In this lecture we will talk about how Louis's France was created.  So in this lecture we will talk as much or more about Louis's predecessors Henri IV, and the two Cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, who ruled France during Louis XIII's reign and the minority of Louis XIV.  This I hope will allow us to put Louis himself in a proper perspective.

To appreciate what was happening in France at this time we must distinguish between what was new and what was not.

The idea that monarchs have a special connection with God, a Divine Right to rule, was not new.  The idea that monarchs have a hereditary property right to the government of their kingdoms was not new.  Nor was the idea that no human power had the right to regulate or check up on the monarch new.  The greatness of the monarch and his estate -- or state --  was again an old idea.  All these ideas were exploited for the selfish purposes of monarchs and their henchmen, but they were also capable of
inspiring a sense of selfless purpose, usually in the same people who profited from the system.

In the 17th c. there was an important new idea associated with the old ones:  an appreciation of economic power.  In the past absolutist experiments had foundered on the inability of otherwise mighty monarchs to pay for their wars.    The comparison between majestic Spain, owner of half the world and bankrupt, and insignificant Holland, a country lacking natural resources of any kind yet increasingly wealthy, was provocative.  The Dutch example made centralizers into conscious economic modernizers.

The Dutch also exercised a different influence.   The Dutch, so successful in turning a sand spit into a world economic power, revived belief in the limitless potential of humanity.  In the 1620s and 30s, zealous strongmen, Richelieu in France, Buckingham and then Strafford in England, and Olivares in Spain were preaching the gospel of absolutism with renewed faith.  In two countries they failed, but in France luck and skill won the day.

They won out there through the conjunction of favorable circumstances.  It must be emphasized that the tools of central government are much the same in any time or place.  a loyal effective army and a loyal effective bureaucracy.  Building up the bureaucracy is perhaps the trickier problem, and I would like to discuss it for a moment, with reference to the French situation.

French kings had been trying to build up a strong loyal bureaucracy since at least the late 12th century.  Some of them succeeded for a while.  Maintaining such a corps was not easy.  For one thing, the holders of offices always tried to establish property rights to them.   If the king could have paid his officers decent salaries, he would have had better control over them.  But he never could. Officers were recompensed mainly with legal privileges, including exemptions from taxation, and the right to collect fees.  Once they got those rights, they held on with a death grip.

Long ago, in fact, kings had given up trying to hire and fire most of their officers.  They too began to treat offices as property, and sold them outright.  They also sold reversions to office -- in other words, the right to be next in line for a vacancy -- and the right to pass on offices to one's heirs.  Throughout our whole period, most officers of would-be absolute French kings were scarcely under the king's control.  They could only be removed for gross dereliction of duty, or by being bought out, which the kings never had the money to do.  Thus whether they actually implemented royal policies depended more on how those policies affected their own interests, and how likely the king would be able to check up on them, than on any other factor.

Venality of office, as this system is called, had its advantages. Those who purchased office from the king paid him money, while those who bought office from someone else paid the king a tax.   Then they recouped the money from lesser subjects.   So venality of office was indirect taxation, and it was tempting to sell new offices any time that money was short.  "One of the most wonderful privileges of the kings of France," said Desmarets,  a 17th century bureaucrat, "is that when the king creates an office, God, at that very instant, creates a fool to buy it."  [Maland 252] But the immovability of officers so created was a problem that any monarch or centralizing minister had to wrestle with constantly.

One way of dealing with the problem was to create new supervisory offices that outranked the old ones, and which were given to people who were particularly trusted by the monarch.  But these offices were liable to become property in their turn, and so institutions built to amplify the king's power became barriers to his exercise of it.  Thus, for example,the French district courts called  parlements had been created as instruments of the royal will, but by the 17th century they were called sovereign courts, and were the main guardians of regional autonomy.

This long discussion of venality of office shows how blunt and dull the instruments of absolutism were.   It took a great deal of energy even to control the governmental hierarchy.

A short chronological survey of efforts at centralization from Henry IV.

By 1598, France, sick of war, submitted to Henri's rule. His own character was a major asset.  Unlike the previous three kings,
Henri was a vigorous and personally attractive man.  His war record gave him some claim to be a hero, and he had cultivated the image of a swaggering Gascon soldier [Maland 143].  He also advertised himself as the king who wanted every subject to be able to afford a chicken in the pot. He was a very capable man.

Yet Henri's centralizing efforts were hampered by the necessity of buying of both Catholic Leaguers and Huguenots with special privileges.  The Huguenots in fact enjoyed what was almost a state within a state.  But his government made a little progress by the creation of new offices.  (Élus, deputies of provincial governors, who spied on them.)  The need for money was so pressing, however, that Henri instituted a tax on offices, the  paulette, [known after its inventor, Charles Paulet], which guaranteed the officer against dismissal and made his position hereditary. An immediate gain in royal power and revenue was bought at the expense of the future.

