembly later discovered, when it set about collecting the vingtièmes, that the rural municipalities within the appanages of the princes submitted unfinished and untrue accounts. In April 1788, the Assembly acknowledged that it would not be ready to offer any additional funds.82 The district assembly in Laon, part of the généralité of Soissons, used language seemingly taken from the social sciences in deliberations over the means of making taxes proportionate to landholdings. It found that royal investigators of the vingtièmes had covered 129 of the 351 Laonnais parishes and had raised the yield by a quarter between 1776 and 1784. The assembly of Laonnais learned from the investigators that, to proceed in the remaining parishes, it would have to overcome the reluctance of the king, princes, and Order of Malta to turn over their records. The duc d’Orléans, in particular, possessed the domains of Marle and La Fère and showed repugnance for i­nvestigations of his income.83 The crown faced similar difficulties in seeking to implement a tax to replace the corvée labor required of rural inhabitants to build and maintain the roads. In 1779, the Assembly of Haute-Guyenne agreed to put an end to forced labor and instead finance roadwork with a tax of 1/11 of the taille, about 300,000 livres, and a voluntary contribution of the privileged orders. This contribution amounted to 1/15 of the nobles’ vingtièmes for 17,500 and 1/15 of the clergy’s tithes for 13,500. Yet the Order of Malta, proprietor of domains in Haute-Guyenne, refused to pay. The Assembly negotiated with the crown the right to issue bonds worth 1,200,000 to finance the roadwork and use the new taxes to service the bonds. The crown exempted the bond yields from the vingtièmes. Religious establishments, nobles, and well-to-do townspeople snapped up the bonds. The Assembly also negotiated new rules for indemnities to proprietors affected by the roadwork. The crown formerly had refused such indemnities on the grounds that the roads added to the value of properties and offset any losses.84 In essence, the Assembly of Haute-Guyenne went down the well-worn path, followed by nobles since the time of Louis XIV, of adapting to intrusive policies, working within the royal agenda, and benefiting from doing so.85 In the other pays d’élections, a royal ruling of 1786 converted the corvée into a money tax for three years. The Parlement of Grenoble protested that the tax would be extracted from villagers into a central treasury of each province. Dauphinois communities would be reticent to pay if they did not control the funds. The Parlement further argued that privileges formed part of the time-honored constitution of the realm and ought to exempt noble lands from the new tax. Several months later, the Assembly of Notables agreed to the substitution of a money tax for the corvée provided that it be controlled by the provincial assemblies. Although a few of the Notables’ bureaus

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recommended that the privileged orders contribute to the tax, the Assembly of Dauphiné levied it solely on the land of commoners.86 When the provincial assembly in Orléans sought to implement the new tax for roadwork, the municipal officers of Blois, Chartres, and Montargie wrote to the controller general that the corvée had always been regarded as a corollary of paying the taille and that they enjoyed “precious immunities … the recompense of recognized services … rendered in the times of troubles of the monarchy.”87 Their immunity, they claimed, should therefore apply to the tax levied to replace the corvée. The lieutenant de la Touchey wrote to the controller general in 1788 that Orléans ought to be exempt from the tax representative of the corvée in view of “the multiple laws which have constantly exempted the appanage of the duc d’Orléans from variations introduced by different edicts in the constitution of the municipalities.”88 The Assembly of Upper Normandy issued instructions in 1788 to use the rolls of the capitation to subject the privileged orders to the tax for roadwork. Necker expressed agreement that the privileged orders, officers of justice, and personnel of the tax farms ought to pay the new rates, but argued that the rates could only apply to those subject to the taille, otherwise the monarchy might suffer further untimely political turmoil.89 The Assembly of Roussillon wrote to Necker in April 1789 that local nobles and jurists renounced their exemptions from the tax for roadwork, but the clergy and other members of the privileged orders did not. The Assembly asked Necker to suspend the tax for fear that some clergymen, nobles, and office holders would refuse to pay and provoke the Third Estate to make a show of repudiating it.90 The Third Estate and the provincial assemblies Arbitrary taxation represented the focal point of the movement of nobles, clergymen, magistrates, well-to-do commoners, and even the urban crowd against the central government in 1787. Nobles, such as the justices of the Parlement of Grenoble, gained popularity by opposing provincial assemblies widely regarded as ministerial projects intended to extract taxes. Newspapers made favorable references to free peoples and elected governments, and critical references to the unrepresentative makeup of the assemblies. In the autumn of 1788, the crown received hundreds of deliberations of tribunals and municipalities in favor of freely elected provincial estates as alternatives to the assemblies.91 What has been overlooked by historians is that in the midst of this ­movement – in 1787 and the first half of 1788, when the first two estates in the Assembly of Notables and parlements enjoyed broad support thanks to

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their opposition to arbitrary taxation – many commoners already used the discourse of will against the nobility. By focusing on the conflict between the administrative monarchy and the privileged orders over taxation, historians lose sight of what we have seen in the previous sections: the court nobles’ use of the feudal corporate structures of the monarchy in their rivalries for influence in Versailles, in the enactment of policy, and in the composition of the provincial assemblies. These structures made it impossible for the assemblies to impose taxes on the nobility and clergy. The feudal corporate structures of the monarchy ultimately instilled frustrations in commoners and led them to promote equal rights of citizenship as the basis for national sovereignty, even as these commoners joined nobles against the arbitrary authority of the crown, in 1787 and 1788. The Abbé Sieyès, to take a case in point, started out in life as the son of a minor municipal official in a small town. Over the course of several years when Sieyès abased himself before a nobly born bishop in order to become this potentate’s protégé, he saw plenty of mediocre nobles rise past him in the church hierarchy.92 According to a meticulously researched biography, this experience surged to the forefront of Sieyès’s consciousness when he compiled fiscal records, in his capacity as member of the Assembly of Orléanais, and saw that the duc de Luxembourg, the baron de Montboissier, M. de Saint-Fargeau, and other nobles paid hardly any vingtièmes for their immense landed wealth. Two members of the assembly, the general vicar de Lubersac and the comte de Rochambeau, felt patriotically inspired to propose that the nobles pay an equitable share and lighten the burden on the inferior class. But the rest of the nobles used their influence over the members of the Third Estate of the Assembly, many of whom enjoyed privileges, to prevent any reduction of their exemptions. This experience of seeing the nobility refuse to make sacrifices for the common good crystalized Sieyès’s political thinking, which soon manifested itself in What is the Third Estate? and in his proposal to fellow deputies of the Third Estate to transform themselves into the National Assembly in June 1789.93 Thus, at the moment the provincial assemblies were founded, commoners already perceived the problems posed by the nobles’ authority over them. J.-M.-A. Servan, a lawyer in the Parlement of Grenoble, had taken up enlightened causes – denouncing the severity of the criminal code and prejudices against Protestants – before running afoul of a grand seigneur and resigning from the tribunal in the early 1770s. He argued in 1788, in an essay on the provincial assemblies, that most of the members of the Third Estate … sold out, or were ready to do so, to the two orders with power and riches. And how could they do otherwise? The

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only way they can expect a fortune is in the service of the first two orders, and the only way they can expect distinction is in their baseness before the nobility and clergy. Benefices on one side, judicial offices on the other … what chains in the hands of the nobility and clergy to oppress the Third Estate.94

Similarly, the physician Valdruche de Mont-Rémy, having spent weeks side by side with the privileged orders in the district assembly of Joinville in Champagne, expressed irritation with them in a letter to the Academy of Arras at the beginning of February 1788. One could not “be a good citizen, a good patriot, in supporting the privileges of the nobility and clergy, in defending the claims which debase the largest part of humanity … [claims] contrary to good sense, to natural law, even to good mores and which our magistrates nevertheless call sacred properties.”95 An anonymous memo sent from Normandy to the controller general stated disapprovingly that merchants had not been considered for membership in the provincial assemblies. Deliberations of proprietors neglected the general interests when commercial concerns were not raised. Members of the assemblies, the author argued, ought to be genuine representatives of the people if they hoped to inspire confidence.96 Going into more detail, a merchant named Fanon wrote a letter in 1787 to the controller general to denounce a concerted effort to silence the Third Estate of the district of Crépy-en-Valois in the généralité of Soissons. The first two estates of the district assembly of Crépyen-Valois comprised “five of the most powerful seigneurs … a Benedictine prior, a Bernadine, a canon and a village priest … The weight which credit and riches naturally give are already more than enough to tip the balance: but hardly satisfied with this advantage,” the seigneurs chose two tenant farmers of the Benedictines to represent the Third Estate and thus “assured … a decisive majority.” The rentier and landowning townspeople, as deputies of the Third Estate in this district assembly, had wealth and privileges, knew nothing of the people’s interests, and allotted taxes to the detriment of the citizens of modest means. The people hid their dismay in the hope of remaining in the good graces of the powerful. Fanon averred that only shopkeepers/merchants (commerçants) and artisans, the greater part of the urban population, could allot taxes accurately.97 Municipal officers and jurists of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, also in Soissonnais, wrote to the controller general in November 1787 that the makeup of the district assembly flouted the king’s wish to include commoners. The Third Estate comprised a squire, a noble office holder, and a seigneurial agent of the marquis de Liancourt, president of this assembly. The fourth place … is occupied by Bosquillon de Marigny, officer of ten or twelve seigneurial courts … and consequently in the pay … of the lords to which they

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belong … Huvey … deputy of the Third Estate … is in the pay [aux gages] of le duc de Fitz-James, … is the fiscal steward of his seigneurial court … and is his representative in the assemblies of seven parishes of his duché pairie.

The municipal officers and jurists concluded that the district assembly of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, comprising nobles and their officers, deprived the citizenry of a voice.98 The common people of Auvergne showed contempt for the provincial assembly. They suspected that it amounted to nothing more than a reshuffling of the traditional authorities, the same ones responsible for taxes, privileges, and thousands of other abuses. The provincial assembly in Orléans could not overcome the distrust of the people in spite of the good intentions of its members. A plowman was reported to have stated, in hearing of the assembly in Orléans, “again new exactions [mangeries]!”99 The Assembly of Gascogne put much time into a report on local lawlessness, attacks on lords, and smuggling in violation of the tax farms. The members called on the king’s mounted constabulary to disarm the population on the margins unassociated with the trades. They also put time into making an impressive show of their meeting. The Assembly held a mass in the Cathedral of Auch with public music and a sermon by the archbishop. All the trades were invited, but only the municipal officers and a single judge of the seneschal court showed up. The people did not attend despite great efforts to turn them out. They had heard a rumor that, rather than accept sacrifices for the common good, the archbishop demanded 20,000 livres for attending, the bishop of Lectoure 10,000, and the other dignitaries comparable sums. Their experience led them to believe that the Assembly offered a spectacle of which they would bear the cost. When the Assembly drew to a close at the end of 1787, the people of Auch assembled, arms in hand, to scoff at the delegates and shout imprecations. The delegates had planned to bring the Assembly to a close with a Te Deum but did not go through with it for fear that local artisans would sing a counter-song invoking the sufferings of the common people.100 Historians have long supposed that these sorts of popular assemblies emerged only in the autumn of 1788, after leading nobles threatened to combat the demands of the Third Estate for representation, and after writers began to portray the first two estates and parlements as bodies of aristocrats willing to accommodate with power to exclude the rest of the population.101 The foregoing protests show, however, over a year earlier, when the provincial assemblies looked as though they might replace the traditional authorities, that they already brought to the fore the question of how these authorities should be composed. They thus revealed deep-seated discontent over the

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heritable jurisdictions of lords and officers that precluded popular participation. This discontent led people to use a discourse of will in favor of national sovereignty. Overall, the foregoing protests addressed the same issue raised by Argenson and physiocrats like Le Trosne. These writers argued that the feudal legacies of the monarchy, the jurisdictional rights of lords and venal officers, precluded the public participation needed for the crown to tax the privileged orders and secure confidence in royal finances. Louis XVI turned to the plans of physiocrats for provincial assemblies in the 1770s and 1780s after unsuccessful, financially debilitating wars revealed the need for systematic reform. Much of the opposition to the provincial assemblies no doubt focused on the royal ministers, wedded to administrative monarchy, who employed the discourse of reason and universal taxes in an effort to have the assemblies take revenue from the privileged orders without according them representation in the government. Yet the main reason for the opposition is to be found in the feudal corporate structures of the monarchy. The king faced chronic shortages of funds and continually fell back on privileged groups for infusions of revenue. Traditional privileges formed part of the logic of customary action – the institutionalized ways of doing things – in the king’s court and councils and led their members to assimilate a discourse of justice attentive to the historic constitution and inimical to a standardized administration of assemblies. Potentates in Versailles reasoned that the attachment of royal subjects to particular rights allowed the king to retain ultimate power, as the judge of claims to historic legitimacy, and permitted the high nobles to retain their rank at the apex of the state. In contrast, a comprehensive network of assemblies would encourage participants to perceive common interests and develop a national program at the expense of royal absolutism. The Old Regime elite was certainly divided into the powerful and ­powerless. Many nobles led modest, even poor, lives very different from the 2,000 aristocrats who had a residence in Versailles.102 We have seen in this chapter that the duc de Nivernais and the clients of the house of Artois recognized the potential for resentment among provincial nobles excluded from the levers of power. Indeed, when provincial nobles obtained representation in the Assembly in Orléans, they drew on the discourse of reason, universal laws, and taxes applicable to all proprietors in an effort to eliminate the extraordinary privileges of the magnates in Versailles. Nevertheless, in spite of such divisions, the evidence presented in this chapter suggests that when grandees such as the duc de Polignac enforced their extensive seigneurial rights, they set the tone for the provincial assemblies. The efforts of the houses of Orléans and Artois to maintain their extraordinary

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privileges relative to provincial nobles may well have inculcated the habit of passing the demands of the regime on to more vulnerable classes of royal subjects. After all, the avowed aim of the Assemblies of Alsace and Orléans to extend the vingtièmes to the domains of the king and princes had the end result of obstructing fiscal reforms and assuring that taxation continued to fall on common subjects bereft of representation. The Assembly of Haute-Guyenne, as we have seen, resolved to retain noble privileges so as to distinguish fief holders from what they described as their unruly vassals in the rural communities. In sum, potentates in Versailles helped shape the political practice and language of the nobles in the provinces. Lastly, this chapter helps explain why the Revolution took the form of a struggle of commoners against the privileged orders. The discourse of will, employed to promote popular sovereignty, appeared in the archival documents regarding the provincial assemblies from 1787 and 1788 – before, that is to say, historians generally date the movement of the Third Estate against the privileged orders. The documents were written by lower-level office holders and merchants, or reported on the attitudes of peasants and artisans. They reveal the widespread aspiration of commoners to participate in government. But this aspiration brought forth indignant reactions and fears of rioting among the high-ranking nobles in control of the assemblies. Thus, as the monarchy collapsed, and new institutions were in the making, rivals for power could score political gains by hitting upon a trope intelligible to commoners: that to participate in government, they would have to overcome the resistance of the privileged orders. In the following chapter on Berry, we will see in more detail, on the local level, how the feudal structures of the monarchy prevented the creation of representative assemblies and bred discontent among ­commoners excluded from political rights. Notes 1 Keith Baker, “French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 289–90, 293–4, 296–7, 302–3; Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 24–5, 36–8, 121, 125–7, 172–3, 239, 243; Dale Van Kley, “From the Lessons of French History to Truths for all Times and all People: The Historical Origins of an AntiHistorical Declaration,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 81, 83, 90, 93, 106; Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 253, 286–7, 316. Sarah Maza presents these discourses in “The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,” in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 44–5, 47. 2 John Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester:

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Manchester University Press, 2002), 12, 110–11, 116, 183–4, 189; Darryl Dee, Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV’s France: Franche-Comté and Absolute Monarchy, 1674–1715 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 56–7, 60, 66, 69, 151, 162, 173, 179; William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 13, 42, 156, 177, 219, 338. 3 Michael Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth‐Century France,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 303–4, 313–14; Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48, 196, 203, 211; Kathryn Norberg, “The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution of 1789,” in Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789, ed. Philip Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 257–60, 264; Joël Félix, “The Financial Origins of the French Revolution,” in The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Peter Campbell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 47; Joël Félix, Finances et politique au siècle des Lumières: le ministère L’Averdy, 1763–1768 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1999), 35–6, 39–40, 43, 49; George Grantham, “The French Cliometric Revolution: A Survey of Cliometric Contributions to French Economic History,” European Review of Economic History 1 (1997), 378–9. 4 Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers,” 316, 318; Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation, 56–7, 95, 196, 203, 211. 5 John Bosher, French Finances 1770–1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 183, 303; Gail Bossenga, “Markets, the Patrimonial State, and the Origins of the French Revolution,” in 1650–1850: Ideas, Æsthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin Lee Cope and Scott Paul Gordon (New York: AMS Press, 2005), 460, 485, 495–7, 505–6; Norberg, “The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788,” 262, 285–6, 292. 6 François de Labat de Vivens, Observations sur divers moyens de soutenir et d’encourager l’agriculture, principalement dans la Guyenne: Où l’on traite des cultures propres à cette province, & des obstacles qui les empêchent de s’étendre, Première partie (1756), 28, 50–1; Lucien Lachaze, Les états provinciaux de l’ancienne France et la question des états provinciaux aux xviie et xviiie siècles. L’assemblée provinciale du Berri sous Louis XVI (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1909), 84–9; Maurice  Bordes, L’administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1972), 160; Mathieu Marraud, La noblesse de Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2000), 120, 306–7. 7 René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, “Jusqu’où la démocratie peut être admise dans le gouvernement monarchique [Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France],” in D’Argenson, considérations sur le gouvernement: a critical edition, with other political texts, ed. Andrew Jainchill (Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 126. 8 Ibid., 121–2. 9 Ibid., 184–6. 10 Ibid., 135–7. See also pp. 150 and 153. 11 Ibid., 87, 162–3, 171–2, 175, 183. 12 Antonella Alimento, Réformes fiscales et crises politiques dans la France de Louis XV: De la taille tarifée au cadastre général, trans. Mireille Gille (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 329–30, 350; Félix Mourlot, La Fin de l’ancien régime et les débuts de la Révolution dans la généralité de Caen (1787–1790) (Paris: Au Siège de la Société, 1913), 29–30; Félix, Finances et politique au siècle des Lumières, 208–9. 13 Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 48, 175, 177; Pierre Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, resultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921), 37–9; Georges Weulersse, La physiocratie sous les ministères de Turgot et de Necker (1774–1781) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 320–1; Félix, Finances et politique au siècle des Lumières, 233–8; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 239–40. 14 Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, “Mémoire sur les municipalités,” in Oeuvres de Turgot

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et documents le concernant, ed. Gustave Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1922), 4:574–6, 580. 15 Ibid., 576. See also pp. 577, 581–2, 586–7, 619. 16 Ibid., 620. 17 Jacques Necker, De l’administration des finances de la France (1784), 1:122–3. See also p. 103. Jacques Necker, “Extrait du mémoire de M. Necker, présenté au roi en 1778 sur l’établissement des administrations provinciales,” in Objets proposés à l’Assemblée des Notables (Paris: A l’Imprimerie Polytype, 1787), 27, 29, 33. 18 Necker, De l’administration des finances de la France, 2:228, 245, 278–9, 281. 19 John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 80, 249; John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 154, 232–3, 241, 266. 20 “Observations de Condorcet,” (Vie de Turgot, 123) in Oeuvres de Turgot, 622–4. 21 Guillaume-François Le Trosne, De L’Administration provinciale et de la réforme de l’impôt (Basle: Pierre J. Duplain, Libraire, 1788), 269–71, 345–6. 22 Ibid., 455–6. 23 Ibid., 439. 24 Ibid., 358–60. See also p. 470. 25 Ibid., 268, 270–1, 341–2, 344, 436, 473, 485. 26 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 194–201. 27 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) H1583. 28 The similar rulings are found in AN H1586, H1587/2, H1612. 29 Procès verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guienne, tenue à Villefranche dans les mois de novembre & décembre 1786 (Haute-Guyenne: s.n., 1787), 368–9. For general information on taxation in Haute-Guyenne, see Gérard Boscary, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guyenne, 1779–1790 (Paris: Impr. E. Desfossés, 1932), 243. 30 AN H1519. 31 AN H1596. 32 AN H1594, H1600. For background on d’Ormesson, see Boscary, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guyenne, 44–5; Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation, 86, 152. 33 AN H1611. See also Journal de l’Abbé de Véri April 1776 in Oeuvres de Turgot, 627. 34 John Hardman, “Decision-making,” in The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Peter Campbell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 66–7; Julian Swann, Politics and the Parlement of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 50–2. 35 Joël Félix, Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette: Un couple en politique (Paris: Payot, 2006), 203; François Bluche, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1973), 88, 98–9, 102, 121; Daniel Roche, La France des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 321, 325. 36 Pierre Goubert, “La société traditionelle,” in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 2: Des derniers temps de l’âge seigneurial aux préludes de l’âge industriel (1660–1789), ed. Ernest Labrousse et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 584. 37 Bibliothèque Nationale (BN) Collection Joly de Fleury 560, fol. 7432. Rafe Blaufarb discusses the king’s patrimonial rights in The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 149. On the king’s liberality with his possessions, see Félix, Louis XVI, 410. 38 Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 108–9, 173. 39 AN H1466. 40 AN H1700. For background on the factional disputes pitting Vergennes against Necker, see Gustav Schelle, Du Pont de Nemours et L’école physiocratique (Paris: Librairie Guillaumin et Cie, 1888), 56; Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996), 297–8, 301; Price, Preserving the Monarchy, 51–2, 56. Court alliances led

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Vergennes to go so far as to back Calonne’s plan for provincial assemblies, written by Du Pont in 1786, even though he disapproved of participatory bodies. Daniel Wick argues that lineage nobles excluded from Louis XVI’s ministry led the opposition to his policies in order to regain their advantages in Versailles. Wick, A Conspiracy of Well-Intentioned Men: The Society of Thirty and the French Revolution (New York: Garland, 1987), 124, 132–3. 41 AN H1603; BN Collection Joly de Fleury 1037. For background on the duc de Nivernais and the Assembly of Nivernais, see Paul Émile Robert Bizardel, Une ébauche de décentralisation administrative à la fin de l’ancien régime: L’assemblée provinciale du Nivernais (Bordeaux: impr. de A. Saugnac, 1913), 147; Lucien Perey, La fin du XVIIIe siècle: le duc de Nivernais, 1763–1798 (Paris: C. Levy, 1891), 307–8. 42 AN H1519. See also Price, Preserving the Monarchy, 152–3; Marraud, La noblesse de Paris, 240–2. 43 AN H1519. 44 François-Emmanuel Guignard Saint-Priest, comte de, “Examen des administrations provinciales,” in Objets proposés à l’Assemblée (Paris: A l’Imprimerie Polytype, 1787), 50–1, 55. 45 Félix, Louis XVI, 451. 46 Saint-Priest, “Examen des administrations provinciales,” 62, 65; Price, Preserving the Monarchy, 196–7. 47 BN Collection Joly de Fleury, 596: fols. 225–6. See also fols. 135–6. For background on Amécourt see John Hardman, French Politics 1774–1789: From the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the Bastille (London: Longman, 1995), 220; Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787, 120–1; Swann, Politics and the Parlement, 14; Price, Preserving the Monarchy, 160. 48 AN H1519. 49 BN Collection Joly de Fleury, 596, fols. 19–23. 50 Timothy Tackett, Priest & Parish in Eighteenth-Century France: A Social and Political Study of the Curés in a Diocese of Dauphiné, 1750–1791 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 98, 100, 263–5; Maurice Bordes, “La ville de Lectoure, Pays d’Etats et l’Assemblée Provinciale d’Auch,” Bulletin de la société archéologique, historique, littéraire & scientifique du Gers 72 (1971), 541. 51 BN Collection Joly de Fleury, 560, fol. 7427. 52 Ibid. 53 Fabrice Vigier, Itinéraire d’un prêtre à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: René Lecesve, curé de Sainte-Triaise de Poitiers (Poitiers: Société des antiquaires de l’ouest, 1998), 122–3. 54 Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787, 158–9; Bossenga, “Markets, the Patrimonial State,” 476, 484, 496–7, 505–6. 55 AN H1609. 56 Marraud, La noblesse de Paris, 306–8. 57 Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 18, 50–2. 58 BN Collection Joly de Fleury 1040, fols. 3, 9, 17. 59 AN H1594, H1496, H1609; Léonce de Lavergne, Les assemblées provinciales sous Louis XVI (Paris: Lévy, Michel, frères, 1864), 322–3; M. de la Trémoïlle, “L’Assemblée provinciale d’Anjou d’après les archives de Serrant (1787–1789),” L’Anjou historique 1 (1900), 543, 674; Ch. Hoffman, “L’administration provinciale dans la Haute-Alsace,” Revue d’Alsace (1899– 1900), 381–2. 60 AN H1594. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Georges Coeuret, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Normandie, 1787–1789 (Paris: Jouve & Cie, 1927), 47; Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales, 137. 64 Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 68–70. 65 BN Collection Joly de Fleury 1040, fols. 1, 7, 11–12, 19. 66 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 126; Baker, “French Political Thought,” 293–4;

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Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 92–93; Timothy Tackett, “Nobles and Third Estate in the Revolutionary Dynamic of the National Assembly, 1789–1790,” The American Historical Review 94 (1989), 301. 67 AN H1609. 68 Ibid.; AN H1599. For background on the Assembly of Gascogne, see Le Marquis de GalardMagnas, Comte – Rendu des séances de l’administration provinciale d’Auch avec notes et documents (Agen: Impr. Virgile Lenthéric, 1887), 57–8. 69 Trémouïlle, “L’Assemblée provinciale d’Anjou,” 458; Jay Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 173–4, 216, 263. 70 AN H1597; M. l’abbé de Lubersac, Vues politiques et patriotiques sur l’administration des finances de la France contenant un plan raisonné d’administrations ou d’assemblées provinciales, etc.: dédiées a monsieur, frere du roi (Paris: De l’Imprimerie de Monsieur, 1787), 72, 259. 71 Procès-verbal des séances de l’Assemblée Provinciale de L’Isle de France. Tenues à Melun, en novembre & décembre 1787 (Sens: Chez la Ve Tarbé, 1788), lxxii-lxxxii, 441–52. 72 Ibid., 236. See also pp. lxxii-lxxxii, 441–52. 73 AN H1597. 74 Boscary, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guyenne, 35–6, 66, 68. 75 Ibid., 223–4. 76 Ibid., 140–1, 237–8; Procès verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guienne, 45–7, 50–1, 247, 252–5, 259–60. 77 Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 39, 41, 47, 50. 78 Augustin Rioche, De l’administration des vingtièmes sous l’ancien régime (Paris: A. Rousseau, 1904), 120, 130. 79 Lavergne, Les assemblées provinciales, 298–9. 80 AN H1602; AN C/12; Procès-verbal des séances [20–24 août 1787] de l’Assemblée provinciale d’Alsace (Strasbourg: F.G. Levrault, 1787), 135–40; Charles-Marie Créquy, Résultat des assemblées provinciales, à l’usage des états d’une province (Brussels: [s.n.], 1788), 63. 81 Assemblée provinciale, Procès-verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale de l’Orléanois, tenue à Orléans aux mois de novembre & de décembre 1787 (Orléans: Impr. de Couret de Villeneuve, 1787), 196. 82 Créquy, Résultat des assemblées provinciales, 57–9; Henry Fromont, Essai sur l’administration de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité d’Orléans (1787–1790) (Paris: Impr. Faculté de Médecine, 1907), 262–9. 83 Cécile Souchon, “L’assemblée d’élection de Laon et les ‘affaires du pays’,” in Les pouvoirs régionaux: représentants et élus (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1987), 112–13. 84 Boscary, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guyenne, 330–1, 336–9. 85 Beik, Absolutism and Society, 13, 140, 245–6, 295–7, 308, 314; Dee, Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV’s France, 60, 104, 144, 151, 162, 167–9, 173. 86 BN Collection Joly de Fleury 1040, fols. 85, 87–8; Jean Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné et les affaires publiques dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1942), 2:128, 163–7; Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 311–12. 87 AN H1590. 88 Ibid. 89 Procès-verbal de la Commission intermédiaire de l’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Normandie, 1787– 1790: Analyse et extraits, ed. Ernest Lebègue (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1916), 43n no. 2, 83–5. 90 AN H1590. 91 Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 108, 309–12, 352. 92 William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 13–14, 140. 93 This account is taken from Paul Bastid, Sieyès et sa pensée (Paris: Hachette 1970, new edition revised and augmented), 46–8.

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94 J.-M.-A. Servan, Réflexions sur la réformation des états provinciaux (S.l.: s.n., 1788), 25. 95 Abbé L. Berthe, “Les Assemblées provinciales et l’opinion publique en 1787–1788 d’après la correspondence du bureau de l’académie d’Arras,” Revue du Nord 48, 189 (1966), 188–9. 96 AN H1597. 97 AN H1465. 98 Ibid. 99 Lavergne, Les assemblées provinciales, 166. For Auvergne, see Francisque Balthazard Mège, Chroniques et récits de la Révolution dans la ci-devant Basse-Auvergne ... L’Assemblée Provinciale (1787–1790) (Paris: s.n., 1867), 20. 100 Galard-Magnas, Comte – Rendu des séances de l’administration provinciale d’Auch, 50–1, 61, 369–95, 401. 101 Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 160, 162. 102 Gail Bossenga, The Politics of Privilege: Old Regime and Revolution in Lille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 202–3; Isser Woloch and Gregory Brown, Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715–1789, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 309.

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Berry: the emergence of anti-noble politics

2

The emergence of anti-noble politics and the provincial assembly of Berry

Bengy de Puyvallée – executive agent of the provincial assembly and then deputy of the Second Estate to the Estates General – hailed from a noble family with siblings in the magistracy and officer corps of the royal armies. He expressed devotion to the king and to separate orders in the Estates General in the summer of 1789. When he returned from Versailles to Berry in the autumn to confer with his constituents, he found the populace so agitated that he had to go back to the capital incognito. Along the way, Bengy de Puyvallée allegedly overheard a boatman say, “If I happened to come across some aristocrat deputy in my ferry, I would throw him in the Loire.”1 The question raised in what follows is how things came to this point. Jacques Necker, the director general of finances, intended to alleviate this sort of political tension when he had Louis XVI make Berry the site of the first provincial assembly in 1778. According to Joseph-Alphonse de Véri – abbot of Saint-Satur, a frequent presence in the royal court, and member of the assembly – Necker created the Assembly of Berry “for the distribution of the taxes and the making of roads … Necker felt that such an administration was more useful to the taxpayers, more peaceful for the people and less bothersome for the minister of Finances who found himself crushed by the mountain of individual complaints.”2 Lucien Lachaze, author of the last book on the Assembly of Berry, a 604-page tome published in 1909, showed that the Assembly improved the network of roads and sent commissioners to work with inhabitants and distribute the taxes more equitably. Yet overall, Lachaze concluded, like Pierre Renouvin, author of the standard work on all of the provincial assemblies (published in 1921), that the Assembly of Berry was made up of unelected privileged elites, remained subject to royal control, and accomplished very little.3 While one can only agree with these conclusions, they do not address the fundamental questions of why the crown appointed privileged elites, why it could not work with the elites on reforms, and why, in the years following

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the last meeting of the assembly in 1786, people in Berry expressed enmity toward the nobility. The answers all relate to the feudal corporatist elite of the Old Regime. Several nobles embraced the prospect of serving in the Assembly of Berry, improving the administration, and developing the provincial economy. Yet they faced grandees, such as the comte d’Artois, the seigneur with the most extensive domains in Berry, who set the standard for defending and exploiting exclusive rights. The Assembly thus ran into obstacles on two levels. First, the monarchy, notwithstanding reformers such as Necker, protected feudal laws beneficial to grandees in Versailles. Second, although a number of elites sought to turn the Assembly to positive ends, much of their property consisted of lordships and offices, the value of which depended on preventing the Assembly from extending its sphere of activity at the expense of their jurisdictional rights. For commoners, this patrimonial authority not only precluded political participation, but also entailed privileges and exactions harmful to their livelihood. The people of Berry thus came to see the nobles as obstacles to civic renewal and joined a revolution against them when the crisis of the regime offered the opportunity in 1789. Ultimately, what is at stake here is not simply an underdeveloped province in the center of France but the experiences of the inhabitants of rural areas and small towns across the country. The foregoing argument should therefore interest anyone who cares about why people sought revolutionary change and why they came to see nobles such as Bengy de Puyvallée as their adversaries. To answer these questions, this chapter begins with an examination of the clergymen, nobles, and commoners named by the king to the Assembly, especially addressing their views on, and holdings of, seigneurial property. The second part comprises an analysis their policies with regard to the administration and taxes. The conclusion covers the ways in which the seigneurial regime, administration, and taxes of Berry bore on the crisis of 1789. The provincial assembly and seigneurial regime of Berry The members of the Assembly of Berry recognized that the seigneurial regime perpetuated economic inertia and administrative inefficiency, but ultimately found it too ingrained to extricate from the social fabric of the province. They convened in 1778 as the first assembly of its kind. Louis XVI and Necker appointed prominent personages to give it as much luster as possible. They named Louis-Phélypeaux de la Vrillière, the archbishop of Bourges, capital of Berry, as president. Phélypeaux, whose benefice provided an income of 100,000 livres a year, hailed from a long line of royal ministers. In addition

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to the abbé de Véri, mentioned above, the other ten deputies of the First Estate comprised high clergymen, abbots, and canons. The twelve deputies of the Second Estate included great lords such as Charles-Léon, marquis de Bouthillier de Beaujeu. They included Charles-Antoine Léonard de Sahuguet d’Amarzit d’Espagnac, seigneur de Sancerre and beneficiary of the lucrative exchanges of domains with the king made during the ministry of Calonne. The king named the squire M. Soumard – seigneur de Crosse, mayor of Bourges, and president of the bailliage court – first deputy of the Third Estate, and the king filled the other twenty-three seats of the Third Estate with purchasers of seigneurial rights, venal judges, and municipal officers.4 These dignitaries traditionally defended their public honors and functions against the encroachments of the crown, the pretentions of other elites, and the occasional insubordination of the common people. By appointing them to the Assembly of Berry, Louis XVI and Necker hoped to make them representatives responsible for the people’s welfare and focus their regard on the problems facing the province. One of these problems was “feudalism.” Argenson and Le Trosne, we have seen, held it responsible for peasant poverty and agricultural backwardness. They recognized, however, that the king possessed royal domains, even ultimate feudal rights over the entire realm. Indeed, champions of absolute monarchy insisted upon the king’s inalienable and constitutional right of ultimate jurisdiction over every lord’s sphere of authority, from one end of France to the other. In its capacity as the highest law court, the Parlement of Paris burned a book outlining a proposal for the reimbursement and abolition of feudal rights. The Parlement condemned the proposal for shaking “the foundations of the state” and issued arrest warrants for those involved in the publication.5 Nevertheless, only a few years later, the feudal regime became a subject for reform when the Assembly of Berry sponsored an essay competition on the means to improve the administration and standard of living in rural areas. The stated goal of the competition was to determine how to augment the population of the province. The Assembly received eighteen essays, mostly from jurists, of which twelve are located in the archives. The essayists claimed that substandard husbandry in Berry had led to demographic decline. They argued that landlords preferred life in the towns free from the burdens borne by rural inhabitants. The landlords’ reliance on sharecropping removed any incentive for the farmers to invest in improving the soil. Leases should instead entail a fixed sum so that the cultivator would reap the rewards of hard work and good harvests. The tithe and terrage, feudal levies in kind on the harvests of certain crops and fields, prevented farmers from accumulating capital. Peasants did not prepare untilled lands for crops and livestock for fear that they would be

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subject to these levies. The peasants should therefore free themselves from the levies by making one-time payments to the lords. One author even proposed progressive taxation to encourage the division of the large properties into smaller farms. Another called for exempting the peasants from the tax, known as the taille, collected from commoners. This author advocated a new rural code and tribunals staffed by peasants to judge agricultural litigation.6 The Assembly of Berry thus gave the members a critical perspective on the seigneurial regime. One reads in their minutes that sharecroppers did not have plots of land or pasture to enclose and improve, rented cattle on extortionate terms, fell into debt, and even lacked adequate nourishment. The people of established ranks, the Assembly affirmed, lived in the towns, where they had influence over the administration and could foist the tax burden onto the rural inhabitants. “This disorder derives from … the favor accorded to ranks, to credit, even to wealth, against the defenseless class of obscure inhabitants of the countryside.”7 To rectify these problems, Armand-Joseph duc de Béthune-Charost – a peer of France, lieutenant general of Picardy and Boulonais, governor of Calais, president of the Estates of Brittany, knight of the military order of Saint-Louis and member of the Assembly of Berry – intended to allow the peasants of his domain to give him a one-time disbursement and cease paying seigneurial dues. Charost planned to convert the goods he collected by use of his feudal monopoly over mills and ovens (banalités) into a money rent. He meant to relinquish the tolls he collected on merchandise passing through his domain. Charost hoped to abolish the corvée labor and ceremonies of homage to which he was entitled. Jean-Marie Heurtault de Lamerville, an assistant to the Assembly, made a presentation to this body about the property he purchased with the intention of creating a specialized farm run in accordance with the latest agronomic ideas.8 The provincial assembly would have to bring along some of the most powerful figures in the realm if it were to generalize the agricultural reforms pioneered by its members. Nobles in Versailles had a primary stake in the parcelized sovereignty characteristic of the seigneurial jurisdictions that blanketed Berry. The cardinal François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis, for example – a friend of Madame Pompadour (the favorite of Louis XV), ambassador to Venice, and secretary of state for foreign affairs – had jurisdiction over La Charité, one of the principal towns of Berry. His lordship entitled him to name the officers of La Charité’s bailliage court.9 From 1758 to 1760, the aldermen decided, in assemblies of residents, to litigate against the cardinal’s tithe and right of halage, authorizing tolls on goods passing through the area, as well as against his levies on a range of products sold in La Charité. In 1759, the residents wrote to the intendant, appointed by

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the king to oversee the administration of Berry, that the seigneurial officers “have pushed to the limit their usurpation of the rights of the community.” La Charité’s notables and residents alleged that the principal officer did not “spare any means whatsoever to avenge himself against those who … dared dispute the rights he usurped.”10 Charand, Bernis’s receiver of rights on wine, wrote to him in 1759 that the aldermen, in “tumultuous” assemblies of their supporters, ignored his prerogative to name the municipal officials. These false notables prepared petitions “by substituting … for the true notables a mob of the vilest artisans, even several beggars, so as to impose themselves through numbers.”11 Charand therefore requested Bernis’s authorization to proceed against the “illicit” assemblies. “I see my lord a general upheaval and unfortunate developments for the town if authority does not come to its rescue … The miserable town … will find itself oppressed if it continues to be led by people without birth …, having nothing in common but passion.”12 Bernis acted on Charand’s request, using his influence in Versailles to have the so-called false notables expelled from the municipality. He then visited La Charité in 1761. As he entered the town, the mayor and aldermen, decked out in ceremonial robes and preceded by the bailiffs and valets, hastened to get close to him and offer honorary wine carried by drummers.13 In 1776, Louis XVI turned Berry into an appanage, granting his brother, the comte d’Artois, chateaux and towers to oversee the province and his properties. Local lords then had to maintain records in the bureau of finances of Bourges of the feudal ceremonies of homage performed before Artois’s officers. In 1784, these officers – having previously permitted the mayor, aldermen, and notables of Bourges to meet in electoral assemblies – invoked Artois’s seigneurial right to name the town officials. The mayor and aldermen of Bourges protested, but the royal council upheld Artois’s right to approve all municipal officers. Subsequently, the villages and towns of Mehun, Argenton, and Châteauroux, like Bourges, had to obtain Artois’s approval for all ­municipal officials.14 By enforcing their extensive rights, the grandees close to the king set an example for local lords. Many of these provincial seigneurs required the peasants to do unpaid corvée labor and chateau guard duty, as well as pay tolls at markets and butchers’ shops. The peasants had to pay to use seigneurial mills and ovens, and comply with the terrage by annually handing over a portion of the harvest from certain fields. The lords maintained seigneurial tribunals to enforce these obligations and adjudicate disputes. Their judges often oversaw the election of village syndics and tax collectors.15 In one of numerous cases found in the archives, the syndic of Clion wrote

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to the provincial assembly at the end of 1782 that the lord’s steward “ruined the proprietors, the small ones especially, by the rigor with which he has collected the seigneurial dues.”16 The peasants of Saulnay wrote – in the grievance list (cahier de doléances) composed during the elections to the Estates General in the spring of 1789 – that “the lord summoned … these farmers and laborers certain times of the years, sometimes the most critical times, to comply with the … corvée, that is the days using their arms or their carts and oxen without being paid or nourished.”17 The peasants of Berry depended on the labor and sale of oxen more than they did on the commerce of wheat and wool. They needed uncultivated areas and wilderness for grazing. The lords, however, extended the properties worked by their sharecroppers so as to gain revenue from the products of sheep nourished on these untilled lands.18 The syndic and inhabitants of Givardon, for instance, wrote to the intendant in 1785 that the seigneur de Sagonne invoked the customary law of the province to take their common land, shared with seven other villages, and give it to Ruby de Bergenise, the subdelegate working under the intendant in Sancoins. The common land represented “the sole resource of the inhabitants … to nourish the cows … that furnish the primary subsistence of the most miserable.” The inhabitants of Givardon had long relied on legal titles to defend the land, but “following the example of your subdelegate, several other individuals also take possession of the parts suitable to them, have sheepfolds built … and propose having the parts … useful to them … closed off … The usurpers have ordered the confiscation of the livestock we have taken into the commons.”19 It was difficult for the peasants to contest seigneurial usurpations of this sort. Litigation was expensive, and the powerful and wealthy sometimes prolonged it in order to burden social inferiors with court costs, keep them in line, and punish their disobedience. Yet every now and then, the peasants were absolutely certain of the justice of their cause or burned with desire to see the lord suffer defeat.20 The intendant generally sought to prevent things from coming to this point. His primary responsibility was the collection of taxes, which could be imperiled by judicial fees and peasant insolvency. For this reason, the intendant usually conciliated the parties. In 1784, for instance, he wrote to his subdelegate of a request of the syndic and inhabitants of Buley for “authorization to sue sieur Hyde, seigneur of the land of Neuville, who seized … part of the common land of the parish. I would desire, before according the requested authorization, that you familiarize yourself with the dispute and do all you can to conciliate the parties.”21 The monarchy, however, could not systematically force the peasants to settle with elites intent on appropriating their common lands. If it did so, it would no longer be seen as an impartial arbiter and might drive the peasants into

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extralegal disorderly actions.22 The intendant therefore occasionally allowed peasant communities to use the tribunals. These cases, one should observe, did not concern the lords. Litigation over feudal customs could lead to instructive debates which the intendants preferred to avoid. If the peasants learned to challenge the seigneurs, they might make it a habit, and upset the established order. Instead, the intendant directed the peasants against non-­seigneurial proprietors. As an illustration, the subdelegate wrote to the intendant in 1781 that his predecessor “had made me responsible for committing the inhabitants … of Saint-Vérain to come to an agreement relative to their use-rights.” The preceding intendant thought that … there was a dispute between the seigneur and inhabitants; but … I have learned with certitude that it was not at all question of the seigneur, but merely of several unknown individuals, without any ties to the lord, who usurped the use-rights … on their own initiative [and] cleared part of the common land … Since it is impossible to confer with these sorts of people, or to enter into an arrangement, I thought it unnecessary for the inhabitants of Saint-Vérain to ask for your authorization to sue the usurpers whose expulsion is important to the interests and security of the public.23

As this case illustrates, the intendant might allow the peasants to litigate over the abuses of non-seigneurial landlords. The Assembly of Berry, we have seen, expressed even more concern than did the intendant about the problems facing the peasantry. But its members could not do much in the face of legal customs joining court nobles to provincial lords in defense of the established order. In other words, what contemporaries called the constitution of the monarchy held up and thus shaped the course of events, and prevented reformers from enacting policies generally recognized as advantageous. The intendant maintained order in accordance with seigneurial customs offering members of the king’s family, grandees of the royal court, and local lords economic advantages and authority over the inhabitants. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the Assembly did not take up any measures to limit manorial rights even though the members recognized these rights as the cause of poverty in the province. It was also for this reason that the plans of Heurtault de Lamerville and the duc de Charost came to naught. Given the customary practices of seigneurs across Berry, it proved impossible for individual lords to swim against the current and convert their feudal property into lands managed according to state-of-the-art methods. Right down to the end of the Old Regime, the accounts of Lamerville’s domains, which he had planned to have cultivated in line with enlightened principles, reveal a relationship of master to dependents denounced by the Physiocrats, the Assembly, and Lamerville himself. His

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advances to the sharecroppers thrust them deeper into debts they could never reimburse and exacerbated their poverty.24 Charost, likewise, abandoned his plan to free the peasants from his seigneurial rights. He eventually ceded his lordship over Saint-Amand to François-Marie comte de Fougières, vicomte de Brosse, general lieutenant of Bourbonnais, and first master of the comte d’Artois’s manor. The inhabitants litigated against this concession, but the Parlement of Paris ruled against them in 1783 and 1785, confirming Fougières as the beneficiary, and Charost the ultimate possessor of the right to collect revenue from ovens, butchers’ shops, and markets, and to name the officers and judges. The residents of SaintAmand thus remained subject to the droit de bourgeoisie consisting of monetary dues, a bushel of oats, and labor services. Fougières secured rights over ponds, mills, woods, houses, meadows, heaths, and plowed fields, as well as over boats to cross the rivers. He secured a levy on the harvests of all the lands of Saint-Amand, Chagny, Orval, Bruère, and Épineuil, and a tithe on the harvests of an even greater number of villages. The ruling obliged the inhabitants to pay all of the arrears since 1765 and all of Charost’s legal fees.25 According to the inhabitants of Saint-Amand, the tribunals upheld odious customs that turned the relations of master and servant into law. Some inhabitants wished to appeal the rulings to the royal council, but moderates prevailed, and they agreed to negotiate. They formally recognized Charost’s seigneurial rights, and he waived some of the arrears and legal fees. In 1786, when Fougières exercised his right to name the mayor and lieutenant mayor of Saint-Amand, the nominees refused to accept the posts. In December 1788 and January 1789, town officials, and a great number of inhabitants, deliberated not only that they would freely elect their municipal officers, but also that they should have as many deputies in the Estates General as the first two estates combined, and that votes should be counted in this body by head rather than by order.26 The governmental and fiscal reforms of the provincial assembly Thus, reformers of the Assembly of Berry proved helpless in the face of the seigneurial regime. The demands of the people of Saint-Amand suggest that political tension grew as a result. One notices parallel developments in the Assembly’s deliberations on taxes, which occupied the largest share of its sessions. These discussions portended momentous changes. Overall, the inhabitants of Berry surrendered more income to the state than to the lords. The seigneurs – as the foregoing cases make clear – utilized their jurisdictional rights primarily to monopolize valuable grazing lands. Dues, to be sure, could

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amount to over a third of the direct taxes. The peasants of Fontgombault, for example, stated in their cahier that they paid 960 livres in land rents and constituted rents, 666 in seigneurial cens and rentes, 945 in tailles, 339 in capitation (tax paid by nobles and commoners alike), 90 in fees for the costs of collection, 208 for roadwork, and other minor sums for a total of 3,423.27 In general, peasant communities of Berry paid more attention to state taxes than to seigneurial dues. The inhabitants of Azay-le-Ferron, for example, complained in their cahier about a taille of 4,761 livres, capitation of 5,154, vingtièmes (universal tax on nobles and commoners) of 2,869, the gabelle salt tax of 4,200, and new rates of 1,553 for roadwork, together amounting to 18,538 livres. Taken together, Berry’s direct taxes, essentially the taille, capitation, and vingtièmes, amounted to 2,477,798 livres in 1787 and 2,631,482 in 1788, roughly the same annual amount since 1779. Of this sum, about 1,200,000 came from the taille, a little more than 4 livres per person, the lowest rate in the realm.28 The fiscal contribution of the province came more from indirect taxes, above all the gabelle. Despite the low level of direct taxation, the Assembly of Berry faced opposition in its very first session when it sought to impose a minor levy to fund improvements to the generally recognized poor state of the provincial roads. The Assembly determined that it would take an eternity to build a new network of roads with the existing system based on the unpaid corvée labor of rural inhabitants. The problem was how to raise the funds to replace this system. The abbé de Véri wrote in his journal, “the nobility and clergy, being exempt from the corvée, did not want to be … subject to a tax substituted for the corvée.”29 The ecclesiastics made the bishop of Bourges, president of the provincial assembly, fear to be condemned by the next assembly of the clergy, if under his presidency the provincial assembly cut into the privileges of his order. The members of the Third Estate, of whom almost all are exempt from the corvée by their offices, rebellious on account of the injustice of this vexation on the people and shocked by the phrases of vanity of several nobles and ecclesiastics, wanted everyone to pay without recognizing any exemptions.30

