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

financiers battening
    upon the crown’s fiscal operations had compelling reasons to oppose re-
    forms in the royal fiscal administration.55 But what ultimately underlay the
    53 Ibid., p. 631.
    54 Vivian R. Gruder, The Royal Provincial Intendants: A Governing Elite in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 208.
    55 On these points, see, among many sources, the articles by Gail Bossenga, Liana Vardi, and Cissie Fairchilds in French Historical Studies 15 (1988): 688ff.; Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Julian Dent, Crisis in Finance: Crown, Financiers and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), pp. 234–35; and Bosher, French Finances , passim.
    34
    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    crown’s fiscal difficulties (at least among domestic factors) was its lack of accountability, and this stemmed from the kings’ decision to rule in nonrepresentative fashion. “Without a representative body,” one specialist has
    observed, “French kings had the greatest difficulty in gathering support for
    their policies throughout the realm. In a sense the administrative apparatus
    that came slowly into being filled the vacuum which existed. But it was
    never a complete substitute.”56
    That, in fact, “it was never a complete substitute” was something the
    absolutists ruling France would themselves be forced to concede as their
    involvement in foreign affairs deepened. When, for instance, Louis XIV
    faced the prospect of defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, he thought
    of seeking national support for his embattled government by addressing
    something like an Estates General. “I come to you,” he said in a speech
    apparently drafted for such an event, “in order to ask your counsel and
    your aid in this meeting, which will assure our salvation. By our united
    efforts our enemies will know that we are not in the state they wish to
    have believed, and we can by means of the indispensable aid I ask of you
    oblige them to make a peace . . . honorable for us. . . .”57 At some point, this
    radical gesture, envisaged so incongruously by the exemplar of divine-right
    absolutism, was abandoned. Yet Louis still found it necessary to issue two
    extraordinary appeals for national support in the form of public letters,
    one to the French bishops and the other to the provincial governors. It
    is, moreover, telling that during subsequent peace talks the Sun King’s
    negotiators were morbidly sensitive to allied propaganda concerning the
    Estates General. Such touchiness, it now seems, reflected the crown’s fear
    that military defeat or a dictated peace could entail the destruction of
    Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy.58
    In the event, France and its enemies were able to achieve peace at
    Utrecht and Rastadt; and absolutism in France survived to fight another
    day. But a generation later, French ministers scouring the country for
    new sources of revenue with which to finance renewed warfare could
    not avoid reviving old constitutional questions, thus conjuring up once
    again the specter of the Estates General. They did so in part by levying
    a new tax called the vingtième on noble as well as common landowners.
    Lords who in many cases had already been helping impoverished peasant
    tenants pay their own “ignoble” tax (the so-called taille ) would in future
    have to pay taxation assessed at 5 percent on their own lands. This turn
    56 David Parker, The Making of French Absolutism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 146.
    57 Cited in Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV. Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 211–13.
    58 Ibid., 267. See also, on this subject, Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: