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and a host of financiers and minor administrators.
    It is only to be expected that we should be able to attribute to the
    long personal reign of the former king especially important refinements in
    the structure and methods of absolutism – refinements that scholars have
    generally been able to correlate with international events. For example,
    though experts may still differ on precisely when prerogatives accu-
    mulated in the hands of the intendants, they agree in associating that
    process closely with France’s growing involvement in war.51 They see
    similar forces at work behind the rise to power of “fiscal functionaries” at
    Versailles. In general, Michel Antoine has written, each of the Sun King’s
    wars “demanded . . . greater and greater resources, and the last one, that of
    the Spanish Succession, called for a genuine policy of national emergency.”
    This ensured that “fiscal-administrative governance, and therefore statism
    in general” would emerge “in a chronology patterned after the chronology
    of warfare.”52
    Under Louis XV, the growing significance of the controller-general
    of finance witnessed to the increasingly symbiotic relationship between
    50 See Pierre Goubert, L’Ancien Régime , 2 vols. (Paris: A. Colin, 1969–73); and Michel Antoine, Le Conseil du Roi sous le règne de Louis XV (Geneva: Droz, 1970).
    51 See, for example, J. Russell Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 668; and Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin , pp. 282–83 and 131–32.
    52 Antoine, Conseil du Roi , pp. 76–77, 631.
    The ancien régime
    33
    war and absolutism. Indeed, Antoine has noted, “the War of the Austrian
    Succession and the Seven Years’ War . . . [brought] to its apogee the pre-
    ponderant authority of the bureau of the controller-general of finance.”53
    It need hardly be added that this tendency continued right into the reign
    of Louis XVI, whose finance ministers, from Jacques Necker on, wrestling
    with the budgetary consequences of renewed war against Britain, would
    increasingly hold the fate of the regime in their hands.
    There was, of course, a dampening message in all of this for royalty.
    In France, as in the other powers competing for security and prestige
    in eighteenth-century Europe, the purportedly “absolute” monarch was
    coming to play second fiddle to those impersonal administrative proce-
    dures that alone afforded him the money, men, and matériel required to
    support military campaigns. As Frederick the Great might have put it,
    the French king was becoming little more than the “first servant of the
    State.” He must, in a real procedural sense, defer to his controller-general
    at Versailles, to his intendants and their subdelegates and all collectors and
    dispensers of royal moneys in the field, and to the innumerable, faceless
    administrators who assisted these agents of the crown at all levels. Even if
    we can agree that royal government in the final century of the old regime
    was at best “quasi-bureaucratic,” that is, not yet fully bureaucratic in the
    modern sense, we are no less struck by the increasingly depersonalized
    nature of that government.54
    However, if their waging of war on an unprecedented scale led the
    Bourbons to implement a certain kind of “administrative” absolutism, it
    also brought them up against the limits of that absolutism. Part of the prob-
    lem, of course, was that the existence of privileged corps – craft guilds,
    syndicates of financiers, even peasant villages – under the panoply of abso-
    lutism made for networks of special interests that could deprive the crown
    of badly needed revenue in the long run. Plainly, the diversion of capital
    from agriculture, industry, and commerce to offices in guilds and high
    finance, and the economic conservatism of most peasants, only inhibited
    (taxable) economic development; at the same time,