The Third Estate claimed that exemptions for the clergy and nobility would augment the tax 25 to 50 percent for everyone else. Yet it was feared that “the members of the nobility might withdraw if one attacked their privileges.”31 Thus, to avert dissolution, the Assembly had to fund roadwork by adding to the taille and retaining the exemptions of clergymen, nobles, officers of the tax farms, guards of the royal stables, masters of the postal service, inspectors and proprietors of manufactures, and contractors in charge of providing for soldiers encamped behind the lines. The cour des aides, the high fiscal

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court of the realm, informed the controller general in 1781 that some office holders paid the taille but had not had to labor on the roads. Making these office holders liable for the added sums, along with other commoners, stripped them of a right preserved by other members of the privileged orders.32 Although many townspeople thus felt aggrieved by the reform, no one could deny its benefits. The Assembly of Berry invited villagers to name the tax collectors, evaluate the contractors’ bids, and pay for the roadwork from the sums added to the taille. This system, by avoiding the venal receivers, who took a percentage of the fiscal proceeds before they reached royal treasuries, addressed one of the villagers’ main complaints about taxation. It raised 300,000 to 400,000 livres a year for the roadwork and spared people the burden of unpaid labor.33 The reform came under attack after Necker’s dismissal in 1781 brought the provincial assemblies into disfavor in Versailles. Factions of courtiers vied for the king’s attention in their pursuit of pensions and power. Competition among the nobles in Versailles deprived royal decision making of bureaucratic rationality. The king’s ministers had to balance the aristocratic cliques if they were to set an agenda for the country. Necker proved unable to do so, as his opponents succeeded in rallying court nobles against the alleged injustice of assemblies at variance with the distinct treaties and privileges by which the provinces had joined the realm in past centuries.34 For this reason, the intendant and the chief engineer of Haute-Guyenne, the second province to receive an assembly in 1779, regained control over roadwork after Necker left the government. In Berry, the Assembly fought off the efforts of the ministry to insinuate the intendant’s subdelegate into the bidding for projects, retained the system of local control, and improved the network of thoroughfares. The Assembly oversaw the construction of many roads and better integrated Berry into the realm.35 Conversely, the other taxes of Berry, as the enumeration of village obligations mentioned above attests, divided each locality from the next. Fiscal dispensations and seigneurial rights varied from parish to parish. Recent studies of the monarchy highlight the distinct privileges of its various groups of subjects. These distinctions militated against national unity.36 The provincial assembly lamented this problem in its minutes, bewailing the disjointedness of the administration, which permitted the privileged orders to turn legal customs to their advantage by withdrawing assessments from the tax rolls and foisting their share onto the other inhabitants. As an illustration of this practice, the intendant received a report from Sancerre in 1785 of the discontent caused by the decision of the cour des aides to grant an office holder’s request for exemption from the taille, a decision that obliged the other residents to cover his portion. The intendant informed the controller general: “the composition

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of the taille rolls … excited … a movement of tense agitation … among … the inferior class.” He expressed concern lest “the people accustom themselves to gathering in crowds which will lead to violence” and advised the subdelegate to “imprison, after the agitation ceases … the principal instigator.”37 To head off such unrest, the intendant sometimes prevented particularly disruptive elites from using the courts. To take a case in point, letters exchanged between the intendant and subdelegates in 1779 and the following years show that the sieur Peyrot, holder of property and judicial rights over most of the parish of Villers near Châteauroux, instilled fear in the villagers, browbeat the tax collector into moderating his assessment, and exempted his horses, oxen, and valets, as well as his brother, from the corvée on the roads. The priest brought these abuses to the attention of the subdelegate. In retaliation, Peyrot gathered his extended family, sharecroppers, tenants, and guards in a self-styled parish assembly to request authorization to sue the priest for appropriating the village commons. Nevertheless, considering the ­disruptiveness of Peyrot’s actions, the intendant refused him the use of the courts.38 The intendant, moreover, sometimes permitted commoners to litigate against local elites over certain taxes. This permission contrasted with his stance on seigneurial rights. Whereas litigation against lords might upset the established order, cases involving fiscal issues made the monarchy seem impartial while protecting the peasants’ ability to pay taxes. These cases did not question the legality of privileges, but rather the tendency of lords to seek immunities for more than one domain, for fields farmed by tenants, for newly cleared lands, or for other irregular situations. The royal council, for instance, granted the appeal of the community of Naillac and quashed a ruling of the cour des aides of 1784. This ruling had upheld a decision of the élection of Le Blanc of 1780 to permit the sieur de Lafond to remove his assessment for about 8.5 hectares of arable fields and meadows from the taille rolls of Naillac and add it to the rolls taking account of his holdings in the province of La Marche. Seigneurs often held lands in different areas and paid all of their taxes in the parish containing their principal holdings. The inhabitants’ and collectors’ lack of knowledge of the other holdings could allow the landowners to avoid taxation. In this case, the rulings of the cour des aides and élection had made the inhabitants of Naillac cover the deficit in the fiscal rolls caused by the transfer of de Lafond’s tax liability. In quashing the rulings of the cour des aides and élection, the royal decision of 1786 stated that the transfer of the tax encouraged fraud by obliging the collectors to take the word of de Lafond about the value of distant assets.39 The problem with such legal challenges was the cost. This case from Naillac resembled several others from the 1780s, all of which involved legal

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fees for a series of appeals all the way up to the royal council. Indeed, a common grievance of the peasants in the spring of 1789 was that they paid fees to the venal judges responsible for upholding seigneurial and fiscal privileges. The judges enjoyed immunities from the exactions they enforced in the courts. The treasurers of France, for instance, holders of offices in the twenty-nine bureaus of finances of the realm, safeguarded the king’s seigneurial titles, registered letters of nobility, auctioned off the leases to collect municipal indirect taxes, adjudicated litigation regarding the royal roads, and worked with the intendants to oversee the distribution of taxes. They enjoyed hereditary nobility after two generations of service. The provincial tax receiver annually gave the bureau of finances of Bourges, composed of thirty-three judges, 67,000 livres in monetary rewards known as gages.40 The tax receiver gave the élection of Bourges, one of the seven district fiscal courts of Berry, 4,537 livres a year. The eight magistrates of this court adjudicated tax disputes, received the royal fiscal demands from the bureaus of finances, and, in collaboration with the intendant, assessed and distributed the taxes among the parishes. In a case indicative of this legal jurisdiction, located in the minutes of the élection of Bourges from November 2, 1782, the judges acted on a request from the general director of the royal tax farms in Paris by accompanying the local officer of the aides (indirect tax) to the house of a shopkeeper, searching the premises, and seizing illegal bottles worth 640 livres.41 Common subjects expressed negative opinions about the venal magistracy in 55 of 122 cahiers written in parishes of Berry in the spring of 1789. In one of these cahiers, the inhabitants of Subtray-Mézières stated that hereditary offices in the judiciary were the source of abuses and extra burdens. “What proportion is there between the money spent on offices and the immense advantages derived from them?” The taxpayers had to compensate for the exemptions of the venal officers. People acceded to offices without talent or merit. A competition, the cahier concluded, would be much fairer.42 The abbé de Véri thought that Necker had naively overlooked the opposition likely to follow if the provincial assembly were to seek to reform the traditional jurisdictions: I see obstacles emerging from the tribunals, Parlement, Cour des comptes43 and élections;44 from the members of the Royal Council who are destined for the provincial intendancies, from the old councilors of State who are afraid for monarchical authority; and lastly from the nobility of other provinces which has become rebellious on account of the overly-pronounced precedence benefitting the clergy.45

Such opposition became apparent when the provincial assembly offered villagers the right to enlist experts to distribute the taille. To ensure the

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implementation of this reform, Necker authorized the assembly to take from the venal judiciary the right to adjudicate fiscal litigation. The judges of the élections objected that Necker’s action tarnished their status and diminished the value of their offices. The cour des aides protested to the king that the élections had jurisdiction over taxes and that transferring it to the assembly constituted an illegal abuse of power. The assembly, Necker retorted, would have little chance of success if the traditional jurisdictions remained intact. The assembly would come across untaxed properties and would face lawsuits when seeking to add them to the fiscal rolls. The assembly would not charge for settling these disputes, whereas the ordinary courts permitted the rich to crush the poor with legal fees. Necker affirmed that the fees cost the poor five times what they could hope for in reductions from winning their cases. Above all, offering the assembly jurisdiction over fiscal matters would help it to prevail over the foot-dragging of landlords and thus to compose accurate rolls. The intendant issued a protest in 1780 on the side of the cour des aides and élections, but the royal council upheld the assembly’s jurisdiction.46 This reform not only eased the fiscal burden on the populace but also promised to alter the balance of power in the countryside. Rural communities responded to the opportunity with a stream of petitions asking the provincial assembly to intervene against village elites. The petitioners claimed that the seigneurs controlled most of the land and intimidated the collectors into assigning their taxes to the other inhabitants. Consider the thirteen signatories – “all day laborers” (manouvriers) of the parish of Villabon in the district (élection) of Bourges – of a letter to the assembly. They claimed that “the taille cannot be distributed more unequally and with any less proportionality. The poorest pay … six times more than do the rich proprietors and tenant farmers. It is in vain that … the overtaxed bring the evidence to the collectors.” Several residents, “who ruin all the … inhabitants under their jurisdiction,” inspire fear in the collectors. The collectors “are careful not to find a solution for the abuse … They believe themselves free from the obligation to reform the tax rolls by stating that they do not want to expose themselves to the disapprobation of those under whose jurisdiction they live.” The “day laborers” then asked the assembly to send an agent to distribute the taille for 1782.47 The provincial assembly acted on several petitions of this sort.48 The inhabitants of Saint-Amand, for example, wrote to the controller general in 1781 that residents with status and wealth, and the power to advance or hinder the careers of the collectors, had their assessments withdrawn from the fiscal rolls and placed on a separate one kept by the intendant, a practice known as tax d’office. As a result, many nobles, seigneurs, and office holders paid hardly any taxes on revenue from annuities. Owners of small plots, by contrast, had high assessments. The inhabitants argued that the injustice was compounded

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when the rolls of the taille were used as the basis for the new tax for roadwork. The oligarchy in control of Saint-Amand used “despotism,” the inhabitants claimed, to intimidate persons appointed to rectify the problem.49 The provincial assembly wrote to royal ministers in 1782 that the officers named by the comte de Fougières, lord of Saint-Amand, sought to retain the right to administer the taille according to the inaccurate rolls. The assembly listed several magistrates better qualified to distribute the taxes. A letter from the crown authorized one of them to go to Saint-Amand and, against the wishes of Fougières’s officers, call together the inhabitants, bourgeois notables, vintners, and other residents of this station to obtain accurate information for the collectors.50 The venal officers of the fiscal courts did not reconcile themselves to these reforms. In 1780, the élection of Bourges ruled to relieve the provincial assembly’s appointee, the sieur Louis Corbinon, a notary, of his remit to collect the taxes of the parishes of St. Bonnet and St. Privé. The assembly appealed to the crown that the élection thwarted all of its undertakings. The royal council quashed the ruling, reinstated Corbinon, and declared that the élection had exceeded its competence. However, in 1782–83, after the dismissal of Necker, when opinion in Versailles turned against the provincial assemblies, the king restored the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts, under the supervision of the intendant, and left the assembly solely with the right to end litigation by means of conciliation. Five members of the assembly resigned in protest, and the stream of peasant petitions, asking the assembly to intervene against village elites and rectify the tax rolls, dwindled to a trickle.51 The provincial assembly faced further obstacles to its efforts to reform the vingtièmes. It took over responsibility for collecting this tax in 1779 and dismissed the ten royal agents, whose investigations of landed incomes had added 140,000 livres to the fiscal rolls over the previous decade. The assembly hoped to win the support and cooperation of the taxpayers by putting an end to investigations widely disliked by the populace. It invited parish assemblies to elect assessors responsible for setting the vingtième rates. One of the members of the provincial assembly, the duc de Charost, and several other great proprietors, set an example for the landed classes by going along with this initiative and disclosing all of their revenue to the assessors.52 However, Bengnet, the comte d’Artois’s agent, wrote to the Assembly of Berry that the assessors might undermine the privileges of the duchies, earldoms, and seigneuries of his appanage. According to a deliberation of the Assembly, “all … the woods that have more considerable contents belong to … the comte d’Artois, apanagiste of Berry.” The Assembly wrote that it received from Bengnet “a ruling of the royal council of February 28, 1781 which fixed … the contribution for the vingtièmes of all the properties, assets,

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and seigneurial rights included in … the domains the comte d’Artois possesses … After this ruling … it seems that there must not be any difficulty to accord the removal of the extra burdens as demanded by Bengnet.”53 In this way, the crown prevented village representatives from accurately assessing the vingtième taxes of the greatest property holder in the province. Given this dispensation for Artois, how could the Assembly of Berry ask other lords to divulge their landed incomes? In the event, the privileged classes proved just as reticent as Artois to cooperate with the assessors. By 1783, only 23.6 percent of the nobles had declared their income, and over 30 percent of this compliant minority had made flawed and unusable declarations. Only 230 of Berry’s 723 parishes attended to their responsibilities for the vingtièmes. The Assembly received complaints that the new system of village elections of assessors suffered from injustice, special treatment, and personal interest. The largest proprietors used their influence over sharecroppers and laborers to avoid requests to declare their income. Overall, the Assembly’s assumption of responsibility for the vingtièmes led to more administrative confusion than had existed previously.54 The provincial assembly did not even take up the main burden on the inhabitants. In Berry, indirect taxes amounted to 5.5 million a year, more than twice as much as all the direct taxes combined. The gabelle, the largest indirect tax, accorded nobles, ecclesiastics, and many office holders a free provision of salt or a moderate price of 10 livres the minot (72 liters). Commoners had to purchase a minot at heavily taxed monopoly prices, an average of over 20 livres per person. The crown authorized the tax farmers to impose fines on smugglers, whip and brand with a hot iron offenders late in paying the fines, and send recidivists to the galleys for three years. The inhabitants joined several revolts in support of smugglers and against gabelle agents in the 1760s and 1770s. In one such incident, a cabaret owner, after witnessing the arrest of smugglers, alerted the laborers of the ironworks of Ardentes in the forest of Châteauroux. The laborers arrived armed and angry, freed the captives, and forced the gabelle officers to flee.55 When invited to express their views in the spring of 1789, nearly every list of grievances composed in the villages of Berry condemned the gabelle. The residents of Celon, in the district of Le Châtre, for example, asked for the abolition of the gabelle in view of the heavy fees accruing to the tax farmers. Fields went untilled, they informed, due to ravages caused by the constant battles pitting tax farmers against smugglers.56 M. de Luzignan proposed to fellow members of the provincial assembly in 1780 that – in view of the great burden caused by the gabelle and of the sums reaped by the tax farmers – they replace it by adding to the capitation. The duc de Charost submitted a similar plan to the king six years later. But the king and

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the assembly ignored these plans. The king did not want to tamper with his primary stream of revenue from Berry, and the assembly avoided the conflict likely to result from attempting to make the privileged orders pay additional direct taxes on their lands.57 The provincial assembly and revolutionary politics Alexis de Tocqueville argued that “the very men who had the most to fear from the anger of the masses … members of the government, high official, [and] the privileged few … drew attention to the monstrous vices of the institutions which pressed most heavily on the common people … And thus championing the cause of the underprivileged they made them acutely conscious of their wrongs.”58 Given the evidence presented in this chapter, it may indeed be true that the upper classes, by discussing reforms in the provincial assembly, drew attention to iniquities and thus stoked political passions when their initiatives faltered in the face of entrenched privileges. As we have seen, one reason the assembly could not overcome these privileges was the factional struggles in the royal court, which led to Necker’s dismissal, turned the tide against the assemblies, and deprived the one in Berry of the backing needed for its initiatives. Some court nobles, however, owing to their participation in the provincial assembly, had a different perspective from their peers in Versailles, a perspective more attuned to the problems facing Berry. The abbé de Véri, for instance – rather than join his peers in Versailles in obstructing the Assembly’s work, discrediting Necker, and reaping the advantages of a change in the ministry – defied his fellow abbots and canons over the universal tax to finance roadwork. He declared his opposition to “the principle of exemption itself.” Véri wrote that when the king added Charost to the Assembly in 1779, the members feared “that, as a peer of France, he would have an ambition for the precedence which this title gives at Court and in the Parlement and which the nobility does not want to recognize anywhere else. The resolution he took, to only sit according to the rank of his age, like the other hereditary nobles, removed all difficulties.”59 This patriotic attitude facilitated the implementation of the new tax, controlled by rural communities, which put an end to forced labor on the roads and improved the infrastructure of the province. Indeed, Charost and the archbishop of Bourges, president of the Assembly, contributed thousands of livres out of their own pockets to this tax to help improve local roads. The Assembly, moreover, sought to lighten the burden on rural commoners by reforming the distribution of the taille. It sought to adjudicate fiscal litigation and spare the inhabitants the obligation of appearing before venal judges widely

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regarded as extortionist and biased against commoners. Upon the urging of Charost, the participants in Berry’s assembly of the nobility for the election of deputies to the Estates General, in the spring of 1789, renounced fiscal privileges for the good of the homeland. Hertault de Lamerville, after his work for the provincial assembly, later participated in all phases of the Revolution, including in the National Assembly and then in the administration of the Cher department (formed from the former province of Berry) from 1791 through 1796.60 Nevertheless, although the nobles agreed to Charost’s proposal to renounce tax privileges, they generally saw a gulf between themselves and the magnates of the Assembly of Berry. When the deputies gathered in the Assembly for the first time in 1778, they determined that one must possess a titled fief or right of justice, 3,000 to 4,000 livres of annual rent, and one hundred years and four generations of nobility to sit with the Second Estate. The intention was to restrict the number of privileged persons and force most of them into the Third Estate. The nobles of Berry protested and refused to consider the members of the Assembly their representatives.61 In January 1789, a gathering of the nobility of Châteauroux denounced the Assembly as a ministerial scheme and called for representative provincial estates instead. With regard to the Estates General, the nobles of Châteauroux called for deliberations in common, votes counted by head, and the abolition of fiscal privileges.62 Nearly all of the nobles, however, spurned the provincial assembly for entirely different reasons. The nobles found it troubling that the assembly invited rural residents to criticize the seigneurial regime and to evaluate land taxes rather than accept the voluntary declarations of the property owners. The comte du Buat-Nançay, a member of the assembly at odds with Véri and Charost, typified the nobles’ views. From the 1750s into the 1770s, he drew on studies of the Middle Ages to write books about the value of elevating a class, endowed with a superior capacity for grand moral sentiments, to provide an example of patriotic national service for common subjects to follow. Buat-Nançay wrote an indignant letter to the assembly in 1780 protesting that, in naming an administrative commission for Vierzon, it listed him below a prior and priest. “I will never assent to this degradation of the nobility in my person … I protest any precedence … that the lower clergy could usurp from the nobility.”63 In a book published in 1785 on Necker’s time as the director general of finances, Buat-Nançay argued that Necker sought to destroy the greatest constitution ever, one upholding a centuries-old monarchy, by allowing day laborers to participate and voice their grievances in assemblies and, more generally, by making all social ranks equal. Buat-Nançay no doubt hoped to maintain the privileges, which the peasants of Neuvy-sur-Barangeon

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denounced in their grievances in the spring of 1789. They stated that BuatNançay used his seigneurial court to renew his titles and uphold the right to collect a tithe, monopolize common lands, and have the villagers transport a terrage of one of every eleven sheaves of grain to his residence.64 Buat-Nançay felt justified in asserting these rights due to convictions, shared with other nobles of Berry, that they played a special role in the monarchy as a class responsible for the standards of generosity and selflessness needed to inspire the emulation of other citizens. These convictions led to commotion in the electoral assembly of the Second Estate in Bourges in the spring of 1789. The comte de Guibert, a court noble and member of the king’s Council of War, had recently enacted military reforms, which, in suppressing venal posts, created two tracks of officer recruitment, one for the upper nobility and one for the rest of the Second Estate in the lower ranks. The reforms enforced discipline on officers, including Prussian corporal punishment, a blow with the flat of a sword. Nobles saw the reforms, like those pursued by the high nobles of the Assembly of Berry, as a humiliating challenge to the image of the Second Estate traditionally projected by the monarchy. When Guibert rose to address the electoral assembly, the nobles heckled and silenced him, and expelled him from their deliberations.65 These convictions prevented the delegates of the three estates from working together. When they met in Bourges to examine their respective cahiers, discussions collapsed over the first demand of the Third Estate for the vote by head at the Estates General. The nobles voted 120 to 2 for the vote by order. Their cahier called for institutional limits to the central power, through the re-establishment of the nation’s customary practice of assembly, before any business could proceed at the Estates General. It also insisted on the preservation of seigneurial rights, including the honorific and useful prerogatives inherent in lands and persons. The nobles’ dissatisfaction with the reforms of the Assembly of Berry led them to spurn Charost in spite of his high rank and experience in public affairs. They instead elected the marquis de Bouthillier, an archconservative member of the Assembly. They elected Bengy de Puyvallée, executive agent of the Assembly from 1778 to 1786, and Hertault de Lamerville, an assistant to the Assembly. Lamerville helped edit the nobles’ cahier, and both he and Bengy de Puyvallée pledged to maintain the nobles as a separate order in the Estates General.66 Whereas provincial nobles opposed the Assembly of Berry for attempting to eliminate tax privileges and for critically discussing the seigneurial regime, commoners opposed it for not pursuing such reforms with sufficient vigor. Of course, well-to-do members of the Third Estate, like the nobles, benefited from seigneurial rents and privileges. Their leaders in the town assemblies in the spring of 1789 consisted of lords, office holders on the

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path to ennoblement, and stewards of the comte d’Artois and other grand seigneurs.67 Yet they coalesced against the Old Regime despite having pursued their careers through its customary channels. Urban residents, we have seen, had had the experience of bowing to the authority of grandees, such as the comte de Fougières, the Cardinal de Bernis, and the comte d’Artois, in La Charité, Bourges, Saint-Amand, and other towns. When the peasants contested seigneurial rights over common lands, the crown made them come to terms with nobles yet permitted them to take bourgeois proprietors to court. Pamphleteers expressed impatience with such inequality in hundreds of publications in 1789. They denounced the royal court as the aristocratic head of the nobles’ domination of the country. Sieyès famously depicted the nobility as a caste at war with the nation, parasitically living off the lifeblood of the people and making them less healthy.68 The Assembly of Berry could only have contributed to this impression. The articles of the royal edict founding the Assembly, for example, stated that opinions would first be given by the clergy, then the nobility, and lastly the Third Estate.69 The Assembly actually declared in its minutes that the nobles paid excessive taxes relative to their small numbers and fortunes and that “it would be worthy of his majesty … and founded on the truest justice” to reduce their burden.70 As we have seen, the Assembly, after heated debate over the tax for roadwork, ended up maintaining the exemptions of the privileged orders, despite Third Estate protests, while doing away with those of many townspeople. The Assembly’s plans to ease the burden on the peasants, by helping them make the tax rolls more accurate, involved encroachments on the authority of venal offices belonging to members of the Third Estate in the district fiscal courts and municipalities. It may be for these reasons that commoners eschewed the Third Estate of the provincial assembly when electing deputies to the Estates General. Impressions of injustice thus prepared townspeople to embrace a revolution against the Old Regime despite their custom of making careers within it. One reads in the cahier of the bailliage of Issoudun – composed, like all courts of this rank, of venal judges of the Third Estate – that the appanages of the princes should be abolished, because they burdened the province by subjecting it to a second administration. Venality should be abolished, the judges affirmed, because it permitted the wealthy to obtain public functions without having acquired the requisite talent. Instead, merit, proven in official competition, should be the criterion for acceding to the bench. The office holders of the bailliage court of Bourges stated that dispensing justice on behalf of the people and king represented an eminent function and should be done without outrageous fees. They stated that parishioners ought to be able to free themselves from seigneurial burdens after reimbursing the lords. The administrative agents (procureurs) of the tribunals of Bourges claimed (inaccurately)

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that Berry had always been franche and allodialle – free, in other words, from seigneurial jurisdictions and dues. They demanded therefore that the three estates of the province declare Berry exempt from feudal rights.71 The final cahier of the Third Estate of Berry, meeting in Bourges, demanded the abrogation of laws closing the civil and military ranks to commoners. Those in attendance enjoined their mandatories not to take part in any deliberations unless the deputies of all three estates met together in a single assembly with votes counted by head. The nobles sent the comte de la Châtre to ask the Third Estate to show in written signatures the balance of the ballots on the question of voting in the Estates General. The signatures came in at 206 for voting by head and 0 opposed, a prelude to the Tennis Court Oath.72 At the Estates General, where the majority of the nobles trumpeted their honor and loyalty to the king, and refused to join a common assembly, members of the Third Estate sensed an aristocratic conspiracy. The king and two of his brothers were related to foreign monarchs. The comte d’Artois, Condé, Polignac, and other grandees fled the country in July 1789. Many bourgeois leaders believed the nobles would call on foreign rulers to intervene and preserve the rights of the privileged orders. The aspiration of the Third Estate to end the nobles’ political dominance took on the hues of a war of independence against a foreign regime.73 In the countryside, the provincial assembly had encouraged the peasants to participate in the administration of roadwork, petition for adjustments to the tax rolls, and elect assessors to distribute the vingtièmes and lighten their burden. Nevertheless, power struggles in Versailles weakened the provincial assembly, and the success of the comte d’Artois in maintaining his exemptions led local lords to cling to their own privileges and thus close off the channels of peasant participation in the administration of taxes. The assembly did not even take up the gabelle tax on salt despite the fact that it amounted to the main burden weighing on the population and provoked much violence. Thus, while the Second Estate of Berry saw the high nobles of the provincial assembly as too reformist, the rural population became frustrated by these nobles’ inaction. The assembly evoked all of the burdens of the seigneurial regime but took no concrete measures to mitigate them. One should recall that, in discussing these burdens, the assembly referred to the peasants as the “class of obscure inhabitants of the countryside.” Indeed, certain statements in the minutes could have come from colonial administrators rather than from the people’s representatives. The assembly described the village syndics as illiterate and the peasants as uninterested in government and ignorant of their own interests. Having attributed provincial poverty to the seigneurial regime in one session, the assembly attributed it to the congenital indolence of the inhabitants

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in another. The peasants “do not put forth the slightest effort to procure their subsistence.” As soon as their labor became scarce, they took advantage of the situation to demand high wages for performing hardly any work. They thus made enough in a day to live in idleness for several more. “Such laziness makes all work tiresome, and it never ceases to be so for those often at rest.”74 Given these sorts of attitudes, the peasants concluded that if the government were to attend to their problems, it would have to be composed of elected representatives, not appointed elites. Of 122 cahiers written in rural parishes in the spring of 1789, 56 referred to the provincial assembly and invariably in a negative way. They typically called for provincial estates comprising as many delegates of commoners as of the first two orders combined and requiring votes by head rather than by order. The cahier of Montgivray, for instance, stated that though the assembly was created for the people’s good, it had in fact become a burden. The members named their successors and perpetuated their terms in office. Berry, the villagers argued, should instead have estates elected by the people.75 This aspiration to participate in government seemed to be threatened in the summer of 1789 by a plot of nobles, who had fled to country, to have foreign monarchs invade and impose the nobles’ rule. The peasants suspected that the comte d’Artois would arrive with thousands of brigands recruited outside the country. Acting as though the gabelle were a foreign imposition of the Old Regime, the inhabitants of Berry, toward the end of September 1789, began to trade freely in contraband salt and even battled detachments sent by the Constituent Assembly to enforce the  Old Regime’s indirect taxes until they could be replaced by new ones on the land. The lords, too, became personae non grata in Berry, as the peasantry, in a region-wide revolt in 1790, seized common lands, meadows, and forests, which the seigneurial classes had appropriated and converted to grazing land for their sharecroppers’ sheep over the preceding decades.76 To sum up, in 1778, the monarchy introduced the Assembly of Berry in an effort to create a consensual administration of the province and head off this sort of conflict. More than a few of these forty-eight clergymen, nobles, and office holders, deliberating under the presidency of the archbishop, embraced the chance to help make Berry more prosperous. The Assembly recognized the iniquities of the seigneurial regime. It actually instituted a tax, controlled by villagers, to finance roadwork and improve transport while liberating them from unpaid corvée labor. The Assembly sought to remove the vices from the judiciary, which permitted the landed classes to transfer their tax liabilities to common subjects. The Assembly devised a system to put an end to the central administration’s heavy-handed investigations of assets and permit parishioners

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to jointly consider one another’s revenues for the purpose of assessing the vingtièmes. However, the opposition of local lords and magistrates, in conjunction with factions in the royal court opposed to Necker, undermined these reforms. Above all, the provincial assembly could do nothing about the seigneurial regime and gabelle tax. The assembly thus did little to alleviate the daily inconveniences of the Old Regime. Even its success in substituting a money tax for the corvée on the roads preserved the nobles’ exemptions, as it foisted a new tax on many townspeople. Customary laws did not apply equally to the different ranks of royal subjects, and this reform of the corvée, in continuity with the traditions of the monarchy, demonstrated that the regime worked to the advantage of the privileged elite. For these reasons, the inhabitants of Berry came to perceive the provincial assembly as an external imposition, not a body representative of the people. The elites who made up the assembly seemed to have an interest in perpetuating the laws and customs of the Old Regime. When called upon to express their grievances and vote on representatives, commoners began to fear that the nobles would use their relations with the king and foreign potentates to prevent the people from ever playing a role in government. Thus, as royal authority crumbled in the summer of 1789, people took matters into their own hands, fighting against the indirect taxes and seigneurial rights, and making nobles such as Bengy de Puyvallée, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, feel unsafe in the province. Berry, to be sure, was an overwhelmingly rural province in which the seigneurial regime and rural taxation dominated discussion in the provincial assembly. In the next chapter, we will see that clusters of manufacturers, as well as burgeoning classes of workers and merchants, posed different challenges for the assemblies in Lyonnais and drew the members of these bodies into urgent debates about political economy. Notes   1 Jean de Goy, “Notice historique sur M. de Bengy-Puyvallée: Député de la noblesse du Berry aux États Généraux de 1789. Par Pierre de Bengy-Puyvallée, son fils,” Mémoires de l’union des sociétés savantes de Bourges 5 (1955–56), 58. See also pp. 48, 52.   2 Baron Jehan de Witte, ed., Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Jules Tallandier, 1928–1930), 2:145–6.   3 Lucien Lachaze, Les états provinciaux de l’ancienne France et la question des états provinciaux aux xviie et xviiie siècles. L’assemblée provinciale du Berri sous Louis XVI (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1909), 120, 130–2, 447–9, 534–5, 583–4; Pierre Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, résultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921).   4 This information was culled from various sources: Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) K681;

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Léonce de Lavergne, Les assemblées provinciales sous Louis XVI (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1864), 35–6; Claude Michaud, “L’assemblée provinciale du Berry (1778–1789),” in Les assemblées d’Etats dans la France méridionale à l’époque moderne: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre d’histoire moderne en 1994, ed. Anne Blanchard, Henri Michel, and Elie Pélaquier (Montpellier: Université Paul Valéry, Centre d’histoire moderne, 1995), 223; L. Cartier Saint-René, Histoire du duché-pairie de Charost et de la seigneurie de Mareuil (Paris: A. Chaix, 1879), 189; Maire Camille Brimont, M. de Puségur et l’église de Bourges pendant la révolution, 1789–1802 (Bourges: Impr. Tardy Pigelet, 1896), 27; M.J. Chardin, “Extrait des procès-verbaux,” Bulletin de la Société libre d’émulation du commerce et d’industrie de la Seine-Inférieure (1903), 334–5; Compte rendu des travaux de la Société du Berry à Paris, huitème année (Octobre, 1861), 75, 78; M. Paulin Riffé, “Essais généalogiques sur les anciennes familles du Berry (famille de Bengy),” Mémoire de la Société des Antiquaires du Centre 5 (1873–74), 203; Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 129–32.   5 John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 89; Georges Weulersse, La physiocratie sous les ministères de Turgot et de Necker (1774–1781) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 28; Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 29–30, 32–3; Thomas E. Kaiser, “Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 309–10, 312; David Parker, “Absolutism, Feudalism and Property Rights in the France of Louis XIV,” Past and Present 179 (2003), 91–2.   6 Archives Départementales du Cher (ADC) C1091.  7 Procès-verbal des séances de l’administration provinciale du Berri, tenue à Bourges au mois d’octobre 1783 (Bourges: Impr. de B. Cristo, 1784), 105. See also pp. 103, 130.   8 L. Cartier Saint-René, Les bienfaits d’Armand-Joseph, duc de Béthune-Charost: extrait de l’Histoire du Duché-Pairie de Charost et de la Seigneurie de Mareuil (Issoudun: Impr. Laboureur, Grolleau et Filloux, 1925), 3, 5; Frédéric Reiffenberg, Notice sur Armand-Joseph de Béthune, duc de Charost (Versailles: Cerf, 1877), 15; Michèle Talin d’Eyzac, “Jean-Marie Heurtault de Lamerville, un physiocrate en Berry,” Cahiers d’archéologie & d’histoire du Berry 110 (June 1992), 18–19.   9 ADC C1315. 10 ADC C15. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Claude Aveline, Petite histoire de La Charité (Charité-sur-Loire: A. Delayance, 1924), 138–9, 145. 14 ADC C15, C850. 15 Dumonteil Fernand, Une ville seigneuriale en 1789, Saint-Amand-Montrond (Bourges: Sire, 1887), 21, 52, 59–60, 67–8; J.-P. Surrault, L’Indre: le Bas-Berry de la préhistoire à nos jours (Saint-Jeand’Angély: Bordessoules, 1990), 197–8; Eugène Sallé, Ségry: son terroir et ses habitants au cours des siècles (Châteauroux: Impr. Badel, 1959), 75. 16 ADC C30. 17 Denis  Jeanson and  Jacques  Tournaire, eds., Cahiers de doléances:  région Centre. Indre, vol. 2 (Tours: Denis Jeanson, 1995), 291. 18 François-P. Gay, La champagne du Berry: Essai sur la formation d’un paysage agraire et l’évolution d’une société rurale (Bourges: Tardy, 1967), 162, 259–60; Ernest Menault, Histoire de l’agriculture en Berry: la condition paysanne du Ve au XVIIIe siècle (Mayenne: Royer, 1991), 112. 19 ADC C30. 20 Anthony  Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice:  Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 47. 21 ADC C30. 22 Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 32, 154–5. 23 ADC C30.

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24 Talin d’Eyzac, “Jean-Marie Heurtault de Lamerville,” 23. 25 ADC E205. The vingtièmes tax rolls enumerate Charost’s seigneurial rights: ADC C231. 26 Antonin Proust, Recueil de documents concernant l’histoire de la révolution 1789–1800: archives de l’Ouest Série A Opérations électorales de 1789 No. 4 Anjou, Maine, Berry (Paris: Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et cie, Éditeurs Librairie Internationale, 1868), 246–7; Fernand, Une ville seigneuriale, 42–3, 45–6, 67–8, 102n2, 123, 274. 27 Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: région Centre / 1, Indre, 293. 28 AN H1600, P5191, P1592; ADC C1142, L45; Robert Harris, Necker, Reform Statesman of the Ancien Régime (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), 185; Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: région Centre / 1, Indre, 124. 29 Jehan de Witte, Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 308. 30 Ibid., 236. 31 Ibid., 237. 32 ADC C1315. For the details of the tax exemptions see AN K681. 33 AN K681; Jehan de Witte, Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 406; Marcel Marion, Histoire du Berry et du Bourbonnais (Paris: Boivin & cie, 1933), 215–16; Antonella Alimento, Réformes fiscales et crises politiques dans la France de Louis XV: de la taille tarifée au cadastre général, trans. Mireille Gille (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2008), 23, 82, 113, 240, 366–7. 34 Thomas Kaiser and Dale Van Kley, “Introduction” and “Conclusion: From Old Regime to French Revolution,” in From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Thomas Kaiser and Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 12–13, 251–2; John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45. 35 AN K681, H1600; Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 439. 36 Michael Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 17–18; David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24–5; Pierre Serna, “Every Revolution is a War of Independence,” in The French Revolution in Global Perspective, ed. Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt, and William Max Nelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 165, 172, 174–7, 180. 37 ADC C28. 38 ADC C30. 39 AN H1582; Louis Raynal, Histoire du Berry: depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’en 1789, 4 vols. (Bourges: Librairie de Verneil, 1847) 4:486. Several other royal rulings of this sort are found in AN H1574/1, H1579/1, ADC C1114, C1315. 40 AN P5191, P5194. 41 This case is located in ADC C579. For the rest of the information on the élections, see AN P5194; ADC C584, C585, C615, C1109. 42 Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: région Centre / Indre 2, 146. 43 High court responsible for verifying royal accounts. 44 District fiscal courts discussed below, 60. 45 Jehan de Witte, Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 173–4. 46 Le Baron de Girardot, Essai sur les assemblées provinciales: Et en particulier sur celle du Berry, 1778–1790 (Bourges: Librairie de Vermeil, Éditeur, 1845), 195–6; Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 353–4, 359–60; Raynal, Histoire du Berry, 4:474; Compte rendu des travaux de la Société du Berry, 79. 47 ADC C1114. 48 These cases are located in ADC C1114. 49 ADC C1090, C1114. 50 ADC B4307, C231, C1142, C1315, E205; Fernand, Une ville seigneuriale, 52, 59–60. 51 The peasant petitions are located in ADC C1114. AN H1575/1 and ADC C1315 contain the cases of St. Bonnet and St. Privé. For information on this jurisdictional dispute, see Procès-verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale du Berri, tenue à Bourges en octobre & novembre 1783; seconde

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édition (Bourges: Chez B. Cristo, Imprimeur du Roi; Paris: chez Née de la Rochelle, 1787), 29–31; Raynal, Histoire du Berry, 4:474. 52 Marcel Marion, L’impôt sur le revenu au dix-huitième siècle: Principalement en Guyenne (Geneva: Slatkine-Megariotis Reprints, 1976, Reprint of the ed. Toulouse, 1901), 212, 224–6. 53 ADC C1315. 54 ADC C1315. Procès-verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale du Berri, tenue à Bourges en octobre & novembre 1783, 56–57 and Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée provinciale du Berri. Tomes Troisième. 1786 (Bourges: Chez B. Cristo, Imprimeur du Roi; Paris: chez Née de la Rochelle, 1787), 102. 55 This revolt is described in Jean Nicolas, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 81–2; pp. 87, 112, 416 mention other revolts against the gabelle in Berry. For information about this tax, see Anne-Marie Aubin, Criminalité en Berry au XVIIIème siècle (Toulouse: Royer, 2001), 110–11, 117; Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 191, 208. 56 M. Bruneau, “Les élections et les cahiers du Tiers-État de la ville de Bourges en 1789,” Mémoires de la société historique littéraire artistique et scientifique du Cher 5 (1888–89), 289; Alfred Antoine Gandilhon and Charles Schmidt, eds., Département du Cher. Cahiers de doléances du bailliage de Bourges et des bailliages secondaires de Vierzon et d’Henrichemont pour les États généraux de 1789 (Bourges: Tardy-Pigelet, 1910), 199; Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: région Centre / 1, Indre, 177. 57 Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 205–6; Reiffenberg, Notice sur Armand-Joseph de Béthune, 27–8. 58 Quote from the first page of the chapter “How the spirit of revolt was promoted by the well-intentioned efforts to improve the people’s lot.” Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 180. 59 Jehan de Witte, Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 233, 236. 60 ADC L188. Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée provinciale du Berri. Tomes Troisième. 1786, 178, 213–8; Jehan de Witte, Journal de l’abbé de Véri, 33–4; Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants: 1789–1791 (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 459–60. 61 Brimont, M. de Puségur et l’église de Bourges, 7, 44–5; Compte rendu des travaux de la Société du Berry, 78. 62 AN BA 24. 63 ADC C1113. 64 Louis Gabriel, comte Dubuat-Nançay, Remarques d’un Français, ou, Examen impartial du livre de M. Necker sur l’administration des finances de France pour servir de correctif et de supplément a son ouvrage (1785), 16–18, 24, 30, 96–7; Gandilhon and Schmidt, Département du Cher. Cahiers, 256–7. For Buat-Nançay’s scholarship, see Jay Smith, Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 212–13, 216; for his relationship to the local nobility, see Brimont, M. de Puségur et l’église de Bourges, 44–5, 47. 65 ADC L188. For Guibert’s reforms, see Rafe Blaufarb, The French Army 1750–1820: Careers, Talent, Merit (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), 33, 38, 44. For the attitudes of the nobility, see G. Wimbée, Histoire du Berry des origines à 1790 (Saint-Amand-Montrond: Les Presses de l’Imprimerie Bussière, 1957), 258; Smith, Nobility Reimagined, 263. For a description of Guibert as the quintessential court noble, see Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Lydia Cochrane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148. 66 ADC L188; François Jenn, “Partager le sort commun (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in Histoire du Berry, ed. Guy Devailly (Toulouse: Privat, 1980), 237; Marcel Bruneau, Les débuts de la Révolution dans les départements du Cher et de l’Indre (1789–1791) (Geneva: Slatkine – Megariotis Reprints, 1977), 27–8, 34. It appears that Hertault de Lamerville followed his patriotic views after the political tide changed in the summer of 1789. 67 Philippe Werth, Issoudun à la fin de l’ancien régime (1772–1789) (Issoudun: Imprimerie Gaignault, 1983), 73; Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: région Centre, 1:191, 229, 2:57; Gandilhon and Schmidt, Département du Cher. Cahiers, 689.

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68 William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 55, 59. 69 Lachaze, Les états provinciaux, 132. 70 Procès-verbal des séances de l’administration provinciale du Berri, 278. 71 Gandilhon and Schmidt, Département du Cher. Cahiers, 606–11, 654; Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances région centre Indre 2, 68, 70. 72 ADC L188. 73 Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 137; Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947, expanded bicentennial edition 1988), 100–1, 117–18; Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended, 100–1; Serna, “Every Revolution is a War of Independence,” 176, 180. 74 Procès-verbal des séances de l’administration provinciale du Berri, 123; see also pp. 66, 278–80. 75 Jeanson and Tournaire, Cahiers de doléances: Cahiers de doléances région centre Indre 2, 156. 76 Anatoli Ado, Paysans en Révolution: Terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794, trans. Serge Aberdam (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1996), 148, 199–200, 212–14, 220–1.