When Henri was assassinated in 1610, the heir, young Louis XIII, was only nine years old.   Central authority suffered until Armand de Richelieu, became a member of the royal council in 1624.

By background, Richelieu was only a minor noble, but from a family that controlled a bishopric  in the west of France.  Although he was not particularly religious, he took up the family position and used it to chip away at Huguenot privileges.  When the Estates General was summoned in 1614, he was elected as a deputy, and during an otherwise fruitless session managed to attract the attention of the Queen Regent.  Once in her service, he ingratiated himself with her son the King, too.  He won his Cardinal's hat reconciling one of their frequent quarrels.  When, in 1624, Marie got him on the royal council he abandoned her to become the king's first minister, and in some ways his master.

Richelieu's ideals at first were to gain a time of peace during which he could reduce the royal debt and reform the kingdom, making it more obedient to the king's will and his own.  He accomplished a great deal in his time, despite constant intrigue:  he created a navy, reformed the currency,  and attempted, but without success, to make taxation fairer and more lucrative.  Most important, he cut down on Huguenot privileges after an unsuccessful revolt, and likewise restricted the freedom of the
parlements.  Both developments would be taken much further by Louis XIV.

But though he was a strong reformer,  Richelieu was convinced that the reputation of the crown in foreign countries was an
important part of its power at home.  Indeed, even reform had success in war as its ultimate aim.  At the end of his life, Richelieu said that he had worked for the king "to ruin the Huguenot faction, humble the pride of the great nobles, reduce all his subjects to their proper duty and raise his name amongst foreign nations to the pinnacle where it ought to be."  [Maland 162]

So when Spain and the Emperor seemed to be doing too well in the Thirty Years' War, Richelieu did not hesitate to throw France into the conflict -- on the supposedly Protestant side.  For the last years of his life and Louis XIII's reign -- both men died in 1643 -- Richelieu had to abandon his reforming plans to direct the war.  This of course added significantly to the royal debt and stored up trouble for the future, but at least his campaigns were mostly successful.  France's reputation was
increased at the expense of Spain.

Because Louis XIV was a minor in 1643, Richelieu was succeeded by another Cardinal, Mazarin.  Mazarin was an Italian, a papal diplomat who had been an ally of Richelieu.  After Louis XIII's death he quickly won the confidence of the new regent, the old king's widow, Anne of Austria.  It is commonly thought that the two had a secret marriage.

Mazarin's abilities were immediately put to the test.  Important French nobles hated him as an effete foreigner, and war with Spain continued, although the treasury was empty.

Mazarin proved very adept at finding money.  He manipulated government bonds and sold lots of new offices, while withholding salaries from the established officers and cutting down on their powers.  He continued Richelieu's policy of using new super-officers, called  intendants, to control the administration.

By 1648, as the war dragged on, the officer class, the nobility, and the parlements were all fed up with him.  Mazarin's attempt to arrest members of the Paris Parlement who had tried to block a tax increase resulted in a riot which soon became the
revolt known as the Fronde.

The beginning of the Fronde is reminiscent of Charles I's attempt to arrest the 5 MPs, which had happened only six years earlier.  There is a rough similarity in the course of the two Civil Wars.  At the beginning, the Fronde was widely popular because the government had gored everybody's ox. But hostility to Mazarin and the ghost of Richelieu was not enough keep the
opposition together.

When the noble Frondeurs, a group known as the  Importants  or "VIPs," allied themselves with Spain, the officer class and the Parlement refused to go along with treason.  Already terrified by Parisian mobs, they defected to Mazarin.  Mazarin then secured his position in much the same way that Charles II restored his.  He left the kingdom until it became obvious that no one else could guarantee order.

Actually it was the young  king who ended the Fronde.  In 1652, after four years of civil war, the teenaged Louis XIV declared that he had reached his majority.  This pacified Paris, and soon Mazarin was called back to run the government, which he did until 1661.

We see that French absolutism was not a matter of superior techniques of government, but merely a matter of determined men using whatever expedients came to hand to increase the power of the court over the country.  Sometimes they won, sometimes they suffered setbacks.  Richelieu and Mazarin had not created a stable system.

But Louis XIV, for many years, did seem to have acheived stability.   Was this an illusion or reality?  In either case, how did he do it?

Louis XIV enjoyed some of the advantages of Henri IV and some unique to himself.  Like his grandfather, Louis came to power when the forces of particularism were in bad odor.  The king and his power were seen as the saviors of the nation.

 Also, Louis was capable.  When Mazarin died,  Louis made it his full time occupation to run the state, to the craft of being king.

Louis was fortunate in a way that Henri had not been.  He had deputies and ministers who had been trained under Richelieu and Mazarin, men who had learned their craft from masters, and were dedicated -- for selfish and unselfish reasons -- to the supremacy of the crown.

