If the monarchical state found it necessary to suppress the principalities, the reason lay in its claim to a monopoly of public power in matters of defence, justice, finance and spiritual authority. Can it be said to have realised that claim?
Monopoly of the armed forces
Fundamental to the new institutions was the distinction between the ordinary, war-time provision, the professional army, and the extraordinary provision, which relied chiefly on service by the nobility. In 1461 the professional army consisted essentially of the royal guard, French and Scots, and the compagnies desgens d’armes de l’ordonnance, that is 7,000 heavy cavalry, gentlemen for the most part, permanently maintained at the king’s expense. It also included artillery, although its four companies were to be organised in the reign of Louis XI. The Achilles heel of this mobile emergency force, usually stationed on the frontiers, was the infantry. The reserve force of the francs-archers, mobilisedin case of need, proved so unsatisfactory over the years that, in 1480, the king decided to replace it with a permanentbodyof 14,000 men, a most costly experiment which Louis’s successors abandoned in favour of a levy of volunteers (aventuriers) and of Swiss mercenaries, employed as the need arose. In spite of the plan drawn up by Marshal de Gie in 1504, the infantry remained in the ‘extraordinary’ category.
The infantry was also responsible for the defence of the country’s territory, but not for that of royal castles, maintained by old retainers (mortes payes). The fortifications and defences of the bonnes villes were left entirely in the hands of their inhabitants; the levy of nobles, in the form of the arriere ban, was frequently used, but could provide no more than a meagre territorial reserve of poorly equipped horsemen.
Only the king possessed an effective military force since, in theory, princes were not allowed to levy men. For all that, private wars did not die out: witness the conflict waged in the Midi from 1483 to 1512 by the two branches of the house of Foix. As for the aventuriers, they became completely uncontrollable between campaigns, and posed a constant threat to law and order, particularly about 1520. Command of the compagnies d’ordonnance themselves was distributed as a favour to chosen members of the aristocracy; the men remained in the service of their captains, who were in sole charge of recruitment. In short, the royal monopoly in matters of the use of force was still very precarious. None the less, the professional army was relatively inexpensive. Apart from the period 1472 to 1483, when Louis XI forced an extravagant arms race on his Burgundian and Breton enemies, the army was only one and a half times greater in 1520 than it had been at the death of Charles VII (1461), although the resources of the kingdom had more than doubled in the meantime.
The king as dispenser of justice
The bedrock of the state, however, was not military might but the upholding of justice by which ‘kings rule, while kingdoms, principalities and monarchies are maintained’ (‘les roys regnent, les royaumes, principautes et monarchies sont entretenues’). This prime attribute promoted the comparison between the king and Christ as the ‘sun of justice’, a device which became part of royal iconography in the time of Charles VIII. This was justice which the king was expected to dispense himself through his council, under the leadership of the chancellor. Such was the importance attributed to it that, in 1497, the grand conseilwas detached to become a genuine, specialised court of justice. Whether justice was dispensed by the king in person or, as was more usual, through delegation, it was important that it should be well administered, based as it was on laws that were constant and readily understood. Hence the decision was taken in 1454 to draw up and record all local customs, a long and exacting labour which came to fruition only in the period 1506—15. At the same time there was an increase in the number of grandes ordonnances aimed at the reform of justice (ten were issued between 1490 and 1539), while the reign of Louis XII saw the first printed collections of ordonnances, forerunners of a codification of French law.
None the less, the king did not possess a judicial monopoly, and in no way aspired to one. Clergy remained answerable to their own courts; they were not put on trial, not even for treason, as the cases concerning Cardinal Jean Balue (1469) and Georges d’Amboise (1487) were to show. In the vast majority of cases trials were conducted by seignorial judges who administered justice that was prompt and inexpensive, though it was not guaranteed in law. Exactly the opposite can be said of the royal courts in the bailliages and senechaussees. As courts of appeal, they received more and more cases of first instance. Their proliferation (there were some 323 in existence in 1515, excluding those in Provence and Brittany) demonstrates even better than the parlements the existence of a network of royal courts so tight-knit that no litigant would be more than a day’s walk away from one. It was in this manner that the king fulfilled his role as dispenser of justice.
The financial state
The royal fiscal system had been reconstructed after the recapture of Paris in 1436. It was still based on the fundamental distinction between the ordinary finances, the receipt from the domain which the sovereign received by right and without question, and the extraordinary revenues, otherwise known as taxation, whose collection relied upon compulsion by the state and, perforce, upon the consent of his subjects. There were thus two systems, each with its separate parallel administration; in both, the sanctioning of expenditure — guaranteed either by the treasurers of France or by the generaux des finances — functioned independently of collection and overall administration. However, the two systems were not of equal importance, since the ordinary finances amounted to scarcely more than 2 per cent of total state revenue, while extraordinary finances were obtained by direct taxation, the taille and (to the extent of a third) by indirect taxation such as the aides on the sale of articles and the gabelle raised on salt.