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Lyonnais: bourgeois liberalism, revolutionary politics

3

Bourgeois liberalism and revolutionary politics: the provincial assembly of Lyonnais In the 1780s, Lyon had about 150,000 inhabitants, most of whom labored in workshops, especially in the silk industry. An even larger number of peasants toiled in cottage manufacturing for the merchants in Lyon. The merchants controlled costs and quickened production through innovations that reduced the hours of drudgery needed to unfurl the silk and program designs onto the looms. The enhanced profits helped expand the number of looms from 8,330 in 1739, to 11,007 in 1769, an average of 12,000 a year from 1770 to 1784, and 14,777 in 1788. At this time, the merchants annually sold about 20 million livres worth of silk in France and about 40 million abroad, mostly in England. Saint-Étienne, the second largest town in the province, had silk and armaments manufactures. The hardware industry in particular provided work for over 65 percent of Saint-Étienne’s 29,000 inhabitants and for thousands more in nearby villages. The hardware sold all over the Mediterranean and Americas at the end of the Old Regime.1 For the Assembly of Lyonnais, this commerce raised questions that hardly concerned the elites of Berry, Poitou, and other provinces. What, for example, was the Assembly to do about the tolls and monopolies that hindered production and harmed commercial interests? How were Lyonnais laws and customs to accommodate the growing number of townspeople with the wealth and ambition to join the upper classes? Historians have approached these questions in two ways. First, according to the classic interpretation of the Revolution, the growth of commerce and industry increased the wealth of the bourgeoisie, expanded the ranks of liberal professionals and public employees, and thus paved the way for the intellectual and ideological flowering of the philosophes and economists. In 1789, the bourgeoisie drew on these resources to forcibly take away the nobles’ privileges, ensure economic liberty, bring the nobles down from the top of the social hierarchy, and put government in the hands of those with wealth, talent, experience, and ambition.2

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In line with this interpretation, I will show that, in Lyonnais, the prosperity of the workshops laid the basis for a hegemonic discourse, shared even by the nobles, in favor of economic liberalism. The Assembly of Lyonnais, led by nobles and comprising members of the bourgeoisie, thus insisted on free trade over the objections of the holders of monopoly rights to the coal of the Forez region of the province. Nobles, merchants, and municipal authorities supported the crackdown of royal troops on the efforts of Lyonnais laborers to interfere with the market by raising the price of the silk produced in the artisans’ workshops. Nevertheless, the upper classes avoided reforms liable to undermine the octrois of Lyon. These indirect taxes formed the main impediment to regional commerce and the target of public criticism. Yet the octrois also funded loans to the king and royal patronage to grandees, attracted investments from property owners, and protected the privileges of municipal elites. Liberal declarations, moreover, threatened public order by emboldening common subjects to attack the tolls and tax bureaus which burdened popular households more than they did the businesses of the merchants. I argue, then, that in spite of the general belief in economic liberty, the clergymen, nobles, and townspeople of the provincial assembly did not seek to restructure the social and political relations with the aim of putting Lyonnais on a capitalist footing. The second, more recent, approach to the questions regarding commerce and politics starts from the foregoing premise that capitalism did not pose itself as an alternative to the existing social order. Historians posit rather that the expansion of commerce and consumption, especially of luxury apparel, blurred visible hierarchies, changed lifestyles and attendant attitudes, attracted people to a regime of civic equality, with social differences based solely on wealth, and repelled them from the legal incoherencies upholding privileges.3 If the force of the market economy, according to this line of reasoning, created hopes for a rational social order based on civic equality, the monarchy’s hierarchy of power and privileges, I argue, led provincial inhabitants to see the nobles as the opponents of these hopes. The Lyonnais bourgeoisie, despite the industrial expansion, formed part of an elite characterized by the possession of offices, titles, privileges, and jurisdictions. Jurists and property owners experienced subordination to the nobility in their professional and economic lives, even if the outward distinctions of dress had blurred. For this reason, bourgeois elites took advantage of the crisis of the monarchy in 1789 to do away with the nobles’ hereditary possession of the highest offices and broadest privileges. In the elaboration of this argument, we will first examine the deliberations of the provincial and district assemblies about trade restrictions. Although both noble and bourgeois members favored economic liberalism, they did not

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consistently pursue liberal policies, because many Lyonnais residents invested their fortunes in governmental bodies supported by trade restrictions. We will see in the second part of the chapter that the high clergymen and nobles in charge of the assemblies focused the deliberations instead on the privileges and offices open to members of the Third Estate. Yet they stymied proposals to limit the seigneurial rights and tax exemptions crucial to the nobles’ rank in the political hierarchy. The final part demonstrates that these deliberations represented a typical experience of the stifling structures of the monarchy. Commoners thus sought to tear them down when the crisis of the regime presented the opportunity in 1789. The provincial assembly and economic liberalism A generally held conviction about the value of free trade led the provincial assembly to advocate the removal of commercial monopolies but not to challenge the main fetter on the provincial economy, Lyon’s octrois, from which the king, court nobles, local authorities, and investors drew income. Such a challenge instead came from common people inspired in unforeseen ways by the liberal pronouncements of the elites and the assembly. The Assembly of Lyonnais took shape in September 1787, when the king appointed seventeen prominent men, who in turn named twenty-nine others to complete the membership. It included public figures of the First Estate such as Antoine de Malvin de Montazet – archbishop, abbot of Fontenay, prior of Salles, comte and vicar general of Lyon, and president of the provincial assembly – and Louis Charrier de La Roche, grand vicar of the archbishop and head (prévôt) of the cathedral chapter of Ainay in Lyon. The Second Estate consisted of five marquises, three barons, and three counts such as JeanBaptiste-Espérance, comte de Laurencin. The Third Estate was composed of knights, jurists, and municipal magistrates such as Pierre-Suzanne Deschamps, a squire, lawyer, and landowner, and Camille Dugas, a proprietor of the ennobling office of secrétaire du Roi. Nineteen of the twenty-one members of the Third Estate were exempt from the direct tax on commoners known as the taille. The majority owned seigneurial domains. A number of them only agreed to join the Third Estate if doing so would not compromise their expected ennoblement.4 The provincial assembly named the deputies of the district assemblies in Lyon, Roanne, Villefranche, Montbrison, and Saint-Étienne, who then named the rest of the members. As in the provincial body, half of the seats were held by nobles and clergymen such as the priest of Villefranche, René-Jean-Louis Desvernay, in the district assembly of Beaujolais. Desvernay had a seigneur and

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secrétaire du Roi, affiliated with the Parlement of Nancy, one of the thirteen high courts of the realm, in his immediate family. The Third Estate comprised jurists and landowning townspeople intent on joining the nobility. In the assembly of Saint-Étienne, for example, seven of the twelve members of the Third Estate did not appear in the rolls of the taille.5 The members of the assemblies mirrored the social elites of the province, many of whom had made their fortunes in the silk industry. The wealthiest merchants typically gave up commerce after purchasing an office in the bureau of finances and other tribunals, or retired from business to lead the honorable life of the bourgeois, a term for the townspeople living from rent. Two aldermen of Lyon annually joined the nobility at the end of their terms. For these reasons, nobles and venal judges enjoyed the largest fortunes in Lyon, much larger than those of merchants and manufacturers, and their wealth grew relative to that of the commercial classes over the course of the eighteenth century.6 The merchants, in this way, evinced the “privileges, particularism, and status-bound inactivity,” adduced in the scholarship as characteristic of the Old Regime bourgeoisie.7 They emulated the nobles at the head of the provincial assembly. One of the first acts of this body was to write Respectueuses Représentations to the king in defense of the established ranks. “The lineage nobles and ecclesiastics, to whom his majesty confided” the assembly, rejected anything liable to degrade [their] functions in public opinion, and the precedence accorded to the intendant8 … would unfailingly produce this effect. The high dignities of the State and Church, of which the presidents of the assemblies are personally adorned … – the titles of princes, dukes and peers, field marshals of France, governors, archbishops and bishops – give them a preeminence which would be harmed … In Lyon, your highness the archbishop, primate of France, who in all public ceremonies … has precedence … would neglect the dignity of his see if … he ceded … precedence to the intendant.9

The scholarship, however, not only emphasizes such traditional concerns about status. It also emphasizes the elaboration of new assumptions about the government and economy. Many administrators, men of letters, engineers, and merchants came to believe that the public good consisted of the endless growth of production and capital. Growth, in turn, depended on the ability of royal subjects to freely buy and sell goods and services. Laws therefore had to be based on commercial expertise and apply universally regardless of historic privileges.10 To take a case in point, noble office holders, and a growing number of bourgeois jurists and doctors, nearly all of whom lived from various forms of rent, exhibited their high culture in the public séances on belles-lettres

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and ancient Greek and Roman authors in the learned academies of Lyon. These traditional displays of rank notwithstanding, the avowed purpose of the academies was to promote progress through the diffusion of knowledge. The members hoped to spread information about the latest techniques in agriculture. They made known, in their publications, that market hindrances raised prices, caused crises, and could lead Lyon to ruin. Though this liberalism put the academies at odds with the merchants – who as a rule sought monopoly rights to inhibit competition, raise prices, and amass extra profit – it suited the representatives of the commercial classes and the interpreters of their common interests. When the silk industry faced hard times in the 1780s, the academy of Lyon sponsored essay competitions on the means to improve economic conditions. In general, the purpose of the competitions was to foster advances in the technical aspects of production.11 The elites of the provincial assembly shared the awareness that the Lyonnais economy depended on the regional workshops. One of them stated in the minutes, in reference to the depressed conditions in the first months of 1788, “the interest of the commerce of this great city which owes its splendor to it, the interest of our buildings whose value comes from the success of our manufactures, the interest of our movable assets whose price and consumption absolutely depends on it, must hold the attention of all the orders of citizens.”12 Correspondingly, the members of the provincial assembly took a dim view of the monarchy’s practice of offering monopoly rights over the Lyonnais economy as patronage to propitiate potentially disruptive potentates. The duc d’Orléans, the highest prince of the blood, held over 25 percent of the seigneuries of the Beaujolais region of the province, including numerous tolls on roads and bridges. The ducs de Villeroy, hereditary governors of Lyon, and residents of Versailles since the end of the 1600s, enjoyed the right des coches along the Saône, a privilege, which the dukes leased to tax farmers for 10,000 livres annually from the 1720s onward. Malvin de Montazet, the archbishop, obtained tens of thousands of livres from his monopoly over the wine trade in Lyon in the month of August, a privilege he exploited by selling licenses to local merchants and cabaret owners.13 Similarly, the marquis de Mondragon, lord of Saint-Chamond and several villages in the surrounding countryside, gained from the growth of manufacturing by supplying local workshops with coal. Forez had the largest known coal deposits, yielding more than all other French mines combined. Mondragon asked the king for an exclusive fifty-year concession over the subsoil of his seigneurial domain. The intendant expressed concern that Mondragon might not invest sufficiently in the operations. Indeed, after Mondragon secured the concession in 1774, his venture never produced sufficient coal for SaintChamond’s manufacturers.14

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Most of Forez’s coal came from a subsoil monopoly created by the crown at the beginning of the century for Odet-Joseph de Vaux de Giry de Saint-Cyr, councilor of state, tutor of the dauphin, and chaplain of Madame the dauphine. Merchants of Paris, opposed to this concession, wrote a report to the royal council in 1760 demanding that “all proprietors of mines in Forez be permitted to exploit them and that all merchants of Paris be permitted to buy the coal from there and to have it exported from this province without opposition from … de Vaux de Giry de Saint-Cyr.” Royal ministers learned that “the boat merchants came together … to present a request so that they would be permitted to engage in the commerce of coal.” They claimed to have “waited for the death of … Giry de Saint-Cyr to attack a privilege which they believed to have been maintained only on account of his credit.”15 Louis XV and Louis XVI nevertheless retained the monopoly in favor of the Duke de Charost, a peer of France studied in Chapter 2. The marquis d’Osmond – a court noble whose illustrious name helped him renew his fortune through an advantageous marriage to the daughter of a West Indian planter – later obtained the concession in 1786. In the meantime, the merchants, businessmen, and officials of Saint-Étienne had bought up the rural land and had no intention of seeing Osmond use his influence at court to corner all of the coal profit.16 They met in March 1788 to declare their opposition to a monopoly that prevented them from exploiting the coal on their holdings. They stated their “unanimous opinion … that the concession, being destructive of the right of property, causing the greatest injustice to commerce and to the entire province, and not resulting in any advantage for the state … be revoked.”17 Later that spring, the district assembly in Saint-Étienne deliberated that the “concession is detrimental to the manufactures of this city … The workshops … inevitably will decline, either because they will find hardly any of the necessary coal, or because, when they find it, they will be obliged to pay too much for it.”18 The following month, the provincial assembly supported these protests, declaring, “any concession in general is detrimental to the rights of property.” This one in particular was “prejudicial to the public good on account of the harm it does to the commerce of Saint-Étienne, to the high cost it occasions in the price of coal.”19 The dispute over the mines of Forez draws attention to the ambiguous relationship of the high nobility to the early expansion of industry. While nobles partook in cutting-edge mining ventures, they depended on the crown for the property and profits. Indeed, the marquis d’Osmond’s contemporaries in the district and provincial assemblies of Forez and Lyonnais, elites supportive of free markets and economic growth, saw his mining concession as a privilege more in keeping with the feudal legacies of the monarchy than

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with the capitalist future of the country. The crown used its patrimonial rights to apportion the economic prizes of the realm much like medieval kings had bestowed fiefs on loyal vassals.20 Be that as it may, in creating the monopoly concession, the crown argued that the coal of Forez rivaled the high quality found in England and, if traded freely, would stimulate too much commerce in the direction of Paris. The royal armaments workshops in Saint-Étienne would lack coal, river ports would lack boats, merchants would suffer, and mines across the realm would be driven out of business.21 The fact of the matter is that de Giry de SaintCyr and the duc de Charost, the prior holders of the concession, did not get involved directly in the mining. Rather, they used the monopoly to purchase on the cheap the coal taken from the subsoil by local landowners. These rentiers of Saint-Étienne did not have sufficiently large landholdings, funds, or expertise to develop the mines, which were thus often inactive and always badly exploited. The local peasants labored primarily on their strips of land and only collected coal when they needed extra money to round out their subsistence. They lacked the skills and reliability of regular employees. The marquis d’Osmond, in contrast, planned to develop the mines. He invested in steam engines and recruited trained workers from outside the realm to operate them.22 While the king’s concession of monopoly rights to the mines around Saint-Étienne seems to have been intended to expand the regional economy, his support for the octrois of Lyon clearly hindered its development. City leaders secured control over this indirect tax on silk, drinks, livestock, and firewood on condition that they use the proceeds to raise loans for the king. The octrois brought in over 2,000,000 livres a year in the 1770s and 2,500,000 a decade later. They serviced an outstanding debt of 28,000,000 in 1760 and nearly 40,000,000 in the 1780s.23 By ceding the octrois to the municipality, the king obtained these sums without delays or administrative overhead. The city government, in turn, leased the right to collect the octrois to tax farmers. In France as a whole, the tax farms employed 20,000 agents, the largest paramilitary force in Europe, authorized to carry out searches and seize contraband, make arrests, imprison smugglers, and initiate proceedings against suspects, accomplices, and anyone thought to be interfering with their work.24 In Lyon, brigades of the tax farmers surprised merchants, inspected their cargo, and fined those deemed to have brought silk into the realm illicitly.25 By the end of the 1750s, a growing chorus of writers drew attention to the unchecked authority of the tax farmers and the cruel punishments meted out to smugglers. Physiocrats won popularity for their school of economic thought by denouncing the fiscal monopolies as violations of the laws

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of nature, constraints on the economy, and burdens on the king’s finances. A justice in the Parlement of Grenoble argued that the tax farmers’ efforts to stamp out contraband set off an escalating cycle of violence and reprisals from smugglers.26 Around 1770, the Parlement of Grenoble began to pass verdicts ordering the tax farmers of Lyon to give back to the merchants the silk cocoons seized from them. It discharged the merchants from summons to appear before the intendant and answer for their illicit cargo. The cour des aides of Aix (sovereign court responsible for fiscal litigation) exempted Lyonnais silk merchants from orders to appear before the intendant and pay fines. It ruled that the tax farmers must pay 10,000 livres if they turned to the intendant for legal verdicts.27 Historians have documented these ways in which magistrates and writers turned public opinion against the delegation of responsibility for tax revenue collection to financial elites. What has escaped scholarly attention were all the interests bound up with the tax farms. If one examines Lyon, one sees that the octrois brought high nobles, municipal officials, and other elites behind royal absolutism. Specifically, the kings granted the duc de Villeroy, and the ­hangers-on of his household, millions of livres from the proceeds of the octrois over the course of the eighteenth century. Many merchants, moreover, abandoned business to make more rapid profits by purchasing the right to administer the octrois. They thus hoped to buy their way into the nobility. An even larger number of investors obtained returns of 5 percent on municipal bonds backed by the octrois. Many of these depositors hailed from the clergy and nobility, or benefited from the status of bourgeois de Lyon, and thus enjoyed immunity from the tax on wine used to service the loans. To attract investors, the crown exempted the yields on the annuities from the vingtième taxes, which nobles and other elites were supposed to pay at the same rate as commoners. To top it all, the octrois protected the wealth and status of the rentier classes in control of the municipality by placing the tax burden on the subsistence items of the poor.28 In defense of these vested interests, the municipal officials of Lyon informed the crown that the rulings of the Parlement of Grenoble and cour des aides of Aix undermined the finances of the city. The tax farmers drafted edicts for the royal council to quash the rulings of the courts and uphold the jurisdiction of the intendant. The crown then decreed a fine of 1,000 livres to be collected by the municipality from merchants guilty of circumventing the intendant and appealing to the courts.29 In the 1780s, merchants hoping to lower business costs petitioned the municipality against the increases of the octrois used to service its growing debt. Public opinion focused on the octrois as the cause of high prices, economic asphyxiation, and popular misery.30 To take a case in point, the

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merchant Étienne Mayet, responding to a question posed by the Academy of Lyon about the prospects of local workshops, wrote, “food would fall to a regular price, if it weren’t subjected to overly burdensome octrois. Everyone knows that food prices fix those of labor; everyone is even more certain that it is principally to the low price of labor that our cloths owe their sales.” Yet the price of cloths, Mayet claimed, was in the process of increasing.31 The provincial assembly deliberated, in February 1788, “to suppress the abusive routine … of making separate rolls for the capitation [a tax on nobles and commoners alike] for the employees of the customs, tax farms, and octrois and to authorize the taxation of these individuals in the rolls along with the other taxpayers.” The assembly wrote to the controller general in the fall of 1788 that the separate rolls permitted “employees of the tax farms” to be “taxed at a rate infinitely below their means.”32 The district assembly in Roanne wrote to Necker in April 1789, on behalf of the municipality of Saint-Germain Laval, to oppose a lawsuit initiated by the tax farmers after a domiciliary visit of a man suspected of slaughtering a pig for personal use. According to the assembly, “the rights demanded by the … indirect tax farm” violated “the liberty of dwellings … we hope … you will give orders to suspend the penalty … and prohibit in the future the officials of the tax farms from making such visits to other dwellings.”33 The provincial assembly, however, did not demand substantive reform of the octrois, let alone abolition. Its restraint no doubt stemmed from the ambiguity of its position. Although the members opposed impediments to trade in principle, they were aware of all the investments in the octrois and of the king’s reliance on its proceeds. They also knew that public declarations could disturb the status quo. After all, in 1786, a year before the assembly met, its president, the archbishop, invoked his droit de banvin, an old feudal monopoly over the sale of wine in Lyon in the month of August. The archbishop demanded a fee from nightclub owners and merchants, as well as arrears from previous years, for the licenses to sell wine. These businessmen closed their shops and called on workers to resist. But the movement immediately escaped their control. Artisans and journeymen did not seek a liberal economy so much as the end of a seigneurial levy harmful to their livelihood. The popular classes generally rejected the merchant thinking behind the free market and law of the strongest. Roused by the merchants’ protests against the archbishop, the artisans called a strike with the aim of obtaining fixed tariffs for the silk products of their workshops. The strike drew the artisans into conflict with merchants intent on purchasing the products at market prices. In the midst of the work stoppage, the demonstrators confiscated the harquebuses from the municipal guard, disarmed the bourgeois militia, stormed the archbishop’s palace and city hall, and broke into the prison to liberate their companions. The mounted

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constabulary fired on the crowd yet could not restore order until royal troops occupied the city. The municipality then put a number of striking workers to death.34 Over the next two years, as we have seen, the provincial assembly issued liberal statements in favor of manufacturing interests: “all the citizens should see,” the members of the assembly stated, “with what courage we have fought against the extension of an onerous toll collected on the outskirts of Lyon.”35 Acting in accordance with such statements, a common carrier known as Canard refused to pay the toll – collected for the monarchy at l’Isle Barbé in the Sâone at the northwestern entrance to Lyon – and urged others to do the same. A report prepared for the royal council advised the confiscation of Canard’s goods, a fine, and the public posting of the condemnation. “It is not a question here of a taxpayer, who believes himself exempt … on account of a privilege … but of a man who contests the existence of the right, a conduct very dangerous for all tax offices which interest the government.”36 At the end of June 1789, after news arrived in Lyon of the unification of the Estates General into the National Assembly, the intendant reported that a crowd “laid waste to the furniture and destroyed the registers [of the octrois], it did the same to … the houses of the employees of the tax farms.” In the ensuing days “the common carriers … refused to pay” the indirect taxes and “the inhabitants of the suburbs sought to offer them support.”37 A week after this report reached the king, his subjects in Paris torched the customs gates in the days before they attacked the Bastille. The customs funded municipal expenses and hospitals. The Parisian committee of electors, fearing to lose these funds, pledged to rebuild the tollgates. Judges had little sympathy for anti-fiscal rebellions. They deemed this violence destructive and entirely different from the legitimate action taken against the Bastille.38 Similarly, the Lyonnais elite understood the drawbacks of the octrois but also recognized the state’s reliance on the taxes. Eager to restore order, “several members of the nobility,” it was reported to the crown, “and a great number of merchants voluntarily took up arms, and, commanded by the … knights of the  royal … military order of Saint-Louis, they got … together with the king’s troops to defend Lyon, end the disorders and reestablish the collection of the rights.” Shots were fired and “two men and four or five horses were killed.” A letter to Versailles on July 10, 1789 confirmed the restoration of order and of the octrois in particular.39 Ten days later, when news arrived of the fall of the Bastille, a former municipal official of Saint-Étienne led the popular classes to the marquis d’Osmond’s mining operation, destroyed the up-to-date machines he had purchased, looted merchandise and horses, and forced the skilled workers to flee. The rentier elite of Saint-Étienne thus claimed its property rights to

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the subsoil, and the peasants preserved their right to collect coal during the irregular intervals when they needed income to round out their subsistence.40 The provincial assembly, tax reforms, and seigneurial rights In this way, the bourgeoisie showed little inclination to take the disparate interests in hand and forge a common path to regional development. To the contrary, its members actually defended the octrois of Lyon and directed the destruction of the modern mining operations near Saint-Étienne. Though Lyonnais was a leading manufacturing province, it was still, like the rest of France, primarily agricultural. Its upper classes, whether merchants, office holders, or landowners, continued to pursue ranks, privileges, and offices within the monarchy rather than cash reserves in the manner of investors of the capitalist era. Be that as it may, while pursuing careers within the monarchy, many members of the bourgeoisie hoped for a better administration and a more prosperous future for the kingdom. Indeed, historians of well-to-do families in provincial towns emphasize the bonds formed across professional groups, the pride taken in public functions, and the legal erudition displayed in scholarly writings and academies. Urban priests, landowners, and officials used their education and professional expertise to publicize projects of civic improvement. They hoped that such improvements represented steps forward for the nation as a whole.41 The provincial assemblies focused this civic-mindedness on ways of reforming taxation and roadwork. We will perceive in what follows that office holders of the Third Estate came to see heritable jurisdictions as obstacles to their hopes, when they, rather than the high clergy or nobility, always seemed to be the ones asked to sacrifice privileges to the public good. This preoccupation with privilege developed in part out of the provision – in the edict of 1787 bringing the provincial assemblies into existence – for elections to what were known as rural municipalities (municipalités). This provision constituted a radical rupture with tradition. The royal council had sometimes sided with peasant communities in litigation against seigneurs but had never pursued a plan to supplant the feudal authorities in the countryside.42 In Lyonnais, these authorities had endured since time immemorial in meetings, known as assizes, convoked by seigneurial judges to recall the tithes, dues and monopolies, prohibitions on bearing arms and hunting, and rules for zoning, grape harvests, and public morals legally binding on the manor.43 Notaries, jurists, and office holders benefited from the rights recognized in the assizes. They obtained income from rural communities by serving as

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seigneurial judges and by leasing the right to collect dues from the royal domains and individual lords.44 The residents of Saint-Didier-sur-Beaujeu stated in their grievance list (cahier de doléances), composed during the elections to the Estates General in the spring of 1789, that the collectors form demands against each inhabitant of the seigneurial jurisdiction for the most trifling levies as well as for the most significant under the pretext that they are obliged to carry out collection and show their accounts. They cause considerable fees, and the inhabitants who cannot pay are obliged to sell their lands … and thus the stewards collect lods on the property transfers. By dint of these increased levies, as well as the arrears of dues, fees and lods reiterated … on most of the inhabitants of the jurisdiction, one sees … the collectors of the nobles’ rights, who originally had nothing, succeed in less than ten or twelve years in making a brilliant fortune and often buying the seigneuries.45

The rural municipalities, it is true, did not mobilize a system of rural democracy against these rights. Inhabitants had to pay 10 livres of taxes to vote, and 30 to be elected, and the seigneur had the right to preside over the meetings. Yet the rural municipalities still represented the peasants’ concerns in ways the assizes, convoked to recall the regulations of the manor, never did. Moreover, in the ensuing years, the rural municipalities were to send representatives to arrondissement meetings to vote in new members of the district assemblies, which in turn were to elect the future participants in the provincial assemblies. Rural inhabitants were thus led to believe they might contest the sorts of abuses enumerated by the residents of Saint-Didier. An outpouring of complaints ensued. Rural municipalities across the province brought up the practice known as the transport des cotes, which allowed landowners with plots scattered across different parishes to pay all of their taxes in their place of residence. Villagers believed that absentee landowners thereby reduced their assessments and obliged the peasants to pay extra sums covering the resultant deficit in the tax rolls. What one should notice is that the upper-level assemblies, composed of provincial elites, often took up the peasants’ cause. One of the arguments of this book is that the provincial assemblies offered a novel perspective. Whereas the nobles customarily defended privileges from peasant protests and intrusive royal policies, in the assemblies, they served as representatives entrusted with reforms by the king. Louis XVI instructed the participants to improve the conditions of the provincial inhabitants. In the case at hand, the Assembly of Lyonnais recorded in its minutes toward the end of 1788 that whereas a royal declaration of 1768 had abolished the transport of assessments, the “cour des aides … ordered … that the custom … be continued.” This order prohibited “any examination of the drawbacks and abuses.” But the Assembly

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was “touched by the observations and complaints … of citizens interested in the public good.” It therefore asked “the Royal Council [for] a regulation … that would prohibit all transports and order the re-establishment of all the tax assessments transported.”46 Another privilege, which the rural municipalities brought to the attention of the provincial assembly, was the cost of clerical residences. Parish priests hailed from families of merchants, proprietors, office holders, lawyers, and notaries. After 1750, many of them acquired a taste for elegant houses to distinguish themselves from the peasants in the village cottages.47 The sieur Martinot, for example, priest of Echalas, drew this community into litigation at the beginning of 1789 over improvements to his house. The district assembly in Roanne described the case as “monstrous, persecutory and contrary to all principles.” In using the judiciary, “the priest found the secret to generate fees which mount to at least 6,000 livres … This unhappy community … with a sixth of this sum, and perhaps less, would have completed the repairs if the priest did not persist in pleading uselessly.” The assembly in Roanne asked the royal council to annul the lawsuit just as it had annulled one “introduced in the bailliage of Montbrison by the priest of Saint-Georges de Baroille en Forez.”48 The judicial fees mentioned in this case came up recurrently in the provincial assembly. Even minor lawsuits could amount to burdens on the peasants and dissuade them from seeking justice. The mere threat of litigation sometimes sufficed to browbeat a rural community into compliance with the  demands of wealthier residents.49 The assembly of Roanne pointed out this problem at the beginning of 1789 when considering an appeal to the royal council of a ruling of the cour des aides that discharged the sieur Perroton de Chatelier of his responsibility for collecting the taxes of a community. Taking taxes from commoners was a thankless task, which the well-to-do preferred to avoid. Yet the members of the district assembly in Roanne did not believe that the peasants had to perform it unquestioningly. “We do not wish to expose … this community to support … at its own cost, an appeal, because it is rare that communities, always badly defended, not succumb even in the most just lawsuits.” The assembly decided to beseech Perroton to forego the court costs awarded to him by the cour des aides. If he insisted on them, the assembly vowed to take up the community’s defense, free of charge, in the royal council.50 The members of the provincial assembly thus became aware of the unfairness, from the peasants’ perspective, of judicial bodies. The assembly received a report, for instance, about the judgment of the élection of Lyon that discharged Jean Siméon from responsibility for collecting the taxes of SaintGenis-Terrenoire. The assembly then pledged to the elected municipality of

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the village to have the judgment overturned by the royal council. The assembly wrote “to Necker to inform him of the annoyances experienced by the rural municipalities on account of the élections.”51 As the preceding cases indicate, the local courts generally sided with social elites against rural communities. However, between 1777 and 1789, several communities raised funds to appeal local rulings to the royal council. As an illustration, in 1777–78, the élection of Lyon and the cour des aides of Paris removed the dame de Francisqui de Curis, widow of François de Francisqui, a squire and major of the troops de la Grenade, from the tax rolls of Albigny, obliged the villagers to cover the resultant shortfall, and compelled them to reimburse her fiscal payments of previous years. The land in question consisted of seven plots within a domain purchased by Francisqui in 1773 from the sieur Becard, a venal magistrate enjoying the status of bourgeois of Lyon. In appealing the rulings to the royal council, the syndics, inhabitants, and community of Albigny objected that a noble’s four plowings of tax-exempt land must be situated within a single parish, not scattered across several of them like Francisqui’s.52 Rural communities, however, generally preferred not to risk their resources financing drawn-out appeals. To accommodate them, the provincial assembly sought to take over the jurisdictions of the élections and bureau of finances. This latter court registered thousands of concessions of seigneurial properties from the royal domains to local lords. The officers received a feudal oath of loyalty on behalf of the king each time they did so. The bureau of finances also judged litigation regarding the roads and received the royal tax bill for the province before apportioning it to the élections. Toward the end of 1787, the assembly resolved, “there would result little advantage and perhaps several problems if the … bureaus of finances and … élections continued to participate in the distribution of taxes.” The assembly then limited these courts to the nomination of a single delegate to its meetings. The delegate would only provide the assembly with information about the relevant laws. “Under any other affiliation, the delegates could … disturb … an operation about which they have no exact figures.”53 The rural municipalities, in these ways, prompted the provincial assembly to take on the privileges of many local elites. To take a case in point, the abbot de Boisboissel – a church canon, the comte de Lyon, and president of the district assembly in Saint-Étienne – told this body in 1788 that their activities were “surrounded by pitfalls and dangers,” namely the “opulent proprietors” who sought to avoid the burden of taxation and shift all of it onto the shoulders of the unfortunate.54 Nevertheless, the status of bourgeois of Lyon concerned thousands of well-to-do townspeople and proved difficult to reform. In a series of rulings

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from 1760 to 1788, the élection of Lyon granted the requests of lords, merchants, office holders, and seigneurial agents to remove their agricultural lands from the rolls of the taille on the grounds that they resided in the city most of the year and thus qualified for the status of bourgeois.55 Rural inhabitants, however, objected to this privilege. The cahier of Belleroche, for example, advocated the suppression of the élection tribunals so that “Beaujolais … be released from … the right of bourgeois of Lyon, a right that gives rise to the greatest abuses.”56 Taking up the complaints of the rural municipalities, the district assembly in Villefranche deliberated toward the end of 1787 that “the  parishes of Beaujolais are overtaxed because a great number of these bourgeois, in putting in a plea for their privilege, foist onto the other proprietors a tax that should be borne by all.” The assembly vowed to ask the king to suspend the category bourgeois of Lyon.57 But Lyon’s elite benefited from this privilege and defended it in the courts and assemblies. In 1788, for example, the élection of Lyon granted the request of Charles François Marie Brunet, a member of the district assembly, for the privileges of the city and “prohibited the … inhabitants … of SaintGermain-au-Mont-d’Or to impose the taille on” his domain.58 The district assembly wrote to the provincial body that “the exemptions enjoyed by the bourgeois … are … an inherent right of the city of which the inhabitants may not be deprived.”59 The same year, the provincial assembly took up the complaints of the bourgeois of Lyon about the elected municipality of Fontaines. The bourgeois objected to paying taxes traditionally levied solely on the residents of this locality. The assembly informed the king’s intendant of finances, Antoine-Louis Blondel, “Fontaines … should not have changed the fiscal rolls on its own authority.”60 In this way, while the Assembly of Lyonnais sought to improve conditions in the countryside, its members thought that many of the rural municipalities’ proposals went too far. The municipality of Saint-Germain-Laval, for example, a rural parish of about 1,500 inhabitants, sent a deliberation, worth quoting at some length, to the district assembly of Roanne in October 1788. The first line stated, “the privileges concerning the … taille have been in all times, the despair of common tax-payers [and] the direst blow to agriculture … because if there is any exception the best regulation will be … a palliative that will not attack the evil in its source.” Concerning the provincial assembly, the municipality deliberated that “the privileged class … composes half of … [it] and … the Third Estate … is represented in large part by privileged persons.” The municipality recognized that a “spirit of justice, beneficence and patriotism animates” the members of the assembly. “The basis of [the assembly’s] constitution is to adopt the most just mode of distributing taxes.” However, according to the villagers elected to the municipality of Saint-Germain-Laval,

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“far from being useful, the provincial assembly would be nothing more than a dangerous organization if these [fiscal] distinctions subsisted. How would the assembly matter to the people … if, owing to the advantages of credit and riches, it gathered together the means of suffocating the … oppressed party by having it represented by people interested in serving it badly?”61 Similarly, in July 1788, the controller general took up a report from the provincial assembly that the municipality “of Saint-Paul-en-Jarez … complained about the exemptions of privileged persons.” This complaint did not involve the transport of assessments, the status of bourgeois, or the pretensions of parish priests. Rather, the municipality of Saint-Paul-en-Jarez contested the very existence of privileges. The assembly responded, “the exemptions … are founded on the law and must exist until it pleases the king to order otherwise.”62 Other rural municipalities sought to remove seigneurial agents from their midst. The municipality of Ambierle, for instance, expressed discontent at having the seigneurial judge as its syndic. According to the notes of the provincial assembly, “the inhabitants maintain that this quality is incompatible with the post of syndic; given the impossibility of being both the lord’s man and the representative of the parish.” The assembly tersely opined, however, that “this municipality must remain as it is.”63 The tendency of the rural municipalities to challenge seigneurial authority led the provincial assembly to ask the king to circumscribe the peasants’ role in them: given the peasants’ “system of conspiracy … if one allowed them the liberty of association in the … municipalities … receptive to all sorts of seduction” the peasants will unite “against all that humiliates and subjugates them.” The peasants will become “tumultuous … which usually happens when an assembly composed of people from the countryside does not have at its head someone who inspires the respect and confidence to bring them back to the sense of reason … by his wisdom and keep them under control by the superiority of his rank.” In the coming years, villagers, “almost all illiterate, incapable in most cases of … discussing an opinion and comprehending the public good … and … accessible to all sorts of corruption” would make up the “deputies of the … parishes called to vote to renew the districts, and by degrees the provincial assemblies.” The assembly therefore proposed that the traditional elites take part in the rural municipalities and supervise the proceedings.64 In sum, the nobles in charge of the provincial assembly, in their zeal to serve the king by ameliorating the conditions of the people, took on the great number of peripheral members of the dominant class such as landlords, priests, and jurists over exemptions, clerical residences, and local jurisdictions but defended the seigneurial rights and privileges central to the nobles’ status. This reluctance to confront the core institutions of the Old Regime

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became apparent when the king sought to reform the system for roadwork. Royal regulations of 1757 required the rural inhabitants of Lyonnais to perform twelve days of corvée labor on the roads. The first two estates, bourgeois of Lyon, and employees of the tax farms were exempt. New regulations of the 1770s augmented the labor services, obliged some peasants to work twenty days a year far from their homes, and expanded exemptions to include town residents and managers of the nobles’ lands. Rural inhabitants defied the regulations and fought back against brigades of the mounted constabulary sent to enforce them. The peasants of Fontaines drove royal troops out of their parish. By the end of the decade, prison sentences and billeting troops no longer sufficed to quell the unrest. Less than a twelfth of the work was done, and roads began to deteriorate. Updated rules in 1782 made everyone listed in the rolls of the taille liable for the work and offered parishes the right to avoid it by paying a tax. The intendant informed the controller general that everyone but the large proprietors welcomed the change. The monarchy sought to formalize it in 1787 by having the provincial assembly levy a tax on proprietors and put an end to all forced labor on the roads. Yet the assembly did not include the privileged orders in the tax rolls and put off any discussion of doing so until the meeting of the Estates General.65 The provincial assembly also proved reluctant to make nobles pay the  vingtièmes. These taxes were supposed to take 5 percent of incomes regardless of a person’s status. The crown added them to the commoners’ taille rolls, but allowed nobles to make voluntary declarations of their income, which by all accounts reduced their rates. Yet during 1770s, the royal agent Jean François Delmas went over notarial records in Montbrison to assess the holdings of privileged persons and make them pay the legal rate. The administrator Rigotier used information brought by rural residents to his bureau in Lyon to augment the vingtièmes of the nobles.66 The king resumed this initiative in 1787 when he invited the provincial assemblies to collect the vingtièmes. The intendant informed the Assembly of Lyonnais that the vingtièmes should amount to 2,136,000 livres, up from 1,421,892 the previous year. The crown extrapolated this increase from the verifications completed by its agents in about 14 percent of the parishes during the 1770s. The Assembly disputed these figures, stating that all properties had already been verified, that the remaining ones susceptible to increases belonged to the king, the duc d’Orléans, the Order of Malta and the Hospitals, and that these properties should pay only about 5 percent of the additional sum requested. The Assembly stated that the verifications had been carried out in a time of prosperity and that land rents had since declined. It then declared at the end of November 1787 that it would not collect the vingtièmes for the crown.67

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In refusing to do so, the Assembly of Lyonnais laid the province open to new investigations by royal agents. It petitioned “His Majesty to not submit the province to verifications which would be more alarming to the people than useful to the tax authorities and which would erase the hope they felt that the new form of administration would contribute to their relief and to their happiness.”68 The archbishop of Lyon proposed instead that the taxes be distributed in a spirit of equality “without ever degenerating into humiliating espionage.”69 The district assembly of Beaujolais wrote to the newly elected village representatives in April 1788 that “the rigorous verifications used by the vingtième agents can only be balanced by the particular verifications made by the municipalities … which will become a defensive arm in our hands.” The members of the assembly clearly hoped to protect the nobles’ right to make voluntary declarations. They advised the municipalities that, in verifying landed incomes, one should not “consult the notarial records, the … local experts in feudal titles, or the seigneurial archives to appraise the farms … It is possible without employing this sort of inquisition to know by approximation the product. The lord knows better than anyone else the properties of this sort.” The assembly invited the rural municipalities “to procure the truest possible results without resorting to always-costly and alarming cadasters and surveying.” As for “an exact geometric verification … the assembly does not demand at all such … precision. It is enough to know approximately the yield … of the properties exempt from taxation.”70 Six months later, the assembly of Beaujolais deemed even accommodating evaluations of this sort too intrusive: However just, sage, and moderate these verifications might be they would still appear as an odious inquisition that would establish between the municipalities and the parish inhabitants, of whom they are … the representatives and champions, a division incited by the personal interests and hatreds of internal struggles which in all times and places are the first obstacles to the public good.71

The provincial assembly ultimately declared, “until the Nation has sanctioned [the vingtèmes] by … the Estates General, the … assemblies have no other mission than that of simplifying, clarifying, and evening out the … taxes legally established.”72 By invoking consent, through the Estates General, the members of the assembly, like nobles across the realm, drew a conceptual link between taxation and representation. As a new institution, which aroused interest across the province, the assembly thus helped galvanize public opinion against the crown. While the assembly’s position cannot be considered revolutionary, it became so when commoners like the peasants of Saint-GermainLaval and Ambierle, analyzed above, took the more radical step of demanding representation for the common people.73

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Revolutionary outcomes The deadlock over taxation thus brought the issue of political participation to the fore. The commoners’ eagerness to partake in government led to conflict with the provincial assembly, headed by the high clergy and nobility, which sought to prod the crown toward traditional restrictive forms of representation. Conflict did not arise out of opposing views on the economy. The noble and bourgeois members of the academies and assemblies had the same opinion on the virtues of free trade and the expansion of manufacturing. In the cahiers, the nobility called for the revocation of all royal concessions for mines, the abolition of tolls, after reimbursement of the titleholders, the conversion of municipal into national debt of all sums borrowed on behalf of the king, and the reduction of the octrois and other levies at the entrance to Lyon to the minimum recognized as absolutely necessary to liquidate the remaining obligations of the city. These demands hardly differed from those put forward by the municipality and bourgeois of Lyon, and by the Third Estate of the province.74 The problem, we saw above, was the reluctance of the upper classes to act on these views and challenge the vested interests bound up in the octrois of Lyon. The three estates of the provincial assembly also joined in protesting against the suppression of the Parlement of Paris in May 1788. The king and his ministers prevailed upon several office holders in the seneschal court to accept posts in the grand bailliage, set up to replace the Parlement, but especially hoped to coopt a judge of the stature of Pierre-Antoine Barou du Soleil. This jurist had attained membership in the Academy of Lyon and the Third Estate of the assembly. But Barou du Soleil protested his fidelity to the laws of the kingdom and condemned the opportunism of his peers in the seneschal court. The crown then exiled him to the fort of Brescou on an island off the southern coast. The assembly expressed outrage that one of its members was “struck by a rigorous order” for defending the constitution of the monarchy. It addressed letters “to His Majesty … with the purpose of bringing this disgrace to an end.”75 The crown suppressed the bureaus of finances along with the Parlement, and just as it transferred the Parlement’s responsibilities to the grand bailliages, so too did it offer the bureau of finances’ responsibilities for taxes and roadwork to the provincial assembly. In June 1788, Lyon’s treasurers of France, as the judges in the bureaus of finances were known, wrote an open letter disputing the assertion that their offices saddled common subjects with extra burdens. Although their offices granted nobility after a generation of service, in Lyon only one of them had acceded to the Second Estate in this manner. “This company has always been composed … of officers already noble.” Rather than create exemptions from the common fiscal burden, they

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claimed to benefit their compatriots by diligently administering taxation and roadwork. The magistrates therefore called for the restoration of their offices as well as for “the convocation of the Estates General, which alone can … make joy and tranquility replace disorder and public consternation.”76 The members of the provincial and district assemblies in Lyon shared this aspiration. In January 1789, the district assembly deliberated that, in comparison to provincial estates, its own meetings represented a poor form of administration. The provincial assembly resolved to solicit from “the king the establishment in this province, of … estates, in the manner of those of Dauphiné.”77 These estates had taken shape the previous summer on the initiative of patriots acting in defiance of the crown when it suppressed the Parlement of Grenoble. The Estates of Dauphiné generated excitement across the realm. Had estates been established in Lyonnais, they surely would have eclipsed the provincial assembly. Even so, the members of the assembly demanded estates, putting the wishes of their constituents before their own interests. The upper clergymen and nobles of the provincial assembly had deliberated for months over the crown’s efforts to impose the vingtièmes and taxes for roadwork on all proprietors. They had attended to the complaints of the rural municipalities, when venal judges authorized the privileged classes to remove assessments from the tax rolls and thereby add to the burden on villagers. After this experience, the electoral gatherings of the nobility in Lyon, Montbrison, and Villefranche embraced fiscal equality in the spring of 1789.78 The provincial assembly, we have seen, condemned popular initiatives liable to undermine seigneurial authority. Nevertheless, toward the end of 1787, the municipality elected by the peasants of Propières prevailed upon the district assembly of Beaujolais to send two of its members, the marquis de Monspey and the abbot Varenard, to confer with the inhabitants about their complaint against M. Lavoix D’Agolette. The documents do not offer any further information about this dispute but do show that the provincial assembly sided with the municipality of Anse against its seigneur. According to the village representatives, the lord had customarily used monopoly rights over the village oven, and the woods used to fire it, to bake the inhabitants’ bread at fixed prices but then turned his rights to more lucrative ends in disregard of the municipality’s instructions. The provincial assembly sought to redress this complaint by writing to “the intendant to approve” the municipality’s efforts to oblige the holders of the monopoly rights to put the oven at the inhabitants’ disposal in the customary manner.79 Several months later, the nobles of Forez, meeting in Montbrison, demanded that the rural inhabitants have the right to put an end to seigneurial dues after reimbursing the titleholders. They asked their representatives to make merit, rather than purchase and inheritance, the criterion for acceding

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to the bench. Deschamps, a member of the provincial assembly, presided over the nobles’ electoral gathering in Lyon, which also demanded that villagers have the right to unburden themselves of seigneurial dues. After his election to the Estates General, Deschamps, on June 27, 1789, urged his fellow nobles to join him and forty-six other members of the Second Estate in uniting with the deputies of the Third: “it is by the wisdom and ascendancy of your opinion and guidance that you defend the homeland. It is not by forsaking them that one brings back those who would throw themselves into exaggerated ideas, always applauded by their partisans.”80 The comte de Laurencin, after taking part in the provincial assembly, embraced the principle of civic equality and won election to the commune and district of Lyon in 1792.81 Although these positions staked out by individual lords may seem trivial, they in fact demonstrate one of the arguments of this book, developed more thoroughly in Chapter 6: that the provincial assemblies offered a new logic, or institutionalized manner, of political practice leading elites to consider the needs of provincial inhabitants. The members could not help but see that the traditional jurisdictions stood in conflict with the reforms entrusted to them by the king. The argument is not that the assemblies transformed the consciousness of every member. What they did was change the institutional setting, make elites act politically in new ways, and thus lead them to conceive of a different relationship to the state. While these elites saw the advantages of taking charge of reforms, most of them, in view of their lineages, properties, and jurisdictions, remained reluctant to make such a leap. They enjoyed privileges as municipal officers and rentiers, and especially as seigneurs. The constitution of the monarchy thus militated against an evolution toward a liberal regime in which townspeople and nobles would have the same legal means of making their way in the world. Thus, if one scrutinizes the provincial assembly’s appeal for estates in Lyonnais, it is clear that the goal was to dampen the hopes for national representation spreading among commoners. The assembly aimed to avoid mass elections in the parishes, bailliages, and sénéchaussées. In preference to this unsettling prospect, the district assembly of Lyon deliberated in January 1789 that estates “enable the provinces to appear through their deputies in national assemblies and to defend their rights there.”82 A month earlier, the provincial assembly endorsed a regulation for each order to furnish “an equal number of its representatives to the Estates General so that there is not any preponderance of one over another.” The assembly adhered to “the wish expressed by the Parlement of Paris, … to require in preference to any other form, the one observed in 1614,” permitting the first two estates to dominate the proceedings.83 When nobles gathered in Villefranche in the spring of 1789, Jean Despiney Delaye, seigneur de Saint-Denis-Despiney and president of the

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district assembly, read an essay, redolent of the oaths of a medieval monarchy, in praise of the noble largesse of the duc d’Orléans, the foremost holder of feudal rights in Beaujolais. Despiney declared, in the name of Orléans, the sacrifice of all the “prince’s” onerous rights. The Beaujolais nobility unanimously applauded Orléans and named him deputy to the Estates General for the protection of their interests as well as those of the region. They demanded, in their cahier, that their representatives vote by order in the Estates General in keeping with the constitution of the monarchy. They demanded that when the parish seigneur did not attend the rural municipality, a lineage noble and fief holder should preside over the proceedings, not the inhabitants’ elected syndic.84 The Second Estate of Forez stated that the Estates General should decide the manner of voting and that the nobility should retain its due influence in public affairs. In the words of the nobles meeting in Lyon, “we want our deputies to insist upon deliberations by order.”85 For non-noble elites, the proceedings of the provincial assembly confirmed the experience of inequality characteristic of their lives under the Old Regime. Parish priests saw the assembly, headed by the archbishop, beneficiary of an annual income of tens of thousands of livres, side with the rural municipalities in disputes over the costs of the priests’ residences. Many of them no doubt perceived the double standard. In the spring of 1789, the priests of Forez forced the First Estate, meeting in Roanne, to declare that “it was ridiculous and odious to see … the high clergy preach evangelic poverty in the midst of opulence and sumptuous luxury.”86 The Lyonnais prior Charrier de la Roche subsequently joined the Third Estate in Versailles on June 19, 1789, and his fellow clergyman, Desvernay from Villefranche, played a prominent role on the Night of August 4th, renouncing his privileges and prodding his fellow deputies to abolish feudalism. The high-ranking nobles at the head of the provincial assembly alleviated the burdens on rural inhabitants by diminishing the cost of litigation, eliminating the transport of tax assessments, and appropriating the jurisdictions of lower-level office holders. These initiatives undermined the privileges of wellto-do commoners. Yet the assembly obstructed reforms of the vingtièmes and taxes for roadwork that would have subjected nobles to laws applicable to other subjects. In this way, for the nearly two years of the assemblies’ existence, townspeople saw the nobles eliminate privileges open to the Third Estate, impeding its upper strata from climbing the political hierarchy, but resist reforms liable to undermine the nobles’ rank in the regime.87 The provincial assembly thus drew attention to the experience of so many members of the bourgeoisie of having to degrade themselves before noble patrons in order to make their way in the world.88 Saint-Étienne, for instance, was located within the jurisdiction of Pierre Gilbert de Voisins, a

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judge in the Parlement of Paris, whose feudal titles included the right to name the municipal officers. The crown freed the townspeople from Voisins’s sphere of authority in 1787 by offering him an advantageous exchange from the royal domains in return for his seigneurial rights over Saint-Étienne. In December 1788, forty-two well-to-do residents gathered to declare that the nobility and clergy formed a formidable colossus, maintained an exclusive right to the favors and privileges of the regime, and prevented the Third Estate from bringing its grievances to the throne.89 The same month, in Montbrison, office holders in the municipality and tribunal, and representatives of jurists, merchants, rentier landowners, and guilds assembled to declare that in the Estates General, the deputies of the Third Estate should have a preponderant voice, in accordance with the natural order, so as to consign to oblivion the despotism of the feudal reign when the nobles arrogated the rights of citizenship.90 In the spring of 1789, the meetings of the Third Estate in the towns of Lyonnais demanded with one voice that the three orders deliberate together and votes be counted by head in the Estates General. The Third Estate of Beaujolais, in particular, complained that it “supported … almost alone, all the weight of … taxation without having as much say as the other estates in the … administration of which it should have even more of a right to share the advantages.” These well-to-do commoners therefore demanded, in the first article of the cahier, that “all distinctions degrading for the Third Estate must be abolished.”91 Similarly, the peasants of Lyonnais initially took an interest in the rural municipalities, when their representatives worked with the provincial assembly on issues that mattered to them, such as the transport of tax assessments, the costliness of clerical residences, and the iniquity of the judiciary. However, the nobles in control of the assembly distrusted the rural municipalities and petitioned the crown to assure seigneurial control over them. This opposition to popular initiatives turned the peasants’ opinions against the assemblies. Over 80 percent of the parish cahiers of Beaujolais referred to the undue power exercised by the nobles over the rest of society. Over 56 percent of the cahiers referred to the assemblies, and over 80 percent of these references were negative. The most common criticism was the lack of representation. In a typical statement, the inhabitants of Saint-Just-d’Avray affirmed in the first article of their cahier the desire to obtain provincial estates, like those of Dauphiné, to “establish a new constitution and replace the irregularity that has introduced itself into the composition of the provincial assemblies in that the Third Estate is insufficiently represented.”92 In conclusion, manufacturing expanded in Lyon, Saint-Étienne, and other towns and villages of the region. Although the merchants tended to abandon

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commerce – once able to afford a judicial office or an ennobling title, and attain the sought-after lifestyle of the rentier – they and the nobles embraced the tenets of economic liberalism. The office holders, marquises, counts, and upper clergy of the learned academies and provincial assembly perceived that the prosperity of the region, their own fortunes, and the wellbeing of the monarchy depended on the progress of trade. The assembly opposed commercial privileges, such as the monopoly rights to the coal deposits of Forez, granted by the monarchy to influential nobles in the capital. The provincial assembly, moreover, worked to alleviate the burdens on the peasantry by abolishing the privileges of parish priests, venal jurists, and rentier landowners. By the spring of 1789, the nobles of Forez recommended that judges no longer have the right to pass on their offices as hereditary property. They and the nobles meeting in Lyon stated that the peasants ought to be able to extinguish seigneurial dues after reimbursing the lords. Yet the provincial assemblies did not accustom the majority of the nobles to base their status on property, education, and talent rather than on privilege. For this reason, the assembly resisted universal taxes equally applicable to nobles and commoners. The nobles did not reject paying taxes per se. They actually renounced exemptions in the spring of 1789. What they rejected was the principle of civic equality implied in these taxes. It was this outlook that led the provincial assembly to oppose the rural municipalities. Whereas peasants had customarily assembled before the seigneurial judge to receive the rules of the manor, the rural municipalities allowed them to elect representatives responsive to their concerns. The nobles, however, recoiled before the prospect of collaborating with commoners in local government and later insisted on voting by order in the Estates General. The growth of commerce, the broadening acquisition of luxury attire, and the blurring of distinctions of dress may have contributed to a change of social perceptions and made people amenable to a regime of civic equality. I conclude that, in the period of the provincial assemblies between 1787 and 1789, commoners focused on the concrete obstacles to such a regime. They saw the nobles as opponents of their aspiration to play an equal role in the debates over the future of the country. While the upper strata of the Third Estate shared this experience of exclusion with other commoners, they adamantly opposed independent actions taken by peasants and artisans. The merchant Étienne Mayet, for ­example – writing in 1786, on the best means to maintain the prosperity of Lyon’s workshops – argued that wage increases might permit the worker to “subsist for a time without the help of his hands: he will use this time to form a secret organization or cabal.”93 Later that year, craft workers and journeymen of Lyon rebelled against the merchant elites in an effort to impose fixed tariffs

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for the silk wears produced in their workshops. The bourgeoisie welcomed royal troops into the city to crush the rebellion and uphold the free market. Three years later, in the summer of 1789, wealthy commoners volunteered for a militia to support, and in many cases stand in for, the monarchy’s overstretched forces of order and put down anti-seigneurial revolts. They left many peasants dead in the fields of Lyonnais.94 It has been argued, in an influential recent book, that members of the upper classes wrote innumerable texts about the injustice of economic monopolies and wasteful indirect taxes. Yet the National Assembly would never have abolished these commercial restrictions had it not been for the popular uprisings against them during the Revolution.95 Along the same lines, it has been demonstrated in this chapter that the upper classes of Lyonnais hoped to reform economic institutions and remove obstacles to growth. However, when the provincial assembly began to debate concrete policies, the members retreated in the face of all of the investments in the tax farms, the monarchy’s reliance on the fiscal proceeds, and the threats to public order liable to result from public criticism of municipal tolls and royal monopolies. One must therefore conclude that popular revolts demonstrated the limits of the liberal convictions held in the abstract and forced the upper classes to confront the actual social relations of the time. Once royal authority began to crumble in 1789, the common people rose in revolt against the octrois of Lyon. They regarded the tax farms as private moneymaking from public contributions. Indeed, noble and bourgeois elites invested in the tax farms despite the barrage of judicial rulings and publications that inveighed against the tax farms as the incarnations of despotism. In the summer of 1789, Lyonnais merchants rallied behind noble officers in the military to put down the unrest and enforce the indirect taxes inherited from the Old Regime until the creation of a new fiscal system. The merchants and nobles probably seemed hypocritical. They applied the liberal creed selectively to foist a free market on the workshops of artisans and laborers but not to dismantle the fiscal and economic institutions beneficial to the upper classes.96 For this reason, if one agrees with public opinion in Lyonnais – that the octrois raised prices and suffocated industry – then one cannot ascribe the creation of a proper context for economic expansion to the liberalism of the educated classes. To account for the removal of the fetters on trade, one must instead consider the upheavals of the Revolution. Peasants and artisans had little interest in free markets. They simply sought to do away with burdensome tolls and tax collectors. In this way, the elimination of hindrances to trade in Lyonnais resulted from the unintended consequences of popular struggles against a fiscal monopoly from which the monarchy, and the whole gamut of the Lyonnais elite, drew wealth and power.97

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These divergent interests were nowhere more evident than in Poitou, the subject of the next chapter. As in Lyonnais, the provincial assembly of Poitou brought to the fore the separate goals pursued by privileged elites and common people. The traditional agrarian economy of Poitou, we will see, created the conditions for these divergences to fuse into hostile camps on a path to civil war during the Revolution. Notes   1 William Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 206 (2010), 94, 96; Maurice Wahl, Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon, 1788–1792 (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie, Éditeurs, 1894), 8; Georges Durand and Jean-Pierre Gutton, “Les temps modernes et la Révolution,” in Le Rhône et Lyon de la préhistoire à nos jours, ed. Gilbert Garrier (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Editions Bordessoules, 1987), 169; Olivier Zeller, “La soierie lyonnaise, de la tradition de prestige aux techniques de pointe,” in Actes du 112e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Lyon, 1987): Section d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (Paris: CTHS, 1987), 1:95; Louis Trénard, “La crise sociale Lyonnaise à la veille de la Révolution,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (1955), 8–9; L. Dubois and F. Dutacq, Histoire de Lyon, vol. 2: De 1595 à 1814 (Lyon: Librairie Pierre Masson, 1948), 154–5; E. Pariset, Histoire de la fabrique lyonnaise: étude sur le régime social et économique de l’industrie de la soie à Lyon, depuis le XVIe siècle (Lyon: A. Rey, 1901), 208–9, 212; Christian Sigel, “Le premier essor (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in Histoire de Saint-Étienne, ed. Jean Merley (Toulouse: Privat, 1990), 99; Bernard Lepetit, Les villes dans la France moderne (1740–1840) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988), 450; Jean-Baptiste Galley, L’élection de Saint-Étienne à la fin de l’ancien régime (Saint-Étienne: Ménard, 1903), 376–7.   2 Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1–2, 45, 47, 49, 217.  3 Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 537, 551; Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An AntiIndividualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 13, 156; John Shovlin, “The Cultural Politics of Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 578, 588, 606; William Sewell, “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in EighteenthCentury France,” Critical Historical Studies 1 (2014), 13–14; Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion,” 119.  4 Procès-verbaux des séances de la première assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon: tenue à Lyon, dans les mois de septembre, novembre & décembre 1787 (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, Imprimeur de l’administration provinciale, 1787), 2–3, 8–11; Galley, L’élection de Saint-Étienne, 447.   5 Archives Départementales du Rhone (hereafter ADR) 9 C 71; Claude Latta, “Une expérience d’institution provinciale à la veille de la Révolution: l’assemblée du département de Montbrison (1787–1789),” in Festival d’histoire de Montbrison (1988), 276; Jean-Baptiste Galley, Saint-Étienne et son district pendant la Révolution (Saint-Étienne: Imp. de “La Loire Républicaine,” 1903–1907), 21.   6 Roger Chartier, “L’académie de Lyon au XVIIIe siècle: étude de sociologie culturelle,” in Nouvelles études lyonnaises, ed. Roger Chartier et al. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1969), 165, 172–4, 183; Maurice Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: les Belles letters, 1970), 190–1, 204, 388–91.   7 Sarah Maza, “Bourgeoisie,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 128.

