EUROPEAN UNION WORLD

The Old Regime in France

Europe in the eighteenth century was composed almost entirely of absolute monarchies, countries run by a king or queen who inherited his or her position and would pass the crown to the eldest son or daughter.

These monarchs knew few restraints on their power and claimed to rule on the basis of divine right as God’s agents on earth. England was somewhat of an exception to this rule, as the Glorious Revolution of 1688concluded a long struggle between Parliament and the Stuart kings and essentially replaced the absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy, in which laws limited the monarch’s powers.1 In most of the rest of Europe, throughout the majority of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the powers of the European monarchs actually increased as powerful monarchs gradually broke the power of feudal lords, centralized power, and created unified, more modern states.

In France, Louis XIV spent much of his reign strengthening the power of the monarchy and centralizing political authority in Paris or, more accurately, at his magnificent palace built at Versailles, ten miles south of Paris. Versailles was meant both to reflect the grandeur of Louis-the Sun King-and to facilitate his centralizing policy. In the past, the kings of France and their royal courts had traveled widely in the kingdom, visiting the royal domains and the provincial chateaus of powerful nobles.

Louis XIV ruled from Versailles, and those nobles who sought royal favor had to live at Versailles for much of the year. Versailles, then, became the symbol both of the power of the king and of France itself. The influence and significance of this was not lost on other European monarchs: Russian tsar Peter the Great and Prussian king Frederick the Great both built palaces modeled on Versailles.

Old regime France-the term old regime, or ancien régime, was introduced by the revolutionaries of 1789-was based on a rigid social hierarchy in which one’s place in society was determined largely by birth, not by hard work or talent. The organization of society was explained by the Great Chain of Being, a concept prevalent since medieval times, which held that the entire world was organized hierarchically, from God and the angels at the top to inanimate objects, such as rocks, at the bottom, with human beings existing somewhere in between. At the top of the human chain stood the king, God’s divine representative, expressed vividly in this 1766 proclamation of Louis XV (r. 1715–1774): “Sovereign power resides in my person alone. . . . It is from me alone that my policies take their existence and their authority; . . . it is to me alone that legislative power belongs, without dependence or division; . . . all public order emanates from me.”2 Louis XV’s great-grandfather, the Sun King, put it a little more simply when he proclaimed, L’état c’est moi (I am the state).

Beneath the king, the rest of French society was organized into three classes, or estates, each with a distinct social responsibility, and each hierarchically organized. The First Estate, the clergy, enjoyed their high status by virtue of their spiritual function and proximity to God, although the clergy comprised less than 1 percent of the population.

The Second Estate, the nobility or aristocracy, provided military support for the king and constituted between 1 and 2 percent of the population. The nobility was actually quite a varied group. The wealthiest and most powerful nobles, numbering only a few hundred families and known as Les Grands, owned large landholdings and elegant chateaus and exercised considerable political influence as councilors of state and local judges. More numerous and less exalted were the provincial nobles, seigneurs, who owned estates, often with many peasants working their lands under various arrangements.

There were also nobles who had few possessions and lived in genteel poverty, holding their titles and very little else. The Third Estate, the remaining 97 percent of the population, comprised everyone else and was responsible for the production of goods and provision of services. France, like all of Europe at the time, was overwhelmingly a rural society; the peasantry made up about 85 percent of the population and therefore the huge bulk of the Third Estate. Compared to other European countries, the French peasantry was relatively prosperous. Even so, fewer than 40 percent owned their own land. Most French peasants rented their land from landlords, either as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.

The old regime economy was, therefore, overwhelmingly rural and agricultural and dominated by subsistence farming, with peasants producing barely enough to meet their own needs; any surplus production was absorbed by rent, tithes, seigneurial dues (paid to the lord of the estate), and taxes. In the late eighteenth century, there was neither a national currency nor a uniform system of weights and measures, nor even a truly national market. A good network of royal highways existed, but it still took at least five days to travel by coach from Paris to Marseilles (about eight hours by car today).

Alongside this traditional agricultural sector, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, commercial trade was expanding, encouraged by royal policy. Since the seventeenth century, economic policy was guided by mercantilist theory, which held that the wealth of a nation could   best be enhanced by the accumulation of precious metals like silver and gold. Countries that did not have native deposits of such metals, like France, had to rely on trade to acquire them. The monarchy encouraged the development of manufacturing industries to provide goods for the international market, and France developed an international reputation for producing luxury goods such as silk, satin, lace, perfumes, and tapestries.

The development of manufacturing and trade led to the growth of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, or the middle class, and to the proliferation of many small merchants and shopkeepers, called the petite bourgeoisie. Near the end of the eighteenth century, the theory of mercantilism, with its emphasis on precious metals and government regulation, came under challenge both by alternative economic theories, such as Adam Smith’s theory of a free market economy (see below), and by the bourgeoisie themselves.

Old regime France was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and Catholicism played an important role in the country, both as a religion and as an institution. Religion was pervasive in daily life, and religious services and celebrations were the most important events in most towns and villages.

Those who attended school were taught by priests, and those without work depended on the church for charity. The church was also a powerful institution politically and was closely intertwined with the monarchy. French kings, as divine monarchs, were crowned in the cathedral at Reims, and the king appointed all bishops and other high officials of the church. The church owned extensive property, perhaps 10 percent of all the land in France, and the incomes from these properties were enormous, sometimes equal to half the annual income of the royal government.

This structure of state and society, described here for France, was similar to that of other European countries in the eighteenth century. Christian monarchs claiming divine right governed all of the major powers (the most important and powerful were France, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and England), which were characterized by a feudal or semi feudal and mercantilist economic system and a rigidly hierarchical social structure.

The royal families of the European capitals, united by common bonds of religion, culture, and blood, were intent on preserving the old order and their positions in it. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, European monarchies had consciously pursued a policy of the balance of power, a system of shifting international alliances that prevented any one country from becoming too powerful. Wars were fought not so much for ideology or nationalism but to maintain the balance of power; consequently, these conflicts were relatively restrained. The victor did not want to crush the vanquished, as this would upset the balance; in any case, the defeated state might be a future ally.

This whole system, both domestic and international, was seriously challenged at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, first by the ideas of the Enlightenment, then by the forces of the French Revolution of 1789, and later by the Industrial Revolution and the emergent power of the new middle class. Monarchy, Christianity, the church, hierarchy, and mercantilism would all be threatened with extinction at the turn of the nineteenth century. By 1815, order would be restored, but only temporarily.