Free Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective by BAILEY STONE

scholarship stressing the
    fiscal restraints placed upon France’s armies in the wars of the eighteenth
    century, much as it has come to dominate conclusions regarding the funding
    (or, more to the point, the habitual underfunding) of Louis XV’s navy.48 Just
    as its failure to concentrate adequately on the requirements of naval warfare
    hobbled France in its struggle against Britons so versed in maritime matters,
    so its failure to focus single-mindedly on the very different requirements
    of continental warfare inhibited France in its campaigns against a Prussian
    prince necessarily proficient in such warfare.
    So the eighteenth-century French, aspiring to glory on both land and sea,
    stumbled in both competitive theaters. They could not help but be dimin-
    ished in an international state system that was acquiring ever more global
    characteristics. And at the same time, in part because of their very effort to
    “keep up” with and master that outer world, those who were ruling France
    inadvertently sponsored – yet failed to “keep up” with – destabilizing
    changes at home.
    s o c i o p o l i t i c a l c h a n g e i n t h e o l d r e g i m e
    Long before French foreign policy assumed the “modern” attributes of
    global outreach, a political theorist named Louis Turquet de Mayerne
    had precociously invoked France’s need for an Estates General wielding
    real legislative powers and for a renovated social elite of industrious,
    meritorious citizens.49 His words have for us today an eerily prophetic
    ring. For, however much the warring rulers of the old regime might
    build up the apparatus of absolutism, they could not in the end help but
    undermine it both by provoking a debate over representative governance
    and by introducing a certain degree of change into the hierarchy of social
    orders.
    That successive Bourbon kings elected to rule without consulting their
    subjects in regularly convened representative bodies, opting instead to de-
    velop, in piecemeal fashion, institutions of absolutism, was no doubt a logi-
    cal reaction to the disorder of the sixteenth century’s “religious” civil wars,
    and to the political instability that seemed to attend every royal minority.
    48 Kennett, French Armies , pp. 138–39.
    49 For a discussion of this political theorist’s ideas, see Elizabeth Adams, “Seventeenth-Century Attitudes toward the French Estates General” (Ph.D. diss., University of
    West Virginia, 1976), pp. 170–87.
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    By the early eighteenth century the architects of absolutism apparently
    had their task well in hand.50 France was a land effectively ruled by the
    standards of the day. Power at the center lay in the hands of the sovereign
    and varying combinations of ministers, “secretaries of state” heading up
    operative governmental departments, “councillors of state,” and “masters
    of requests” transacting business and setting policy in the “committees”
    that were specific emanations for specific purposes of the king’s Council.
    Decisions hammered out at Versailles were then applied in provincial
    France by intendants “commissioned from the Council,” aided by their
    “subdelegates” and (in a somewhat uneasy collaboration) by military
    governors, provincial Estates, and municipal and village officeholders.
    As a general phenomenon, we may thus acknowledge, absolutism re-
    sponded first of all to historical developments within France. Yet, as the
    French state in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries both explored
    the possibilities and experienced some of the intrinsic limitations of
    absolutism, it did so increasingly as a result of its quest for security
    and preeminence in the larger European world.
    It is clear, to start with, that under Louis XIV and Louis XV a frequent
    resort to war that transcended immediate domestic considerations led
    to a concentration of authority and prestige in the hands of ministers,
    intendants,