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  8 Intendants were commissioners appointed by the king to oversee the administration of the provinces.   9 ADR 9 C 2. 10 Amalia Kessler, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 3, 13, 226, 238, 266, 292; Roche, France in the Enlightenment, 72–3, 598; Sewell, “The Empire of Fashion,” 84, 119. 11 Chartier, “L’académie de Lyon,” 149, 152–7, 166, 172–4, 178, 191, 222, 229, 231, 234, 236–7, 245–6; Pariset, Histoire de la fabrique lyonnaise, 233, 249. 12 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon et sa commission intermédiaire 1787–1790, ed. Georges Guigue (Trévoux: Imprimerie de Jules Jeannin, 1898), 52. 13 ADR 9 C 72, 8 C 236; Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection Joly Fleury, 560, dossier 7749, fol. 275; Claude Faure, ed., Cahiers de doléances du Beaujolais pour les Etats Généraux de 1789 (Lyon: Impr. Nouvelle Lyonnaise, 1939), 133; Aimé Vingtrinier, Le dernier des Villeroy et sa famille: à propos d’un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque de Lyon (Paris: H. Champion, 1888), 12, 97; François Bayard, “Les pouvoirs dans la ville,” in Histoire de Lyon: des origines à nos jours, vol. 2: Du XVIe siècle à nos jours, ed. François Bayard and Pierre Cayez (Le Coteau: Horvath, 1990), 93; Wahl, Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon, 27; Trénard, “La crise sociale,” 17. 14 Ken Adler, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France: 1763–1815 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 168–9; E. Leseure, Historique des mines de houille du département de la Loire (Saint-Étienne: Société de l’Imp. Théolier, 1901), 90–93; Pétrus Faure, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier dans le département de la Loire (Saint-Étienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1956), 24. 15 ADR 1 C 190. 16 For Osmond’s use of influence at court to secure the monopoly, see Archives Départementales du Loire (ADL) C76. For other information on Osmond, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56–7. For the bourgeoisie of Saint-Étienne, see Josette Garnier, Bourgeoisie et propriété immobilière en Forez aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (SaintEtienne: Centre d’études foréziennes, 1982), 214; Galley, L’élection de Saint-Étienne, 493–4; Adler, Engineering the Revolution, 188. 17 ADR 1 C 190. 18 P. Tézenas du Montcel, Étude sur les assemblées provinciales du département de Saint-Étienne et sa commission intermédiaire (8 octobre 1787–21 juillet 1790) (Saint-Étienne: Société de l’imprimerie Théolier, 1903), 260. See also pp. 249–50, 252–3, 257. 19 ADR 9 C 3. 20 Paul Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 155, 166–7; Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 36–7. 21 ADR 1 C 190. 22 Jeff Horn, The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution: 1750–1830 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 111, 114; Jean Merley, “La situation du basin houiller stéphanois en 1783,” Bulletin du Centre d’histoire régionale 2 (1977), 59–60, 63; Maurice Garden, “Le Lyonnais, première région industrielle de France,” in Histoire de Lyon et du lyonnais, ed. André Latreille (Toulouse: Privat, 1975), 243–4. 23 Eugène Courbis, Municipalité lyonnaise sous l’ancien régime (Lyon: Waltener & Cie, 1900), 120; Gail Bossenga, “Society,” in Old Regime France, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69; Wahl, Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon, 21. 24 Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of the Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 170. 25 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) AN H/1125. 26 Kwass, Contraband, 297, 301. 27 AN H/1125.

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28 AN H/1124; ADR 1 C 42; Wahl, Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon, 18, 20, 23; Garden, Lyon et les Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle, 394–5. 29 AN H/1125. 30 Pariset, Histoire de la fabrique lyonnaise, 233; Wahl, Les premières années de la Révolution à Lyon, 22–3. 31 M. Mayet, Mémoire sur les manufactures de Lyon (Paris: Chez Moutard, 1786), 37. 32 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 72, 98. 33 ADR 9 C 10. 34 Jean Nicolas, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 252–3, 315; C. Beaulieu, Histoire de Lyon depuis les Gaulois jusqu’à nos jours (Lyon: Auguste Baron, Libraire-Éditeur, 1837), 399–400; Pariset, Histoire de la fabrique lyonnaise, 232–3, 236–8, 249. 35 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 194. 36 ADR 1 C 68. 37 ADR 1 C 12. 38 Kwass, Contraband, 333, 337. 39 Ibid. 40 Horn, The Path Not Taken, 111, 114; Adler, Engineering the Revolution, 168–9; Jacqueline Bayon, “La crise révolutionnaire (1783–1815),” in Histoire de Saint-Etienne, ed. Jean Merley (Toulouse: Privat, 1990), 110. 41 Christine Adams, A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 117, 146, 148–9, 257–9; Christopher Johnson, Becoming Bourgeois: Love, Kinship and Power in Provincial France, 1670–1880 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 5, 12, 102. 42 Hilton Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 2, 15, 45–7, 197–8; J.Q.C Mackrell, The Attack on “Feudalism” in Eighteenth Century France (London: Routledge, 2007), 15, 71. 43 Serge Dontenwill, “Le role des assises et règlements de seigneurie dans la régulation sociale aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Le cas du Centre-Est de la France,” in Les justices de village; administration et justice locales de la fin du Moyen Âge à la révolution; actes du colloque d’Angers des 26 et 27 octobre (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), 223, 231; Serge Dontenwill, Du terrior au pays et à la région: les espaces sociaux en Roannais à l’époque préindustrielle (milieu du XVIIe siècle – fin du XVIIIe siècle). Essai d’histoire géographique (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 1997), 207; Jean-Pierre Gutton, Villages du lyonnais: sous la monarchie, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1978), 92–4. Christianne Lombard Déaux argues that seigneurial rights amounted to rigid, irrational, and unpleasant constraints. Seigneurs et seigneuries en Lyonnais et Beaujolais des guerres de religion à la Révolution: organisation, fonctionnement, évolution de la vie des campagnes (Lyon: Bellier, 2005), 143. 44 Garnier, Bourgeoisie et propriété, 161–2, 215. 45 Faure, Cahiers de doléances du Beaujolais, 118. 46 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 335–6. 47 Philip Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 148, 156, 159. 48 ADR 9 C 10. 49 Anthony  Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice:  Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 47. 50 ADR 9 C 10. 51 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 117. 52 AN H1575/1, H1579/1. Additional appeals made by peasant communities of the Lyonnais against judicial rulings are found in AN H1572/2, H1573/1, H1576, H1578, H1580/2, H1582, H1584, H1585, ADR 1 C 47. 53 ADR 9 C 68. ADR 8 C 1 contains thousands of fois et hommages et  aveux et dénombrements received by the bureau of finances for the concession of lordships from the king’s domains.

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54 Tézenas du Montcel, Étude sur les assemblées provinciales du département de Saint-Étienne, 271–2. 55 The rulings are found in ADR 3 C 89. 56 Faure, Cahiers de doléances du Beaujolais, 27; Étienne Fournial and Jean Pierre Gutton, eds., Cahiers de doléances de la province de Forez: bailliage principal de Montbrison et bailliage secondaire de Bourg-Argental (Saint-Étienne: Centre d’études foréziennes, 1974–75). 57 ADR 9 C 68. 58 ADR 3 C 89. 59 ADR 9 C 58. 60 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 68. 61 ADR 9 C 11. 62 AN H1519. 63 ADR 9 C 13. 64 ADR 9 C 2. 65 Abbé L. Chatelard, “La corvée royale dans le Lyonnais (1720–1789),” Revue d’histoire de Lyon (1908), 164–5, 172, 174, 179, 181–2; Henri Hours, “Émeutes et émotions populaires dans les campagnes du Lyonnais au XVIIIe siècle,” Cahiers d’histoire 9 (1964), 151–2; E. Brossard and Joseph Delapoix de Fréminville, Histoire du département de la Loire pendant la révolution française (1789–1799) (Saint-Étienne: Chevalier; Paris: H. Champion, 1904–07), 88. 66 ADL C 2; ADR 9 C 13. For background on the vingtièmes see Michael Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 303–4, 313–14; Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48, 56–7, 196, 203, 211. 67 Procès-verbaux des séances de la première assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 52–6. 68 ADR 9 C 71. 69 Procès-verbaux des séances de la première assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 10, 27, 59–60. 70 ADR 9 C 69. 71 ADR 9 C 71. 72 ADR 9 C 2. 73 Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers,” 300, 327, 329, 332; Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation, 274. 74 Henri de Jouvencel, ed., L’assemblée de la noblesse de la sénéchaussée de Lyon en 1789: étude historique et généalogique (Lyon: L. Brun, 1907), 108, 111–12; Assemblée nationale constituante (1789–1791), ed., États généraux; Cahiers des sénéchaussées et bailliages. Série 1 / Tome 3 / impr. par ordre du Sénat et de la Chambre des députés (Paris: P. Dupont, 1879), 600–1, 612, 614–15, 617, 619. 75 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 84–5; Paul Metzger, Contribution à l’étude de deux réformes judiciares au XVIIIe siècle: le Conseil supérieur et le Grand bailliage de Lyon, 1771–1774, 1788 (Lyon: A. Rey, imprimeur-éditeur, 1913), 383–4, 390–5; Tézenas du Montcel, Étude sur les assemblées provinciales du département de Saint-Étienne, 269. 76 ADR 8 C 230. 77 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 119. The deliberation of the district assembly of Lyon is found in ADR 9 C 11. 78 Raoul de Clavière, ed., Les assemblées des trois ordres de la sénéchaussée de Beaujolais en 1789: étude historique et généalogique (Lyon: Librairie A. Badiou-Amant, 1935), 219; Henri de Jouvencel, ed., L’Assemblée de la noblesse du bailliage de Forez en 1789: étude historique et généalogique (Lyon: Librairie ancienne de Louis Brun, 1911), 56; Jouvencel, L’assemblée de la noblesse de la sénéchaussée de Lyon, 103–4. 79 For the conflict in the parish of Propières, see ADR 9 C 68. For Anse, see ADR 1 C 42. 80 Quoted from Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants: 1789–1791 (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 281–2. 81 ADR 9 C 71; Louis Dériard and Jules Dériard, Antoine-Auguste Dériard, sa vie intime, ses travaux scientifiques et littéraires, et le résumé analytique de ses “Biographies des Lyonnais dignes de mémoire, nés

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à Lyon ou qui y ont acquis droit de cité”: par ses fils Jules et Louis Dériard (Lyon: Impr. de Pitrat aîné, 1890), 301; Jouvencel, L’Assemblée de la noblesse du bailliage de Forez, 58; Jouvencel, L’assemblée de la noblesse de la sénéchaussée de Lyon, 106. 82 ADR 9 C 11. 83 Procès-verbaux des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité de Lyon, 114. 84 Clavière, Les assemblées des trois ordres de la sénéchaussée de Beaujolais, 221–4. 85 Jouvencel, L’assemblée de la noblesse de la sénéchaussée de Lyon, 100; Jouvencel, L’Assemblée de la noblesse du bailliage de Forez, 55. 86 Francisque Pothier, Roanne pendant la Révolution (1789–1796) (Roanne: Chez Durand, Libraire, 1868), 23. 87 Galley, Saint-Étienne et son district, 14–15; Pothier, Roanne pendant la Révolution, 23. 88 For these degrading experiences, see William Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 13–14, 64, 140. 89 For the inhabitants’ declaration, see AN BIII 172 fols. 215–31. For Voisins’s feudal rights, ADR 1 C 46. 90 ADL 1 J 133. 91 Faure, Cahiers de doléances du Beaujolais, 164; Assemblée nationale constituante, États généraux; Cahiers des sénéchaussées et bailliages, 608, 616. 92 Faure, Cahiers de doléances du Beaujolais, 126. 93 Mayet, Mémoire sur les manufactures de Lyon, 60–1. 94 Anatoli Ado, Paysans en révolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794, trans. Serge Aberdam (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1996), 150–1. 95 Kwass, Contraband, 341. 96 John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 101–3, 237–8; Bryant Ragan, “Rural Political Activism and Fiscal Equality in the Revolutionary Somme,” in Recreating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant Ragan and Elizabeth Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 50; Clay Ramsay, The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 178–9. 97 Robert Brenner attributes the transition to capitalism in England to the unintended consequence of class struggles of the feudal period. These struggles accomplished primitive accumulation, specifically the dispossession, or separation, of the peasants from the means of production and subsistence. Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). My conclusion is more modest: simply that the popular struggles of the French Revolution put an end to tolls, tax farms, and monopolies inhibiting commerce.

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poitou: the question of feudalism

4

Poitou and the question of feudalism, from the Old Regime to revolution and counterrevolution Poitou ranked near the bottom of the tables of population and wealth made in 1784 by Jacques Necker, the former director general of finances. Its relevance, as a pays d’élection under the royal administration (as opposed to Burgundy, Languedoc, Brittany, and other pays d’état run by estates), was the particular relationship of the upper classes to the monarchy. In Berry and Lyonnais, the pays d’élection studied in Chapters 2 and 3, the nobles accepted the king’s invitation to join provincial assemblies and discuss commerce, elections, privileges, and the corvée labor required of rural commoners on the roads. In doing so, a notable minority of them sought to eliminate monopolies, tax exemptions, venal offices, and seigneurial rights. In Poitou, the nobles unanimously rejected any hint of reform. To understand their distinctive stance, one must examine the integrative role of the king’s patrimonial rights. To be precise, the king and his family fortified feudalism, and harnessed all levels of the nobility to what was known as the constitution of the monarchy, by exploiting the royal domains and by ceding lordships from the domains to grandees. These high nobles made the most of lucrative seigneuries and sold other lordships to local members of the Second Estate. The king and Poitevin nobles negotiated the issues of local government through these feudal networks. In consequence, the rural municipalities, created by the crown in 1787 to enlist the support of village representatives for reforms, amounted to more of a challenge to, and called forth more opposition from, the nobility of Poitou than they did in other provinces. Just as the monarchy alienated authority over rural areas to the lords, so too did it sell the administration and judiciary to the high justices of the Parlement in Paris, general receivers of taxes in Poitou, directors of the excises in the towns, and local judges in bureaus of finances, seneschal courts, and district fiscal tribunals (élections). The jurisdictional rights of these officers, like those of the lords, militated against the efforts of royal reformers to introduce the three-tiered system of provincial, district, and village assemblies. The

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reformers hoped to use the assemblies to make taxes more legitimate and thus overcome the nobles’ reluctance pay them. However, from the top of the feudal hierarchy, members of the king’s family refused to comply with fiscal reforms, and local nobles and members of the provincial assembly then followed suit. The leaders of the Third Estate, both in the provincial and district assemblies, as well as in the towns of Poitou, owned lower-level judgeships. These positions represented the vast majority of venal offices. Townspeople also purchased lordships, though ones not as extensive as those of the high nobility. Above all, better-off commoners administered seigneurial rights, collected the dues, and managed the sharecropping properties belonging to themselves and to the nobles. These tasks drew the revenue produced in the countryside to the upper classes residing in the towns. This Old Regime bourgeoisie embraced the provincial assemblies in spite of its investment in the feudal structures of the monarchy. Its members hoped to work with the nobles on administrative reform and economic development. They assumed that reforms would make for a brighter future through a sharing of the fiscal burden and an opening of the upper ranks of the monarchy to officials like themselves. When great lords and high judges defended their hereditary spheres of authority, and used the assemblies to stifle political participation, the townspeople responded by using an anti-feudal rhetoric against the nobility. The peasants, for their part, embraced the rural municipalities as a chance to participate in local government and improve their conditions, but became disillusioned with the reform as the nobles and wealthy commoners of the provincial and districts assemblies thwarted their initiatives. Peasants, then, in the spring of 1789, began to loot stores of grain, refuse to pay taxes and, over the following months, attack châteaux and burn feudal titles regardless of whether these actions harmed well-to-do commoners or nobles. Peasants thus had an adversarial relation with the Old Regime bourgeoisie, which, as administrators of seigneurial domains and sharecropping units, represented the face of feudalism to the countryside. Well-to-do townspeople made use of the anti-feudal rhetoric in a restrictive manner, limiting it to the nobles’ seigneurial holdings and high offices but not including the burdens weighing on sharecroppers. These burdens continued to benefit the townspeople after the National Assembly abolished feudalism in 1789. The peasants later regarded these townspeople as truly malevolent, and rebelled against them in 1793, when, as revolutionary officials, the townspeople continued to draw revenue to urban areas through taxes and land rents, and then conscripted rural inhabitants to fight for a regime at war with their religious practices. In a word, one cannot fully understand the War of the Vendée without

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considering the Old Regime bourgeoisie, which had administered feudalism and then continued to enforce burdensome agrarian relations after 1789 under a new regime of conscription and war against the religious t­raditions of the countryside. Paul Bois and Charles Tilly focused on agrarian relations in their classic studies of counterrevolution in the West. They showed that the bourgeoisie embraced the movement against the seigneurial regime and then came into conflict with peasants economically and culturally isolated from the towns. From the peasants’ perspective, the bourgeoisie seemed to be the only beneficiary of the revolutionary changes. Absent from Bois and Tilly, however, is the townspeople’s previous involvement in the seigneurial regime. This involvement left an underlying feeling of mistrust, which turned to overt hostility when the bourgeoisie took control of the revolutionary administration and imposed unpopular policies on the countryside.1 To give substance to these arguments, this chapter first contains an analysis of the feudal hierarchy that thwarted reformist plans for the peasants to participate in rural municipalities. The second part comprises a study of the venal jurisdictions, which frustrated the hopes of townspeople to use the provincial and district assemblies to implement reforms. One such reform, we will see in the third section, was a new fiscal system, run by the assemblies, which would have made taxation equal for all inhabitants had not the high nobles at the head of the feudal hierarchy intervened to impede investigations of their landed incomes. Finally, we will see how the upper classes’ possession of lordships and offices provides the background necessary for understanding the War of the Vendée of 1793. The seigneurial regime of Poitou and rural municipalities The monarchy’s combination of progressive reforms and traditional practices embroiled rural areas in turmoil and instilled in the peasantry an enduring suspicion of the town-based authorities. On the one hand, the introduction of representation into local government in 1787 amounted to the most innovative policy in the history of the monarchy. The crown invited country dwellers to participate in elections as individuals rather than as members of estates. In the coming years, these rural municipalities were to send representatives to arrondissement meetings for the purpose of voting for new members of the district assemblies, which in turn would elect the future participants in the provincial assemblies. The purpose of the three tiers of assemblies was to enlist royal subjects in the reform of the fiscal system. What happened in consequence was the emergence of political discussion and the formation of

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rural leaders.2 On the other hand, as we saw in previous chapters, Louis XVI did not preside over a unified state apparatus. Even as he awakened political initiative by introducing the rural municipalities, he concurrently drew on his own seigneurial rights to place a hierarchy of authorities, from the grandees down through town elites, over the people of the countryside. Many historians, to be sure, doubt the relevance of the seigneurial regime. Bois minimized the relevance of feudalism to the peasants of the West. Alfred Cobban described it as “a particularly functionless survival, the relics of an atrophied organ, which only a very adventurous social biologist could use to justify a classification with some fossil feudal order of the past.”3 François Furet argued: “in protesting against the residual and secondary seigneurial rights, which were psychologically all the more irritating as they represented a marginal drain on an already marginal operation, French peasants of the late eighteenth-century were really attacking the spread of landed capitalism.”4 Eric Hazan, writing from the opposite end of the political spectrum, agrees that feudalism had been decisively weakened by the end of the reign of Louis XIV and that the Revolution liquidated an already moribund system.5 As Furet discerned, many seigneurs adapted their methods to new conditions in order to profit from their lands. Many seigneurs of Bordelais, with an eye to the lucrative wine trade, allowed dues to fall into twenty-nine-year arrears before demanding payment, bankrupting peasants, taking possession of the lands, and enlarging their commercial vineyards. In Normandy, seigneurs garnered less and less revenue from dues and more and more from their property rights over large farms and forests. The landed estates of the pays de France, a region north of Paris, generated wealth from the value of their wheat, wool, oats, and straw on urban markets.6 In Berry, studied in Chapter 2, the lords’ sharecroppers and tenants used their seigneurial prerogatives to appropriate common lands and extend the areas of sheep rearing for the market. Nevertheless, as we saw in Berry and Lyonnais, in taking advantage of market opportunities, the lords laid down all sorts of ordinances to direct the village economy and regulate the lives of the peasants. What distinguished Poitou from other provinces was both the vigor of the seigneurial regime and its assimilatory function, forging bonds between local elites and Versailles. In this sense, Poitou also differed from the pays d’état of Languedoc and Burgundy, where positions in the estates, rather than fiefs, brought elites into the streams of provincial revenues. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Estates of Languedoc and Burgundy enlarged their role in the administration of finances and taxation. Lordships no doubt amounted to good investments. Yet in Languedoc and Burgundy, the crown did not always back their jurisdictions. In these provinces, the king broadened his regulatory power

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not through the seigneurs, but by working with the Estates and intendant, and by preventing the lords from extending their rights over common lands.7 The distinctive features of the seigneurial regime in Poitou, its robustness and connection to Versailles, came to the fore after 1778 when the king turned the province into an appanage for his brother, the comte d’Artois. The officers of Artois’s household made a studied effort to profit from this endowment of seigneurial lands and rights. They renewed, and more efficiently exploited, some seigneurial titles, or sold other baronies and domains for ready cash. The appanage, moreover, entitled the comte d’Artois to name the holders of church benefices and municipal offices, and receive payments for the s­wearing-in of venal judges in Lusignan, Parthenay, Châtellerault, Saint-Maixent, and other towns of Poitou.8 The duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg, head of one of the kingdom’s wealthy and powerful lineages, secured 24,000 livres a year from the comté d’Olonne in the western part of Poitou. In 1779, he sold the duchy of Châtellerault, formerly ceded to him from the royal domains, to Louis Nicolas d’Escars marquis de Pérusse, a peer of the realm serving as colonel of the comte d’Artois’s cavalry. The royal council later dismissed the pretensions of the tithe collectors, parish priests, and residents of the duchy and ruled instead to uphold Pérusse’s exemptions from direct taxes and tithes for scrublands converted to arable acreage by his sharecroppers. Yet the king simultaneously asserted claims to investiture fees from venal officers and dues from property transfers within the royal domains, and thereby obliged Pérusse to defend his rights as the duc de Châtellerault in the courts. Indeed, these claims to eminent domain – made by the king and comte d’Artois to augment the yields of their seigneurial rights and forests, and garner a share of the fees accruing to office holders – prompted local nobles and municipal magistrates to protest that Poitou could not legally be given away as an appanage.9 This is not to say that provincial elites joined together in opposition to the royal court. Rather, their protest against Artois’s appanage reflects the routine disputes of a society of orders in which they vied for the honors, ranks, and privileges regulated by the king. Indeed, the evidence suggests that lordships drew the elites into the material and political networks of the king and grandees. Local investors benefited from the seigneurial possessions sold by the comte d’Artois from his appanage. Innumerable nobles, who inherited lordships within the royal domains in Poitou, performed ceremonies of homage to the king’s officers. At the end of the day, the nobles of Poitou presented the formal acknowledgment of feudal allegiance in the spring of 1789 when they elected Montmorency-Luxembourg and Pérusse d’Escars to the Estates General, and paid homage to the comte d’Artois amid general expressions of affection and reverence for the king.10

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Well-to-do commoners, like nobles, hoped to profit from the domains of the king and grandees. They leased from the royal domains the right to collect tolls at the entrance to several towns of Poitou. Many of them purchased positions of receiver within Artois’s appanage to obtain a portion of the seigneurial take. Michel Génest thus made a fortune from the position of collector – on behalf of Montmorency-Luxembourg and Pérusse d’Escars – of the fines, tolls, tithes, market levies, dues on property transfers, fees from venal officers, monopoly charges for the use of wine presses, and other seigneurial perquisites within the duchy de Châtellerault.11 Patterning themselves after the king and grandees, the nobility of Poitou relied on bourgeois intermediaries to administer an amalgam of sharecropping and seigneurial tenures. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the overall burden weighed as heavily on the peasantry as had the feudal regime seven centuries earlier. Sharecroppers had to pay menus suffrages of up to 20 livres beyond the division of the harvest stipulated in the leases. They had to make deliveries in kind of butter, poultry, wood for heating, hay for horses, and fruit from the gardens, as well as perform labor services with oxen and carts, for the benefit of the proprietors or their agents. These obligations – combined with the various seigneurial rights, such as tithes, lods et ventes levied on land sales, dues in recognition of lordship (cens), portions of the harvest of certain plots (terrage), and monopolies over mills, ovens, and wine presses – took more than half of the output of the countryside. The town-based beneficiaries invested hardly any of it back into farming. Many of them, moreover, held offices in the royal and seigneurial tribunals and thus had legal jurisdiction over the agricultural population.12 These seigneurial bonds, between the magnates in Versailles and the elites of Poitou, not only worked to take wealth from the countryside, but could also work in the opposite sense, to project the nobles’ traditional status as overlords, taking the king’s edicts in hand, seeing to law and order, and defending their dependents from intrusive burdens. Specifically, a royal declaration in 1786 permitted the tax farmers of the gabelle to sell salt at monopoly prices in Poitou, a province traditionally franc-salé exempt from this fiscal levy. An assembly of the notables of Châtellerault addressed an essay to the comte d’Artois explaining the town’s opposition. The notables also informed three figures, who would join the provincial and district assemblies the following year: the abbot Riguet, the marquis de Pérusse d’Escars, and d’Appellevoisin marquis de la Rochedumaine. At the beginning of 1787, Rochedumaine and the marquis de Crussol d’Amboise, a member of the district assembly of SaintMaixent several months later, wrote back to the mayor of Châtellerault that they had used their influence with Artois and other nobles in Versailles to have the tax suspended.13

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In a word, Poitevin elites transacted many of their political and economic affairs through the feudal networks of the monarchy. That is why the rural municipalities, inherently inimical to these networks, found absolutely no support among the elites. This unanimous rejection distinguished Poitou from Berry and Lyonnais where the provincial assemblies worked with the rural municipalities to resolve some of the peasants’ grievances. Admittedly, the rural municipalities did not create village democracy. The regulations granted the presidency to the parish seigneur. The requirement of 10 livres of direct taxes to vote, and 30 to be elected, excluded most villagers. Yet the rural municipalities still offered the peasants more scope for autonomous action than had the previous assemblies of inhabitants, which theoretically included all of the tax-paying villagers but usually fell under the sway of the tenant farmers in charge of the sharecropping domains and implemented the directives of the seigneurial officers. The rural municipalities gave the peasants the right to assemble for elections independently of the lords and priests and, much like a bureaucracy, had the same uniform composition and function in every parish. These autonomous elections and standardized administrations militated against the tradition of aristocratic discretion integral to the seigneurial regime. It is probably for this reason that the peasants seem to have welcomed the municipalities. They mentioned the rural municipalities in only 17 of 190 cahiers de doléances written in the parishes of Poitou in the spring of 1789, eight times positively, seven negatively, and two neutrally. However, as Henri Couturier surmised, the general neglect of the issue suggests tacit approval.14 Consider the report written in the bureau of the controller general in October 1787 about the peasants of Conflens, an agricultural bourg of about 2,500 inhabitants. The three village oligarchs – a venal judge (the mayor), a “privilégié” (the échevin or alderman), and the intendant’s appointed subdelegate and venal tax receiver (the procureur or executive agent) – complained that the inhabitants used the elections to the rural municipalities to supplant them at the head of the parish administration.15 What made such elections particularly subversive was the regulation for the peasants’ representative, the syndic, to preside over the rural municipality when the seigneur did not attend or when his jurisdiction did not encompass the parish church. Several complaints sent to the crown by local lords suggest that this situation must have been common. M. de Guvon, for instance, objected that though “his fief almost entirely incorporates” the parish of Antigny, his jurisdiction did not include the parish church, and he therefore “would run the risk of seeing himself presided over by a syndic who might only be his tenant paying him a quitrent as feudal lord.”16 Some lords sought to retain control by preventing the rural municipalities from obtaining the parish documents. Specifically, in a report written

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toward the end of 1788 on the district assembly meeting in Fontenay, the intendant revealed that “as a consequence of the complaint made by the syndics and members of the municipality of Château Fromage, the seigneurial officers are summoned to write to M. de Chouppe, lord of the locality, and ask him to give back to the municipality the titles of the parish.” 17 Another way the lords suppressed popular initiatives was to have their officers supervise the elections and prevail on the residents to select them as syndic. This post interested the lords, once they saw the composition of the provincial assembly. The crown appointed the initial deputies of the provincial assembly who then named additional elites to complete the membership. The provincial assembly then selected delegates for the district assemblies who in turn coopted the rest of the participants. The king named Beaupoil de SaintAulaire, the bishop of Poitiers, beneficiary of a diocesan income of 45,000 livres, president of the provincial assembly. The Second Estate of the provincial and district assemblies consisted of great lords such as the retired regiment captain, Jouslard comte d’Iversay. The marquis de Pérusse d’Escars, president of the district assembly of Châtellerault, hosted its sessions in his château. The Third Estate comprised jurists, venal mayors, seigneurial judges, and leaseholders of the lands of lords and clergymen. Typical of this bourgeoisie was Hippolyte Delavau de la Massone, seigneur of Chasnay and Saint-Germain, venal judge in the seneschal court, and member of the district assembly of Châtellerault.18 Many lords surmised that heading the rural municipalities as syndic – under the aegis of such aristocratic assemblies – helped them to display the honor, generosity, and patriotic service to the king characteristic of feudal knights.19 Nevertheless, in accepting the post of syndic, the lords soon noticed that the duties tainted the self-proclaimed virtues of their lineages. Consider the report of the intendant, in February 1788, that “in a large number of parishes … people have named as syndic lineage nobles or persons who, thanks to their fortunes, enjoy a degree of consideration which they do not believe they can reconcile with the duties of their positions.” These elites “had intended to solely take on work that would have them interact with the provincial assembly.” But before long, they became aware that the intendant expected them to  endure “the pains” of publishing the posters for the militia draft, compiling the lists of prospective recruits, and taking the boys to the drawing. These duties “hardly seem reconcilable with the rank of a lineage noble, of a former officer retired with the cross of Saint-Louis, or of a man whose fortune, education, and relations afford a degree of consideration above the ordinary in the canton where he lives.”20 Many elites, moreover, found that the post exposed them to the slights liable to emerge in participatory assemblies. The sieur Rabereul, an infantry

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officer and syndic of Mirbeau, wrote to the chief officer of the Parlement of Paris that a village notary insulted him in a session of the rural municipality in October 1787. The notary declared, “If we were elsewhere we would see; go out, and I’ll show you!” Rabereul explained that in remaining silent about this incident, it would expose the syndics and other members to public derision, especially at the moment of a new creation when it is essential that it enjoy the greatest consideration, without which the municipalities would become so contemptible that honest men would refuse to attend and the operations would suffer along with the public good.21

The most common way the lords sought to restrict the initiative of the rural inhabitants was to ask the king to alter the regulations. Thus, the district assembly of Poitiers, meeting under the presidency of the abbot of Lentilhac – comte de Lyon, abbot of Saint-Cyprien, grand prévôt of the cathedral chapter of Remiremont, and general vicar of the diocese – informed that most of the parishes of the countryside, if one excludes the lord …, will be nothing but a heap of people … incapable of taking a calm and honest resolution … Before coming to a vote there will be ruses and the least stupid will be able to subjugate the votes of the others. The presence of the lord … could put a brake on the ruses and prevent the influence of the most enterprising … who is not always the most honest. The lord …, in representing at the time of the election the true principles that should determine the choice, would prevent seduction.22

A few months later, the district assembly of Poitiers expressed reservations about the requirement that the rural municipalities solely include residents of the countryside. It reported that, since large proprietors tended to live in the towns, this provision resulted in assemblies composed of landless sharecroppers “without any interest that the affairs of the parish be well regulated.” Some of the rural municipalities “moved aside the seigneurs … and concentrated the power … in their syndic.”23 The district assembly of Niort, under the presidency of du Rousseau, marquis de Fayolle, reported, in 1788, that “the ignorance that reigns in … the municipalities of the countryside would necessitate … the enlightenment of the … seigneurs to guide their operations.”24 The district assembly of Poitiers proposed that the crown “offer the provincial assembly the liberty to compose the municipalities with the individuals most suited to work in them … even if these individuals live elsewhere.”25 The district assembly of Poitiers stated, in the summer of 1788, that “it would be … a great advantage if one could diminish the number of ­municipalities … and it seems that one could do so easily if each community …, instead of forming alone a municipality, settled for sending to each

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administrative center … two deputies, one for the clergy or nobility and one for the Third Estate which would form … an assembly of twenty persons.” The advantage would be to avoid assemblies liable to become “too numerous” and “tumultuous.”26 In short, the provincial and district assemblies of Poitou brought the leaders of the Third Estate behind the nobility against the participation of villagers in government. Members of bourgeoisie, the foregoing shows, drew wealth from the countryside in the same way as did the nobility and Church. Above all, they had day-to-day dealings with the peasantry as dues collectors and judges. We will see later in the chapter that these relationships instilled in the peasants a profound mistrust of the town-based authorities. This mistrust provided the background to the religious revolt against the Republic, known as the War of the Vendée, in 1793. The established authorities and the provincial assembly The leaders of the Third Estate, who came to run the various levels of government during the Revolution, had seen the provincial assembly as a chance to participate in public affairs together with the nobles and clergymen. Of course, as the foregoing indicates, the bourgeois elites, like the nobles, disapproved of participatory government in the countrywide. Yet they genuinely hoped for civic renewal and believed that the assemblies provided a forum for the upper classes to cooperate over reforms. This hope, we will see, turned into frustration, when the nobles refused to relinquish their superior rank within the monarchy. Affluent townspeople consisted largely of businessmen and landowners. They valued the experience of the office holders in the bailliage, présidial, and seneschal courts, and regarded these jurists as the ablest representatives of the Third Estate. A good number of jurists espoused Enlightenment criticisms of the venal judiciary, of torture in court procedures, and of the severity of the penal system. Several judges wrote legal commentaries, and they all generally took pride in their professional work and status. They believed they should have a larger scope to use their abilities in the service of the country. The jurists thought that the monetary limits on their cases should increase so as to broaden their competence relative to the justices of the parlements. Some also believed that the parlements’ jurisdictions ought to be divided and the legal responsibilities spread to a wider range of judges.27 One such jurist, Rouget de Gourcez, office holder in a tribunal of Niort – prior to purchasing the office of mayor in 1769, a post he held for two decades – and member of the Third Estate of the provincial assembly in 1787,

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expressed an aggressive patriotism in letters to an official in Saint-Maixent during the American War. He stated that the heads of commanders ought to roll for the surrender of certain islands to the English. As mayor of Niort, Gourcez called the comfortably-off residents together to set up a fund of bread in times of dearth and activated public works to provide for the poor during harsh winters. These public-works projects created a promenade and enlarged the area for cattle brought to fairs. Gourcez saw to the building of bridges and roads, and the demolition of the town walls. He also organized donations to found a library and hire a librarian.28 Cochon de Lapparent also showed an interest in civic improvement. His father possessed a seigneurial domain and provided him with an office in the seneschal court of Fontenay. Several years before joining the Third Estate of the district assembly of Niort in 1787, Lapparent wrote an essay criticizing the comte d’Artois’s claim to the marshes between Niort and the Atlantic. Artois’s officers asserted that the area belonged to the royal domain and hence to his appanage. They put forward a plan to drain and develop the wetlands. The real aim, it seems, was to collect payments from the inhabitants in return for respecting their traditional use-rights to the marshes. Lapparent detailed all of the useful purposes to which local proprietors put the land. “It is up to them to judge if certain parts are still susceptible to improvement.” He had about ten knights of Saint-Louis and a hundred residents of Niort sign the essay before sending it to Artois.29 The jurist Félix Faulcon held an office in the présidial court of Poitiers before his election to the Estates General as an alternate in 1789. He expressed high regard – in letters exchanged in the early 1780s with Texier, a magistrate in Loudun, a town in northern Poitou – for the experience and talent displayed by his fellow jurists in protecting the properties and liberties of provincial residents. Faulcon and Texier regretted that the Conseil supérieur of Poitiers, created by Louis XV in 1771 to diminish the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, had been disbanded by Louis XVI in 1774. They believed that it had spared the populace the obligation of traveling to Paris, where litigants, unable to pay the fees of the myriad judicial personnel, lacked the money to bring cases to a close. The Conseil supérieur, of course, had raised the profile of lower-level jurists such as Faulcon and Texier. After it was dissolved, they complained that the king showered flattering distinctions on the parlementaires but did not even notice their scrupulous attention to legal affairs.30 In 1787, Faulcon and Texier expressed hope that the provincial assemblies would accurately assess each subject’s property, streamline the collection of taxes and the disbursement of the proceeds to the crown, and eliminate the obligatory corvée labor required of rural commoners on the roads.31 In advocating the simplification of the fiscal system, the jurists no doubt hoped

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to see the abolition of the offices of general receiver. The holders of these offices loaned money to court nobles, had family members among the king’s highest officers and financiers, and obtained tens of thousands of livres every year from royal revenues. The squire Jean-Élie Forien de Saint-Juire, for example, seigneur of la Roche-Esmaud and formerly the mayor of Poitiers and president of the présidial court, held the offices of receiver of the districts of Poitiers and Fontenay – offices a rung below the general receivers for the entire province – as well as the offices of municipal receiver in these towns, together worth hundreds of thousands of livres and tens of thousands in annual income. In 1771, Forien took legal action at the district fiscal court (élection) of Poitiers to register his direct management of the woods and meadows of his sharecropping farms of Fié and Joriseaudière. A favorable verdict would allow him to exempt his properties from the direct tax on commoners known as the taille.32 These were precisely the sorts of privileges that Faulcon and Texier hoped to see their fellow venal officers relinquish in the spirit of renewal kindled by the provincial assemblies. They expressed confidence that the assemblies would look into all means of improving the administration. A plurality of voices and the wishes of the greatest number, rather than the caprice of a few, would then direct the government. “The mutual dependence of the members of each assembly,” argued Texier, “would prevent them from focusing on individual interests as people generally do today, because each will have to weigh his concerns against those of the other members.”33 To Faulcon and his fellow jurists, venality of office typified the concern for individual interest all too common at the time. Venality, Texier wrote to Faulcon, put the scales of justice in the hands of incompetents and put the people’s lives and fortunes in the hands of “ignorance” and “passions.” The provincial assembly, they believed, would simplify litigation, diminish the complexity of the laws, and publicize the extraordinary and inhumane punishments. Texier wrote that, to improve the judiciary, venality would have to be abolished and ranks distributed according to merit, dedication, and experience. Such a reform would promote emulation in the study of the laws and in the equity of judgments.34 Given these expectations, Faulcon and his colleagues in the lower-level courts of Poitou could not but have been disappointed by the way the provincial assembly played out. The justices of the bureau of finances of Poitiers, a tribunal charged with adjudicating litigation over roadwork, the royal domains, municipal taxes, and other matters, enjoyed exemption from the taille, from taxes on drinks, salt, and other goods, and from the billeting of troops. The monarchy paid each one of them over 2,000 livres a year, the greatest returns on judicial offices in the province. The treasurers of France,

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as the justices were known, had the highest standing of any royal officials in Poitiers after the suppression of the Conseil supérieur. They did not embrace the opportunity for enlightened reform offered by the assembly. According to a report written in the controller general’s office at the end of August 1787, “three judges of the bureau of finances of Poitiers named to represent the Third Estate in the district assemblies … yielded to complaints of their tribunal, which affirmed that they could not sit in the order of the Third without derogating the privileges attached to their rank; in consequence, they abstained from appearing.”35 In spurning the provincial assembly, the bureau of finances of Poitiers followed the lead of the Parlement of Paris. Faulcon had written to his colleague Texier at the beginning of the 1780s that the parlementaires were enervated by a voluptuous life, guided by ambition, and in thrall to the monarch’s will even when it opposed the will of the nation. Texier countered that the Parlement had roots in the earliest days of the monarchy, brought the people’s grievances to the throne, prevented excessive taxes, and protected the constitution of the realm from despotism. However, toward the end of the summer of 1787, inspired by hope for reforms, Texier could not see how the Parlement’s opposition to the provincial assemblies advanced the public good. The assemblies, he believed, would reorganize the courts and require magistrates to compete for advancement through judicial erudition and impartial rulings. Texier came to suspect that “this is what the Parlement fears and what determines its resistance and complaints against the new constitution of provincial assemblies.”36 Faulcon wrote back piling on criticism that the parlementaires permitted excessive taxes on the people, when the taxes spared their privileges. They only opposed the crown when their prerogatives and interests were at stake. Though supposed to dispense justice, they actually represented the “plague” and “leeches” on the people. The hodgepodge of jurisprudence across the realm resulted, Faulcon wrote, from the right arrogated by the parlements to accept, modify, or refuse the laws of the throne. In the fall of 1788, when the parlements returned triumphantly after forcing the crown to withdraw the edicts reorganizing the judiciary and making it more pliable, Faulcon wrote that though the Parlement was once again master, it would soon be eclipsed by the Estates General. He hoped the Estates General “would stem the usurpations of the Our Seigneurs [the parlementaires]. God grant that all those who compose this august assembly [the Estates General] put aside all personal views and busy themselves solely with … the public good, and it is then that the French will start to have a homeland.”37