The accomplishments of Louis XIV's first thirty years (1661-91) of personal rule were not insignificant.  Businesslike ministers under the unquestioned leadership of the king were able to rebuild the fleet, and expand, discipline and standardize the army.

Colbert, Louis's financial genius, was able to increase revenues substantially.  He not only collected more taxes but supervised tax farmers so that they did not skim off the vast majority of the take.    Improvement in royal revenue can be seen in this table:
 

Year	Taxes levied from population	Kept by tax farmers	Revenue left to king
1661	85 million livres	53 million livres	32 million livres
1683	116 million livres	23 million livres	93 million livres

In 1683,  tax receipts were over 2 1/2 times higher than they had been twenty-two years earlier.  Added to this, Colbert figured out how to repudiate most of the royal debt [Maland 265-266].

 Colbert was a dedicated modernizer, investing royal money in new industries, in colonial expansion, and in the economic infrastructure.  One example of the latter will show the scope of his ambition.  He had built the Languedoc canal, linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic by a system that included one hundred locks and a 180 yard tunnel blasted through a
mountain with gunpowder, the first time such a thing had ever been done.

In the first years of Louis's rule, France undoubtedly prospered, and the king and his government with it.  Partly this was due to the hard work of the king and his ministers, and especially the imagination of Colbert. Also it was the first extensive period since 1559 that France had not been racked by civil and foreign wars.  France was naturally the largest and one of the most fertile countries in western Europe.  Now it had the opportunity to exploit its own resources.

The greatest triumph of Louis's early years was the creation of his court of Versailles.  Versailles was a small hunting villa outside of Paris that Louis decided to make into a shrine to his own royal power.  Vast resources were devoted to making it the most beautiful palace of its time. But the physical setting was only the beginning.  Louis's court, once occupied, became a ritual celebration of kingship.  The nobility of France, whom Louis had already excluded from most political offices, gathered at
Versailles in hopes of gaining a pension, a grant of property, any sign of royal favor.  While they waited, they were required to worship the king.Each person, according to his or her rank or acceptability, was invited to or excluded from taking some part in dressing the king, watching the king eat, witnessing the king worship, at Mass, the only being more important than himself.  Every minute that Louis did not put towards government, or to his few more or less normal diversions, was invested in this grand dance of power.

This  had precisely the hypnotic effect that it was intended to have.  Versailles convinced France that Louis and the state were indeed identical, that the glory of one was the good of the other.

This impression was amplified by the practical fact that Louis and his ministers systematically destroyed the power of any institution that had a claim to some autonomy -- provincial estates, the parlements, and even town governments were stripped of independence through bribery, pressure, and brutal intimidation.  Outside of France the effect was even stronger.  For a century or more after Versailles became Louis's headquarters (in 1682), every monarch in Europe knew exactly what model he
should emulate.  Everyone wanted to be a Sun King, a divinity on earth, around whom all his subjects perforce revolved.

It is important to acknowledge the real accomplishments of Louis XIV, not to minimize them.  The cultural and practical impact of his apparent success was enormous.   But it must also be pointed out that  in some ways all his efforts made real absolutism less possible.  He may have destroyed or tamed old, independent authorities of great prestige, such as the remaining provincial estates.  But the privileges of the immovable officers of state that his absolutist predecessors had created, and he added to, remained almost untouched.

Two examples may be cited.  Colbert, besides being an economic thinker of talent, was also a dedicated systematizer.  Between 1667 and 1685 he and his uncle  created new civil and criminal procedures and three codes of laws to govern commercial practices, maritime disputes, and the colonies.  All was intended to make France the best governed country in the world.  But the procedures and the laws were ignored by the magistrates who were supposed to enforce them.   Their passive resistance entirely frustrated Colbert's reforms.

Another small example helps make the same point.  Colbert thought good roads were important to national prosperity.  But he was unable to eliminate one barrier to their optimal use -- tolls.  Many landowners had the right to collect tolls in return for an old obligation to repair the roads.  They no longer had that obligation, but it proved politically impossible to deprive them of an old established financial right.   Indeed, Colbert, who was also responsible for government revenue, also found himself unable to
eliminate government tolls, which under the new system were counterproductive.

For all the great impression that Louis XIV made on his contemporaries and later generations, in setting expectations for
what government and monarchy could be like, he had not actually solved the problem of government, nor created a new and stable system.  Favorable circumstances and the dedication and talent of both himself and his chief ministers enabled him to exercise more power than any of his predecessors, and for a long period.  But even before he died, the dynamism went out of
his government, and reality set bounds to his limitless ambition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Max Beloff,  The Age of Absolutism 1660-1815  (London, 1954).
J.H. Elliot,  Richelieu and Olivares  (Cambridge, 1984).
J.H. Elliot, "Yet Another Crisis?" in  The European Crisis of the 1590s  ed.
  Peter Clark (London, 1985).
David Maland,  Europe in the Seventeenth Century  (London, 1966).

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.