None now questioned the principle of taxation, even if regions with their own estates, such as Languedoc, reserved the right to discuss the amount to be raised, while the princes acknowledged the crown’s monopoly of its use. In 1512, for instance, Jean d’Albret, although king of Navarre, dared not levy, without authorisation, in his French possessions the subsidy intended for the reconquest of his lost kingdom. This right to tax without opposition was indeed the hallmark of the monarchical state’s absolute power. Even so, the royal financial system was a long way frombeing as coherent as is often alleged, a fact proved by the distinction maintained between ordinary and extraordinary finances. The fundamental concept behind the system was not as yet the idea of public contribution, but still that of a tax granted in return for the royal gift which had created the corresponding obligation. For the king, generosity was not a weakness but a virtue, after justice the most important for which he was esteemed. He was obliged to dispense grace and favour, either by giving alms, annuities and wages raised from his domain, or by paying out at his discretion many pensions, two-thirds of which went to persons of middle rank — the total, between 1460 and 1520, invariably accounting for 35 per cent of gross expenditure. The king was doing precisely the same when he distributed positions of command in the compagnies de gens d’armes or those responsibilities and offices which brought to their holders wages, pensions and special payments. In this sphere the introduction, in 1523, of venality through the sale of offices under the guise of loans was a way of securing a sensible financial return for this practice.
Traditionally, the king’s largesse called, in return, for service: service under arms from the nobles, fulfilment of their duties from office holders, prayers from the clergy. This was not true of the pauvrepeuple, who paid the taille, but received nothing; for them, the king’s gift was embodied in the rigorous discipline of the gens d’armes who, thanks to the enforced taxation of the poor, were regularly paid. From this tradition it followed that any other use made of extraordinary finances, especially the payment of pensions, was not generosity but wanton extravagance berated by moralists and theorists from Guillaume Bude to Claude de Seyssel. It was a moral rather than a political issue, to the extent that genuine fiscal reform, such as the merging of the ordinary and extraordinary revenues under the umbrella of the tresor de I’epargne in 1523, turned out to be almost ineffective in practice.
Hence, in spite of appearances, the system lacked true efficiency. In order to pay for the enormous military expenses of the last ten years of his reign, Louis XI had logically doubled the taxation of his father’s day, increasing it to a sum roughly corresponding to 140 tons of silver. The increase was deemed a breach of right rather than an excessive burden, with the result that the estates general enforced a return to the 1461 level. The state was still so flexible that it could withstand this halving of its livelihood without faltering. In real terms the levy of about 60 tons of pure silver was not to be surpassed before the 1520s. In other words, in this era of renewed prosperity the state was becoming relatively poorer. Meeting current expenses with difficulty, it was compelled, in order to finance the war, to resort either to borrowing or to depredation, in Italy, for example. To make ends meet, the generaux des finances were obliged to fall back upon financial stratagems and negotiate loans, taken out in their own names, from foreign bankers of Lyons. The first issue of annuities (rentes) in 1522 showed that there was at last a readiness to take the plunge and resort to public credit.
Throne and altar
One of the reasons for the continuation of old practices of this kind was that royal absolutism, if it ever existed, was above all ‘mystical’. The king was, indeed, ‘Most Christian’, an ancient form of words which entered diplomatic parlance from 1469 by way of Pope Pius II, and which no one turned to better account than did Louis XI. Consecration with the holy oil and the miracle-working power that flowed from the sacred ampulla (sainte ampoule) established kings as latter-day Davids. This sacred character, ostentatiously proclaimed by Louis in 1479 in his confrontation with the pope, was a royal monopoly, and the most important one of all. It is what gave the king the authority to set himself up as head of the Gallican Church, over which he exercised fully both his sovereign rights within the kingdom as well as his rights as God’s lieutenant. Here was the mainspring of Louis XI’s ecclesiastical policy after 1461 when, in a fit of temper, he abolished the Pragmatic Sanction. In its place was introduced the regime of the concordat, but one to which neither the wholeheartedly Gallican parlement nor the Holy See ever adapted satisfactorily. It was, however, to allow Louis and his successors to settle clerical affairs harmoniously with the pope on a case by case basis, as far as possible accommodating the interests of both parties, and taking into account, too, the pastoral needs of the day. The genuine concordat, that of 1516, merely formalised practices already well established.
The king had in his gift numerous benefices which he bestowed upon his favourites; this was another kind of largesse, and by no means the least important. Thus at the estates of 1484 mischievous tongues could vilify those whom they called Louis’s bishops. For his part, Louis XII used this kind of patronage to bestow favours on his Italian clients. All in all, between 1470 and 1520, 78 per cent of bishoprics were held by members of the king’s council or those connected to them. It is clear that the fusion of service of the Church and that of the secular state was increasing, not diminishing.