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Tax privileges and the provincial assembly Faulcon and other leaders of the Third Estate were particularly disappointed by the failure of the provincial assembly’s fiscal reforms. Charles Alexandre de Calonne and his supporters recognized that the assemblies would have to enjoy the support of provincial elites if they were to raise the taxes needed by the crown. Representative assemblies, Calonne anticipated, would have the wherewithal to stand up to prominent nobles, investigate their incomes, and make accurate assessments of their fiscal liabilities.38 This calculation developed out of the experience of the inadequacies of relying solely on royal appointees to levy taxes. Specifically, the intendant of Poitou had the right to name commissioners for the purpose of making parish rolls for the taille. At the beginning of the 1780s, he dismissed several commissioners who seemed to lack the fortitude to hold firm against large proprietors and prevent them from using their influence over parish residents to remove their land from the fiscal rolls. All told, the intendant’s commissioners made the rolls more comprehensive, imposing taxes on the tenant farmers of the large estates, in about ten parishes.39 Similarly, from the late 1770s to 1789, the royal council quashed several rulings of the tribunals and prevented nobles from taking their assessments out of the parish tax rolls. In a ruling of 1782, for example, the royal council granted the request of the syndics, inhabitants, and community of Payré-surVendre, quashed rulings of the district fiscal court of Fontenay in 1772, and the cour des aides of Paris in 1776, and applied the rolls of the taille made by the community in 1771. The tribunals had granted the request of the baron de Denans to have, as a noble, four plowings of taille-free land even though he already enjoyed exemptions in other parishes. In quashing the rulings in favor of Denans, the royal council made him liable for an assessment of 121 livres.40 Concerning the vingtièmes (universal taxes levied on nobles and commoners alike), the crown raised them in the 1770s, not by adding an additional vingtième to the original two, as it had in 1760–63, but by investigating landed incomes. Royal agents verified revenues in 22 percent of the parishes of the pays d’élection and raised the vingtièmes by a quarter. In some of these parishes, the nobles had to pay 30 to 90 percent of the vingtièmes and as much as 4.9 or even 10.4 percent of their landed income.41 The marquis d’Ormesson, a state councilor on the king’s legal committee of finances, wrote a series of l­etters about the vingtièmes to the intendant of Poitou between 1775 and 1779. “The good of the royal service,” d’Ormesson wrote, “requires uniformity in all parts of this administration.” He wrote in favor of “verifications done with care and according to the principles of a fair distribution. It is the only way … to render justice to the people, to reestablish the equality that must reign in taxation, and

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to uphold the interests of the king.” D’Ormesson stated that two of the fiscal agents in Poitou did not merit their pay, because they had not visited some of the parishes to gather information and thus had not submitted comprehensive reports.42 Nevertheless, from the top of the royal hierarchy, the king’s brother obstructed the work of the royal agents and undoubtedly influenced local elites to do the same. M. de Sainte-Foy, superintendent of the count ­d’Artois’s finances, wrote to d’Ormesson to demand that the “excessively heavy” vingtièmes levied on the duchy de Meilleraye be moderated and that the constraints used to collect them in 1775 and 1776 by the receiver of taxes in Niort be lifted. Sainte-Foy wrote to the intendant, I have not enclosed the documentary evidence … because I presume that you … have enough confidence in … Your Royal Highness to be convinced that the profits have not been underestimated … Moreover, I do not believe that the king’s brother should be compelled to count as clerk to master … I thought, on the contrary, that it would be enough … to affirm to you the truth of these account details for him not to be susceptible to any disciplinary measures … Artois has … entrusted … his wish to me that this affair be terminated, and he will learn with pleasure that you will have contributed to this outcome. 43

D’Ormesson wrote to the intendant “I thought I must defer to this demand.”44 The controller general, Taboureau de Réaux, later renewed the effort to verify the leases, sales of wood, and other documents of the comte d’Artois. He wrote to the intendant that Artois’s declaration undervalued his assets, since one made by a former owner of the duchy of Meilleraye over three decades earlier was higher despite the intervening inflation. “Artois,” Réaux wrote, “who occupies the first rank among the proprietors, derives from his august birth, the privilege … of being able to give them the example: and the council of the Prince, always eager to conform to his intentions, will surely take upon itself the duty to give the necessary orders to procure the clarifications.”45 Further requests to Artois’s intendant of finances about his assets suggest that he never submitted to fiscal assessments.46 Royal appointees, in a word, did not have the stature to make the high nobility accept fiscal evaluations. Poitou encompassed over a thousand rural communities, and the intendant and royal council rectified the taille rolls of only a handful of them. It therefore made sense to put into practice the proposals of reformers and create provincial assemblies to secure the taxpayers’ consent for accurate assessments. In pursuing this course of action, the king and his ministers no doubt expected the support of the rural municipalities. Villagers expressed a unanimous desire, in the parish cahiers of Poitou, to see the abolition of privileges. The residents of Souvigné et Régnié, to take a case

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in point, a parish of 1,359 inhabitants in the lordship of M. Régné and the abbot of Saint-Maixent, stated in their cahier that nobles and ecclesiastics possessed a third of the parish territory in first-class timber. Since the timber went for high prices, the abbot gained 12,000 livres from rents and another 3,000 from woods. M. Vasselot, lord of Negron, possessed domains, woods, meadows, and arable lands worth 1,200 a year. The Benedictines of Saint-Maixent gained 200 livres a year from woods in the parish. None of them “make any payments to the king, a fact which causes a very considerable augmentation for the sharecroppers and farmers … The poor day laborers, who form two thirds of the parish inhabitants … are reduced to begging … [and] feel exceedingly the effects of this injustice.”47 Indeed, a number of the rural municipalities reported that tax collectors fell prey to the wealthy, the privileged orders, and seigneurs, and should therefore follow a cadaster or be replaced by independent-minded proprietors. The elected municipality of Saint-Rémy, for instance, reported that those who distributed the taxes did not do so fairly for fear of making enemies. The local proprietors, rather than the lords, priests, or other tax-exempt elites, should evaluate the domains every two or three years. The proprietors “would tax more scrupulously, and for this reason the domains of the seigneurs, as well as the ecclesiastics and privileged persons, would not be spared, and everyone would pay in a much fairer proportion.”48 The municipality of Pliboux, a parish of 742 inhabitants under the lordship of the squire Charles-Auguste Chitton, actually took the initiative to reduce the taille assessments of eighty day laborers and shift the burden to the tenant farmers and plowmen of the local seigneurs, who, the peasants later complained in their cahier, monopolized all of the community’s best terrains.49 Faulcon, and the other jurists with whom he corresponded, saw an abonnement as the means of making constructive use of the peasants’ desire for equity. As things stood, the vingtièmes were added to the rolls of the taille paid by the peasants, whilst the nobles made voluntary declarations of their landed income to the fiscal authorities. According to Boissière, one of Faulcon’s correspondents, the only way to distribute the vingtièmes with exactitude on “grands seigneurs and men of rank, who use their credit with the royal council, the intendants, and their henchmen to free themselves from the burden with which their fellow countrymen are crushed,” was to have the provincial assembly negotiate a sum with the crown and then investigate fortunes so that it would be distributed uniformly. The former system did not permit taxpayers to diminish their assessments by making known the undervaluation of other properties. With an abonnement, Texier wrote to Faulcon, “the faculties of each person would be brought to the light of day and each one would have an interest, in order to release oneself from taxes, to indicate the best-off.”50 The

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provincial assembly, however, refused to approve an abonnement. According to Boissière, “One must assume … that the clergy and nobility, alone interested in rejecting the abonnement, carried the day over the Third Estate in Poitiers.”51 Unable to come to terms with the Assembly of Poitou, the crown ordered its agents to assess the foremost properties as they had in the 1770s. These verifications required the aid of the newly created rural municipalities. However, in the absence of an abonnement, the peasants had no interest in seeing the agents verify incomes and increase assessments, for such increases would not redound to their benefit. Thus, instead of assisting the royal agents, the rural municipalities called attention to the properties of elites absent from their meetings. One should recall that the municipalities consisted of a number of elected administrators headed by the lord, a syndic chosen by voters, and the parish priest. Rather than tax these figures, the rural municipalities sent reports to the district assemblies about the lands, banal oven, meadows, woods, and seigneurial shares of harvests belonging to religious establishments. At the end of the summer of 1788, the municipality of Marsay reported that 160 hectares of woods in the appanage of the count d’Artois ought to be included in the rolls of the vingtièmes. These woods, the municipality claimed, were worth about 40,000 livres. As for the rest of Marsay, the municipality alleged that an agent had already verified landed incomes, but had done so arbitrarily, imposed excessive taxes, and thus prevented the inhabitants from meeting their obligations to the local lords.52 The reluctance of the rural municipalities to verify landed incomes prompted the controller general to write to the provincial assembly in May 1788 and ask for its assistance. When the provincial assembly passed down this information, the high clergymen and nobles in charge of the district assemblies of Niort, Poitiers, Les Sables, Thouars, and Fontenay wrote back that people already bore an excessive burden and objected to the arbitrariness and ruses of the royal agents. The controller general then wrote to the provincial assembly conceding that the king would forego any increase of the vingtièmes.53 The crown, in this way, faced intractable difficulties in getting the provincial assembly to cooperate in fiscal reform. Filled with members of the privileged orders, the assembly refused to challenge their vested interests. It consequently did not win the support of the peasantry. The assembly was mentioned in 61 of 190 parish cahiers of Poitou, and negatively in two thirds of them. The peasants commonly called for provincial estates, which, they believed, would not fall under the sway of the privileged orders and would not maintain fiscal immunities. The peasants of Le Cormenier, for example, a parish of 385 inhabitants in the lordship of the Benedictines of Saint-Maixent, stated that Poitou should be turned into a pays d’état, “to establish a fair

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allotment of taxes, of which the largest part is born by the most indigent class of citizens.”54 Like the peasantry, patriotic members of the bourgeoisie began to doubt the ability of the provincial assembly to carry out the reforms, which the country, they believed, so desperately needed. M de Lanot – lord of la Bouchardière, judge in the présidial court, and member of the Third Estate of the district assembly of Poitiers – invited Faulcon, in the autumn of 1788, to fill the assembly’s post of executive agent. Faulcon felt flattered by the offer and hoped to be of service to his homeland but stated that all of the detailed administrative work might go for naught given the public’s low opinion of the assemblies, the uncertain political situation, and widespread doubts about their durability.55 Ultimately, the disillusionment with the provincial assemblies, felt by well-to-do commoners like Faulcon, proved fatal to the monarchy. Peter Jones argues that the three tiers of assemblies gathered provincial notables, smalltown lawyers, and village syndics into a form of representation interested in backing the monarchy’s fiscal reforms.56 This constituency may have come into being in many parts of the country, but not in Poitou. There, Faulcon and other local jurists instead envisioned a transformation of the constitution of the monarchy. They perceived that only genuine representation, rather than the kind offered through the provincial assemblies, would make elites look beyond their privileges and focus on the needs of the country. Even better-off peasants, we have seen, hoped to make the rural municipalities truly participatory. But by the spring of 1789, they too comprehended that only a genuinely representative regime, rather than the kind offered in the assemblies, would make equitable laws and improve their conditions. Toward revolution and counterrevolution in Poitou Thus, the nobles’ refusal to deliberate over reforms led commoners to join the cause of revolution and, as we will see, even opened the way for a popular movement in the countryside, which none of the leaders of the three estates could control. In the kingdom as a whole, when nobles composed cahiers in the spring of 1789, the majority avoided the issue of the seigneurial regime. A notable minority, like several of the nobles examined in Chapters 2 and 3 on Berry and Lyonnais, shared the Third Estate’s negative assessment of the seigneurial regime. Poitou formed part of another minority in openly defending seigneurial rights.57 The reason for this attachment to monarchical traditions, this chapter has shown, was the vigor infused in Poitou’s feudal system by the royal family and grandees.

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This is not to say that the nobles of Poitou were averse to patriotic sacrifice. To the contrary, the military traditions of feudalism went hand in hand with generosity and honor. Many nobles made a virtue of largesse as the mark of a gentleman and the basis of social distinction. The spirit of selflessness, it was widely believed, set the nobles apart and raised a standard to which the other classes should aspire.58 As an illustration, dozens of military officers and seigneurs gathered in Secondigny, a town in central Poitou, in October 1788 and renounced tax exemptions and venal offices so as to make it possible to rationalize the administration. The nobility, the gathering affirmed, comprised citizens full of love for the homeland. For this reason, the nobles pleaded with the king to restore their “luster,” since they had always been “the shield of the state and the firmest pillar of the throne.” The nobles demanded that they no longer see themselves confused amid the people lacking public status [les hommes de néant] nor exposed … in the countryside to the provocations of their inferiors; that in consequence, the carrying of arms must be forbidden forever to those who do not justify the right, and, by dint of such sage supervision, the nobles should no longer have the unpleasantness of measuring themselves against certain people utterly unworthy of such an honor. 59

Such affirmations of hierarchy originated at the highest levels of the state. The duc de Luxembourg, as commander of the province, had issued ordinances in 1773 prohibiting anyone bereft of a seigneurial domain on which to hunt from carrying arms within three leagues of Poitiers. Robert de La Salle, a field marshal, commander of the mounted constabulary, and member of the Second Estate of the provincial assembly, cited the judge Lamarque, of the présidial tribunal and district assembly of Poitiers, for violating these ordinances.60 The baron Louis-Jacques-Gilbert Robert de Lézardière et du Poiroux, an executive agent of the provincial assembly, began to use this body, as well as the district assembly of Sables-d’Olonne, near his domains, to organize resistance to the emergent democratic movement toward the end of 1788. Lézardière worked closely with the naval officer Vaugiraud de Rosnay, another member of the provincial assembly, and with his brother, the field marshal de La Salle, to rally the local nobility. At the end of January 1789, a meeting of thirty lineage nobles in Fontenay, also in western Poitou, invited the Second Estate to deliberate on the means of averting the doubling of the third order in the Estates General. The marquis de Coudray, member of the district assembly of Fontenay, exhorted the nobility to hold firmly to its privileges. In February, a meeting of 240 nobles in western Poitou agreed to relinquish tax exemptions but opposed the doubling of the third and vote by head. They sent

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this deliberation to the king and princes, and invited the nobles of the eastern part of the province to adhere to it.61 Nobles elsewhere in Poitou instead focused on obtaining elected provincial estates. They accepted all taxes in a fair proportion without exemptions. However, they also stated their approval of the ruling of December 20, 1788 of the dukes and peers, who condemned the rising tide of democratic debate, the calls for the abolition of feudal dues, and the proposals for a common assembly and vote by head in the Estates General. The nobles sent this statement to “his highness the count d’Artois apanagiste of the province … [and] to the duke de Luxembourg peer of France as a great proprietor in Poitou and an interested party.”62 In this way, the nobles of Poitou remained faithful to a feudal hierarchy with the king and princes at the top and themselves in the provincial points of command. They stated in their cahier that their deputies to the Estates General must not deviate from the right to vote by order and that the agreement of each order be required to validate a deliberation. They declared their attachment to the monarchy in its ancient and constitutional form, namely an equal number of deputies for each estate. The essence of the constitution, they declared, consisted of the nobles’ properties, preeminence, and prerogatives, their “most precious patrimony,” authorized by the Estates General and royal ordinances.63 West of Poitiers, many nobles were not even willing to renounce pecuniary privileges. In the meeting of the Second Estate for writing the cahier, Desprez de Monpezat, author of the declaration of the nobles’ meeting in Secondigny in October 1788, argued against the abandonment of exemptions and won election as the correspondent of the nobility of Parthenay, in the Gâtine region of Poitou, with the deputies in Versailles. Further west, the baron de Lézardière, who had rallied the nobles against the demands of the  Third Estate since the end of 1788, began organizing local nobles for counterrevolution toward the end of 1790.64 Taking everything into account, the ten nobles of the provincial and district assemblies of Poitou, whose subsequent political positions are known, opposed the formation of the National Assembly in the summer of 1789. Nine of them later joined the counterrevolution, and eight actually took part in combat.65 Typical in this regard was Pierre Garnier, seigneur of la Courmorant, Bois-Grollier, la Similière, and other places. He obtained a decision from the royal tribunal in Lusignan granting him the right to collect twenty-nine years of arears of his seigneurial rights in la Similière. Garnier took possession of the house, stable, and five scraps of land of a peasant after his failure to comply with the decision. The peasant then became a leaseholder on the properties he had formerly owned.66 Garnier and the other members of the district assembly

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of Poitiers stated in their minutes that the rural inhabitants were not prepared for the elected municipalities. The villagers did not even know the proper administrative terms, yet kept the lords and priests away, and concentrated the power to decide everything in their representatives. Garnier emigrated at the beginning of the Revolution and joined the armies of the princes in 1791 and 1792. He took part in the counterrevolutionary landing of émigrés at Quiberon in 1795 in an effort to aid the Catholic and royal army in Vendée.67 The leaders of the Third Estate, this chapter has shown, resented the oblivion in which they plugged away at professional work on behalf of the public. The accolades went to the nobles above them in the political hierarchy. The provincial assembly raised hope for change. In Berry, Lyonnais, and other provinces, the assemblies began to create a type of representation envisioned by royal reformers. In Poitou, the nobles in charge of the assembly proved intransigent and thus contributed to the resentment of well-to-do townspeople toward the Second Estate. Townspeople regarded the nobles as the impediments to civic renewal and successful careers. In the spring and summer of 1789, in France as a whole, the term “feudal” came to mean the nobles’ monopoly on the best posts. It meant fragmented sovereignty, civil discord, economic retardation, tithes, church benefices reserved for nobles, and other local, corporate, and personal privileges that ought to be abolished. The discourse contrasted “feudal” to national unity, humanity, economic advance, and juridical equality for citizens.68 In Poitou – where frustrations with the nobles ran particularly deep – these meanings of feudalism had taken hold even earlier. As early as 1779, the parish priests – who enjoyed a certain ease and status relative to other ­villagers, though much less wealth than the upper clergy – united against Beaupoil de Saint-Aulaire, bishop of Poitiers, Isidoire de Mercy, bishop of Luçon, and his close associate and vicar general, the abbot de Rozand, to demand a voice in the financial affairs of the diocese.69 Yet nothing was resolved, as these same members of the high clergy controlled the First Estate of the provincial assembly in 1787. As a result, in the early 1790s, nearly 75 percent of the ecclesiastics, who had filled the First Estate in the provincial and district assemblies, refused the oath of loyalty to the constitution, a percentage higher than that of the rest of the clergy of Poitou. This divergence became apparent in the spring of 1789, when all of the clergy met for the elections to the Estates General. The priests braved the pressure of the authorities and elected their peers to the Estates General, excluding canons, abbots, and monks from their delegation. The intendant Boula de Nanteuil called the meeting an insurrection and public scandal. SaintAulaire stated that the priests threatened the Church’s property, and even its civil and political existence. Three months later, in Versailles, it was three

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priests from Poitou who initiated the defections from the First and Second Estates toward the Third for the verification of credentials in common and the creation of the National Assembly.70 The Third Estate in the provincial and district assemblies, we have seen, consisted of urban rentiers, jurists in local courts, municipal office holders, and managers of the lords’ domains – simply put, an Old Regime bourgeoisie. They no doubt identified with the abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s protest that they attended to nineteen-twentieths of the public functions, namely the painful, burdensome work spurned by the privileged classes in possession of the lucrative and honorable posts. Nearly every one of the members of the Third Estate of the provincial and district assemblies of Poitou went on to support the Revolution as elected mayors and judges, militiamen, purchasers of national lands, and members of the National Assembly and Jacobin club.71 Commoners of Poitou, frustrated with the nobles’ rank, expressed concern that the oligarchic municipality of Poitiers might rally to the nobility and silence the rest of the Third Estate. As an illustration, Gusteau, a resident of Châtillon, a village fifteen miles south of Poitiers, wrote a letter in January 1789 expressing fear lest the venal jurists and financiers at the head of the provincial capital manipulate the elections to the Estates General and have the lords’ tenant farmers and judges represent the Third Estate. “Most of these representatives … would not have any … interest in taking up the cause of the class on behalf of which they would be delegated.”72 Gusteau hoped to avoid the experience one had had “in the nomination of the members of the district assemblies among whom one sees few who pay taxes … One has had the imprudence of naming, as members of the Third Estate of the provincial and district assemblies, people who have the prospect of becoming nobles by dint of their offices.”73 Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Parthenay wrote to Necker that the provincial assemblies did not extend participation beyond the municipal office holders. They objected to the presence of the clergy, especially as presidents of the provincial assembly and of several of the districts. The clergy, the inhabitants affirmed, should not control the administration, because its members did not use their immense wealth to contribute to the public treasury. The nobility occupied the first and most lucrative positions in the state, owned at least two thirds of the best properties, and had no justification for their privileges. The inhabitants protested, above all, that the municipal offices had become venal in 1771 and their owners therefore had no reason to pay attention to the views of the citizens. The inhabitants thus had no means of putting their observations in the cahier written for their deputies to the Estates General.74 In the spring of 1789, the commoners excluded from the municipal

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administration of Poitiers hoped for a truly representative town assembly for the elections to the Estates General. The delegates of the artisan trades threatened to stay away if the municipal oligarchs took part in the vote. They did not want the hated representatives of the public powers, whether subdelegates of the intendant or venal officers, to join their meeting.75 It was especially in western Poitou – where nobles, we have seen, had been most active in organizing against the Third Estate since 1787 – that the revolutionary impetus was strongest. The jurists, navy captains, merchants, and artisans representing the trades of Sables-d’Olonne met in January 1789 to declare that the clergy and nobility held the Third Estate in servitude. The first two orders, they claimed, composed of the privileged, the rich, the possessors of immense property and capital, and gorged with gratifications, pensions, and honors, refused to lighten the burden on the Third Estate and share proportionally in taxation. While some nobles, the people of Sables asserted, had done estimable things for the country, most belonged to the Second Estate by dint of offices made venal due to the monarchy’s financial needs.76 When the Third Estate of the entire province met in Poitiers, the representatives from western Poitou won support thanks to their sharp criticisms of the nobility. They formed a majority around the strongest protests found in the cahiers of Fontenay. Only two of the eighteen deputies elected to represent the Third Estate in Versailles resided in Poitiers. The cahier of the Third Estate of the province called, in the first point, for the doubling of the Third Estate and vote by head in order to focus attention on the general good and silence prejudices of rank.77 While these positions no doubt enjoyed unanimous support in the Third Estate, they did not resolve the main grievances of the peasantry. The political leaders hoped to bring the nation forward by liquidating what they considered feudalism yet also sought to restrict the meaning of the term.78 The tragedy of Poitou is that in its zeal to establish the country on a new foundation, the bourgeoisie did not consider the means of encompassing the peasants’ concerns within its measures to abolish feudalism. Whereas the peasants expressed unequivocal opposition to seigneurial jurisdictions, dues, and tithes in the parish cahiers, the priests, who played a decisive role in the electoral meeting of the First Estate in the spring of 1789, called the tithe the church’s most ancient possession and assured patrimony, and lamented their parishioners’ criticisms of it.79 Although the town leaders charged with writing the cahier of Saint-Maixent referred to lordly rights as hateful legacies of feudal barbarity, they also stated that these rights should not be abolished without compensation and that the basic seigneurial dues in recognition of lordship (cens) should remain. The priests, they wrote, ought to enjoy additional support from the nation, because priests served the essential

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function of imparting religion, “the proper restraint on the people.”80 The Third Estate of the district of Niort stated that while seigneurial courts multiplied fees and the duration of litigation, the lords should nonetheless retain “the simple landed jurisdiction over everything related to their seigneurial rights.”81 The meeting of the Third Estate of the entire province condemned the seigneurial regime as usurpation, and a hindrance to liberty and prosperity, but also stated that the lords’ rights, as property, should remain until the peasants paid them compensation.82 In contrast to this tergiversation, the peasants of Poitou sometimes wittingly forgot to deliver seigneurial payments or rejected them outright in the decades after 1750. The peasants joined revolts against tax farmers, and took part in uprisings in both Poitiers and the countryside to force down grain prices. The landed classes, we have seen, turned a profit on marketable surpluses taken from the countryside through sharecropping agreements and seigneurial dues. Revolts swept across the province in the spring of 1789, as the peasants looted grain convoys, broke into granaries, and forcibly lowered prices. In the struggle over bread, the peasants did not differentiate well-off commoners from nobles. In Poitou, these groups actually united in a bourgeois militia against the popular revolts months before the fall of the Bastille. In the following years, 119 anti-seigneurial uprisings, and another 205 subsistence revolts, took place in the West, particularly in the departments of the former province of Poitou.83 These rebellions contributed to the abolition of seigneurial jurisdictions during the Revolution. Peasants could then exchange opinions, without restrictions, on everything from agricultural production to religious observance. Yet as the revolutionary leaders established new institutions, they imposed an economic order, which, from the point of view of the lower classes, made existence precarious. Creuzé de la Touche, to take a case in point, a judge in the seneschal court of Châtellerault and member of the Third Estate in the provincial assembly, adamantly opposed the people’s desire for measures to hold down grain prices. The year 1785 saw a drought in Poitou, and fears of a bad harvest led to demands for restrictions on the grain trade. Yet Creuzé took what he regarded as a courageous stance by defending the free circulation of wheat. After his election to the Estates General, Creuzé frequently attended the Jacobin club. He wrote to his constituents in 1790 that “the bishoprics and biggest benefices had become uniquely the patrimony of les grands and members of the court, that is to say the cruelest enemies of the people.” Yet Creuzé’s campaign against “feudalism” categorically excluded measures to make subsistence available to the lower classes. As a deputy to the Convention, amidst calls for policies to maintain low grain prices, he defended a liberal trade policy so forcefully that he became known as a sympathizer of

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Physiocracy, the school of economic thought supportive of a free market in agricultural commodities.84 The revolutionary leaders, moreover, reduced the fiscal levies on the towns, by putting an end to indirect taxes, but increased the burden on the countryside, especially after war broke out in 1792. Many sharecroppers complained that proprietors added the value of the abolished tithes to land rents. While seigneurial rights disappeared under the pressure of the rural revolts, the state left the abusive leasing agreements of the region in place, treating them like any other property. The sharecroppers remained poor, as the Revolution only seemed to benefit the former seigneurial stewards and landholders of the Third Estate.85 These townspeople controlled the districts and departments created by the National Assembly after 1789. Things came to a head when the National Assembly standardized clerical salaries, eliminated many small parishes, circumscribed episcopal authority, instituted elections for ecclesiastic positions, and required an oath of loyalty of all clergymen. These policies violated the beliefs of many priests and peasants, whose lives revolved around grandiose rituals, the Sacred Heart, and processions. The educated classes preferred a more rational interior devotion to God. Elected officials saw the rural religious practices as relics of ignorance, which allowed unscrupulous priests to fanaticize peasants and steer them toward counterrevolution. In the face of official hostility, priests fled the country in large numbers, and the peasants felt further resentment at this disruption of their religious routines.86 The War of the Vendée then broke out in March 1793, when the peasants of the West refused the orders of the well-to-do townspeople in the government, who were exempt from military service, to assemble for the draft. As resistance spread, the same areas that had seen anti-seigneurial events in the early years of the Revolution often corresponded to those of counterrevolution. The western countryside did not diametrically oppose the Revolution. The peasants had taken action against the documents, symbols, and châteaux of the lords in 1789 and subsequent years. Yet they did not envision any alternative to the seigneurial system, simply a desire to avoid authorities and exactions perceived as unjust. In this way, the political engagement of the anti-seigneurial revolts formed part of the rural communities’ experience, which they later turned against the Revolution. What was unique about the peasants of the West was that they went over to the counterrevolution further and faster than did their counterparts in other parts of the country.87 Of course, this analysis of the social and economic legacies of the Old Regime merely provides background to the classic studies of the Vendée’s pattern of dispersed rural settlements, which made the gatherings for religious events and ceremonies all that much more meaningful to the peasants.

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Protestants of the region precipitated a hardline Catholic response, because they embraced the Revolution and welcomed its conscription decrees more avidly than did fellow patriots in other parts of the country. Political leaders in Paris, moreover, rallied support for their faction in the Convention by publicly denouncing the rebels of the West as counterrevolutionary allies of the English, Marie Antoinette, and émigrés, and thus transformed what could have remained a local conflict into a grim escalating cycle of revolt and counterinsurgency.88 Thus, a traditional peasant rebellion escalated into the War of the Vendée. What this chapter has shown is that one’s understanding of it remains incomplete without an appreciation of the imbrication of the bourgeoisie, the target of the rebellion, within the agrarian relations of the region. The middle classes had enjoyed exemptions, managed their lands in the same way as did the nobility, collected tithes and dues on behalf of the lords and clergymen, and staffed the courts upholding the legality of these burdens. As the Revolution unfolded, rather than put an end to rents and taxes, which drew the wealth of the countryside to the towns, the bourgeois officials seemed to benefit from them. It is understandable that the peasants, having long regarded the well-off townspeople with suspicion, came to see them as truly malevolent when they drafted the peasants to fight against the peasants’ religious customs in 1793. Ironically, the strength of feudal bonds in Poitou, relative to other provinces, later made it possible for the former lords to muster a popular base for armed resistance to the revolutionary leaders, who, in the West, had been the face of the seigneurial regime – as judges, dues collectors, and administrators – to the rural populace. Peasants allied with the lords against the efforts of town leaders to establish new taxes and authorities.89 In summary, to understand the rural inhabitants’ rebellion against these bourgeois elites, one must begin one’s analysis with the royal domains in Poitou. The king alienated the province to the comte d’Artois, the duc de Luxembourg, and other magnates of the royal court. These high nobles ceded certain seigneurial properties in return for money and carefully exploited the more lucrative ones. Local nobles, in this way, not only obtained seigneurial properties, but also a standard for making the most of the feudal customs of the province. Like the king and his brother, the local nobles contracted well-to-do townspeople as dues collectors and land managers to draw the revenue from their domains to Niort, Fontenay, Secondigny, and other towns of Poitou. Yet precisely because the feudal customs drew broad strata of the upper classes into the regime, they also made it exceedingly difficult for the monarchy to carry out reforms. The king faced deep-rooted opposition in 1787 when his reformist ministers instituted representative municipalities in rural areas with

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the aim of helping the provincial assembly to reform the tax rolls and increase state revenues. The bourgeoisie thus played a role in the seigneurial system, but a secondary one, primarily collecting rents for the nobility. The townspeople’s judicial offices were likewise subordinate to the Parlement. The provincial assemblies permitted the upper classes to contemplate such issues by disengaging them from their customary focus on particular rights and jurisdictions. The assemblies offered an opportunity for the educated public to come together and reform taxation, standardize the law, dispense justice to all citizens, and prevent office holders from controlling the courts and turning a profit on the tax system. The opportunity, however, was lost, as the high judges of the Parlement of Paris and bureau of finances of Poitiers affirmed their venal spheres of authority. The provincial assembly faced further problems due to the manner of its composition. The high clergymen and nobles appointed by the crown to run it refused to negotiate a payment for the vingtième taxes. Had this abonnement gone forward, the rural municipalities would have had an incentive to verify the landed income of the privileged orders and correspondingly reduce the villagers’ portion of the taxes. The assemblies thus amounted to another frustrating episode, common to the Old Regime, as the nobles, at the head of the feudal hierarchy, scuppered the reforms. The refusal of Poitevin nobles even to contemplate reforms led the townspeople to develop a markedly combative stance vis-à-vis the Second Estate. Despite this widespread resentment toward the nobility, the c­ ommoners themselves were deeply divided. The townspeople hoped to abolish the customs they regarded as feudal – the patchwork of laws and institutions that entrenched the nobles’ rank – but their conception of feudalism stopped short of endorsing the peasants’ hopes to eliminate the burdens weighing on the countryside. The peasants joined revolts, in the first years of the Revolution, against the landed classes for amassing grain and collecting seigneurial dues. As the Revolution unfolded, well-to-do commoners – the members of the landed classes, that is, in daily contact with the peasants as seigneurial judges and estate managers – laid hold of the departments of the former province of Poitou. These townspeople continued to benefit from the sharecropping agreements that lumped burdens on the peasantry. They also imposed new religious rules and leaders, taxes and conscription, and ultimately executed the king. The peasants of the Vendée, for these reasons, after an initial bout of revolts against the lords in 1789–91, persisted in their rebelliousness in subsequent years, but in a new guise, under the leadership of former nobles, who shared their enmity toward the revolutionary regime. Without a well-defined ideology to oppose the impositions of the towns, the peasants fought a traditional war against the national armies mobilized by the revolutionary leaders.

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Notes   1 Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 2, 30, 33, 36; Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest (Le Mans: Imprimerie M. Vilaire, 1960).   2 Peter Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–9, 40, 144, 146.   3 Alfred Cobban, “The Myth of the French Revolution,” in Aspects of the French Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 96; Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest, 334, 336, 338, 387–8, 396, 400, 403.   4 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 95–6.   5 Eric Hazan, A People’s History of the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2014), 83.   6 William Beik, A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 31, 33, 41; John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 189; Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13, 66, 71, 107, 199; Jean-Marc Moriceau, Les Fermiers de l’Île de France: l’ascension d’un patronat agricole (XVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1994), 640, 659–60, 779–80.  7 William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 42, 248, 258, 260–1, 311, 314, 335–6; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 23, 25, 110–11; Jérôme Loiseau, “Elle fera ce que l’on voudra”: la noblesse aux états de Bourgogne et la monarchie d’Henri IV à Louis XIV, 1602–1715 (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2014), 104, 137–9, 199, 228, 250, 252, 254; Robert Schwartz, “The Noble Profession of Seigneur in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy,” in The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay Smith (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 83–5.   8 Archives Départementales de la Vienne (hereafter ADV) C16, C588, C607, C854, C855; Mercure de France, dedié au roi par une société de gens de lettres (Paris: Bureau du Mercure, 3, février, 1787), 75; Sandrine Bula, “Les finances royales et la gestion de l’apanage du Comte d’Artois,” in L’administration des finances sous l’ancien régime: colloque tenu à Bercy les 22 et 23 février 1996 (Paris: Comité pour l’Histoire Économique et Financière de la France, 1997), 347, 352–3; Pierre Arches, “Parthenay au début de 1789: problèmes politiques et économiques, la franc-maçonnerie,” Bulletin de la société historique et scientifique des Deux-Sèvres, deuxième série V (1972), 99; Pierre Dubois-Destrizais, “Nouvelles recherches sur Jean-Claude Dubois: constituant, Maire de Châtellerault,” Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest et des musées de Poitiers IX (1967), 197–8; Jean Guyonnet, Histoire de la ville de Saint-Maixent des origines à nos jours (Poitiers: D. Brissaud, 1978), 48; Jacques Péret, Seigneurs et seigneuries en Gâtine poitevine: la duché de la Meilleraye XVIIe–XVIII siècles (Poitiers: Au siège de la Société, 1976), 90; Jacques Péret, “L’élection de Saint-Maixent sous Louis XVI: étude administrative et sociale,” Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de l’ouest et des musées de Poitiers XII (1973), 196; René Crozet, Histoire du Poitou (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 80, 97.   9 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) H1581/2; ADV C472; Paul Filleul, Le Duc de Montmorency Luxembourg, Premier Baron chrétien de France, Fondateur du Grand Orient (Paris: Labergerie, 1939), 27–8; Alfred Hérault, Histoire de Châtellerault (Châtellerault: Imprimerie A. Videau, 1928), 274–6; Beik, A Social and Cultural History, 86–7; Crozet, Histoire du Poitou, 80, 97. 10 Nicole Pellegrin et al., “Les temps modernes (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle),” in La Vienne de la préhistoire à nos jours, ed. Jean Tarrade (Saint-Jean-d’Angély: Editions Bordessoules, 1986), 204; Filleul, Le Duc de Montmorency Luxembourg, 96.

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11 ADV C585, C588, C590; Guy Lebert, “La culture matérielle d’un notable Châtelleraudais: Michel Génest, négociant, fermier général du Duché de Châtellerault et maire de la ville de 1768 à 1771,” Revue historique du Centre-Ouest 2 (2003), 279–80. 12 Nicolas Toussaint Le Moyne des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de Police; contenant l’origine et les progrès de cette partie importante de l’administration civile en France; les loix, règlemens et arrêts qui y ont rapport, etc (Paris, 1786–90), 105; Jean-Marie Augustin, La Révolution française en Haut-Poitou et Pays charentais, 1789–1799 (Toulouse: Privat, 1989), 50–1; M.-L. Autexier, Les droits féodaux et les droits seigneuriaux en Poitou de 1559 à 1799 (Fontenay-le-Comte: P. & O. Lussaud frères, imprimeurs, 1947), 147; Alain Gérard, Pourquoi la Vendée? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990), 73–4, 136; Bernard Martin, La vie en Poitou dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle: Mazeuil, paroisse du Mirebalais ([Maulévrier]: Hérault, 1988), 69–70; Pierre Arches, “Économie et société en Deux-Sèvres. Le commerce des bestiaux (dans les années 1760) et un réseau familial (XVIIIème–milieu du XIXème siècle),” Bulletin de la Société historique et scientifique des Deux-Sèvres VIII (2000), 36; Marie Louise Fracard, La fin de l’ancien régime à Niort; essai de sociologie religieuse (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1956), 33; Prosper Boissonnade, Essai sur l’organisation du travail en Poitou, depuis le XIe siècle jusqu’à la Révolution (Paris: H. Champion, 1900), 2:281; Pierre-Yannick Legal, “Paysans Bas-Poitevins entre plaine, bocage, Gâtine et marais (1730–1750),” Recherches vendéennes 2 (1995), 331–2; Jean-Luc Sarrazin, La Vendée: des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean d’Angély: Bordessoules, 1982), 206–7; Jacques Péret, “De Louis XIV à la Révolution,” in Histoire de Poitiers, ed. Robert Favreau (Toulouse: Privat, 1985), 222–3, 227–8, 230; Jacques Péret, “L’exemplaire histoire d’une famille bourgeoise poitevine, les Monnet (1660–1880),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 26 (1979), 108–9, 112–13; Jacques Péret, “Cheptel et hiérarchies sociales en Gâtine poitevine au XVIIIe siècle,” in Campagnes de l’Ouest: stratigraphie et relations sociales dans l’histoire, ed. Annie Antoine (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 417–18; Péret, Seigneurs et seigneuries, 222; Hérault, Histoire de Châtellerault, 292, 294; Dubois-Destrizais, “Nouvelles recherches,” 195. 13 Charles-Claude Lalanne, Histoire de Chatelleraud et du Chatelleraudais / 2 (Chatellerault: Rivière, 1858), 262–3. 14 ADV C607; J Marcadé, Protestants poitevins: de la Révocation à la Révolution (La Crèche: Geste éditions, 1998), 172; Philippe Bossis, “Le laboureur des bocages du Centre-Ouest, principalement au XVIIIe siècle,” in Campagnes de l’Ouest, ed. Annie Antoine (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 399; Henri Couturier, La préparation des états généraux de 1789 en Poitou, principalement d’après les cahiers des paroisses et des corporations; étude d’histoire du droit (Poitiers: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1909), 190–2; Crozet, Histoire du Poitou, 99. 15 AN H1519. 16 AN H1519. This archival file contains several complaints sent by local lords to the crown. See also ADV C608. 17 ADV C608. 18 ADV C607, C860; Procès verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale du Poitou tenue à Poitiers en novembre & décembre 1787, 1–2, 6–7, 336; Antoine René Hyacinthe Thibaudeau, Histoire de Poitou ... Nouvelle édition, précédée d’une introduction par H. de Ste. Hermine (Niort, 1839), 489–96. 19 Jay Smith analyzed these “noble” characteristics in Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 216, 263; Robert Descimon, “Chercher de nouvelles voies pour interpréter les phénomènes nobiliaires dans la France moderne. La noblesse, ‘essence’ ou rapport social?,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 46 (1999), 7–9. 20 AN H1591. 21 Bibliothèque Nationale, Collection Joly de Fleury 561, 7473. 22 ADV C607. The district assembly of Niort issued a similar protest: ADV C608. 23 ADV C607. 24 ADV C608.

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25 ADV C607. 26 Ibid. 27 Philip Dawson, Provincial Magistrates and Revolutionary Politics in France, 1789–1795 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 132, 169; Christine Adams, A Taste for Comfort and Status: A Bourgeois Family in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 117, 148–9, 257–8. 28 For the patriotic letters, see Archives Départementales Deux-Sèvres (hereafter ADD-S) 15 F 2. See also Hilaire-Alexandre Briquet, Histoire de la ville de Niort (Niort: Robin, Libraire-Éditeur, 1832), 2:220–1. Clarisse Coulomb focuses on the aspirations for municipal improvement as components of a burgeoning bourgeois consciousness in opposition to the perceived persistence of feudal institutions. “Claude Rémy Buirette de Verrières: de l’avocat au Parlement à l’avocat du Tiers (1773–1788),” in Les parlementaires acteurs de la vie provinciale XVIIe – XVIIIe siècles, ed. Serge Dauchy et al. (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 93, 99–101, 107–8, 114. 29 Paul Boucher, Charles Cochon de Lapparent, conventionnel, ministre de la police, préfet de l’Empire (Paris: A. Picard, 1969), 18–20. The quote is on p. 21. 30 Gabriel Debien, ed., Correspondance de Félix Faulcon, vol. 1: 1770–1789 (Poitiers: Société des Archives Historiques du Poitou, 1939), 104, 172, 259–60. 31 Ibid., 275. 32 AN H1575/2, P5684, P5688; Michel Brugière, “Les receveurs généraux sous Louis XVI: fossiles ou précurseurs?,” Histoire économique et financière de la France. Études et document 1 (1989), 109; Charles Babinet, “Le présidial de Poitiers. 65 années de sa vie publique et privée (1724 à 1790),” Mémoires de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest VIII (1885), 386–7; Adrien Bonvallet, “Le bureau des finances de la généralité de Poitiers,” Mémoires de la Société des antiquaires de l’Ouest, tome VI de la deuxième série (1883), 315–23; Gabriel Debien, “Défrichement et reprises de fermes en Poitou à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française XL (1968), 394; Jean-Marie Augustin, “Entre élections et offices, les réformes municipales dans les communes du centre-ouest de Louis XIV à Louis XVI,” Bonnes villes du Poitou et des pays charentais, XII–XVIIIe siècle; actes du colloque tenu à Saint-Jean-d’Angély, les 24–25 septembre 1999 (2002), 312; Péret, “L’élection de Saint-Maixent sous Louis XVI,” 197; Péret, “De Louis XIV à la Révolution,” 231. 33 Debien, Correspondance de Félix Faulcon, 275. 34 Ibid., 276. 35 AN H1596. For the bureau of finance of Poitiers, see AN P5684, P5688; Bonvallet, “Le bureau des finances,” 212, 216–21, 225, 236–7, 285, 289–90, 300–3. 36 Debien, Correspondance de Félix Faulcon, 276. See also pp. 173, 175, 275. 37 Ibid., 338. See also pp. 331–2. 38 Jones, Reform and Revolution, 40, 64, 113. 39 Péret, “L’élection de Saint-Maixent sous Louis XVI,” 192–3. 40 AN H1578. For similar cases from Poitou regarding tax-exempt land, in which the royal council overruled venal courts and decided against seigneurs and in favor of rural communities, see AN H1572/2, H1574/2, H1575/2, H1576, H1580/2, H1581/2. 41 Michael Kwass, “A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 70 (1998), 316, 318. 42 ADV C8. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 ADV C630; Bula, “Les finances royales et la gestion de l’apanage,” 352–3. 47 Léonce Cathelineau, Cahier de doléances des sénéchaussées de Niort et de Saint-Maixent, et des communautés et corporations de Niort et Saint-Maixent pour les États généraux de 1789 (Niort: Imprimerie nouvelle G. Clouzot, 1912), 258–9. 48 Eugène Louis, ed., Le Bas-Poitou en 1788; mémoires addressés à la Commission intermédiaire de

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l’Assemblée d’élection de Fontenay par les municipalités de Maillezais et de Chaillé-les-Marais (La Roche-sur-Yon: L. Gasté, imprimeur de la Société d’émulation, 1877–80), 256. See also pp. 10, 26, 72, 224. 49 Peter Jones, “The Provincial Assemblies, 1778–1790; Old or New?,” in Proceedings: The Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850 (23rd meeting), ed. Ellen Lovell Evans and John W. Rooney (Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University, 1994), 384n; Léonce Cathelineau, Département de la Vienne. Cahiers de doléances de la sénéchaussée de Civray pour les États généraux de 1789 (Niort: Imprimerie Saint-Denis, 1925), 113–14. 50 Debien, Correspondance de Félix Faulcon, 1:275–6. 51 Ibid., 1:317. The previous quote of Boissière was from this same letter. 52 ADV C630. 53 Ibid. 54 Cathelineau, Cahiers de doléances des Sénéchaussée de Niort, 80–1. See also Fracard, La fin de l’ancien régime à Niort, 32; Sarrazin, La Vendée, 221. 55 ADV C607; Debien, Correspondance de Félix Faulcon, 339. 56 Jones, Reform and Revolution, 155–6. 57 Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 575. 58 Georges Duby, William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986, 1985 1st American ed.), 87; Smith, Nobility Reimagined, 11, 13–16, 98–9, 173–4, 216, 227, 263. 59 ADV C607. 60 Babinet, “Le présidial de Poitiers,” 406–7. 61 Henry Brunetière, A la veille de la Vendée: le Bas-Poitou et la préparation des Etats généraux de 1789 (Les Sables d’Olonne: Cercle d’or, 1989), 42; Ch.-L. Chassin, La préparation de la guerre de Vendée, 1789–1793 (Paris: P. Dupont, 1892), 1:11, 33–4. 62 ADV C608. 63 H. Beauchet-Filleau, Noblesse du Poitou en 1789: procès-verbaux, cahier des doléances, et noms de tous les signataires des procurations et de leurs mandataires (France: s.n., 1990), 164–5, 167–8, 173. 64 Pierre Arches, “Aux origins de la guerre de Vendée? La noblesse de la Gâtine poitevine (Secondigny, octobre 1788),” Bulletin de la Société historique et scientifique des Deux-Sèvres 24 (1991), 302; Chassin, La préparation de la guerre de Vendée, 1:11. 65 Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire  des Constituants: 1789–1791  (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 251–2, 336–7, 466–7; Emile Monnet, Archives politiques du département des Deux-Sèvres / 1, Histoire des élections législatives de 1789 à 1889 (Niort: L. Clouzot, 1889), 55–6; H. De la Fontonelle de Vaudoré, “Autour du drapeau blanc: biographies inédites des chefs vendéens et des chouans,” Revue du Bas-Poitou, 7 (1894), 97; Nicolas Viton de Saint-Allais, Nobiliaire universel de France ou recueil général des généalogies historiques des maisons nobles de ce royaume (Paris: Au Bureau du Nobiliaire Universel de France, 1819), 152; Henri-Auguste-Georges du Verger La Rochejaquelein marquis de, Maurice Vitrac, and Arnould Galopin, Mémoires de la Marquise de la Rochejaquelein: sur la guerre de vendée (Paris: A. Michel, [18--?]), 340; Eugène Henri Edmond Beauchet-Filleau et al., Dictionnaire historique et généalogique des familles du Poitou. 2 (Brisson–Cyriaque) (Poitiers: Oudin, 1895), 642. 66 ADV E4/32/22–23. 67 Marquis de Moussac, Un prêtre d’autrefois: l’abbé de Moussac, vicaire général de Poitiers, 1753–1827, d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Perria, 1911), 79–80; Charles Emmanuel Joseph Poplimont, La France héraldique (Saint-Germain: Impr. E. Heutte, 1873–75) 4:122. 68 Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 163–4, 167, 519. 69 M.E. Bouloton, “Le clergé de la Vendée pendant la Révolution,” Revue du Bas-Poitou 11 (1898), 18–19; Fabrice Vigier, Les curés du Poitou au siècle des Lumières (La Crèche: Geste, 1999) 262–3, 299; Fabrice Vigier, Itinéraire d’un prêtre à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: René Lecesve, curé de SainteTriaise de Poitiers (Poitiers: Société des antiquaires de l’ouest, 1998), 115, 124; Philippe Bossis, “Le Marais Poitevin occidental et la domination de l’Église au XVIIIe siècle,” Enquêtes et documents, Centre de recherches historiques sur la France Atlantique (1980), 61–2; Christophe Grelet,

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“Entre pauvreté et opulence, les conditions d’existence du clergé bas-poitevin au xviiie siècle,” in L’histoire religieuse dans les pays poitevins et charentais à l’époque moderne: l’état de la recherche: actes des journées d’études de La Rochelle, 8–9 janvier 1999, ed. André Duret, Pascal Even, and Bruno Leal (La Rochelle: Conseil général de la Charente-Maritime, Archives départementales, 2000), 242, 245–6. 70 M.C. Puichaud, “Histoire d’un drapeau de la grande guerre. – L’insurrection vendéenne à Moncoutant, Châtillon et Bressuire,” Revue du Bas-Poitou 11 (1898), 20; M.A. de Goué, “La Prise de Charette (23 Mars 1796). – Étude historique et critique d’apres des documents inédits,” Revue du Bas-Poitou 23 (1910), 136; Edgard Bourloton, “Les Anciens seigneuries de Bas-Poitou. – La seigneurie de Vouvant,” Revue du Bas-Poitou 13 (1900), 426; Paul Guérin, Les petits bollandistes: vies des saints de l’Ancien et du Nouveau Testament, des martyres, des pères, des auteurs sacrés et ecclésiastiques ...: notices sur les congrégations et les ordres religieux: histoire des reliques, des pèlerinages ... d’apres le père Giry dont le travail, pour les vies qu’il a traitées, forme le fond de cet ouvrage: les grands bollandistes qui ont été de nouveau intégralement analysés Surius, Ribadeneira, Godescard ... (Paris: Bloud et Barral, 1878), 188; André Lecler, Martyrs et confesseurs de la foi du diocèse de Limoges pendant la Révolution française. Tome deuxième (Limoges: Ve H. Ducourtieux, 1900), 632–3; Pierre Henri Alfred de Lastic Saint-Jal, Église et la Révolution à Niort et dans les Deux-Sèvres (Saint-Maixent, 1870), 46, 91; Jean Artarit, Dominique Dillon: curé, vendéen et révolutionnaire (La Roche-sur-Yon: Centre vendéen de recherches historiques, 1995), 38–9, 42, 44, 83–4; Jean Lourd, Les Trois curés du Poitou députés du clergé aux États généraux de 1789: audience solennelle de rentrée du 17 septembre 1973, Cour d’appel de Poitiers, discours / prononcé par M. Lourd (Poitiers: Cour d’appel, 1973), 28, 30; Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 69; Paul Henri Ferdinand Beauchet-Filleau, and H. Beauchet-Filleau, Clergé du Poitou en 1789: procès-verbaux, cahier des doléances, et noms de tous les signataires des procurations et de leurs mandataires (Fontenay-le-Comte: Impr. L.-P. Gouraud, 1890), 61, 68–9; Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants, 72–3, 291–2, 657–8. 71 ADD-S L83, L84, L85, L86; Ludovic Magny, Recueil de généalogies de maisons nobles de France; extrait du Nobiliaire universel publié sous la directions de L. de Magny (Paris: A la direction des Archives de la Noblesse, 1894), 2; Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants, 134, 225–6, 244–5, 259, 764–5, 883–4; Chassin, La préparation de la guerre de Vendée, 1:287; Briquet, Histoire de la ville de Niort, 73; Lastic Saint-Jal, Église et la Révolution à Niort, 81. 72 ADV C608. 73 ADV C608. See also Péret, “De Louis XIV à la Révolution,” 222, 225; Pellegrin et al., “Les temps modernes,” 205. 74 AN B A 69. 75 Augustin, La Révolution française en Haut-Poitou, 71. 76 Chassin, La préparation de la guerre de Vendée, 1:28–30. 77 H. Beauchet-Filleau and P. Beauchet-Filleau, Tiers-Etat du Poitou en 1789: procès-verbaux, cahier des doléances, et liste des électeurs (Paris: s.n., 1989, 1888), 94, 101–2; Jacques Péret, “La secousse révolutionnaire 1789–1799,” in Histoire de Poitiers, ed. Robert Favreau (Toulouse: Privat, 1985), 263–4; Artarit, Dominique Dillon, 44. 78 Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50, 56–7; Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 520. 79 Beauchet-Filleau and Beauchet-Filleau, Clergé du Poitou, 54, 59, 61. 80 Cathelineau, Cahiers de doléances des Sénéchaussée de Niort, 136–7. See also p. 140. 81 Ibid., 379. 82 Beauchet-Filleau and Beauchet-Filleau, Tiers-Etat du Poitou en 1789, 116–19. 83 Jean Nicolas, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 87, 100, 112, 252–3, 276, 288; Anatoli Ado, Paysans en révolution: terre, pouvoir et jacquerie 1789–1794, trans. Serge Aberdam (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1996), 106, 118–19; Jacques Péret, Histoire de la Révolution française en PoitouCharentes, 1789–1799 (Poitiers: Projets Editions France, 1988), 20, 22–3; Jacques Péret,

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POITOU: THE QUESTION OF FEUDALISM 137 Les paysans de Gâtine poitevine au XVIIIe siècle (La Crèche: Geste, 1998), 77; Augustin, La Révolution française en Haut-Poitou, 101; Pellegrin et al., “Les temps modernes,” 228; Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 346. Marcel Marion, “Un révolutionnaire très conservateur Creuzé-Latouche,” Revue d’histoire moderne 11 (1936), 101–2. The quote is on p. 104. Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789–99 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 127, 136, 166. David Andress, The French Revolution and the People (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 137, 142, 192; Edward Woell, “The Origins and Outcomes of Religious Schism, 1790–99” and Jean-Clément Martin, “The Vendée, Chouannerie and the State, 1791–99,” both in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 148, 247; McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 101–2, 127, 131. Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2012), 552; McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 127; Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 415. André Benoist, “Le corps pastoral et les Protestants poitevins, face aux idées nouvelles et à la Révolution (1760–1803),” Bulletin de la Société des antiquaires de l’ouest et des musées de Poitiers, 5e série, tome 1 (1987), 148–9; J.-C. Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), 18–19, 55; J.-C. Martin, “The Vendée, Chouannerie and the State,” 253; Gérard, Pourquoi la Vendée?, 124–5, 127, 176; Tilly, The Vendée, 2, 102–3, 172, 261. Neil Davidson argues that urban merchants and authorities sought to carve out positions for themselves within the political structures in Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They extracted revenue from the countryside in the same way as did the feudal lords and the Church. As a result, peasants often allied with the lords against the authority of the towns, particularly against taxation. Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, 515.

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5

Provincial assemblies and the revolutionary challenge to patrimonialism

As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, venality was a flash point for conflict when the crown introduced the provincial assemblies. Office holders suspected that the assemblies would usurp their role in government. The issue was not that offices represented a particularly valuable form of property. Venal property did not offer greater returns than did land, government bonds, or other old regime investments. In times of war, when kings faced urgent need for funds, they threatened to create new offices, making existing ones redundant, or threatened reforms to eliminate state posts. Kings thereby obliged venal officials to pay additional funds in return for preserving their property in the state. These additional funds amounted to forced loans, since the interest payments (gages) on them did not equal the going rate. Despite these drawbacks, venal property remained a core component of upper-class fortunes. The owners sought to gain as much as they could from their investments by collecting the gages from the king and fees from royal subjects in need of their governmental services. They sought to extend their jurisdictions, or spheres of state authority, and thus to augment the fees collected from royal subjects. The broader their jurisdiction, the greater their ability to obstruct royal policy, and the more dependent on them the king became. Powerful officials thus benefited from patronage offered in return for carrying out royal policies. We will see in what follows that, because of these investments in the regime, venal officers opposed the reformist project to renovate the state through provincial assemblies. In opposing the assemblies, office holders did not call for a constitutional order, uniform laws, or representative government. Rather, they made arguments akin to those advanced by Charles Loyseau, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, that legitimate power manifested itself publicly as transmissible family property, fiefs, and offices. This traditional legitimacy maintained a structure of inequality to which commoners owed consent.1 At the end of the Old Regime, office holders continued to

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make arguments comprehensible in terms of the feudal oaths of the medieval monarchy. They regarded the assemblies as replacements for their spheres of authority within the state. Office holders expressed their wish to continue to distinguish themselves as men of rank in possession of the honor of serving the king. Paradoxically, in 1789, hereditary office holders figured prominently among the deputies of the National Assembly who abolished venality. They replaced an absolute monarchy, in which office holders received rewards, patronage, and payments for service in support of the king, with a state apparatus in which bureaucrats received regular salaries for the discharge of impersonal functions on behalf of the citizenry. The deputies created a modern state in which functionaries acceded to offices through standardized criteria rather than purchase and inheritance. How was it possible that the defenders of hereditary posts in the 1770s and 1780s then eradicated venality in the National Assembly? This change did not result from the spread of liberal ideals about the consent of the governed, equality before the law, limited government, individual rights, and the inadmissibility of owning authority over other individuals. Tens of thousands of venal officers, in opposing the provincial assemblies, argued in favor of their right to own governmental authority as a family patrimony. They argued in favor of the king’s absolute sovereignty as the guarantor of their property in office. Provincial assemblies, in contrast, represented a dangerous experiment in popular government liable to undermine the king’s power and the rights of his office holders. I argue that the provincial assemblies turned the defenders of venal offices within the king’s government into advocates of a bureaucracy belonging to the national community. Venal judges, as members of the assemblies, mostly in the Third Estate, obtained a different perspective on the regime. Whereas they had traditionally held venal property, sometimes threatened by royal policies, in the assemblies, they had the experience of functionaries prevented by hereditary officers from carrying out reforms entrusted to them by the king. As members of the assemblies, office holders saw that their peers in the tribunals prevented them from expanding participation in government, distributing taxes more equitably, and eliminating the corvée labor required of rural inhabitants on the roads. Venal judges even prevented the state from attending to basic functions, such as collecting taxes and maintaining infrastructure. Office holders, who served in the assemblies, saw that venal officials extracted patronage from the king in a time of crisis, when he needed them to execute their duties. Of course, many office holders, as members of the provincial assemblies, sympathized with the rights of venal judges and, depending on the local

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circumstances, did not challenge the privileges of hereditary magistrates in all regions of the country. Nonetheless, the assemblies represented such a threat to venal jurisdictions that tens of thousands of office holders obstructed the assemblies’ activities. Many office holders justified such obstruction not only by drawing attention to feudal rights to jurisdictions, but also by detailing their positive service to compatriots. They began to vaunt their expertise in performing public functions. Intrusive policies, such as the assemblies, they argued, prevented them from carrying out their official duties. Venal officers then began to demand coherent guidelines and regular salaries. This new value of public service especially appealed to the mass of venal officers of the Third Estate – in the district fiscal courts (élections), town governments, and other subordinate jurisdictions – who traditionally attended to their duties in the shadow of the high justices, or parlementaires, of the sovereign courts. Lower-level office holders asserted that government posts should be allocated in accordance with talent and virtue proven in open competition, not purchase and inheritance. In these ways, members of the provincial assemblies, and especially the mass of venal officials threatened by them, questioned the jurisdictional rights that hereditary magistrates had defended for centuries. The assemblies encouraged both the participants and venal officials to envision a rational administration of the country in which bureaucrats would see to public functions more effectively than they had as hereditary holders of jurisdictions. This change, they believed, would create a better administered, more prosperous country. To give substance to this argument, the first part of this chapter details the pervasive opposition to the provincial assemblies at all levels of the monarchy, from the parlementaires at the head of the judiciary and administration of the provinces down through the district fiscal courts and municipalities. We will then see that office holders, in resisting the assemblies, brought the royal administration to a standstill and extracted patronage for keeping it functioning in 1788 and 1789. The final part of the chapter presents the growing awareness in these years – in the assemblies and especially among the lion’s share of venal officers in the lower grades of royal officialdom – of bureaucracy as a more desirable form of administration, through which members of the Third Estate could pursue careers in accordance with their talent and experience. Disputes over monarchical government: provincial assemblies or heritable offices? When Jacques Necker, as director general of finances, had the crown establish provincial assemblies in 1778 and 1779, he drew on writings supportive of

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representation for landowners as an alternative to a venal administration. As we saw in Chapter 1, royal reformers, from Argenson writing at mid-century to Le Trosne at the end of the 1770s, argued that venality of office, as a new alienation of public authority in addition to feudal rights, diverted wealth to political property and away from productive investment, led the owners of this property to extract fees from royal subjects, augmented the number of privileged persons, debilitated the state, ran counter to bureaucratic rationality, precluded governmental participation, and thus resulted in a lack of public spirit. Amid the increasingly assertive calls of the sovereign courts and provincial estates for the revitalization of customary institutions to restrain the authority of the intendants, and amid the growing difficulty of collecting adequate taxes, Necker began to create provincial assemblies as a means to offer elites a place in the government and improve the administration of finances. However, the nobles of the sovereign courts perceived the assemblies in precisely the manner Necker and other royal reformers envisioned them, as alternatives to the privileges of hereditary officers. These privileges consisted of the right of the parlementaires to correspond directly with the king through remonstrances. Other office holders usually saw their petitions ignored. The high justices enjoyed the honor of sitting with the princes of the blood and peers of the realm on public occasions. They hoped their service to the king, in enforcing edicts, administering the realm, and bringing its grievances to the throne, would lead to lucrative pensions, commissions, church benefices, honorable sinecures, and positions in the households of members of the royal family. Despite wide differences in the sources and levels of their wealth, the parlementaires shared a proud attachment to these privileges and regarded the provincial assemblies as a challenge to the established order of which their offices constituted integral parts.2 The Parlement of Paris therefore presented the king with “Observations on the Two Rulings of the Council of 12 July 1778 and 27 April 1779 Establishing a Provincial Administration in the Provinces.” The administration … had been confided to magistrates, who by their status and by this mark of confidence enjoyed consideration which could only be regarded as useful to the extent that it turned to the king’s benefit … We feel that the existing form of the administration, which … hitherto had been supported by all authority … would be shaken in all the provinces to which … [the assemblies] could be extended, that the magistrates would no longer have in their position the confidence which gives them the force necessary to fulfil suitably their functions.3

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High office holders in Haute-Guyenne, like the justices in Paris, deemed their courts integral to the monarchy and obstructed policies detrimental to their privileges. Necker had an assembly set up in this province in 1779 and assigned Jean-François-Henry de Richeprey, a habitué of literary salons and an advocate of physiocracy, to work under its auspices to renew the tax rolls. Richeprey toured the province convoking peasant meetings to obtain information and update the cadasters. The office holders of the cour des aides of Montauban, one of four sovereign courts with jurisdiction over fiscal matters, feared for their jurisdiction. Cadasters drawn up under their aegis often proved costly, provoked litigation, and favored the large proprietors. The judges of the cour des aides owned much land and disliked the thought of village meetings to discuss their exemptions. They therefore issued an official ruling, backed by the municipal magistrates of Montauban in 1780, which prohibited the peasant meetings as disturbances of public order. When the office holders rallied the intendant to their side, the members of the assembly grew alarmed and suspended Richeprey’s work. Intrigue in Versailles supported and prob­ ably even guided Richeprey’s adversaries in Haute-Guyenne. Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the former bishop of Montauban, with the support of fellow court nobles eager to expel Necker from the ministry, offered to mediate the dispute at the same time as he incited the municipal officers of Montauban against Richeprey. For his part, Richeprey confessed that, though his assignment had come to naught, the experience swelled his ardor to take this badly managed function away from the cour des aides.4 The office holders of the Parlement de Paris, suspicious lest provincial assemblies led by nobles and clergymen become powerful enough to take their place in the government, refused to register the edict for the formation of another one in 1781. The Parlement declared, in Essay on the Registering of the Letters Patent for the Establishment of a Provincial Administration in the Province of Moulins, “the taste for administering has become a fashion which it is important to bring down … Each lineage noble believes himself capable of governing the state … The secret sources of the … government have been too exposed.”5 Necker already had become unpopular with financial office holders and court nobles for his efforts to consolidate and publicize royal accounts. He then resigned after the king’s brother, the comte de Provence, inflamed the justices of the Parlement against him and weakened his position in the government by exposing to each one of them his confidential essay for Louis XVI on the assemblies.6 Opposition intensified when Louis XVI set up provincial and district assemblies in most of the rest of the realm in 1787. The king even allowed well-to-do peasants to elect village municipalities. In the following years, these peasant councils were to elect the district assemblies, which in turn would

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elect provincial assemblies. Louis XVI undertook this final stab at reform after the controller general, Calonne, brought the impossible state of finances to his attention in 1786. Calonne hoped, in view of his deteriorating relationship with the Parlements, that interest in the assemblies would extend beyond the privileged orders to a broad range of landowners willing to implement fiscal policy. The king invited the highest 144 nobles and clergymen to an Assembly of Notables to review a series of reforms, including the assemblies, in the expectation that their endorsement would oblige the Parlement to uphold the measures. The Notables objected to the provision for membership based on tax payments and proposed instead that each assembly be headed by a nobleman and meet in the traditional form of the three estates. The Notables condemned the intendants and proposed that the assemblies take over their functions.7 The king agreed to divide the provincial assemblies into estates and appoint a clergyman or noble as president. The Notables then expressed their eagerness to see the assemblies in existence as soon as possible. In doing so, they generated excitement about the prospect of limiting the authority of the intendants. In the midst of this excitement, many pamphleteers argued that the central administration appointed the members of the assemblies to impose taxes unilaterally. They called for the revival of estates in the provinces in the hope that these bodies would pave the way for political participation and defend the interests of taxpayers.8 After the endorsement of the Notables, the venal justices of the Parlement of Paris registered the edict for the provincial assemblies despite their misgivings. They affirmed that the vagueness of the regulations for the assemblies would permit the crown to ignore established precedent and alter the administrative structures at will. In the Assembly of Notables, Joly de Fleury, the chief justice (procureur général) of the Parlement, had protested, “in general, all assemblies of residents excite much fermentation in minds which renders them constantly tumultuous.” The assemblies could undercut respect for the first two estates, which “contributed eminently by their example toward containing the French people in the sentiments of love and submission they naturally show their sovereign.”9 The parlementaires believed that provincial assemblies would undermine their exclusive right to bring the grievances of royal subjects to the throne. The assemblies would undermine the absolute power of the king upon which this exclusive right ultimately depended. They observed, in April 1787, after obtaining information about the administration of the three small provinces of Bresse, Bugey, and Gex in southeastern France: It would be dangerous … to give existence to a fourth order; such an innovation would be contrary to the constitution of the monarchy and would one day have

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detrimental consequences and it is one of the principal drawbacks of the provincial assemblies … If one allows the establishment of a fourth order, the order of peasants … it would end up the strongest, because it is the most numerous [and] would overturn all the monarchical principles.10

The provincial Parlements followed the Parlement of Paris in resigned acquiescence and registered the edicts for the provincial assemblies, since the public hoped to see them up and running as soon as possible.11 Yet the Parlements of Normandy, Besançon, Grenoble, and Bordeaux demurred. Although the judges of the provincial parlements garnered much more wealth from the land rents and products of their domains than they did from their offices, it would be wrong to regard them as bourgeois proprietors. They invested in the outward signs of seigneurial power such as châteaux and gallows, and upheld lordly rights and immunities in their professional work in the tribunals. The political life of the provinces revolved around the Parlements and their protection of the people in ways reminiscent of the feudal past. The Parlements published royal edicts, attended to law and order, and defended the inhabitants from royal initiatives liable to cause high prices or excessive taxes. In negotiations with the king over such issues, the first presidents and chief justices sometimes obtained pensions, church benefices, lands within the royal domains, and other favors for their families.12 The provincial assemblies represented an innovation liable to upset these traditions. Several of the Parlements had put forward provincial estates for decades as the sole legitimate form of representation capable of reassuring taxpayers that their interests would be protected. Provincial estates, of course, would encroach upon the venal judges’ sphere of influence. But in contrast to the assemblies, whose members were appointed by the crown and coopted by the appointees, the estates seemed beyond ministerial meddling and more likely to preserve the rights of the aristocracy.13 Indeed, the Parlement of Besançon ruled toward the end of January 1789 that the restored estates of Franche-Comté would “deliberate only by Order and by chamber … in all matters.” Only two orders voting together could oblige the third, except with regard to taxation when unanimity would have to prevail.14 The Parlement of Grenoble, in its declaration of preference for estates, affirmed that the archbishop had held the presidency in the past but that the duc d’Orléans, governor of the province, should now enjoy this honor. The Parlement stated that a member of the Third Estate should never preside over the estates. It declared that the king’s policies made in partnership with the Estates of Dauphiné must preserve the political role of the Parlement to debate the legality of royal edicts.15 The judges of the Parlement of Rouen believed that the provincial assembly

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was more likely than estates to encroach upon their jurisdictional rights. They registered the edict for the assembly but set down that it could not approve or distribute taxes, and could not take out or consent to loans. The exclusive professional orders of lawyers in towns with parlements, such as Rouen and Bordeaux, enjoyed a prestigious association with the tribunals. They generally showed loyalty to the parlementaires on whose good graces their careers depended.16 One such lawyer, Guillaume de la Foy, argued at the beginning of 1789, in an essay on the Duchy of Normandy, that royal ministers established the assembly in order to diminish the rights of the clergy and nobility, “to destroy the Magistracy … with the aim of proceeding more surely to this Cadaster so desired by the Ministers, or rather to take possession of our properties.” The king’s ministers hoped to disseminate and inculcate principles “contrary to the opinions of the … office holders … so as to suppress them afterwards.” The ministers, argued de la Foy, removed the inhabitants from the jurisdiction of impartial and disinterested judges and handed them over to the investigations and inquisitions of petty, hard, and arrogant clerks working under the assembly.17 The Parlement of Bordeaux remonstrated that the provincial assemblies represented an illegal scheme to augment taxes. The crown ignored the remonstrance and instructed the archbishop and the duc d’Ayen to proceed with the preparations for the assemblies in Bordeaux and Limoges. The crown exiled the Parlement to Libourne, to not only punish the judges and break their resistance, but also perhaps to remove them from Bordeaux while the assembly met. The archbishop, however, deemed the circumstances unfavorable and repeatedly postponed the assembly. The duc d’Ayen held the first session in Limoges in August 1787, in spite of the Parlement’s ruling, but adjourned the assembly after one meeting. Once the Parlement had its remonstrance posted all over the jurisdiction, the deputies did not dare assemble in defiance of its express order, and the intendant and archbishop had to shelve the king’s plans.18 Guillaume-Joseph Saige, a lawyer immersed in the Parlement of Bordeaux’s arcane world of legal privileges and precedents, wrote a radical statement of national sovereignty, Catechism of the Citizen, in the early 1770s. He seems either to have regarded the Parlement as a component of the nation or to have changed his views, for a decade and a half later, when the provincial assemblies were created, he wrote a supplement to the Catechism, contending that the purpose of these new bodies was to deprive the Parlement of its role in verifying the laws, especially fiscal edicts. Royal ministers sought to dispense with barriers to legislation created by the Parlement’s right of remonstrance. The assemblies “furnish the pretext to take away from … old bodies august and necessary functions whose age has rendered so inherent to the constitution of the state.”19

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The office holders of the Parlement of Grenoble affirmed that the provincial assembly’s “absolute dependence upon the intendant could lead it to become the instrument of arbitrary power … At the least sign of … opposition to the Ministers’ projects, its constitution … could be altered, to the detriment of the People, by a simple decree wheedled from the … King and his council.” Rather than assemblies, the judges put forward their own role in registering the laws, a right which was “the first and most inviolable of all laws … the safeguard of the Monarchy’s constitution, of the Sovereign’s authority, and of the Subject’s rights.”20 They stated that the Parlement should oversee the construction and repair of the roads and bridges, because this court, unlike the assembly, would prevent the contractors from misusing the people’s labor, incurring needless expenses, or performing faulty work. Anyone who took part in an assembly in Dauphiné, the Parlement ruled, would be liable to legal prosecution.21 The marquis de la Devèze, named by the king to the assembly, recognized the difficulty of prevailing over the office holders. He proposed that the assembly meet in Valence or Romans, “further from the tribunals which are jealous of its deliberations.”22 The venal justices of the Parlement of Besançon refused to register the edict for the provincial assembly. They feared that the assembly might escape the control of the privileged orders.23 The Parlement remonstrated in September 1787: The Franche-Comté asks the king to conserve the complete representation of the three orders … and not to substitute an unconstitutional assembly that represents nothing … The plan … in these assemblies, to render nil the suffrage of the nobility, the suffrage of the Church, and to prohibit them from deliberating separately … under the pretext of partiality against the Third Estate; the plan is intended to assure an opposition to the governmental voice of your Parlement.24

Droz des Villars, who often spoke for his fellow judges, penned reflections in December 1788 on the drawbacks of an assembly in Franche-Comté. The king should instead rely on the Parlement. Since the magistrates were “accustomed to holding the scales of justice, favors and rewards, suitably distributed, have never overburdened the State; the remonstrances of the Courts, maturely weighed, have … had the success they deserved.” Droz des Villars expressed the office holders’ apprehension lest “the paternal government of the good King” give way to “the tumult of a popular administration.”25 In the duchy of Lorraine, the families of the venal judges of the chambre des comptes of Bar-le-Duc – a sovereign court of last resort, like the cours des aides and Parlements – held lordships, church benefices, military ranks, and municipal offices. The court reviewed the accounts of municipal officers, the distribution of taxes, cases of counterfeiting, and fiscal litigation. The judges

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wrote remonstrances to the king in November 1786 in an effort to extend their jurisdiction over the rates added to the tax on commoners, known as the taille. These extra sums were intended to finance roadwork and free rural inhabitants from the royal corvée.26 The chambre des comptes of Bar wrote to the controller general the next year that Lorraine “passed under French domination with its manners, customs, and privileges assured in the treaty of cession and confirmed by … posterior laws.” For this reason, the introduction of a provincial assembly to administer taxation illegally contravened the constitutional order of Lorraine. The Coutume de Lorraine, to which the office holders referred, had taken shape under the influences of Christianity and feudalism, and sustained an archaic social order permeated with distinctions between clerical, noble, and common persons and properties. The magistrates claimed to have long provided useful services, adjudicating more than 5,000 disagreements of taxpayers a year. They pleaded that their tribunal consisted solely of nobles, whereas “a provincial assembly would … represent the king imperfectly in the distribution of taxes.” The resistance of the chambre des comptes met with success, seeing that the following year, the tribunal continued to distribute the taxes despite the crown’s effort to transfer this function to the assembly.27 As this plea of the chambre des comptes suggests, office holders – in contrast to modern bureaucrats who, in Max Weber’s typology of states, serve impersonal functional ends – believed they had a special relationship to the king, much like a vassal’s faith in feudal or patrimonial authority.28 Office holders subordinate to the sovereign courts articulated the same sense of jurisdictional rights held on behalf of the king. In 1787 and 1788, they expressed concern lest the provincial assemblies usurp their place in the monarchy. The bureaus of finances – tribunals in the provincial capitals responsible for regulating roadwork, upholding the king’s seigneurial rights, and assessing and certifying taxes – stood at the summit of many towns that did not have sovereign courts. The treasurers of France, as the office holders were known, had led the inhabitants of Tours against the intendant during the Fronde in 1648, when tax farmers withheld gages and extracted revenue from these magistrates. But after the 1660s, the magistrates ceased to rebel for the reason that submission and financial assistance to the king in difficult times, they hoped, would lead him to protect their privileges. They had seen the erosion of their role in government between 1642 and 1669 but then adjudicated more disputes and issued more ordinances over the course of the eighteenth century than they had in the past. The treasurers of France had the right to nearly 80 liters of salt free from the gabelle tax, and the presidents of the bureaus of finances had the right to nearly 120. Their capitation tax appeared on separate rolls assessed at a lower rate. The magistrates enjoyed exemption

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from the taille, lodging troops, militia duty, corvée labor on the roads, and the seigneurial rights of the king. The treasurers of France owned valuable vineyards around Tours and, thanks their exemption from its excises, had an advantage on the urban wine market.29 The edict introducing the provincial assemblies seemed to dispense with this privileged rank held by the bureaus of finances. The treasurers of France of Soissons declared it unconstitutional in August 1787. They claimed the “privilege to be commissioners of his majesty to the estates in the provinces” and thus claimed, by corollary, that the edict harmed “their prerogative to be commissioners of his majesty in the … provincial assembly for the assessment and administration of the taille.”30 They implored the king to “commit two treasurers of France … to attend the provincial assembly of Soissons as commissioners of the king … and to transmit the king’s orders … at which time these treasurers of France, your commissioners, will enjoy all of the honor, distinction and preeminence attached to this function.”31 The treasurers of France of Paris wrote to the controller general in September 1787 asking the king not to transfer their right to supervise taxes and public works to the provincial assemblies. All of the bureaus of finances collectively sent an essay to the crown a month later expressing concern lest the assemblies usurp their functions: The order of jurisdictions forms part of the public order; the honors attached to the officers of the tribunals were matched to the importance of the services for which they were created … The officers of the Bureaus of Finances are decorated with honorable privileges … They are called, by the laws, to extensive functions … It is by the active and assiduous exercise of these functions and by an inviolable fidelity to their duties that they want to make themselves worthy of the benefaction of the King.32

The bureau of finances of Moulins wrote to the controller general in November 1787 that the members of the provincial assemblies did not serve as titled “magistrates … and thus could” not “have … jurisdiction.” The assemblies had no right to pronounce judgments or command royal subjects. Litigation regarding the roads, the letter stated, must remain within the purview of the bureaus of finances. The treasurers of France of Rouen, in an essay to the controller general in December 1787, echoed their peers in Moulins and Soissons. As “officers of the superior courts and as commissioners … of his majesty” their jurisdiction covered functions that could not be transferred to the assemblies. It was “unfortunate and humiliating for the magistrates” to have their work taken over by the assembly and “thus to see themselves degraded publicly.” In the spring of 1788, the bureaus of finances of Grenoble, Soissons, Limoges, and Tours protested against the appointment of their officers to the

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Third Estate of the assemblies. They stated that hereditary nobility eventually accrued to the holders of their offices because of the dignity of their functions. This future ennoblement barred them from sitting with the Third Estate.33 The treasurers of France of Montauban wrote to the controller general in March 1788 to second the petitions of the other bureaus of finances. The matter at hand, they stated, “should decide [their] rank and consideration … in the order of the magistracy and in public opinion.” They claimed to have long “demanded the duties of commissioners of the king, the natural attributes of our offices deriving from our oldest qualifications.” The treasurers of France of Montauban insisted that the provincial assemblies “answer to the bureaus of finances for the execution of the king’s orders; and that it be to them that the assemblies address the operations for the fiscal administration.” Yet instead of enjoying these honors, a treasurer of France was appointed to the assembly as a deputy of the Third Estate, a place he could not accept without “degrading himself.” What a shocking contrast between this superior inspection [of the assemblies’ work], this eminent service devolved to the treasurers of France by … their rank; and the … subordinate place of the Third Estate which would make disappear the officer of the superior magistracy, the commissioner of the royal council, the director in finances, to allow only to be seen a bourgeois, a proprietor of the lowest rank, thrust into the common class of the people.34

The executive agents (procureurs généraux) of the Assembly of Gascony reported in 1788 that the élections (district fiscal courts) did not comprise a sufficient number of magistrates for their vast jurisdictions and could not make proper surveys of the taxable wealth. The agents therefore advised the Assembly to assume this task. Moreover, the cour des aides gained a denier per livre of taxes for verifying the fiscal rolls. The agents wrote that, to spare the inhabitants this burden, the Assembly should administer the taxes and limit the cour des aides to judicial functions.35 Statements of this sort made the office holders of the élections fear for their jurisdictions. The élus, as they were known, obtained customary payments from the king for the sums paid for their offices and in small towns exercised some of the only public professions of recognized rank. In Champagne, the office holders of Sainte-Menehould wrote an essay to the controller general asserting their jurisdiction over taxation. “Honor is thus the first motive that engages the élections to align themselves against the regulation in question, because the regulation tends to deprive the office holders of functions they have always discharged with zeal … It is certain that the provincial assemblies … will never bring together the necessary expertise to replace the élections.” The office holders in Joinville “observe that they have furnished no cause for

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discharge from their functions, of which one could say that the exercise is attributed to them by the nation itself.” In contrast, one could not claim “that the wish of the nation, which had an influence on the establishment of the élus, presided over the composition of the assemblies which one might well believe … directed by intrigue or power.”36 The élus of Chaumont en Bassigny wrote to the controller general, “the élections, whose origin goes back to the birth of the collection of … taxes in France, were established on the demand of the estates of the realm to administer the fiscal apportionment.” The provincial assemblies, they alleged, “will strip us of the consideration attached to the importance of our functions.”37 The magistrates of Rethel, also in Champagne, wrote to the controller general objecting that the regulations of 1787 for the assemblies entailed “the dispossession … of the most precious and … the most gratifying of their functions concerning the allocation and collection of taxes.” The élus of Rethel stated that the rural municipalities amounted to “assemblies of tenant farmers whose learning is … circumscribed by the tilling of the fields.” Since the farmers subject to the taille were to administer it, “they might do so with their passions and personal interests or with those of their parents and their friends, inversely, that is, to what one observes in the élections where the officers are disinterested with regards to the taille and other taxes by dint of the ­exemptions of their offices.”38 These magistrates had reasonable grounds for concern about their venal property. The controller general Clément Charles François de Laverdy had eliminated thousands of municipal offices two decades earlier. In edicts of 1764–65, Laverdy broke up oligarchies resistant to reform, promoted administrative standardization, and entrusted duties to men of professional ability by allowing the representatives of urban groups and guilds, even persons with little property, to send representatives to town assemblies, which would select municipal magistrates. Laverdy intended to decentralize the kingdom and diminish the role of the intendants. He hoped that the civic pride of local notables would prompt them to manage municipal finances responsibly. Office holders and intendants opposed the reform, and many venal municipalities secured dispensations from it. Laverdy’s successor Terray ceded to the opposition, repealed the edicts, and made municipalities venal again in 1771.39 The provincial assemblies renewed Laverdy’s initiative, and town oligarchies resisted, as they had in the 1760s. The office holders of Amiens wrote to the king in 1787 to demand “a valuable right for our city, a right deriving from our constitution, a right founded on the most solemn … laws, the right to be subject for our municipal regime only to your direct authority … The provincial assembly … pretends that our common lands and our taxes on goods entering the city form part of its jurisdiction.”40 The venal officers refused to

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accede to this pretension. The king’s council then ruled in September 1788 that, for the distribution of taxes, long-standing municipalities such as Amiens would include additional deputies elected under the auspices of the assemblies.41 At the end of 1788, the assembly in Amiens wrote in its minutes that the nomination of deputies to check the excessive influence of the municipal officers still will be insufficient especially in the towns where the … offices being venal, it often happens that all authority is … concentrated in a single family … The assembly thus decides to solicit the royal council to consider these reflections and suppress the municipal officers.42

Similarly, the Assembly of Champagne – whose members included hereditary mayors and officers of Reims and Troyes, one or two of whom enjoyed noble status – sought to diminish the privileges of the venal oligarchs of Reims. These elites claimed to have granted the monarchy funds in its times of need in order to confirm their control over urban affairs and their immunity from taxes on vineyards outside the city. They asserted that the royal council and the Assembly sought to eliminate the exemptions despite rulings of the cour des aides upholding them in 1768 and 1770. Reims’s venal elites argued that the elimination of the exemptions would prove particularly harsh because of the new tax added to the taille to fund roadwork. Yet according to the minutes of the Assembly from November and December 1787, “it seems doubtful to us that these privileges hold up against the laws intended to modify them.”43 The following year, the Assembly of Champagne received a complaint from sieur de Corbie, a lawyer, that although he resided in Reims, he could not serve on the municipal council, because he was not originally from the town. In the future, according to the regulations, the municipal deputies would form the district assemblies, which would then provide new members to the provincial assemblies. Corbie would thus be excluded from the new structure of assemblies. The Assembly of Champagne took up his cause, stating that although the municipal officers possess “the rights of the duchy peerage [duché pairie] of Reims … a large number of commendable subjects, who today inhabit … Reims, find themselves denied … the advantage of being elected member of the district assembly. This exclusion appears contrary to … the law intended to give all citizens a stake in the administration of public affairs.” The intendant and the royal council, however, denied Corbie’s petition because it would cause instability by opening the door to changes to municipal constitutions across the realm.44 This stance of the royal council and intendant of Champagne had defenders among some of the provincial assemblies, as many of the deputies owned offices and had high regard for venal property. Consider the two lieutenant mayors, mayor, administrative lieutenant, and another subaltern magistrate

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(prévôt) selected by the king for the Third Estate of the Assembly of Lorraine and Bar. These venal officers understood the monarchy as a hierarchy of jurisdictions derived from investments in the regime. According to their minutes from November 1787, “it is at this part of the regulations that the [Assembly] paused for the longest interval, on account of the wish to conciliate the dominant principle of elections with the venal offices to which the government alienated the right to administer common affairs.”45 Upon receiving the request of sieur Blouet, owner of the post of lieutenant general of the civil and criminal administration, for precedence in the district assembly over the mayor of Thionville, the Assembly of Lorraine concurred, “an incontestable possession grants him a step up on the mayor … in all the public ceremonies.”46 Provincial assemblies, venal offices, and the breakdown of the royal administration These divergent positions, taken by the assemblies in Auch (Gascony), Amiens, Reims, and Nancy (Lorraine), show that the experience of contending with the privileges of office holders did not elicit the same reaction from all provincial elites. The members of the assemblies assimilated the experience in different ways, and their ideas evolved in relation to local circumstances. What one should bear in mind is that the crown asked them to expand participation in government and apportion the taxes more equitably. The members could not help but see that several parlements did not even allow the assemblies to meet. They saw that the cours des aides and chambre des comptes thwarted their efforts to reform the distribution of taxes and improve the administration of public works. In Lower Normandy, the élus of Avranches, Mortain, and Coutances objected to seeing the provincial assembly in Caen obtain jurisdiction over the taxes added to the taille for financing roadwork. The assembly informed the controller general in December 1788 that the officers of the élection of Avranches appear determined to stop the collection of taxes … and the élection of Mortain announces the same intention … The contractors for the roads, whose commitments have been fulfilled, complained of not being paid and of bills they cannot cover and that creditors are pursuing them … The new contractors, having received no down payments, have not been able to do the necessary work and it is to be feared that the work stopped this winter will not resume.47

The provincial assembly in Rouen wrote to Necker in the fall of 1788 that the élus of Upper Normandy prevented the collection of the tax for roadwork. The élus cited a decision of the cour des aides stipulating that

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taxation remain within their purview and that the fiscal rolls be deposited with them. The élections then began to confiscate the rolls from the collectors. The Parlement and cour des aides annulled both the ruling of the assembly to initiate the new procedure for roadwork and the ruling of the royal council to uphold the one of the assembly. Two months later, the assembly wrote that the tax receivers would cease collection, since they were not sure to take in enough revenue to cover the percentage of the fiscal receipts authorized for their remuneration. The contractors for roadwork disdained the idea of going from village to village to collect their pay. Roadwork then came to a halt. The members of the assembly informed Necker that the tribunals had made their work impossible.48 In this way, the provincial assemblies gave their members first-hand experience of the capacity of venal judges to prevent the monarchy from attending to its basic duty of maintaining the roads. They also saw that the monarchy placated the office holders to keep the government functioning. It ruled in October 1788 to “re-establish, with regard to the bureaus of finances and … the élections, for everything concerning the administration of taxes, things to the same state where they were.”49 A month later, the crown had the cours des aides register a declaration. “Not wishing … that … the distribution and collection of our taxes be delayed … We turn to … the vigilance of our Officers of the Bureaus of Finances and the élections … All contestations relative to the distribution of the Tailles … will continue to be judged by the Officers of the élections.”50 Further placating the bureaus of finances, the king acquiesced to their demands by commissioning several treasurers of France to open and close the provincial assemblies. An administrative report on the assemblies of Anjou and Maine shows that “the intendant proposes to the controller general to accord to [the two treasurers of France of Tours] a bonus which … gives them an expression of satisfaction. He asks in consequence that the controller general … send … them … 1,500 livres.”51 Venal administrators and the modern state We saw in Chapter 1 that reformers of the 1770s and 1780s, such as Du Pont de Nemours and Necker, developed a ministerial program for a bureaucracy composed of expert functionaries to execute policies rationally determined through representative assemblies. Yet the foregoing evidence has shown that office holders up and down the hierarchy of the monarchy, from the parlementaires at the head of the judiciary to the venal magistrates in charge of the towns, rejected this program. This routine of venal officers – of obstructing royal policies, proving their indispensability, and then gaining rewards from

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the king, a routine discernible down to the end of the Old Regime – would not lead one to anticipate that they would abolish the private ownership of offices the next year. Nevertheless, over 40 percent of the deputies of the Third Estate in the Estates General hailed from the ranks of venal officers. Nearly 20 percent of the deputies had served in the provincial and district assemblies. About a quarter of all members of the provincial and district assemblies, principally deputies of the Third Estate, owned venal offices.52 Needless to say, the peasant revolts of that summer created a climate of fear and convinced the deputies of the need to take drastic action. Yet one must keep in mind that the peasants attacked lords not office holders. Therefore, something must have changed in the office holders’ thinking between 1787 and 1788, when they defended venality on principle, and the next year, when they abolished it.53 The assemblies, I maintain, constituted the concrete historical experience through which supporters of a regime, permeated with venal spheres of authority, became its critics. The assemblies served as training grounds in collective political procedures and as meeting places to forge networks and acquaintances among future national leaders.54 Above all, the crown invited the assemblies to oversee fiscal reform, improve the infrastructure, and broaden participation in government. The members could not help but see that the custom of defending jurisdictional rights hindered these initiatives. They saw that office holders did not render accounts for the exercise of public authority. While the provincial assemblies thus offered their members a critical perspective on venality, they had their principal impact on the office holders who did not serve in the assemblies. An unintended consequence of venality, brought to the fore by the assemblies, prepared the owners of jurisdictional rights to embrace a bureaucratic vision of the state. Montesquieu wrote in the Spirit of the Laws, earlier in the century, that venality of office suited monarchies. People living under this form of government tended to pursue individual honor rather than the public good. Venal offices counteracted this disruptive tendency by fixing people to public service as a matter of family reputation. Over three decades later, in defending their jurisdictions against the assemblies, venal magistrates laid claim to this attribute of public service. In the writings examined above – of the chambre des comptes, bureaus of finances, and élections – the office holders touted their education, training, and professionalism. They seemed to regard themselves not only as loyal followers of the king, and proprietors of parts of his government, but also as proficient and dedicated public servants interested in the national welfare. The struggle to preserve their governmental functions even led many office holders to advocate a rational organization of the state impervious to royal

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interference. They came to prefer regular salaries to the unreliable payments of the king.55 The provincial assemblies thus set in motion an evolution from the old to the new, from the defense of titles to authority under the aegis of the king to the liberal affirmation of service to the nation. The sieur Riche de Vandy, for example, wrote to the controller general in 1787 that “if birth, assiduous work, and good conduct could merit an honest man a relative advancement in the rank he has taken up” then he “dares regard himself as having the real titles to obtain it.” He claimed to have come “from a noble family” and to have held the office of director of the gabelle tax in Le Mans for decades. Riche de Vandy asserted, “in the ranks he occupied … he had the satisfaction of fulfilling his duties, meriting public esteem and the interest of his patrons.” He recognized that “the views of the current government portend the destruction of this tax.” The provincial assembly in “Le Mans … will … take up this assignment. The supplicant thus finds himself after … years of difficult work in the painful crisis of losing his rank.” Riche de Vandy therefore hoped to obtain a position in the assembly because of “the utility that he could be to the homeland.” He declared that “if to be named [to the assembly], one only required the unanimous approval of the seigneurs of the province, he would be sure to obtain it.” He thought that the controller general’s approval “My Lord, must … carry much weight.”56 Riche de Vandy, like countless office holders, still prized titles of nobility and patronage from overlords, yet by dint of the assemblies, expressed his useful and meritorious service to the nation. The mass of office holders below the sovereign courts proved particularly disposed to these hopes for a secure existence earned in the discharge of public functions. In 1789, lower-level magistrates stood at the forefront of the movement to abolish hereditary offices. The leaders of the Third Estate had shared the frustration of blocked careers and subservience to much wealthier nobles.57 They thus came to perceive the benefits of a regime in which administrators carried out standardized impersonal functions. Office holders then struck a democratic note in favor of leveling the social differences that had turned the status and rewards bestowed by the king into hereditary rights. In this way, the provincial assemblies paved the way for the National Assembly to forge a state in which officials did not owe obedience to the monarch but rather to a rationally defined hierarchy of governmental functions. It was widely assumed that offices could not be abolished without reimbursing the owners. Since the monarchy lacked the funds, no one expected venality to disappear. The beneficiaries of offices therefore felt free to assert the moral appeal of a judiciary untainted by money. Venality met with general disapproval in the cahiers de doléances written in the spring of 1789. Within this consensus, the Third Estate condemned venality most severely. Its members

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found themselves at a disadvantage in a system that permitted money to bring one to higher positions. They instead embraced a bureaucratic division of impersonal duties free from humbling subordination to nobles. In Rouen, for example, the Parlement controlled the city more firmly in the 1700s than in previous centuries, as the justices amassed the principal positions in the hospital (Hôtel Dieu) and school (collège) after the expulsion of the Jesuits. In 1789, their authority gave way when lesser jurists saw the opportunity to play a hitherto unattainable role in government and organized to free themselves from the tutelage of the Parlement.58 Office holders, in this way, embraced the revolutionary movement and aspired to better positions in a rational administration out from under the authority of the aristocracy. In conclusion, the marquises d’Argenson and Mirabeau, Du Pont de Nemours, Necker, and Le Trosne put forward provincial assemblies as a means of rationalizing the royal administration. These royal reformers saw venal offices as a burden on royal subjects and obstacles to coherent policies. One might have expected office holders to embrace the reform and relinquish their venal property. Many of them experienced their offices as liabilities. The crown repeatedly extracted loans from office holders to finance costly wars by putting extra posts on the market and thus forcing the incumbents to purchase the posts in order to prevent the devaluation of their venal property. Since the returns on the extra posts did not equal those on other investments, they amounted to forced loans and taxes on the privileged orders. Then again, venal offices furnished a rank in the state hierarchy and the status of serving the king. Officers had the authority to obstruct royal policies, defend their privileges, and protect the rights of common subjects. In negotiations over policies, leading judges often obtained patronage from the king. It was to maintain these advantages that venal officers objected to provincial assemblies liable to supplant their role in the government. This chapter has shown that the objections of the Parlements, and of other corps of office holders, to royal decrees did not flow inevitably from an expanding public discussion of educated individuals opposed to arbitrary government. The justices did not defend traditional rights against the absolute power of the monarch. To the contrary, office holders championed royal authority and reasoned that it should eschew experiments in participatory assemblies. The venal magistrates demanded that the king rely on them to rule the country. Office holders serving in the Assembly of Haute-Guyenne helped to shut down local efforts to broaden participation. They saw rural meetings as a challenge to the office holders’ authority. Some venal magistrates even sought to maintain their hereditary ranks in the fall of 1789 when the debates of the National Assembly portended the abolition of property in office. Venal

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officers protested against the National Assembly and its commitment to justice free of charge. They wrote letters to their representatives in the hope that their offices might be preserved.59 In spite of the office holders’ support for an absolute monarch capable of protecting their hereditary status, thousands of them, especially in the subordinate courts, became a reformist constituency during these same years of 1787–89. As the king established the provincial assemblies, the village elections rallied thousands of residents to the cause of placing limits on traditional privileges and royal authority.60 The reason for the emergence of this reformist constituency, I’ve argued, was the change of perspective initiated by the assemblies. Asked to introduce participatory assemblies, reform the fiscal system, and bring the grievances of royal subjects to the throne, the office holders in the assemblies no longer found themselves in the customary role of defending their hereditary jurisdictions against the policies of the crown. They instead came to see that the defense of these jurisdictions obstructed the reasonable reforms entrusted to them by the king. At the same time, tens of thousands of office holders in local courts and administrations, seeing the provincial assemblies assume their role in government, began to defend their professional expertise. They made known the services they provided on behalf of their fellow citizens. Magistrates in the district fiscal courts and municipal governments thus perceived the possibility of serving the public in a more secure, dignified manner independent of their overlords in the Parlements and other sovereign jurisdictions. Numerous venal jurists of the Third Estate grew weary of the hereditary offices that preserved the top posts for the nobility. The experience of the assemblies led them to become critical of the traditions of a regime that offered patronage to persuade the nobles at the head of the judiciary to enforce its policies. With the creation of the assemblies, and the impending changes to the administration, they began to support the objective criteria of talent proven in years of service as the fairest means of acceding to offices. The assemblies thus instilled in hundreds of office holders in the National Assembly the vision for an administration of functionaries paid a regular salary for executing impersonal public duties. A similar process, we will see in the next chapter, unfolded in the countryside, where seigneurial opposition to elections in 1787 and 1788 led many peasants to grow weary of gradual consensual reform. Even some of the nobles, who took part in the provincial assemblies, began to have reservations about seigneurial jurisdictions upon seeing the lords use them to prevent the rural inhabitants from playing a positive role in local government.

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Notes   1 Élie Haddad, “Introduction: La robe comme observatoire des évolutions de la noblesse,” in Épreuves de Noblesse: les expériences nobiliaires de la haute robe parisienne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Robert Descimon and Élie Haddad (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010), 19; William Beik, A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 224; David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996), 113; Jean-Yves Grenier, L’économie d’Ancien Régime: un monde de l’échange et de l’incertitude (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1996), 82.   2 François Bluche, Les Magistrats du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Economica, 1986), 126–7, 176, 180, 237; Julian Swann, “The State and Political Culture,” in Old Regime France 1648–1788, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 155, 161; Bailey Stone, The Parlement de Paris, 1774–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 62, 68–69, 113; Bailey Stone, The French Parlements and the Crisis of the Old Regime (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 98; John Hardman, French Politics 1774–1789: From the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the Bastille (London: Longman, 1995), 220–1.   3 Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter BN), Collection Joly de Fleury 2539, fol. 73, 75.  4 Henri Guilhamon, “Introduction,” in Journal des voyages en Haute-Guienne de J.-F. Henry de Richeprey, ed. Henri Guilhamon (Rodez: Commission des archives historiques du Rouergue, 1952), 1:iii, v, liii, lv-lvi, lix-lx, lxii.   5 BN, Collection Joly de Fleury 1037; Stone, The Parlement de Paris, 69, 117–19.   6 Necker’s essay for the king is analyzed in Chapter 1, p. 20. For Necker, the royal court, and the Parlement see Maurice Bordes, L’Administration provinciale et municipale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société d’édition d’enseignement supérieur, 1972), 164; Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin, 2002), 314, 317.   7 John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 24, 129, 132, 136–8; Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 51–2, 68–70; Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution 1787–1788, trans. Wesley Camp (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), 10–11: Pierre Renouvin, Les Assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, résultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921), 88; Munro Price, “Politics: Louis XVI,” in Old Regime France 1648–1788, edited by William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 224–5, 236–7.  8 Hardman, Overture to Revolution, 234, 264–5; Gruder, The Notables and the Nation, 102, 105, 108, 309–11, 352.   9 BN, Collection Joly de Fleury 1040, fols. 231, 233; 1038, fol. 20; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 1988), 93, 106; Egret, The French Prerevolution, 117, 123. 10 BN, Collection Joly de Fleury 1037, fols. 104, 108. 11 Renouvin, Les Assemblées provinciales, 122–3. 12 Guy Lemarchand, La fin du féodalisme dans le pays de Caux (Paris: CTHS edition, 1989), 324, 338, 340; Jean Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné et les affaires publiques dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Grenoble: B. Arthaud, 1942), 1:210, 239, 2:30, 53; Gérard Aubin, La Seigneurie en Bordelais au XVIIIe siècle d’après la pratique notariale (1715–1789) (Rouen: Publications de la Université de Rouen, 1989), 288, 400–1; Michel Figeac, La Douceur des Lumières: noblesse et art de vivre en Guyenne au XVIIIe siècle (Bordeaux: Mollat, 2001), 229; Maurice Gresset, Gens de justice à Besançon: de la conquête par Louis XIV à la Révolution française, 1674–1789 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1978), 58, 61, 287–8, 296, 326, 333, 335. 13 Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 92–3, 110, 141; Egret, The French Prerevolution, 126–7. 14 BN, Arrêté du parlement de Franche-Comté, du 27 janvier 1789, p. 17. 15 Stone, The French Parlements, 173, 201; Egret, The French Prerevolution, 126–7; Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné, 2:129, 170, 172.

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16 Georges Coeuret, L’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Normandie, 1787–1789 (Paris: Jouve, 1927), 26–7, 58–9; Leonard Berlanstein, The Barristers of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century (1740–1793) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 4; Egret, The French Prerevolution, 124–5; Swann, “The State and Political Culture,” 183. 17 Guillaume de la Foy, De la Constitution du duché ou état souverain de Normandie (1789), 293, 297. 18 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) H1596; Maurice Ardant, “Un Épisode de l’histoire du Limousin,” Bulletin de la Société archéologique et historique du Limousin XI (1861), 93, 96; William Doyle, The Parlement of Bordeaux and the End of the Old Regime 1771–1790 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 267–8. 19 Joseph Saige, Catéchisme du citoyen ou élemens du droit public François par demandes & réponse; suivi de fragmens politiques par le même auteur (1788), 135. See also pp. 132, 134. For the background to this writing, see Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 127–9. 20 AN H1596. 21 AN H1596; Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné, 2:129, 170, 172; Stone, The French Parlements, 150, 241. 22 AN H1599. 23 Gresset, Gens de justice à Besançon, 743, 746. 24 AN H1596. 25 Quoted from Stone, The French Parlements, 191–3. 26 AN H1596; François Désiré Mathieu, L’Ancien Régime dans la province de Lorraine et Barrois d’après des documents inédits (1698–1789) (Paris: Hachette et cie, 1879), 225; Charles-Pierre de Longeaux, La Chambre des Comptes du Duché de Bar (Bar-le-Duc: Contant-Laguerre, 1907), 51, 53, 465, 468, 477–9, 482, 485–7. 27 AN H1597; AN H1596; Mathieu, L’Ancien Régime dans la province de Lorraine, 221–3, 232, 378. 28 Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press 1958), 199. 29 William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 162; François Caillou, Une administration royale d’ancien régime: le bureau des finances de Tours (Tours: Presses Universitaires François Rabelais, 2005), 2:133, 207–8, 210–11, 213, 416–17. 30 AN H1596. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 AN H1596; Maurice Ardant, “Un Épisode de l’histoire du Limousin,” Bulletin de la Société archéologique et historique du Limousin XI (1861), 102–3. 34 AN H1596. 35 AN H1602. 36 AN H1597 contains the essays from both of these judicial bodies in Champagne. For general information on the élus, see Doyle, Venality, 153; William Doyle, Officers, Nobles, and Revolutionaries: Essays on Eighteenth-Century France (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 108–9, 135. 37 AN H1465. 38 AN H1598. 39 Alan Forrest, Paris, the Provinces and the French Revolution (London: Arnold Hodder Publication, 2004), 37; Félix Mourlot, La fin de l’ancien régime et les débuts de la Révolution dans la généralité de Caen (1787–1790) (Paris: Au siège de la Société, 1913), 88; Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 242–3; Doyle, Venality, 107–8. 40 AN H1599. 41 AN H1595. 42 AN H1602. 43 Procès verbal des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de Champagne, tenue à Chalons dans les mois

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de novembre & décembre 1787 (Chalons: Chez Seneuze, Imprimeur), lxxiii, 247–8. For the vineyards of the Reims landowning residents, see Thomas Brennan, “Peasants and Debt in Eighteenth-Century Champagne,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, 2 (2006), 186, 200. For the social makeup of the provincial and district assemblies of Champagne, see the Procès verbal des séances de l’assemblée provinciale de Champagne as well as Lynn Hunt, Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Reims, 1786–1790 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 45–6; Jeff Horn, Qui Parle pour la nation?: les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765–1830 (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 2004), 46–7, 49. 44 AN H1519. 45 Procès-verbal des séances de l’assemblée provinciale des duchés de Lorraine et de Bar ouverte à Nancy, au mois de novembre 1787 (Nancy: Chez H. Haener, 1788), 356. 46 AN H1599. 47 Ibid. 48 Ernest Lebègue, Procès-verbal de la Commission intermédiaire de l’Assemblée provinciale de HauteNormandie, 1787–1790; analyse et extraits (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910), 71, 78–9, 88. 49 AN H1601. See also Coeuret, L’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Normandie, 119. 50 AN H1595. 51 AN H1519. 52 Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 101; Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 81–2. 53 Rafe Blaufarb makes the point that the peasants’ grievances mainly concerned feudal exactions. But the legislation arising out of the Night of August 4th maintained them at a level very difficult for the peasants to reimburse. None of the deputies suggested anything other than a gradual, well-compensated abolition of feudalism. Thus, the deputies could not have sought solely to diffuse peasant anger. What they did would not have done so. Moreover, the deputies did much more than legislate with regard to the harvest dues. On the Night of August 4th, they abolished venal offices, and many other privileges, making careers open to talent. The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 50. 54 Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 82–3. 55 Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Hafner, 1949), 69; Ralph Giesey, “State-Building in Early Modern France: The Role of Royal Officialdom,” Journal of Modern History 55 (1983), 197–8; Mathieu Marraud and Éric Viguier, “La Réforme Maupeou, un révélateur de la question officière (1771–1774),” in Épreuves de Noblesse: les expériences nobiliaires de la haute robe parisienne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle), ed. Robert Descimon and Élie Haddad (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010), 79, 82; Gail Bossenga, “From Corps to Citizenship: The Bureaux des Finances before the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 58 (1986), 632, 634, 642. 56 AN H1598. 57 Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 40–1, 108. 58 Olivier Chaline, “Le Parlement et Rouen au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Les Parlements et la vie de la cité, ed. Yves Sassier and Olivier Chaline (Rouen: Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 2004), 326, 331–2; Doyle, Venality, 270, 273–4. 59 Doyle, Venality, 282. 60 Peter Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8–9, 60, 64, 112, 144, 155–6, 159, 240.

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6

Village elections and the development of liberal perspectives on government

Just as the provincial assemblies led tens of thousands of venal officers in the municipal courts and administrations to reassess their place in the government, so too did the assemblies lead many seigneurs to reassess their ways of serving the king. In fact, the catalyst for this realization and awareness were Louis XV’s policies toward the venal justices of the parlements in 1771. The seemingly despotic suppression of these august tribunals led to disaffection in the royal court, the towns, and the public more generally. Louis XVI reinstated the parlements upon assuming the throne in 1774 but then faced obstruction of policies intended to redress royal finances. To overcome the obstruction, his controller general Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and other reformers, planned to expand the range of property owners involved in the implementation of policy beyond the venal justices.1 The finance minister Jacques Necker acted on these plans by establishing assemblies in Berry and Haute-Guyenne in 1778 and 1779. Seven years later and with bankruptcy looming, the controller general of finances, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, opened the way to further administrative experiments by inviting the highest members of the first two estates to an Assembly of Notables.2 Calonne expected the Notables to endorse a package of reforms, including a graduated system of assemblies over all the provinces, districts, and rural communities of the pays d’élection. The pays d’élection, one should recall, covered two thirds and the core provinces of the realm where medieval estates no longer met. Calonne failed to obtain the Notables’ support for the reforms, but his successor, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, secured acceptance for a modified version of the assemblies. Rather than assemblies to which landowners would accede according to their property taxes, as Turgot and Calonne had planned, the ones established in 1787 were divided into the traditional estates with a bishop or nobleman as president. For this reason, historians have long regarded the assemblies as traditional institutions of the Old Regime.3

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It is the contention of this chapter, however, that the provincial assemblies changed the perspective of many nobles. To understand this change, it is worthwhile to reflect on Alexis de Tocqueville’s thesis that royal centralization, by depriving men of letters of hands-on experience in government, left them ill prepared to think practically about public affairs. The educated classes instead devised purely abstract theories of politics.4 François Furet, the historian most responsible for reviving Tocqueville’s ideas, recognized that he overstated the scale of centralization, neglected the history of venality of office, and thus ignored the restraints on royal authority.5 Indeed, since the 1980s, historians have shown that nobles held heritable positions within the monarchy as venal justices, members of provincial estates, and especially seigneurs over villages.6 Yet these roles accustomed the nobles to defend their jurisdictions from the encroachments of the crown, the pretensions of other elites, and the revolts of the lower classes. As Tocqueville suspected, they did not prepare the nobles to think practically about the problems facing the monarchy. Similarly, writers and statesmen of the eighteenth century – such as René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, the marquis de Mirabeau, and Guillaume-François Le Trosne – recognized that the nobles did not play a constructive role in government. These royal reformers promoted representative assemblies as a means of getting the nobles to identify with the regime, consider its problems, and make sacrifices to the commonweal. This reformist insight, that the monarchy in its traditional form did not orient the nobles toward a positive role in public affairs, runs counter to recent research on the Second Estate. Historians show that the nobles accepted the decline of feudalism, embraced the capitalist economy in its stead, and defended political rights with the aim of restraining royal absolutism.7 I propose to reconcile these opposing views by arguing that intellectual convictions and political practice did not necessarily coincide. Many nobles genuinely embraced the principles associated with the Enlightenment. Yet their logic of customary action and institutionalized ways of doing things, indeed their property in offices and seigneuries, led to political positions at odds with these principles.8 Specifically, when the provincial assemblies were introduced, the nobles united in opposition to the lowest rung of assemblies in the countryside, the municipalités, or rural municipalities. These parish administrations were elected according to a censitary suffrage and led by the parish seigneur. The nobles nonetheless saw the elections as a challenge to their customary prerogatives. From their standpoint, the rural municipalities undermined the seigneurial jurisdictions through which they had traditionally maintained order in the countryside on behalf of the king. Nobles affirmed that even a minimal

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expansion of the number of people involved in government would undermine the stability of the regime. In arguing that nobles rejected any broadening of political participation, I complicate this point by showing that, as the royal reformers foresaw, the provincial assemblies placed nobles in new roles, making them serve the king as representatives of his subjects rather than as hereditary holders of lordships and offices. The king entrusted the assemblies with reforms widely debated at the time, such as making the fiscal rolls more accurate, increasing participation in government, and instituting a money tax to replace the forced corvée labor required of rural commoners on the roads. Exercising governmental responsibility in this way – rather than in their particular spheres of authority – certain nobles recognized a political order more attuned to an enlightened age, more likely to diffuse social conflict, and thus more likely to perpetuate their power. Some of these nobles, who directed the assemblies, subsequently helped open the way toward a government responsive to the general interests of the nation in the summer of 1789. In short, the appearance of liberal nobles willing to take on revolutionary change did not arise out of the spread of Enlightenment ideals but rather out of the change of perspective, revealing hitherto unforeseen possibilities, created by the provincial assemblies in 1778–79 and especially in 1787. In making this argument, I first cover the implementation of the provincial assemblies. Owing to the opposition of the Notables, parlements, and several of Louis XVI’s ministers, the assemblies ended up more aristocratic than reformers had intended. For this reason, between the autumn of 1787 and the middle of 1788, while the parlementaires rode a wave of enthusiasm for participatory government by obstructing royal policies, the nobles in charge of the assemblies sided with local lords in defense of seigneurial jurisdictions and against participatory assemblies in rural communities. In the second part of this chapter, I show that in the latter part of 1788 and the first half of 1789, when nobles across the realm grew defensive of their privileges on account of the mounting calls for an equitable representation of the Third Estate in the Estates General, the ones in charge of the assemblies perceived the problems caused by seigneurial rights and began to support the villagers’ right to elect municipalities. Many of these nobles of the assemblies, I show by way of conclusion, later intervened at critical moments in the summer of 1789 to turn the Estates General into a National Assembly. They spearheaded the eradication of the hereditary jurisdictions, which the deputies of the National Assembly saw as the essence of feudalism, when they abolished it on the Night of August 4th.9

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Seigneurial opposition to rural elections As we saw in Chapter 1, Argenson, Condorcet, and other royal reformers described representative assemblies as a means of resolving problems caused by the seigneurial regime. They argued that the lords’ rights burdened the public, spawned litigation, encumbered farmers, limited production, and maintained inequality. If the rural inhabitants elected local representatives, they could defend themselves against the lords. When Necker implemented assemblies in Berry and Haute-Guyenne in 1778 and 1779, he ignored the proposals for elections on the local level. Perhaps because of the support Necker enjoyed among the court aristocracy, he divided the provincial assemblies into the three juridical orders and required one hundred years of nobility and possession of a fief for the members of the Second Estate.10 Yet in Haute-Guyenne, a crucial aspect of the assembly aligned with the ideas of the reformers. Necker appointed Jean-François Henry de Richeprey, a frequent guest of enlightened salons, to work under the auspices of the assembly to improve the fiscal rolls. Richeprey convoked peasant meetings all over the province to help assess the taxable wealth. These sorts of meetings appealed to rural inhabitants in all parts of the realm. Peasants had grown weary of the local authorities. Feudalism, as it was understood at the time, denoted a system of privately owned public power infused with dependence and hierarchy. When a lord took possession of a fief, its inhabitants had to drop to their knees and ceremonially acknowledge the new master’s jurisdiction over their persons and properties. The lords sought to maintain clear boundaries between their jurisdictions so as to prevent their dependents from appealing the judgments of their seigneurial courts. After 1750, in a period of rising prices, they used the courts to cheaply and promptly enforce corvée labor services, the collection of harvest dues, and fines for cases of illegal pasturing on their fields and infringements of their control over forest products. Investors had high regard for seigneurial property, because it was invariably upheld by the justices of the Parlements, all generally owners of domains.11 Richeprey noted in his journal that the lords in Haute-Guyenne used their influence to skew village records and enhance their tax privileges. Ecclesiastic seigneurs hired feudal experts to revise their titles and augment their revenues. The Assembly of Haute-Guyenne initially backed Richeprey’s efforts to give the peasant meetings a role in fiscal affairs so they could help reform these abuses of seigneurial authority. But seeing the resistance of the lords, the Assembly ended up suspending his work. The Assembly consisted of high clergymen, lineage nobles, and large proprietors. They stated in their minutes in 1786 that the information obtained in the tumult of village meetings might

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be inspired by fear, jealousy, interest, and even vengeance rather than a commitment to level-headed assessments. “We principally have in view … this sort of dependence to which the seigneurs fear being reduced vis-à-vis their vassals, we desire to maintain the possessors of fiefs in their privileges.”12 Calonne regarded the Third Estate as an untapped reservoir of support, which could help overcome this sort of opposition to reforms. He therefore submitted a proposal to the Notables in 1787 for assemblies of property owners at the provincial, district, and parish levels to assess a tax on all lands (impôt territorial). Whereas a bishop presided over the assemblies in Berry and Haute-Guyenne, the highest taxpayer would preside over the ones to be established in 1787.13 The Notables opposed the provision for membership in the provincial assemblies based on tax payments. They proposed instead that each estate be allotted seats and that a nobleman hold the presidency. Brienne explained that the nobles would not attend if they risked being led by people of a lower order. Additionally, the Notables stated that the assemblies should have functions independent of the intendants. They wanted real power for the assemblies at all levels, including the rural municipalities, to oversee tax assessments. Community control over local affairs, the Notables believed, reduced the cost of government. In opposing Calonne’s plan, the Notables were carried along by a general aspiration for representative institutions to put an end to the arbitrary authority of the crown. Their calls for public participation in government to deliberate on taxes brought the country behind the highest members of the first two estates.14 Louis XVI saw no alternative but to dismiss Calonne. He made Brienne the controller general in the hope that his standing with the Notables would facilitate passage of the reforms. The ensuing edict of 1787 stipulated that the king would select clergymen and nobles, and twice as many members of the Third Estate, to meet under the presidency of a bishop or seigneur in the provinces. These deputies would name additional members in the same proportions to join them in provincial administrations, which in turn would compose district assemblies through the same procedure of appointment and cooptation. Yet on the village level, the ideas of Turgot, du Pont, and Calonne saw the light of day. Peasants meeting property qualifications gathered independently and elected deputies and a syndic to meet with the priest under the presidency of the parish seigneur. In the following years, these rural municipalities were to send delegates to arrondissement meetings, which would vote for new district representatives. The districts would elect the provincial assemblies. The lords, and their peers in the provincial assemblies, regarded the village elections as a threat to seigneurial rights. They considered their

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jurisdictions the pillars of royal authority in the countryside. Thus, in 1787 and 1788, while the opposition of the Notables and parlementaires to the crown earned the nobles in these two institutions the support of educated society, whose members longed to participate in government, noble lords sought to prevent the rural inhabitants from meeting for elections. In Champagne, for instance, Jeff Horn finds that the parishes had no administration apart from the lords prior to the municipalities of 1787. The social and economic elite opposed sharing governance with commoners or soliciting their support to run local affairs. Many lords prevented their laborers and sharecroppers from partaking in the elections or used their influence to have the rural municipalities refuse cooperation with the district and provincial assemblies.15 Specifically, according to a report written in the controller general’s bureau, the seigneur of Juvigny – president of the chambre des comptes of Paris, a sovereign court in charge of auditing royal accounts – sought to hold the municipality in his château upon his visits to Champagne. “The municipality opposes his efforts and believes itself unable to conserve the liberty of its deliberations … when … held on the grounds where the seigneur seems to exercise … superiority.” According to the report, “the seigneur … already has too much preponderance in assemblies … of his vassals for him to … add to it.”16 In an effort to prevent rural residents, such as those of Juvigny, form gatherings autonomously, the Assembly of Champagne, under the presidency of Alexandre-Angélique de Talleyrand-Périgord, sent several questions to the controller general about village affairs, particularly “the tumult inseparable from crowded assemblies.” The Assembly proposed instead that elites convoke municipalities to represent solely the parish notables.17 Likewise, the district assembly in Troyes – dominated by the social elite, including another noble judge in the chambre des comptes – expressed aversion for elections likely to bring together large numbers of rural inhabitants. Due to the requirement that one reside in the countryside to vote, these assemblies would exclude the wealthy proprietors and pave the way for the peasants to form cabals. The assembly in Troyes therefore petitioned the crown to cancel the arrondissement meetings of delegates sent by the rural municipalities. The arrondissement meetings were to elect new members of the district assemblies in the future. The district assembly in Troyes proposed instead that its members coopt their own successors.18 In Orléanais, as in Champagne, the rural municipalities seemed to jeopardize the lords’ control over the countryside. To take a case in point, a report written in the controller general’s office in October 1787 stated that the seigneur de Champrond, the first lineage noble in the household of a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, requested the right to preside over the municipality of Saint-Hilaire in the district of Dourdan. His seigneurie was subordinate to

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the fief of Ardennes belonging to the convent of Champ-Benoît de Provins, holder of much of the village land. The controller general rejected the seigneur’s request, for the reason that the parish church was not situated within his jurisdiction. “In the absence of the ladies of Champ-Benoît de Provins, who are the dames and patron saints of the parish, and who can preside over the assembly … the presidency, according to … the regulations, devolves to the … syndic” elected by the residents.19 This prospect of a village leader responsible to local residents troubled the vicomte de Beauharnais, the general vicar de Lubersac, and other illustrious members of the Assembly of Orléanais. They stated in their minutes that if the lord with high justice were not able to attend the rural municipality, then he ought to be able to appoint the president. The upper clergy and princes, the Assembly stated, possessed about half of the fiefs in Orléanais but did not reside in the parishes, and in these cases the syndic elected by the community would hold the presidency. If the syndic held the presidency, the historic privileges of the nobles would disappear, they would be deprived of influence, and the Second Estate would not be regenerated, because according to the regulations, in the ensuing years, the rural municipalities were to send delegates to arrondissement meetings for the purpose of electing the district assemblies, which in turn would renew the provincial assemblies. Conversely, allowing absentee lords to appoint the syndic, the Assembly reported, would contribute to the dignity of the provincial assemblies, whose members should never be confused with people subject to their courts and guidance.20 The electoral guidelines, which seemed so subversive to the seigneurial classes of Orléanais, looked as if they might undermine the lords’ authority over the communities of Soissonnais. The duc de la Rochefoucauld made use of this authority the year before the rural municipalities met, when he unseated the syndic of Liancourt, to the dismay of the inhabitants, on account of a dispute over communal land. La Rochefoucauld’s hunting excursions damaged the fields of Cauffry, Liancourt, and other villages. Pheasants abounded in these areas and threatened the hens and chickens of the inhabitants.21 In 1787, the provincial assembly in Soissons – composed of la Rochefoucauld and other lords meeting under the presidency of the comte d’Egmont – observed that officially authorized elections prevented them from removing local leaders. They wrote to the controller general that unlike the former parish syndics, the ones elected to the new municipalities “are not disposed to carry out the collection” of dues. “Ground rent payments in grains for the benefit of seigneurs … owe their origins to the concessions made to communities in … times of the feudal government.” Yet the inhabitant named by the municipality of Monloué “to collect … a ground rent payment … has … declared his refusal … The lords … founded in titles … to constrain the

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communities, have an interest that collection be done, and in the parishes where the … syndic would not like to carry out the collection, it is indispensable that the municipal assembly see to it in some way.”22 Such challenges to seigneurial rights represented mayhem to the nobles in the Assembly of Soissonnais. Consider their letter to the controller general about the arrondissement assemblies. In the coming years, these assemblies were to draw together representatives of the rural municipalities to vote for new members of the district assemblies. The provincial assembly wrote that they would “degenerate necessarily into anarchy and confusion … There will be a multitude of 300 individuals … full of prejudices” and prone to “tumult and discord.” This situation will result from “the excesses to which … inhabitants of the countryside are inclined and familiar … The individuals of the lowest class, without enlightenment, without knowledge, and without talent, will nonetheless have the crazy ambition … to enter the district assemblies to the discontentment … of the sane portion of the province.”23 As we saw in Chapter 1, the district assemblies in Soissonnais consisted of great lords and high clergymen and, even in the Third Estate, of noble officers in the royal domains and judges in seigneurial courts. In Laon, the district assembly decried “the exorbitant number of deputies who are to compose the arrondissement assemblies … They will form a restless crowd of which solely chance will direct the operations … All possible precautions will not succeed in making a sage and acceptable assembly out of … 220 persons among whom must necessarily be found many peasants.” The assembly in Laon thus proposed that the arrondissement assemblies be broken up into smaller ones “to multiply the points of surveillance.”24 The authoritarian overtones of this proposal are also discernible in the minutes of the Assembly of the Île-de-France. Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, the vicomte de Noailles, the comte de Crillon and the duc de MontmorencyLaval, and other dignitaries of this assembly, meeting under the presidency of the duc du Châtelet, drew attention to “the cabals … inseparable from popular assemblies … The multitude is little suited to discern its true interests … The inexperience of the greater number of [syndics] … makes one fear for their ability to maintain order … One must fear,” the assembly went on, that the rural municipalities “be very rarely presided over by the nobles, because most of the principal fiefs are rarely ever inhabited by their proprietors.” The seigneurs were usually absent from the countryside because of military service, distinguished posts, and honorific employments. “The constitution of the monarchy assures the first two orders of the state the presidency and distinguished rank in all … assemblies … The provincial assembly sees with sorrow the new regime challenge this order.”25 The Assembly of the Three Bishoprics in Lorraine – composed of

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prelates, abbots, counts, and marquises, as well as many jurists in the Third Estate on the path to ennoblement – communicated the same misgivings as did the Assembly of the Île-de-France about the villagers’ aptitude to partake in government.26 Many of the château owners therefore prevented the rural municipalities from obtaining the village documents. According to a ruling of the royal council dispatched to Lorraine at the end of November 1788, “Several clerks of seigneurial tribunals who possess titles belonging to the communities put up obstacles to the delivery of these papers to the municipal assemblies,” whereas it was “indispensable that each municipal assembly learn about the rights, properties, and customs belonging to the communities, and about the income they generate and about everything liable to help the c­ ommunities” manage local affairs.27 The research of Jean Egret shows that, in Dauphiné, seigneurial rents amounted to about as much as direct taxes. When communities contested them, the Parlement of Grenoble consistently ruled in favor of the lords, many of whom held venal judgeships in this tribunal. The president of the Parlement maintained that solely seigneurial stewards could represent rural communities.28 It therefore should come as no surprise that the Parlement protested, in its registers, that as a result of the rural municipalities, the large proprietors “will be abandoned … to the direction of the inhabitants of the countryside.” The Parlement explained that “in this way … the jurisdiction of the château owners, established by the laws and statutes of the province, will be … entirely eradicated, and the seigneurs deprived of … their rights of justice.”29 Though I could go on providing examples, suffice it to say that the opposition of the seigneurial classes to the rural elections was widespread if not unanimous.30 In fact, several officials in charge of the government departments joined the opposition. These royal councilors thought the nobles should have considerable authority within the monarchy.31 The crown therefore resolved several of their grievances. In March 1788, to be precise, a justice in the Parlement of Grenoble brought the lords’ concerns about the rural elections before the king’s first assistant minister overseeing the assemblies. Two months later, the king promulgated letters patent suspending the rural municipalities and electoral meetings in the arrondissements until they could be reconciled with the customary law of Dauphiné.32 Necker – having returned to the ministry in August 1788 with the support of the court aristocracy – wrote to the intendants in October about the rest of the pays d’élections. “All the provincial assemblies united in thinking” that the arrondissement meetings, bringing together the delegates of the rural municipalities to renew the district and provincial assemblies, would prove “tumultuous.” The crown had not taken “precautions to maintain order and

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prepare the proper choices in them.” Necker then annulled the arrondissement assemblies, thus closing off the mechanism for the rural elections to gradually make the upper-level assemblies representative.33 The politics of the provincial assemblies over the following months Necker closed down the participatory channels of the provincial assemblies at the same time as he invited discussion of the Estates General. Royal subjects responded enthusiastically to the invitation by attending meetings and taking resolutions. Authors of hundreds of pamphlets widened the par­ameters of public debate by making the case for the Third Estate. The Notables, reconvened to offer their opinion, grew more conservative in the face of this mobilization and, in their majority, backed the ruling of the Parlement of Paris to maintain the forms of 1614, namely an equal number of deputies for each of the three estates. In the fall of 1788, the king’s brothers and relatives, and the court aristocracy in general, still thought they could counter the demands of the Third Estate. As these demands multiplied, Louis XVI’s ministers and court nobles split into factions, some inclined to double the Third Estate, others to support the Parlement and Notables. Many members of the royal court became aroused against the Third Estate upon seeing the statements of its representatives in Versailles in May and June 1789. They began to regard Necker as an accomplice.34 During these same months, the outlook of certain nobles in the assemblies evolved in the opposite sense. In Picardy, for example, nobles in charge of the provincial and district assemblies, such as the comte Alexandre Théodore Victor de Lameth, learned in their correspondence with the intendant and royal ministers in the spring of 1788 that several nobles sought to assert control over the rural municipalities by using their influence over residents to get themselves elected syndic. Many of these syndics then failed to attend to duties they found unbecoming of a nobleman, such as accompanying local youths to the drawing for militia duty. In the autumn of 1788, the assembly in the provincial capital, Amiens, informed the crown that the intendant caused administrative problems by ignoring the newly elected rural representatives and corresponding solely with the former parish syndics beholden to the lords.35 After observing such phenomena, certain nobles, who had categorically opposed the participation of royal subjects in government, began to question the merits of seigneurial control over the countryside. Members of the provincial assemblies, that is to say, supported the right of rural inhabitants to attend electoral meetings regardless of the lords’ objections. This evolution in

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outlook is precisely what Argenson, Mirabeau, Necker, and other reformers had planned. One might expect to discern this change in attitudes (the recognition of the value of peasant participation in local government) among high nobles with the leisure to join in the intellectual life of the century. Yet in the cases examined above, the wealthiest and most powerful aristocrats, such as the dukes du Châtelet and de la Rochefoucauld, appealed to the crown to disband the rural gatherings as threats to seigneurial prerogatives and public order. What is more, as we will see in the cases examined below, lords from an array of backgrounds – the royal court, ministerial families, historic lineages, and provincial nobility – stood on both sides of this issue of peasant participation in village government. In short, the evidence draws attention to the contingent circumstances created by the administrative reform. The provincial assemblies showed the participants what might be achieved. They revealed opportunities unimaginable prior to 1787.36 To take a case in point, the high clergymen and nobles of the Assembly of Lorraine, having expressed doubt about the peasants’ aptitude to partake in government, subsequently objected to the efforts of a marquis, seigneur of Chaumont sur Aire – comprising Chaumont, Courcelles sur Aire, Erize la Grande, and Erize la Petite in the district of Bar Le Duc – to host all four municipalities in his château. The controller general’s bureau accepted the advice of the Assembly that “the joining of the four villages which form the ban de Chaumont in a sole seigneurie is in no way a reason to join them in a sole … municipality, especially since they form as many separate communities.” Prior to receiving this decision, the seigneur convoked all the inhabitants to his château, but only those of Courcelles turned up; the rest formed their own municipalities.37 The appanage of the prince de Condé, consisting of lands and provisions granted by the king for his support, presented the same obstacles to representative municipalities as did the ban de Chaumont but on a much larger scale. Condé hailed from the highest stratum of the nobility and thus had exclusive access to clandestine books supportive of democracy. Many court nobles enjoyed reading attacks on the gothic and ridiculous appearance of contemporary institutions. Condé kept banned books in his library and supported the careers of Enlightenment writers.38 Condé’s liberal attitudes notwithstanding, his appanage prevented the eighty-nine villages of the district of Clermont from setting up representative municipalities. The Assembly of Lorraine, after examining the issue, wrote to the controller general in 1788 that Condé’s seigneurial rights suppressed salutary initiatives liable to emerge from the rural municipalities. Several communities failed to submit the rolls for the tax to replace the corvée labor required of rural inhabitants on the

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roads. “This delay … might be a consequence of the obstacles created by the bailliage court of Varennes against the activity of the rural municipalities.”39 The Assembly explained that “the rural municipalities play no role in the administration … [As a result of] the … rights of … the Prince de Condé, the municipalities … have continued to be named as in the past.”40 The Assembly of Lorraine reported that the pretensions … of the officers of … the Prince de Condé have rendered so many good wills useless … by openly opposing [the efforts of] the municipal assemblies [to] carry out the functions attributed to them … These facts are proven by the sentences rendered by the bailliage of Varennes which prohibit the assemblies from interfering in the affairs of the communities.

The Assembly then asked “the royal council [to] suppress the old regime in … this district.”41 The conflict between the Assembly of Lorraine and the officers of Condé’s appanage no doubt involved jurisdictional disputes typical of the Old Regime. The members of the Assembly did not want to be deprived of the taxes needed to perform the tasks entrusted to them by the king. Yet the fact remains that their jurisdiction embodied something fundamentally new, not one of the hereditary rights to authority ubiquitous under the monarchy, but a responsibility for rural elections inimical to the traditional hierarchy. Consider how the Assembly of the Île-de-France responded to two complaints of the rural municipalities about the hunting rights of seigneurs. During the preceding years, the seigneurs had followed the king’s example by enlarging their game reserves. They had their judges prohibit the cutting of wood and the grazing of livestock in their copses. The judges, to protect wild animals and birds, warned villagers to tie up their dogs or else see the dogs shot by seigneurial guards. Articulating grievances of peasants across the province, the syndic of the rural municipality of Chapelle Saint-Denis asked the district assembly of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to inform the Assembly of the Île-de-France about the “prodigious quantity of game that ravages the land.”42 The syndic had in mind the capitaineries, or reserves for game and high-grade timber belonging to Louis XVI and his extended family.43 Going into greater detail, the municipality of Chartrettes asked the district assembly in Melun to inform the provincial assembly that the parish was situated between the forest of Fontainebleau and the woods of Massorin and in consequence was devoured … by wild animals from which it is absolutely impossible for them to protect their possessions even though they have passed every night watching over their grains and their vines, a watch which has prevented them from cultivating their possessions.

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The elected leaders of Chartrettes stated that the village had been protected from this devastation until the lord, a marquis, turned the area into a hunting reserve. The inhabitants had had the right to collect brush and hay in the forest for nine months of the year but “now … by an ordinance of … [the marquis] are only accorded three weeks … How can these unhappy inhabitants make enough fodder to nourish … 140 cows and where to find the litter which can make the manure necessary for the grains … in such little time?”44 As we have seen, the Assembly of the Île-de-France had issued disparaging statements about the rural municipalities when it met the previous year. Several members of the Assembly frequented Versailles, hunted with the royal family and, like the above-mentioned marquis, had their own game reserves. Nevertheless, after receiving the petitions of Chapelle Saint-Denis and Chartrettes, they informed the royal minister at the end of 1788, and then more painstakingly in February 1789, that the only remedy was to close the forests and woods off to hunting, prevent the planting of trees and bushes used to attract game, and permit the harvesting of hay prior to the date stipulated in the rules of the capitaineries.45 Similarly, the members of the Assembly of Champagne began to see the problems posed by seigneurial jurisdictions upon receiving a letter in 1788 from the elected syndic of La Ferté. This syndic explained that the duc de Penthièvre, a member of the royal family, made use of customs dating back to the early 1200s to appoint thirteen officers to administer the community and thus prevent him from assuming his functions. The Assembly took up the syndic’s cause, questioning the controller general whether Penthièvre’s men “could truly represent … the wishes … of the inhabitants? The regulations exclude the seigneur from the parish assembly whose object is to name the members of the municipality and here the seigneur alone names all of them. Are the affairs for which these thirteen men were established of the same nature as those the new municipalities have to govern?”46 The point, then, is that to conceptualize the growing acceptance of participatory government one must not only study the nobles with the wealth and leisure to partake in the educated debates of the era. It is also worthwhile examining the changes to the governmental framework, which revealed hitherto inconceivable opportunities to improve the administration. After all, the Assembly of Champagne had described peasant assemblies as threats to the established order. Indeed, in the fall of 1788 and the first half of 1789, as commoners penned pamphlets and attended assemblies to promote the rights of the Third Estate, nobles across the realm insisted on maintaining the monarchy in its traditional forms. Nevertheless, according to a report written in the controller general’s bureau, the upper clergy and nobility in charge of the Assembly of Champagne

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stated that a count, seigneur of Doulaincourt, stifled participatory aspirations beneficial to the country. “Seven inhabitants paying 696 livres … of taxes complained about the … election of … [a] syndic for the reason that he is of the vilest profession, a skinner, and pays only 19 livres of taxes.” The intendant affirmed that according to “the sanest part of the community and particularly … the seigneur of the location,” the syndic “foments division in the community.” The lord “does not believe that any inconvenience could result … from the nomination of a new syndic.” The Assembly, however, opposed the intendant, advising, “it would cause … inconvenience to the deputy who took on with zeal and patriotism the functions confided to him.” The controller general agreed, “there is no reason to accept the complaints of … inhabitants … excited by partisans of a cabal … The profession of [the syndic] is in no way as vile as the inhabitants claim, since he is a saddler, and … was named by the free choice of his fellow citizens.”47 Whereas the Assembly of Champagne opposed this attempt of a seigneur to organize the better-off residents with the aim of replacing an elected syndic eager to serve in public office, the Assembly of Soissonnais supported the same sort of attempt when the roles were reversed, when the peasants of Bléancourt asked to replace a syndic beholden to the local lord. According to a report written in the controller general’s office in August 1788, “the municipal assembly … demands … the replacement of” the syndic, “steward of the seigneurial domain,” as well as the replacement of a father and son, “the first bailiff of the seigneurial court … the second representative of the lord and at the same time son-in-law of” the syndic. This seigneurial steward “is a turbulent and dangerous man; he took advantage of his ascendancy over … the inhabitants to seize their communal property … [and] aggrandize the seigneurial domain.” He “has spread fear … and infringed upon the liberty of suffrages by taking … from one of the members of the municipality a farm rented out by the lord, because [this member] had agreed to pursue the return of the communal property.” The provincial assembly asserted that it was proper “to proceed to the replacement of” the lord’s man. If this syndic remained, “one cannot hope to re-establish good order and harmony” in Bléancourt. The assembly advised the crown “to annul the deliberations of the municipality … Everything leads one to believe that they were solely the product of” the seigneurial agent’s “intrigues.”48 Thus, the Assembly of Soissonnais, which had dismissed the peasants’ right to congregate, because of the subversive initiatives liable to ensue, began to contest the lords’ control over the villages. Consider Manicamp, where according to a report written in the controller general’s bureau in January 1789, the municipality took no part in administrative affairs. The seigneurial officers “have even taken the right to convoke the general assembly of

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inhabitants, and they have such influence in this assembly that they … direct the deliberations.” The officers authorized the former parish syndic to continue in his functions despite the royal order for him to step down in favor of the peasants’ elected representative. The Assembly of Soissonnais instructed the former syndic “to no longer involve himself in the affairs of the community but he paid no mind to this injunction.” The Assembly then “insisted that the titles and papers of the community be turned over to the municipality … [It] wrote … to the … seigneur of … Manicamp,” a duke, but “only got back the copy of a declaration … given … [in] 1691” when Louis XIV made Manicamp into an earldom (comté). According to this declaration, “the community of Manicamp recognized … that the accounts of its rents and revenues must be submitted each year in the presence of the … [seigneurial] officers.”49 The nobles in charge of the Assembly of Soissonnais thus hoped to see rural residents play a role in the administration. Notified in January 1789 of the reluctance of two members to go on attending the municipality of Buzancy, the Assembly informed the controller general that few villagers paid the 10 livres of taxes required to replace the two uninterested members. The Assembly then asked that the “ten livres be moderated or at least that a third of the residents be admissible with the simple total of three livres of … taxes so that the regeneration be easier to carry out and … the inferior class … not deplore being … kept out of the municipal ranks.”50 In Touraine, nearly all of the peasants remained subject to levies on land sales (lods et ventes) and harvests (terrages), as well as to other seigneurial burdens. The research of Brigitte Maillard shows that, out of growing exasperation, or diminishing restraint, the peasants frequently challenged the lords’ rights.51 When the upper clergy, possessors of vast forests, and other wealthy lords, such as the baron de Menou, met in the provincial assembly in the fall of 1787, they stated, like their peers across the realm, that the seigneurs and priests had education and enlightenment, and should therefore direct the rural municipalities.52 Yet, as the assembly’s deliberations unfolded, the members evaluated grievances not from the perspective of holders of jurisdictional rights, as had been the custom, but from the standpoint of representatives responsible for the province. They opined that the people should distribute the taxes and make the wealthy share the burden. In one session, the members received a report about the attempts of several lords to assert rights over tree-lined paths, and about the mobilization of their “vassals” and “dependents” (censitaires) in opposition. The assembly determined that it had a legal responsibility to investigate the lords’ pretensions and even intervene in their jurisdictions “for the public good.”53 In Dauphiné, the Parlement of Grenoble had enforced the right of François Henri comte de Virieu, a future member of the provincial assembly,

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to collect dues from several communities in the 1780s. The peasants rose in revolt against bailiffs sent to enforce the ruling. Royal troops intervened and shot several peasants. The judiciary sentenced the ringleaders to a decade in the galleys.54 Virieu’s determination to enforce the legal entitlement to collect dues precluded any pursuit of better-organized communities, for if the inhabitants were to play a role in the administration, they would surely contest the seigneurial burdens. Thus, whatever Virieu’s intellectual outlook, his political practice cannot be considered liberal. Indeed, as we have seen, the nobles of Dauphiné had convinced the crown to annul the election of rural municipalities and the meetings for voting in the arrondissements. Three months later, in June 1788, Virieu and other members of the provincial assembly took an essay to the king’s minister on behalf of the nobles urging the crown to eschew any policy that might undermine seigneurial justice, “the dignity of their fiefs,” which formed part of the laws and privileges of Dauphiné.55 And yet, the provincial assembly led Virieu to reassess the rural elections. He argued in a published dialogue that the elections from the municipalities up through the provincial assemblies represented “a complete revolution in the system of Government, as the establishment of a true Constitution in the Realm, where, as it were, one had never existed.” Thanks to the assemblies, “the Representatives … are no longer persons independent of the people … called to this power by the right of their offices …, such as … Feudal Jurisdictions …: they are Citizens freely named by the wish of their Fellow Citizen.”56 Virieu wrote to a justice in the Parlement that the current stirrings of civic engagement affected all classes of the population, because the assemblies were “within the reach of the humblest peasant.”57 Virieu, Jean Antoine comte d’Agoult, and other members of the Assembly of Dauphiné affirmed in their minutes in November 1788 that seigneurial stewards, charged with collecting rents, tithes, and dues, enjoyed undue authority, often holding rural inhabitants in thrall through debts. They criticized these stewards as agents of private interests oblivious to the public good. Virieu later recognized, in the spring of 1789, when he expressed such opinions, and especially when he sought to abolish seigneurial rights, that he had become unpopular among his fellow nobles in Dauphiné.58 Similarly, the nobles in charge of the assembly in Strasbourg, by taking responsibility for the royal reforms, developed a different attitude toward the peasant elections from the other lords of Alsace. This province officially belonged to foreign princes possessionnés in accordance with treaties and statutes signed by French kings in 1648 and 1708. The princes ceded their patrimonial rights in innumerable feudal acts to local lords. To settle in a community, known as a gericht in Alsace, peasants had to have a certificate of good behavior from their former lord and take an oath to comply with each point in the titles

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of their new one. The gericht administrations comprised an elected syndic and aldermen, who together saw to tax collection and other affairs under the supervision of a director (prévôt) named by the seigneur. The director executed the lord’s orders, often collected his dues, and oversaw the corvée labor to which he was entitled. The director had the sole right to convoke assemblies and dispense justice.59 Rural inhabitants of Alsace immediately embraced the chance to elect municipalities and challenge these customs. But according to the minutes of the provincial assembly, “a large number [of seigneurs], enjoying the right to name … the gericht … believe themselves … justified in protesting against the municipalities which would deprive … [the gerichts] of … their functions.”60 The seigneurial personnel denied the rural municipalities a place to meet and refused to turn over the archives with the community accounts. The provincial assembly defended this obstruction and, in the autumn of 1787, asked the intendant to suspend the elected municipalities and declare the gerichts the legal governments of the Alsatian countryside.61 Nevertheless, the members of the Assembly of Alsace subsequently claimed to have been “touched by the requests everywhere making themselves heard for the establishment of the rural municipalities [, requests] which left no doubt of the unanimous wish of the communities and the advantages they hoped to gain from the municipalities.”62 The Assembly, in the spring of 1788, declared all unelected gerichts illegal and directed the district assemblies to oversee voting in the villages. A few months later, the Assembly instructed all seigneurial receivers, clerks, attorneys, and bailiffs to stay out of the community affairs run by the municipalities. These new administrations then put all of the seigneurial rights in doubt, prohibiting the communities from paying dues without the municipalities’ permission. They invited the peasants to exercise their imprescriptible right and original liberty over the common lands in spite of the lords’ claims of immemorial possession and legally documented transactions.63 To conclude, royal reformers hoped that elections in the countryside would facilitate the composition of accurate tax rolls and increase the contributions of the privileged orders. They hoped that the nobles’ involvement in provincial assemblies would forge a constructive relationship with the monarchy and consensus around its reforms. The Notables and parlements, however, insisted on the independence of the assemblies from the crown, the preservation of the traditional estates, and the presidency of a bishop or seigneur. Their resistance to the crown earned them support from a public eager to limit the central power and participate in government. The king therefore had to abandon the plan for representation based on tax assessments, and instead

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divided the assemblies into the traditional estates. Yet, in 1787, the reformers succeeded in introducing elected municipalities in the villages, under the presidency of the parish seigneur, and a timeline for the municipalities to elect the district and provincial assemblies in the coming years. Nobles across the realm roundly rejected this policy of permitting the people to take part in local government. Thus, in 1787 and the first half of 1788, while the Second Estate stood in the forefront of the movement for representative government, thanks to their opposition to policies imposed unilaterally by the crown, all levels of the nobility defended the traditional hierarchy in the provinces and sought to prevent the rural inhabitants from participating in village elections. The nobles stated that independent meetings of peasants would lead to rebellion and anarchy. They had possessed seigneurial jurisdictions for centuries and considered it their duty to maintain order in the countryside on behalf of the king. They resisted even the slightest reform in the direction of representative government. In the spring of 1789, when nobles gathered to write cahiers and elect deputies to the Estates General, a notable minority of the Second Estate openly insisted on the preservation of seigneurial rights. Most nobles, however, understood that seigneurial jurisdictions ran counter to the liberalism prevalent in the discourse and ideology of the era. They could hardly defend the seigneurial regime before the public at the end of a century of Enlightenment. The nobles therefore avoided the issue. Their cahiers generally contain no mention of the seigneurial regime.64 And yet, whereas the demands of the Third Estate in the fall of 1788 and 1789 caused the Notables, parlementaires, court aristocracy, and Second Estate to coalesce around the hereditary rights of their order, many nobles in the provincial assemblies, by dint of the practical experience of attending to local reforms, grew critical of seigneurial authority. As Turgot, du Pont, and other reformers had hoped, the nobles’ involvement in government assemblies made a number of them aware of administrative problems, encouraged civic-mindedness, and weakened their attachment to the traditional hierarchy. The assemblies offered a new logic, or institutionalized manner, of political action, not one orienting elites to defend their spheres of authority, but one leading the participants to focus on the needs of provincial inhabitants. The king entrusted the assemblies with reforms widely discussed by the educated elite of the era, including the improvement of the fiscal rolls, the abolition of forced labor on the roads, and the expansion of participation in government. When the nobles of the assemblies witnessed the seigneurial classes thwart the efforts of the rural municipalities to attend to these reforms, they began to think critically about the traditions of the monarchy.