Having said that, it should not be imagined that the will of the king always succeeded in brushing aside local candidates (witness the difficult but successful election of Frangois d’Estaing to the see of Rodez in 1501—4), or that royal bishops, for example Louis d’Amboise in Albi or Etienne de Poncher in Paris, were unsatisfactory bishops. The assemblies of clergy convened by the king as a means of exerting diplomatic pressure on the Holy See proved most attentive towards reform of the Church in 1478 and 1479, above all in 1493, and again in 1510 and 1511, while the estates of 1484 were also much concerned with the matter. The Gallican Church performed its role as a moral guardian of the state more often than it may appear. Claude de Seyssel was not exaggerating when he wrote ‘Since he lives according to the law and the Christian religion, the king may not engage in tyranny. And if he should do so, every prelate or other religious of good character who has the advantage of the people at heart, has the right to remonstrate with him and reprimand him’ (‘Vivant le roi selon la loi et religion chretienne, ne peut faire choses tyranniques. Et s’il en fait quelqu’une, il est loisible a un chacun prelat ou autre religieux bien vivant, ayant bon estime envers le peuple, le lui remontrer et l’in-creperj. The restitution of Roussillon, ordered by the dying Louis XI and carried out by Charles VIII, or the protest raised by Jan Standonck against Louis XII’s divorce, are examples of this. The Church of France, however much under the sway of the Most Christian king, was far from being merely a cog in the wheels of state.
A decentralised state
‘Mystical’ absolutism thus found itself limited by its very nature; its secular form, too, incorporated many other restrictions. In spite of the theory long accepted by historians, the revitalised post-1450 monarchy cannot be perceived as a centralised state manned by a hierarchical body of officers dedicated to its service. On the contrary, the gradual elimination of the principalities and the centralisation of power in the person of the king enforced a decentralisation in geographical and institutional terms which respected the strength of provincial particularism.
The size of the kingdom, unequalled in western Christendom, enforced it, too. Even after the creation of the royal postal system by Louis XI, it still normally took four weeks to cross France from north to south or from east to west. This alone would have justified setting up, as happened between 1450 and 1520, the ten gouvernements entrusted to lieutenants generaux endowed with sweeping powers. The function of these important individuals was, above all, to take the place of the princes in regions in which it no longer seemed appropriate to establish apanages. Such governors, recruited, particularly after 1483, from among the king’s relations, helped to give the royal estate the appearance of a monarchy strongly tempered by aristocracy.
It is against this background, too, that the increase in the number of sovereign courts must be viewed. Even if it was impossible to split up decisionmaking bodies such as the conseil du roi, the chancellerie or the college of the generaux des finances, the same was not true of the administrative machinery. It was a way of stealing a march on Parisian supremacy and of upholding the prestige of provincial capitals in spite of the downfall of their princes. After 1450, parlements in Bordeaux, Grenoble, Dijon, Rouen and Aix-en-Provence joined those of Paris and Toulouse; cours des aides, like the one at Montpellier, were created in Rouen, Dijon and Grenoble, while Louis XII maintained a chambre des comptes at Blois. The regions thus singled out were precisely those whose provincial estates had retained their vitality.
Local autonomy, however, did not chiefly function at this exalted level, but rather on the smaller scale of the chatellenie, seat of rural power, or of the bonne ville, focal point of a small region six or seven leagues in radius, normally the seat of important financial and judicial authorities, a religious centre and a busy market place. A community with municipal institutions, that is a mayor and magistrates, the town enjoyed complete military autonomy, substantial financial resources, and a freedom of administration whose only restraint was the existence of urban lordships. The central authority, of which the town was the local instrument, was exercised by an elite body of public officers and officers of the law who stemmed from the local oligarchy; they wielded this power with an independence that was safeguarded by their wealth and the fixed tenure of their posts. From the same breeding ground came members of the new sovereign provincial courts and deputies, both to the provincial estates, which had in general been abandoned by churchmen and nobility, and to the various assemblies convened to draw up customs or to decide upon monetary and commercial questions. If, in 1515, 5,000 public officers were enough to administer the vast French kingdom, it was because state intervention in local affairs was reduced to a minimum. The renascent monarchy was in no sense a bureaucracy.
The strength of local autonomy, as much as the size of the kingdom, explains also the rarity of estates general. Since discussions normally took place within the separate regions, only the settling of exceptional affairs, such as the refusal to allow any dismemberment of the kingdom in 1468, the organisation of the pseudo-regency in 1484 and the marriage of Claude de France to Francis of Angouleme in 1506, required general meetings. It is probable that the aristocratic party, had it been successful, would not have been able either to modify this state of affairs or to transform the estates general into parliamentary assemblies along English lines.