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For this reason, whereas the cahiers of the Second Estate generally avoided the subject of the lords’ rights, a noteworthy subset of them revealed the same aspirations as the Third Estate for the abolition of the seigneurial regime. What is more, sixteen of the forty-seven nobles – who broke with their order in the Estates General and joined the National Assembly on June 25, 1789 – had taken part in the provincial assemblies over the previous years. This proportion seems even larger when bearing in mind that assemblies had only met in twenty-two of the thirty-four provinces on account of the preservation of medieval estates and the resistance of the parlements. The nobles, moreover, had grown defensive of their privileges in the face of the increasingly numerous and radical demands of the Third Estate. As we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, on Berry and Poitou, they elected their more conservative peers to the Estates General. Across the realm, nobles elected intransigent members of the military caste to the Estates General. They elected only forty-five nobles who had taken part in the assemblies.65 Thus, the nobles who had taken part in the provincial assemblies were three times more likely than their peers in the Estates General to abandon their particular rights and join the National Assembly. The provincial assemblies facilitated the perception of an alternative political order in which the nobles could play a leadership role in the regeneration of the kingdom. The comte de Crillon, for example, who had appreciated the harm caused by the privately owned jurisdictions of the lords during his work in the Assembly of the Île-deFrance, stated upon his arrival at the Estates General that “I am of the firmest opinion that it is much less to maintain than to establish the constitution, that we are all summoned … the vote by order seems … contrary to the liberty of the nation, [and] the necessary … order of things which brings national prosperity.”66 By August, fear gripped all of the deputies, as rural revolts reached a crescendo and the country faced an impending social emergency. The revolts created the context for the Night of August 4th, when the National Assembly abolished the feudal system. In the legislation following the grand declarations of that night, the deputies – for the most part possessors of seigneurial rights or lawyers trained in feudal law – left in place the harvest dues until the peasants compensated the lords. It took ongoing resistance and rebellion for the dues to be completely eliminated in 1792 and 1793.67 What the deputies targeted, in the legislation written in the days following the Night of August 4th, were personal servitude, manorial courts, exclusive hunting rights, and the tithe. The National Assembly, to be exact, abolished the jurisdictional rights integral to feudalism, which, from the perspective of the provincial assemblies, had prevented the rural inhabitants from attending to reforms.68 Privately owned spheres of authority, the members of the assemblies had commented in 1788

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and 1789, sowed unrest by preventing the good will and patriotic impulses of villagers from turning to the benefit of the country. The nobles examined in this chapter – the duc du Châtelet, the comte de Virieu, the comte d’Agoult, the baron de Menou, the comte de Lameth, the vicomte de Noailles, the duc de Montmorency-Laval, Clermont-Tonnerre, the comte d’Egmont, the duc de la Rochefoucauld, the vicaire général de Lubersac, the vicomte de Beauharnais, and Talleyrand-Périgord – had informed the crown about the disorder likely to result from unsupervised meetings of peasants and about the violation of the monarchical constitution embodied in the rural elections. Yet over the following months, because of the institutionalized way of doing things in the provincial assemblies, these same nobles deliberated over cases in which the rural municipalities faced seigneurial obstruction and could not carry out the reforms confided to them by the king. Whereas most nobles, on the Night of August 4, simply judged it prudent to join the wave of renunciations, the above-mentioned ones played a leading role in – indeed spearheaded – the abolition of feudalism, going beyond the repudiation of local privileges by renouncing the principles underlying the seigneurial regime.69 As the duc du Châtelet stated that night, in proposing the abolition of seigneurial rights, “it was time to carry out the salutary projects, voted by so many … strong demands in the provincial assemblies … where the citizens had been able to assemble over the last eighteenth months.”70 Thus, this inclination to clear away the hereditary privileges and titles of the Old Regime did not come to nobles in any natural or inevitable way from the broadening public discussion of educated individuals eager to participate in government. Rather it came to them, I conclude, when royal reformers placed them in unaccustomed situations and roles. By taking part in the provincial assemblies, nobles perceived both the possibility of their continued governance, once they placed themselves at the head of reforms, and the hopelessness of working within the monarchy – as it existed, permeated with seigneurial rights – to address the problems facing the country. Notes   1 Munro Price, “Politics: Louis XVI,” in Old Regime France, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 224–5; Munro Price, Preserving the Monarchy: The Comte de Vergennes, 1774–1787 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114; John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 186–7, 189.   2 Munro Price, “The maréchal de Castries and the Pre-Revolution,” in The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France from the Old Regime to Revolution, ed. Julian Swann and Joël Félix (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 91.   3 Pierre Renouvin, we have seen, established this view among historians. Les assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, resultats (Paris: A. Picard, 1921), 78–80, 275–7.

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  4 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 140–2.   5 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 144, 155.   6 Several of these works, by no means a comprehensive list, include Gail Bossenga, “Status, Corps, and Monarchy: Roots of Modern Citizenship in the Old Regime,” in Tocqueville and Beyond: Essays on the Old Regime in Honor of David D. Bien, ed. Robert Schwartz and Robert Schneider (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003); Joël Félix, “Monarchy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996); Anthony Crubaugh, “Feudalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).   7 None of the following works baldly state that the nobility had become liberal and capitalist. Yet they all leave the impression, with various emphases, that much of the Second Estate accepted the loss of seigneurial power, concentrated instead on developing output for the market from their landed estates, and hoped for a constitution guaranteeing rights of political participation to limit the arbitrary authority of the crown. Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility 1400– 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13, 43–4, 55, 57, 71, 76, 185–6, 199; Michel Figeac, Destins de la noblesse bordelaise (1770–1830) (Bordeaux: Fédération Historique du Sud-Ouest,  1996), 126; Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment, trans. William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12, 22, 172; William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, 1988), 121, 137, 140; John Shovlin, “Nobility,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime, ed. William Doyle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 111, 119, 121; Jay Smith, “Nobility,” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 40–1, 50.   8 My argument about the nobles’ actions and ideals draws on Suzanne Desan’s insights into the interplay between social and political experience, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other. “What’s after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography,” French Historical Studies 23 (2000), 178, 181, 184, 193.   9 On the deputies’ view of feudalism and jurisdictional rights, see Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8–10. 10 Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI, 154. 11 Jeremy Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 7, 22, 47, 71, 194; Robert Schwartz, “The Noble Profession of Seigneur in Eighteenth-Century Burgundy” in The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: Reassessments and New Approaches, ed. Jay Smith (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 78, 83; Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice:  Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750–1800  (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 19, 47, 65, 76, 154–5; Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation, 4, 8–10. 12 Procès verbal des séances de l’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guienne, tenue à Villefranche dans les mois de novembre & décembre 1786 (1787), 255. See also Henri  Guilhamon, ed., Journal des voyages en Haute-Guienne de J.-F. Henry de Richeprey, 2 vols. (Rodez: Commission des archives historiques du Rouergue, 1952), 1:xlvii-li, lxi-lxii, 2:2, 79, 92, 105, 116, 120–1, 158, 173, 289, 295; Gérard Boscary, L’Assemblée provinciale de Haute-Guyenne, 1779–1790 (Paris: Impr. E. Desfossés, 1932), 35, 66, 223–4. 13 Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI, 232–3.

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14 John Hardman, Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France’s Old Regime (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 129, 132, 136–8, 141–2; Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3, 51–3, 157. 15 Jeff Horn, Qui parle pour la nation?: les élections et les élus de la Champagne méridionale, 1765–1830 (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 2004), 46–9. 16 Archives Nationales (hereafter AN) H1519. 17 AN H1609. 18 Albert Babeau, L’Assemblée d’élection et le Bureau intermédiaire de Troyes: Étude sur un essai de décentralisation au siècle dernier (Troyes: Impr. de Dufour-Bouquot, 1873), 8–11, 30–2; Horn, Qui parle pour la nation?, 46–7. For the social composition of the provincial and district assemblies in Champagne, see Lynn Hunt, Revolution and Urban Politics in Provincial France: Troyes and Rheims, 1786–1790 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 45–6. 19 AN H1599. See also AN H1519. 20 Henry Fromont, Essai sur l’administration de l’assemblée provinciale de la généralité d’Orléans (1787–1790) (Paris: Imp. de la Fac. de Médecine, 1907), 19–21. 21 J.D. de La Rochefoucauld, C. Wolikow, G. Ikni, Le duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt: 1747– 1827: de Louis XV à Charles X, un grand seigneur patriote et le mouvement populaire (Paris: Perrin, 1980), 104–5, 111. 22 AN H1519. 23 AN H1593. 24 Ibid. 25 Procès-Verbal des séances de l’Assemblée Provinciale de L’Isle de France. Tenues à Melun, en Novembre & Décembre 1787 (Sens, 1788), lii–liv, lvi, lviii–lix, 1–5. 26 Procès-verbal des séances de l’Assemblée Provinciale des Trois Évêchés et du Clermontois, tenue à Metz dans les mois de novembre et décembre 1787 (Metz, 1787), 4–7, 333–4. 27 AN H1605. 28 Jean Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné et les affaires publiques dans la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Grenoble: Paris, B. Arthaud, 1942), 2:51–7, 62–3. 29 AN H1596. 30 Although the evidence of seigneurial opposition to the rural elections cannot be expressed in numbers, it clearly amounted to an overarching, countrywide process. Evidence of such opposition – from Upper and Lower Normandy, Gascony, Anjou, and Maine (not to mention Poitou and Lyonnais, analyzed in Chapters 3 and 4) – has been left out of the foregoing discussion of the primary source material so as to avoid the appearance of a repetitive list. I found this evidence in AN H1597, H1598, H1602; Guillaume De la Foy, De la Constitution du duché ou état souverain de Normandie (1789), 303–4; M. de la Trémoïlle, “L’Assemblée provinciale d’Anjou d’après les archives de Serrant (1787–1789),” L’Anjou historique 1 (1900), 554–6; Georges Coeuret, L’assemblée provinciale de Haute-Normandie, 1787–1789 (Paris: Jouve & Cie, 1927), 74, 77; Félix Mourlot, La fin de l’ancien régime et les débuts de la Révolution dans la généralité de Caen (1787–1790) (Paris: Au siège de la Société, 1913), 98–9, 133. 31 Price, “The maréchal de Castries and the Pre-Revolution,” 94. 32 Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné, 2:200–1. 33 AN H1601. For Necker’s relationship to the high nobility, see Hardman, Overture to Revolution, 249; Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI, 266. 34 Munro Price, The Road from Versailles: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Fall of the French Monarchy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 2002 1st US ed.), 61; Joël Félix, Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette: un couple en politique (Paris: Payot, 2006), 450–1; William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89, 91; Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947, expanded bicentennial edition 1988), 74, 90; Hardman, Overture to Revolution, 290–1. 35 ANH1591 and H1609. For the members of these assemblies, see Sophie Sédillot, “De l’ancien

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régime au nouveau: l’assemblée provinciale de Picardie, creuset du département de la Somme (1787–1790),” in Réformer l’administration et réformer l’Etat: jalons historiques et juridiques, ed. Sébastien Évrard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015), 55–6. 36 William Doyle draws attention to contingent events in the origins of the Revolution: France and the Age of Revolution: Regimes Old and New from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 97–8. 37 AN H1519. 38 Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris, trans. Lydia Cochrane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 92; Chad Denton, Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility: The Enlightened and the Depraved (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 13–14; Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 136. Rousseau comments on the support he received from the Prince de Condé. The Confessions, trans. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin Classics, 1970), 452, 479. 39 AN H1590. 40 Ibid. 41 AN H1602. 42 AN H1609. 43 Richard Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2; Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France Contemporaine: l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Librairie Hachette et cie, 1887), 74n. For the peasants’ opposition to hunting rights, see I. Loutchisky, “Régime agraire et populations agricoles dans les environs de Paris à la veille de la Révolution,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne & Contemporaine, VII (1933), 97, 134–5; Jacques-Henri Bataillon, Les justices seigneuriales du bailliage de Pontoise à la fin de l’ancien régime (Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey, 1942), 100–1. 44 AN H1599. 45 AN H1609. 46 AN H1519. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Brigitte Maillard, Paysans de Touraine au XVIII siècle: Communautés rurales et société paysanne en Touraine (La Crèche: Geste éditions, 2006), 115, 118, 144, 163, 166, 168. 52 Paul Bois, Paysans de l’Ouest (Le Mans: Mouton, 1960), 329–31, 398; Léonce de Lavergne, Les Assemblées provinciales sous Louis XVI (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, Libraires Éditeurs, 1864), 178, 180; Marc Bouloiseau and André Buchoux, Les municipalités tourangelles de 1787 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1969), 51–2. 53 Procès-Verbal des séances de l’assemblée générale des trois provinces de la généralité de Tours, tenue à Tours ... le 12 novembre 1787 (Tours: Impr. d’A. Vauquer, 1787), 61–2. For other information on this provincial assembly, see Marc Bouloiseau, “Organisation et activité des municipalités rurales en Touraine (1787–1789),” in Villes de l’Europe méditerranéenne et de l’Europe occidentale du Moyen Age au XIXe siècle: Actes du colloque de Nice (27–28 mars 1969) (Monaco: Les Presses de la Société Nouvelle de l’Imprimerie nationale de Monaco, 1969), 194. 54 Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné, 2:69–70. 55 The quote is from Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné, 2:245. See also p. 2:244. 56 Dialogue sur l’établissement et la formation des assemblées provinciales dans la généralité de Grenoble. Entre M. M***, Conseiller au Parlement de Dauphiné ... et M. N***, habitant dans les baronies (1787), 3, 39, 101–4, 122–3. 57 Aimé Louis Champollion-Figeac, Chroniques dauphinoises et documents inédits relatifs au Dauphiné pendant la Révolution: Première période historique. L’ancien régime et la Révolution 1750–1794 (Vienne: E.J. Savigné, 1884), 320. 58 Procès-verbaux des assemblées générales des trois ordres et des états provinciaux du Dauphiné tenus à

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

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Romans en 1788 (Lyon: Impr. de Mougin-Rusand, réimprimés à l’occasion du centenaire de la révolution française, 1888), 162; Jean Egret, La Révolution des notables: Mounier et les monarchiens 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1950), 39–40, 108. Ch. Hoffman, “L’administration provinciale dans la Haute-Alsace,” Revue d’Alsace (1899–1900), 407–9; Antoine Follain, Le village sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 76; Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales, 275–6. AN H1602. Madeleine Barbier, “L’assemblée provinciale d’Alsace et la difficile mise en place des nouvelles structures administratives,” in Réformer l’administration et réformer l’Etat: Jalons historiques et juridiques, ed. Sébastien Évrard (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015), 28, 30, 37. AN H1602. Barbier, “L’assemblée provinciale d’Alsace,” 32–4, 36. John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 575, 596. Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 32–4; Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, 172; Renouvin, Les assemblée provincials, 396–7n. Crillon François Félix Berton des Balbes, comte de, “Noblesse: protestation du comte de Crillon, lors de la séance du 6 mai 1789,” Archives parlementaires Année 8, 1 (1875), 28; Edna Hindie Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants: 1789–1791 (Paris: Universitas, 1991), 615. Peter Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183, 185. For the abolition of hereditary privileges, see Michael Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended: August 4, 1789, and the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 171–2; Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation, 10. Charles Du Bus, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre et l’échec de la Révolution monarchique (1757– 1792) (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1931), 129; Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 172–4; Fitzsimmons, The Night the Old Regime Ended, 108–9; Lemay, Dictionnaire des Constituants, 874; Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism, 428; Egret, La Révolution des notables, 107–8. “Renonciations des députés des provinces à leurs privilèges, lors de la séance du 4 août 1789,” Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860 – Première série (1787–1799), 346.

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Alexis de Tocqueville would have agreed with the foregoing argument, that the monarchy, in the form it took since the Middle Ages, did not prepare the upper classes to think practically about the problems facing the country. The central administration, run by bureaucratic intendants, took local governance over the peasants from the noble lords. The crown made royal subjects similar to one another in their subjection to the state and thereby instilled a culture equality. The nobles’ privileges stood out as a galling inequality, which the nation proved eager to destroy in 1789.1 This book has shown that the nobles’ inexperience with public policy resulted from a political and social order at odds with the one presented by Tocqueville. Members of the upper classes owned over 10,000 seigneurial jurisdictions across the country and an even greater number of venal offices, each with its own sphere of authority. Royal subjects, in possession of some wealth, improved their rank by purchasing what Robert Brenner has called “politically constituted private property,” namely titles, venal offices, seigneurial domains, and other privileges affording entry into the dominant class.2 As Rafe Blaufarb points out, the seigneurial regime imbued property with stipulations for hierarchy and servitude incompatible with liberty and equality. Elites bought, sold, and inherited the right to exercise civil and criminal justice over – and to collect fees, dues, tolls, tithes, and rents from – the inhabitants of delimited areas. The highest lords and office holders routinely extracted patronage from the king in return for carrying out the tasks required of their legal jurisdictions. Contemporaries described “feudalism” in these terms as the defining characteristic of the absolutist state.3 Over the course of the early modern period, the kings attracted and constructed a nobility reliant on politically constituted private property. They reorganized much of the aristocratic class within the state by gathering an expanded patrimonial group. We saw in Chapters 2 and 4, on the assemblies in Berry and Poitou, that kings used their patrimonial rights over the realm

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to offer lands and seigneurial rights to high nobles as patronage. They granted appanages of lands and rights to family members. These potentates made the most of their endowments by selling some domains to provincial elites for cash and by leasing to townspeople the rights to collect dues and exercise justice on other lordships. When the purchasers and lessees imposed seigneurial rights in the name of the king and grandees, they sustained feudal laws, which provincial lords could then exploit on their own domains. In short, the monarchy both ingrained seigneurial rights in the social fabric of the kingdom and brought court and provincial nobles together in defense of hereditary privileges. As Tocqueville surmised, absolute monarchy accustomed the upper classes to think about their private interests rather than the difficulties facing the realm and its inhabitants. However, the reason was not that the monarchy deprived them of government authority, but that their type of authority, privately held offices and lordships, led them to focus on defending their jurisdictions from the pretension of other elites and from royal policies liable to diminish their rights. Elites depended on the king to resolve their conflicting claims to privilege, and to suppress disobedience and revolts liable to dislocate the social and political order. Nobles defended their privileges not by strengthening national representative institutions but by asserting particular rights. They regarded the absolutist state ambivalently, not only as a potential source of policies harmful to privileges, but also as a guardian of stability and source of offices and lordships.4 Kings had perennially pursued policies harmful to lords and office h­ olders when pressed for funds in times of war. They used magistrates as sources of credit, extracting loans from them in return for the confirmation of their property in office. Crown jurists claimed the whole kingdom as the royal domain and thus subject to the king’s seigneurial rights. The king then sold exemptions to elites threatened by his seigneurial claims. While these policies took revenue from the dominant classes, they cemented venal and seigneurial rights within the administration.5 As we saw in the first four chapters, the landed classes drew on these lessons in feudal law to turn the seigneurial regime to their advantage in dealings with common subjects. Nevertheless, beginning in the eighteenth century, royal ministers began to formulate policies of an entirely different nature. At the very moment Louis XIV put an end to the independent power bases of high nobles and their feudal followings – as he fully integrated the upper classes into the state as privileged holders of lordships and offices – French absolutism was overtaken by its cross-Channel rival. Gentry proprietors in England obtained wealth from monetary rents based on free markets in land and labor – a capitalist, purely economic form of income. Venality, of course, existed in England. Kings sold titles and honors prodigiously prior to the 1640s. “Old Corruption” – an

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epithet used in the eighteenth century to denounce the abuse of parliamentary seats and royal favor to manipulate credit, corner markets, and obtain sinecures and fortunate marriages – furnished some of the greatest fortunes in the country. However, the state never developed a sprawling tentacular apparatus of heritable offices. Privileges and perquisites proportionately cost the English state less than a fourth of what they cost the French. The gentry did not show such deep feelings of devotion to the Stuart kings as French nobles did to Louis XIV, because they did not compete with one another for the distribution of pensions, honors, offices, and lordships. The landed classes instead bolstered Parliament to prevent the crown from developing a patrimonial following of venal officers, creating a standing army, enhancing its power, and impinging on the interests of property owners. The disappearance of politically constituted private property and the dominance of Parliament, confirmed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, paved the way for Great Britain to become the preeminent imperial power during the War of the Spanish Succession at the dawn of the eighteenth century.6 In light of these facts, reformers began to question the entire corporate edifice of the French monarchy and seek to restructure its political economy. We saw in Chapter 1 that, already in the last years of Louis XIV, the entourage of the duc de Bourgogne put forth plans for free discussion in local estates in order to encourage elites to identify with the regime and sacrifice their privileges to its fiscal health. Yet it was not until the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63) that the deficiencies of the monarchy became obvious and led even the king to entertain the ideas of the Physiocrats. These theorists lamented the bricolage of poorly integrated provinces, each with privileged institutions resistant to economic unification in the name of traditional liberties.7 Mirabeau, Turgot, du Pont de Nemours, and Le Trosne wrote that the time-honored estates – the clergy, nobility, and townspeople (or commoners) – permitted one class of subjects to use its privileges to trouble the rest of them. Le Trosne defined privileges as venal offices and seigneurial rights. Offices burdened the populace and diverted wealth from productive investment. The seigneurial regime undermined property rights and spawned an army of officials interested in extracting revenue from farmers. Lords and offices holders sought to enlarge their spheres of authority at the expense of the general interest. In contrast to these traditions, the Physiocrats proposed provincial assemblies in which representation would be based solely on the value of landed property, not one’s traditional rank. A uniform system of assemblies would lead people to identify with the state and allow the sovereign to enact general laws. Assemblies would help to improve the economy and augment government revenue. In advancing this program, royal reformers disseminated a discourse of enlightened government and universal laws applicable to all property owners.8

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If there was one thing missing from the Physiocrats’ analysis, it was perhaps an awareness that the state had to work through the remaining elements of the feudal, corporatist elite they described so accurately. Elites, in possession of jurisdictional rights, and dependent on lordships and offices for their social rank, fought tooth and nail against the provincial assemblies. We have seen in every chapter of this book that elites tried to prevent the assemblies from administering taxation, judging disputes, and holding elections to rural municipalities. In opposing the assemblies, lords and office holders invoked the traditional hierarchy and customary laws of the kingdom. These rigidities represented the stakes involved in the judicial discourse used in texts of the period to defend the historical constitution of the monarchy against the crown’s unilateral efforts to impose policies such as the assemblies.9 In analyzing these disputes, provoked by the introduction of provincial assemblies, one does not discern conflicts pitting high nobles in Paris and Versailles, immersed in the intellectual life of the salons, academies, and publishing houses, against local nobles supportive of the high courts, or parlements, and the established order. Nor is one struck by any salient aspiration of the local nobles to develop their landholdings, obtain representation in government, and put an end to the displays of luxury and financial peculation of the aristocrats in Paris and Versailles. Rather, many of the defenders of the established order, who confronted Calonne, du Pont, and other reformers in Versailles and Paris, were the nobles in the king’s entourage. As we saw in Chapter 1, the crown did not have a bureaucratic apparatus or follow consistent policies. Members of the king’s councils and courtiers in Versailles often pursued objectives at odds with one another. Reformist commissioners, for example, such as Jean-François Henry de Richeprey, analyzed in Chapter 6, hoped to see participatory assemblies in the parishes assess the lords’ landed wealth. Yet at the same time, Louis XVI’s ministers undermined such reforms by making exchanges of his domains as patronage to strengthen their factions in the royal court and obtain the attendant political and social rewards. The officers responsible for enforcing the seigneurial rights on these domains obstructed the efforts of representative assemblies to tax the nobles’ lands. That is to say, royal reformers’ plans for the rural municipalities failed in large part because of the magnates in Versailles, who drew local lords and townspeople together in opposition to policies liable to undermine seigneurial privileges. The classic works of Pierre Renouvin and Jean Egret likewise show that the assemblies failed due to the opposition of the privileged classes. The Assembly of Notables (consisting mainly of the highest nobles of the realm convened at the beginning of 1787 to endorse a package of reforms) and the parlements objected to Calonne’s plan to use the provincial assemblies

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with the purpose of broadening support for royal absolutism. They obliged the crown to divide the assemblies into the traditional estates and reserve the leadership for the high clergy and nobility. The assemblies consequently accomplished very little.10 The evidence presented in this book confirms this classic account. Yet it also calls attention to something long overlooked by historians of late Old Regime France: the opposition to the provincial assemblies reveals the politically constituted private property at the heart of French absolutism. This form of property militated against the Physiocrats’ plans to reform the political economy. It leads to the conclusion that the French Revolution must be interpreted from an angle very different from the one used by François Furet. Starting from Tocqueville’s understanding of the Old Regime, Furet depicted a society of atomized individuals cut adrift from the traditional corps by monarchical centralization. The seigneurial regime did not overly burden royal subjects. The nobility lost its traditional power without acquiring a new role in the state. Once royal authority collapsed in the months prior to 1789, society recomposed itself through an ideology of equality. The Jacobin militants, who articulated this ideology, invented powerful nobles as the obstacles to the national will to abolish feudalism. Rather than a popular movement, it was a mental representation of the social sphere which propelled the ­revolution forward.11 This book, in contrast, has portrayed the revolutionary movement as a liberation from oppressive structures, a heroic episode in the narrative of human emancipation in which the participants no longer resigned themselves to the established flow of history as described by their rulers. In particular, if one looks at the articulation of opposition to the nobility in Chapters 2 through 4 on the assemblies of Berry, Lyonnais, and Poitou, one becomes immediately aware that the grievances of well-to-do commoners were rooted in concrete social conditions. Members of this Old Regime bourgeoisie, such as Rouget de Gourcez, mayor of Niort, and Félix Faulcon, judge in the présidial court of Poitiers, had lateral ties to office holders and jurists in other towns of Poitou. They no doubt benefited from seigneurial rents and privileges. They purchased lordships and offices, and often took up posts as seigneurial stewards for the great nobles of the realm. Some of them planned to become nobles themselves. Yet they were all subordinate to the noble justices of the Parlement of Paris, as well as to grandees such as the cardinal François-Joachim de Pierre de Bernis and the duc de Villeroy, whose seigneurial jurisdictions extended over the provincial towns. The mayors, jurists, and lawyers, who managed the administration, courts, manufactures, and agriculture in the provinces, wrote letters and essays about their wish to improve the economy, infrastructure, and judicial administration of their towns and provinces. They viewed

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the provincial assemblies as an opportunity for nobles and commoners to come together, enact reforms, make the country more prosperous, and create opportunities for social mobility. These aspirations were frustrated in the deliberations of the provincial assemblies. Specifically, although the assemblies oversaw the introduction of a money tax for infrastructure to free rural commoners from forced corvée labor on the roads, this tax spread the burden to well-to-do townspeople formerly exempt from roadwork, but maintained the exemptions of the First and Second Estates. The assemblies attempted to take over the functions of lower-level tribunals in order to diminish the tax privileges of, and fees collected by, the venal jurists, parish priests, and rentier landowners in the towns. Yet the assemblies resisted royal plans to reform the vingtième taxes in ways that would alleviate the burden on common subjects by obliging nobles to pay at the same rate. The jurists at the head of the Third Estate, especially in Poitou, held the Parlement of Paris responsible. They argued that the Parlement rallied behind royal absolutism to uphold hereditary rights, prevent the assemblies from broadening participation in government, avert the composition of a uniform system of laws, and block the opening of careers in the courts to talent. The jurists of Poitou argued that the Parlement thereby betrayed the cause of the nation. The argument developed in this book is not that the provincial assemblies served as the decisive experience, turning commoners into revolutionaries. Rather, by threatening to supplant the politically constituted private property of the dominant classes, the assemblies faced opposition revelatory of the privileges enjoyed by lords and office holders. These privileges weighed on common subjects, caused daily inconveniences, and formed rigidities restricting the careers of ambitious townspeople. Appreciating these structural inequalities permits a more robust account of the years preceding the French Revolution. Over the last two decades, several historians have argued that the circumstances following from the breakdown of royal authority after 1787 – the Assembly of Notables, the composition of grievances in cahiers de doléances, the election of deputies, and the proceedings of the Estates General – fractured the social order, opened up hitherto unimaginable possibilities for change, and mobilized the population politically. The events themselves thus added up to causes of the Revolution.12 What this book offers is an understanding of the sort of society in which the collapse of the state could usher in a revolutionary sequence of events. Commoners seized on contingent occurrences to make a Revolution because of their frustrating experience of living under the inequalities of the Old Regime. If there was one group which may have undergone a political evolution through the provincial assemblies, it was the nobility. Most nobles, to be

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sure – both within, and especially outside of, the assemblies – protested that the elections to rural municipalities violated the customs of the monarchy granting lords responsibility for public order in the countryside. The parlements objected that participatory gatherings in the villages kindled rebellion. Nevertheless, as reformist authors and statesmen, from Necker to Condorcet, argued, the assemblies offered a different logic of political practice, one oriented toward the general interests of the country rather than the defense of particular privileges. Chapter 6 contains evidence that when lords obstructed the elections to the rural municipalities, the nobles at the head of the assemblies began to understand that seigneurial jurisdictions stood in conflict with their views and responsibilities. One sees, unmistakably, a budding awareness among several nobles in the assemblies that they might cement their leadership over the Third Estate by relinquishing their traditional spheres of authority and by permitting well-to-do commoners to take part in reforms under their direction. They no doubt began to envision the conversion of their feudal and venal property into the modern absolute private property, which the National Assembly would legislate into existence in the years ahead.13 Thus, a group of noble deputies to the Estates General, after taking part in the provincial assemblies, appreciated the problems posed for the country by personal servitude, exclusive hunting rights, manorial courts, and other aspects of the seigneurial regime. They thus assimilated a critical outlook on the customary prerogatives grounded in the monarchical constitution. These nobles then spun off from the monarchy and swam with the political currents. They played a decisive role in the National Assembly in extricating the administration from the hereditary rights of the privileged orders and in making it accountable through elections. Yet these nobles, we have seen, represented a minority of the Second Estate. Most nobles opposed reforms liable to undermine the traditional hierarchy. Well-to-do commoners had hoped the assemblies would permit the upper classes to come together to reform the fiscal administration, withdraw the provinces from the judicial authority of the Parlement of Paris, and permit educated and talented officials to enjoy unfettered careers within the state. The failure of the assemblies thus represented another experience, common to the Old Regime, of entrenched inequalities maintaining the subordination of the Third Estate. Such experience explains why growing masses of commoners made use of a discourse of will, setting forth the nation as the rightful sovereign, when the crisis of the monarchy made it possible to do so.14 The landowning rentiers and professionals at the head of the Third Estate denounced the feudal obstacles to reform but excluded from their conception of feudalism many of the burdens borne by the peasantry. It required years of peasant protests and revolts, extending back to the rural municipalities of

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1787, to oblige the upper classes finally to abolish all vestiges of the seigneurial regime in 1793. Once accomplished, the rural inhabitants generally sought to provide for their households more securely, free from the extraordinary impositions of the revolutionary period. The landed classes of the imperial and monarchical regimes of the nineteenth century could therefore count on the peasants as a conservative constituency. Apart from episodic uprisings, the peasantry served as a bulwark of the established order.15 Some nobles became acquainted with this prospect through their experience in the provincial assemblies. They perceived that they might lead by consent, once they gave up their privileges. These nobles, however, represented a minority of the Second Estate, and thus could not dispel the frustrations, which coalesced in a revolutionary movement, as royal authority crumbled in 1787 and 1788.

Notes   1 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 13, 18, 26–7, 33, 35, 60, 68, 78, 203–4.   2 Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2003), 652.   3 Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2, 4, 8–9.  4 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 36, 204, 654, 659n20.   5 Thomas Kaiser, “Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 309–10, 312; David Parker, “Absolutism, Feudalism and Property Rights in the France of Louis XIV,” Past and Present 179 (2003), 91–2.   6 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 105–6, 195, 203–4, 208, 212, 217, 321, 333; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), xx, 14–17, 21, 73; E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), 26–7, 29–30, 35, 37; Bailey Stone, The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of England, France, and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 51, 83, 115; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993; first published 1966), 6–7, 14, 17, 40, 67; Geoff Kennedy, “Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution,” in History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (London: Verso, 2007), 42; Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe (London: Verso, 1991), 162; Isser Woloch and Gregory Brown, Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress, 1715–1789 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), 93; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 204, 649, 652, 657.   7 Paul Cheney, “The Political Economy of Colonization: From Composite Monarchy to Nation,” in The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Stephen Kaplan and Sophus Reinert (London: Anthem Press, 2019).   8 Details of this discourse are found in Keith Baker, “French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 289, 302–3; Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121, 127, 239–41, 243; Dale Van Kley, “From the Lessons of French

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CONCLUSION 193 History to Truths for all Times and all People: The Historical Origins of an Anti-Historical Declaration,” in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 90; Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 253, 286–7.   9 Baker, “French Political Thought,” 289, 293–4; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 36–8, 126; Van Kley, “From the Lessons of French History to Truths for all Times and all People,” 81, 83; Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 316. 10 Pierre Renouvin, Les assemblées provinciales de 1787: origines, développement, resultats (Paris: A.  Picard, 1921), 78–80, 275–7; Jean Egret, The French Prerevolution 1787–1788, trans. Wesley Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 10–11, 64, 115, 117, 124–7. 11 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 25–6, 33–5, 54, 56, 63, 99. 12 Vivian Gruder, The Notables and the Nation: The Political Schooling of the French, 1787–1788 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Peter Campbell, “Rethinking the Origins of the French Revolution,” in A Companion to the French Revolution, ed. Peter McPhee (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 4, 15, 18; John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 163–4, 237, 267–8, 519–20; Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 46, 75, 91–2, 151, 308, 313; William Doyle, France and the Age of Revolution: Regimes Old and New from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 97–8. 13 Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation, 10, 50, 56–7, 66, 71. Perry Anderson discusses this zone of possible compromise in which nobles could join, or even lead, the bourgeoisie in revolutions and convert their feudal rights into absolute private property. “The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution,” in English Questions (London: Verso, 1992), 111, 113. 14 Dale Van Kley places the emergence of this revolutionary discourse in the Estates General and National Assembly in June and July 1789. “From the Lessons of French History to Truths for all Times and all People,” 93–4, 106. Yet frustrations with the restrictions and inequalities of the Old Regime had long existed. One observes, in every chapter of his book, the prior emergence of revolutionary statements and demands in Berry and Haute-Guyenne in the late 1770s and in many other provinces in the fall of 1787 and into 1788. 15 Louis Bergeron,  France under Napoleon, trans. R.R. Palmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; original French version 1972), 126, 135, 138; André-Jean Tudesq, Les grands notables en France (1840–1849). Etude historique d’une psychologie sociale (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), 197; Adéline Daumard, “Caractères de la société bourgeoise,” in Histoire économique et sociale de la France, ed. Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976), 3:893, 933, 950; Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981; 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2010), 9, 13, 77.

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Index

Index

Note: literary works can be found under authors’ names Note: “n.” after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page absolute monarchy definition 2–3, 185–6, 189 historical trajectory 2 nobles’ support 4, 10–11, 28–9, 32, 168 and tax farms 82 venal office holders’ support 138–9, 143, 156–7, 190 Agoult, Jean Antoine comte d’ 176, 180 Alsace 24, 31, 36, 43, 176–7 Amiens 150–1, 152, 170 Anderson, Perry 2, 193n.3 Anjou 31, 33, 153, 182n.30 Argenson, Rene-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis de 4, 10, 17 Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France 4, 17–19 on feudalism 18, 22, 42, 51, 164 on provincial assemblies 14, 18–20, 162, 164, 170–1 on royal domains 25 on venality of office 18, 22, 42, 141, 156 Artois, Charles Philippe, Comte d’ 68–9 appanage 50, 53, 62–3, 67, 109–10, 115, 119, 121, 130 in Assembly of Notables 31–2 household 27, 42, 56, 62, 67, 109–10, 115, 119, 124 and provincial assemblies 27 royal court 26–7, 63, 110

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Assembly of Notables 26 circumstance in the origins of the French Revolution 9, 190 and fiscal/financial administration 35–7 and national politics 9, 31, 38, 165–6, 170, 178 and provincial assemblies 32, 143, 161, 163, 165, 177, 188 Auvergne 31, 41 Ayen, Louis de Noailles duc d’ 31, 145 bailliage courts 51, 52, 67, 87, 114, 172, 189 Baker, Keith 14–15, 32, 192n.8 Beauharnais, Alexandre François Marie, Vicomte de 167, 180 Beaujolais (capital Villefranche) 77, 79, 89, 92, 94–7 Beik, William 3 Bengy de Puyvallée, Philippe-Jacques de 49–50, 66, 70 Bernis, cardinal Francois-Joachim de Pierre de 52–3, 67, 189 Béthune-Charost, Armand-Joseph duc de 52, 55–6, 62, 63, 64–5, 66, 80–1 Blaufarb, Rafe 3, 160n.53, 181n.9, 185 Bois, Paul 107, 108 Bordeaux 26, 31, 108, 145 Bourbonnais (capital Moulins) 26, 56, 142, 148 Bourges 50–1, 53, 57, 60, 61–2, 64, 66–8

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218 INDEX Bourgogne, Louis duc de 17, 187 Bouthillier de Beaujeu, Charles-Leon, marquis de 51, 66 Brenner, Robert 4, 104n.97, 185 Buat-Nançay, Louis Gabriel, comte du 65–6 bureaucracy distinct from royal absolutism 16–17, 58, 141, 147, 188 envisioned by reformers 20, 36, 111, 153 envisioned by revolutionaries 7–8, 139–41 within old regime monarchy 17, 185 rejected by court nobles 10 and venality of office 154, 156 bureaus of finances (tribunals) 60, 105, 147–9, 153, 154 bureau of finances of Bourges 53, 60 bureau of finances of Lyon 78, 88, 93, 102n53 bureau of finances of Poitiers 116–7, 131 Calonne, Charles Alexandre de and Assembly of Notables 8, 26, 35, 161, 165, 188 plans for provincial assemblies 35, 118, 143, 165 and royal court 27–8, 30, 46n.40, 188 and royal domains 25, 51 capitation (universal tax on nobles and commoners) 16, 23, 38, 57, 63, 83, 147 chambres des comptes 28, 146–7, 152, 154, 166 Champagne 24, 31, 40, 149–51, 166, 173–4 Châteauroux 53, 59, 63, 65 Châtelet, Louis-Marie-Florent de Lomont d’Haraucourt, duc du 168, 171, 180 Châtellerault 109–10, 112, 128 circumstances as causes of the French Revolution 8–9, 13n.22, 171, 190 Clermont‑Tonnerre, Stanislas Marie Adélaïde, comte de 34, 168, 180 coal mines 76, 79–81, 85, 93, 98 Condé, Louis Joseph, Prince de 25, 68, 171–2, 183n.38 Condorcet, Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de 21, 164, 191 cour des aides of Aix 82

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cour des aides of Montauban 142 cour des aides of Paris 23, 28, 31, 57–9, 61, 86–8, 118, 149, 151–3 Creuzé de la Touche, Jacques Antoine 128 Crillon, comte de 168, 179 Dauphiné 31, 37–8, 94, 97, 144, 146, 169, 175–6 Deschamps, Pierre-Suzanne 77, 95 Desvernay, Rene-Jean-Louis 77, 96 Dewald, Jonathan 1–2, 4, 181n.7 du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel 46n.40, 153, 187, 188 Mémoire sur les municipalités 4, 19–21, 24 on provincial assemblies 10, 14, 20–21, 30, 156, 165, 178 on seigneurial rights 4 on venal offices 4 Egmont, comte de 167, 180 Egret, Jean 6, 169, 188 élections (district fiscal courts) 20, 23, 28, 140, 149–50, 152–4, 157 élections in Berry 59–62, 67 élections in Lyonnais 87–9 élections in Poitou 105, 116, 118 England 1, 2, 3, 16, 17, 75, 81, 186 Enlightenment 171, 178, 187 and agriculture 55 in Assembly of Notables, 35–6 elites 32, 162–3, 164, 175 and judiciary 39, 114 and provincial assemblies 22, 26, 117, 163 Estates General 9, 27, 49, 68, 190 composition 154, 179, 191 elections to 9, 163, 170, 178–9 in Berry 49, 54, 56, 65–8 in Lyonnais 84, 86, 91–2, 94–8 in Poitou 109, 115, 117, 123–8 Faulcon, Félix 115–8, 120, 122, 189 finances of the monarchy 16–17, 20, 30, 56–7, 81–2, 142 Fontenay-le-Comte 112, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 127, 130 Forez (capital Montbrison) 76, 77, 79–81, 87, 91, 94, 96–8

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INDEX 219 Foy, Guillaume de la 145 Furet, François 1–3, 11, 108, 162, 189 gabelle (salt tax) 20, 57, 63, 68, 69, 70, 73n.57, 110, 147, 155 Gascogne (capital Auch) 24, 29–30, 33, 41, 149, 152, 182n.30 Gourcez, Rouget de 114–15, 189 Haute-Guyenne 3, 21, 22, 24, 26, 43, 161, 165 judicial office holders 142, 149, 156 royal corvée 37, 58 taxation 23, 35 village elections 164 historic constitution of the monarchy basis of absolutism 28, 30, 42, 51, 146 basis of noble privileges 3, 55, 95, 124, 141, 143–4, 146, 167–8, 180 discourse of 14, 28–9, 32, 93, 117, 145–8, 150–1 nobles’ attachment to 25, 33, 37, 38, 65, 95–6, 124 revolutionaries’ desire to change 78, 97, 122, 176, 179, 181n.7, 191 use made of by nobles 14–15, 19, 22, 29, 188 use made of by the king 25, 51, 105 Ile-de-France 23, 34, 168–9, 172–3, 179 Jacobins 2, 126, 128, 189 Lamerville, Jean-Marie Heurtault de 52, 55, 65, 66, 73n.66 Lameth, Alexandre Theodore Victor de 170, 180 Lapparent, Charles Cochon de 115 Laurencin, Jean-Baptiste-Esperance, comte de 77, 95 Laverdy, Clement Charles Francois de 19, 150 Les Sables-d’Olonne 109, 121, 123, 127 Le Trosne, Guillaume Francois 7, 15, 25, 42, 51, 141, 156, 162, 187 De L’Administration provinciale et de la réforme de l’impôt 21–2

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Lézardière, baron Louis-Jacques-Gilbert Robert de 123, 124 Limousin 31, 34 Loménie de Brienne, Étienne Charles de 31, 161, 165 Lorraine (capital Nancy) 31, 78, 146–7, 152, 168–9, 171–2 Louis XIV 2, 4, 16, 37, 108, 175, 186, 187 Louis XV 25, 52, 80, 115, 161 Louis XVI Assembly of Notables 26, 165 monarchical state 24, 26, 108 parlements 115, 161 provincial assemblies 3, 5, 9, 11, 22, 24, 49–51, 86, 142 reformist impulses 19, 42, 143 royal court 5, 25, 26, 27, 46n.40, 80, 142, 163, 170 royal domains 25, 53, 172, 188 state finances 17 Lubersac, M. l’abbé, vicaire général de 33, 39, 167, 180 Lyon 77, 84, 88, 92–6, 98, 113 academies 79, 83, 93 administration 78, 79, 82, 84, 87–9, 91, 93–4 bourgeois of 88–9, 91, 93 economy 75, 78, 79, 96, 98 octrois 76, 77, 81–2, 85, 93, 99 Marxist scholars 3–4 Menou, Jacques-François, baron de 175, 180 Mirabeau, Victor de Riqueti, marquis de 7, 15, 17, 19, 21, 156, 162, 171, 187 Mémoire sur l’utilité des Etats provinciaux 17 Montmorency-Laval, Mathieu Jean Felicité de Montmorency, duc de 168, 180 Montmorency-Luxembourg, Anne Charles Sigismond de 39, 109–10, 123–4, 130 National Assembly 65, 126, 129 abolishes commercial restrictions 99 abolishes feudalism 7, 96, 106, 160n.53, 163, 179–80, 191 abolishes venality of office 139, 155–7, 191

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220 INDEX National Assembly (cont.) and contingent circumstances 9 creation of 39, 84, 124, 126, 163, 179 Necker, Jacques 24, 65, 83, 88, 105, 126, 152–3, 170 case for provincial assemblies 14, 20, 49–51, 60, 140–1, 153, 156, 161, 171, 191 management of provincial assemblies 21–2, 26, 38, 50, 61, 142, 164, 169–70 and royal court 21, 26, 58, 62, 64, 70, 142, 164, 169 Night of August 4, 1789, see National Assembly abolishes feudalism Niort 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 128, 130 Noailles, Louis Marc Antoine de 168, 180 Normandy 19, 38, 40, 108, 145, 152, 182n.30 Orléanais 21, 23, 24, 36, 38, 39, 41–3, 166–7 Orléans, Louis Philippe II, duc d’ 25, 36–8, 42, 79, 91, 96, 144 Ormesson, Henri Lefèvre d’ 19, 24, 26, 30, 32, 118–19 Osmond, René-Eustache, marquis d’ 80–1, 84, 101n.16 Paris 17, 23, 33, 60, 80–1, 84, 108, 115, 130, 148, 188 parlementaires 4, 115, 117, 140–1, 143, 145, 156, 163, 166, 178 Parlement of Besancon 36, 143–4, 146 Parlement of Bordeaux 24, 36, 143, 145 Parlement of Grenoble 37, 38, 39, 82, 94, 144, 146, 169, 175–6 Parlement of Paris 26, 64, 95, 97, 113, 131 and feudalism 51 jurisdiction 60, 131, 142, 188, 191 and monarchy 16, 30, 93, 105, 115, 117, 142–3, 190 registration of edicts 25, 28, 30, 36, 143, 170 remonstrances 141 rulings 56, 170 Parlement of Rouen 143–5, 153, 156

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parlements 146, 188 jurisdiction 114, 144, 157 and monarchy 20, 28, 30, 41, 143, 161, 163, 179 and provincial assemblies 177, 188, 191 registration of edicts 38, 117, 144, 152 remonstrances 156 and seigneurial rights 144, 164 Parthenay 109, 124, 126 patronage 10, 25, 30, 76, 79, 138–40, 155–7, 185–6, 188 pays d’état (Brittany, Burgundy, Languedoc) 6, 25, 52, 105, 108 Penthièvre, Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, duc de 173 Pérusse, Louis Nicolas d’Escars marquis de 109, 110, 112 physiocrats 4, 19, 21, 42, 55, 81, 129, 142, 187–9 Poitiers, 112–13, 115–7, 121–8, 131, 189 Polignac, Jules duc de 25–6, 42, 68 présidial courts 114, 115, 116, 122, 123, 189 Renouvin, Pierre 5, 49, 188 Richeprey, Jean-Francois-Henry de 142, 164, 188 Roanne 77, 83, 87, 89, 96 Rochefoucauld, duc de la 167, 171, 180 Rouen 144, 145, 148, 152, 156 royal corvée (forced labor) on the roads abolition in Berry 57–8, 64, 69 Lyonnais 91 and grievances of the Third Estate 58, 190 and privileged orders 37–8, 57, 70 and provincial assemblies 64, 105, 171 reformers’ plans to abolish 6, 91, 115, 163, 178 and venal office holders 139, 146–8 and village politics 59 Saige, Guillaume-Joseph 145 Catechism of the Citizen 145 Saint-Amand-Montrond 56, 61–2, 67 Saint-Aulaire, Beaupoil de (bishop of Poitiers) 112, 125 Saint-Etienne 75, 77–8, 80–1, 84, 85, 88, 96–7

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INDEX 221 Saint-Germain-Laval 83, 89–90, 92 Saint-Maixent 109, 110, 115, 120, 121, 127 seneschal courts 34, 41, 93, 105, 112, 114, 115, 128 Seven Years’ War (1756–63) 19, 187 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph 39, 67, 126 Soissonnais 24, 37, 40, 148, 167–8, 174–5 taille (direct tax on commoners) 16, 22–3, 37–8, 147–8, 150–3 Berry 52, 57–62, 64, 72 Lyonnais 77–8, 89, 91 Poitou 116, 118–20 Talleyrand-Perigord, Alexandre-Angelique de 166, 180 Tocqueville, Alexis de 1–3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 22, 64, 162, 185–6, 189 Touraine 31, 147–8, 153, 175

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Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 4, 19, 21, 24, 26, 30, 161, 165, 178, 187 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, comte de 26–7, 45–6n.40 Véri, Joseph Alphonse de 49, 51, 57, 60, 64, 65 Villeroy, Neufville de (noble dynasty) 79, 82, 189 vingtièmes (universal tax on nobles and commoners) 16, 20, 23–4, 26, 35–7, 39, 43, 190 Berry 57, 62–3, 68, 70, 72n.25 Lyonnais 82, 91–2, 94, 96 Poitou 118–21, 131 Virieu, Francois Henri comte de 175–6, 180 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) 17, 187 War of the Vendée 10, 107, 114, 125, 129–31

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