READING: Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: Þe Regrouping of þe French Aristocracy After Louis XIV

Usually we talk about þe transformation of an aristocracy into a bourgeoisie, but how about þe transformation of a bourgeoisie into an aristocracy?

Looking for historical analogies to modern China and the ruling class that is the Chinese Communist Party, I am. As Daniel Davies says:

Dan Davies: the valve amplifier of history: ‘Learning the lessons of history could itself be an excellent way of knuckling down and solving your own problems. The trick here is to realise that “recognising that an analogy is no good” is a relatively quick cognitive operation. Any kind of problem solving is based on making mental models of the problem; abstracting some of the detail while hoping that you’re capturing enough of the causal structure so that if you solve the problem “in the model” the same solution will work in real life.  Usually, disanalogies are quick to spot; if there’s a good reason why the mental model won’t translate, it tends to be glaring.

Creating a mental model from scratch is a very expensive cognitive operation, though. So, if you have a supply of previously existing mental models, it might be a very good strategy to just start going through them one by one, effectively running your thumb through the book going “nope, nope, nope, maybe … nope, nope, nope … nah, doesn’t work … maybe … nope, nope … hang on this might work”.  Rather than taking on the expensive task of making a model that you’re certain will work because you’ve constructed that way, you’re making multiple cheap attempts.

But where might you get a large supply of ready made mental models to go through in this way?  Yes, obviously, you’re way ahead, nice one readers…

And so in my search I have come back to the absolutely brilliant Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy After Louis XIV.

But who can I talk to about this? I am not going to be able to persuade Noah Smith to read it. And who is there outside France who (a) has read this, (b) thinks that this is the best case study of a very important general process, and (c) is still alive for me to talk to? And who inside France would ever have deigned to read a history of their 1700s written by a corn-fed WASP guy born in Waukegan, Illinois?

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Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy After Louis XIV:

<https://archive.org/details/robesword0000fran/mode/1up?view=theater&q=mid-eighteenth>

THERE Is A PASSAGE in La Bruyére which expresses as concisely as any I know the familiar historical impression of the French nobility under Louis XIV: “A nobleman, if he lives at home in his province, lives free but without substance; if he lives at court, he is taken care of, but enslaved.”! There, in miniature, is the picture of a class of subjects reduced to indigence by economic developments beyond their powers of adaptation or broken to sycophancy by the cardinal and the king who had dominated the Grand Siècle.

But consider the same class a century later, in the 1780’s. It had ruined Maupeou and Turgot, reconquered every bishopric in the realm," imposed the rule of four quarterings of nobility for high army appointments, and forced the monarchy into a cowed, ultimately fatal solicitude for privileged interests. To Arthur Young, it is true, even this later nobility seemed ineffectual; and theorists such as Pareto and Sorel have sneered at the humanitarian anemia which had sapped its capacity for violence in its own defense.’ Nevertheless, the French aristocracy, if it did not have the strength to suppress revolution, had at least recovered enough strength to make revolution inevitable.

The present study thus originated with the posing of a problem, that of the “dynamics of obstruction.” It is clearly not enough to say that a revolutionary situation takes shape when the Left produces the power and determination to do something, while the Right refuses to do anything. The difference between an explosive volcano and a harmlessly bubbling crater lies partly in the hardening of the former’s crust. Had the French aristocracy before 1789 been a ruling group too weak to block even gradual reform, there would have been no such revolution as in fact occurred. But we are still faced with the discrepancy between a noble class groveling before Louis XIV and the same class intimidating Louis XVI. Just what were the mechanics of the oft-cited “feudal reaction” of the eighteenth century, what was its chronological staging, and in what sense can it be said to have been feudal?

The answers to questions such as these are not to be found in even the closest study of the immediate background of the Revolution. They belong to the history of the ancien régime itself, viewed not as a mere prelude but as a period having its own internal suspense. Whoever immerses himself in the public records, the family papers, the memoirs and correspondence of the last hundred years of the old monarchy cannot fail to share some of that suspense, even as he finds his initial curiosity increasingly focussed on what he begins to discern as the critical issues and periods of years.

In examining the general resurgence of the French nobility, I have been steadily forced toward primary concentration on the magistracy of the sovereign courts, the high noblesse de robe, as the crucial element. Similarly, it soon became clear that the decisive stage in the aristocratic regrouping lay in the period between 1715 and the middle of the eighteenth century, and that during subsequent decades privileged groups tended rather to exploit their reestablished power than to form new alignments. For reasons which will be discussed in the opening chapter, 1715 represents an obvious starting point.

The choice of a terminal date is admittedly more difficult. There is, however, some value in having a specific year to place beside that of Louis XIV’s death as a boundary marker for the study as a whole; and 1748, which saw the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the appearance of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, seems to me the strongest candidate. After Aix-la-Chapelle the nobility, especially the nobility of the robe, for the first time revealed the full extent of its obstructive political power, based on less apparent developments of the preceding decades. Simultaneously the former Bordeaux président à mortierpublished the greatest single statement of the aristocratic position, as it had grown out of social fusion and intellectual cross-insemination between parlementary and feudal groups. Thereafter, at both the political and intellectual levels, historical interest inevitably shifts to other forces—the monarchy and the Third Estate—which still offered alternative possibilities of behavior and expression….

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ON THE MORNING of Sunday, September 1, 1715, in a fetid room at Versailles, the longest reign in modern history came to an end. Within the hour, couriers were pounding over the dusty road to Paris, while behind them in the great palace the halls and reception rooms began to fill with courtiers, brought scurrying from their cramped but precious sleeping quarters by the whispered words of serving men. From Versailles to the capital and thence out across the provinces and the rest of Europe, even to the scattered colonies across the seas, the news spread as swiftly as hoof and sail could carry it. The king was dead…

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The feudal reaction in eighteenth-century France took the form of a resurgence of power to obstruct the crown—until the very moment when the explosion came from below, the nobility’s face was to be turned suspiciously upward toward the king. To explain this resurgence I have had to call attention to a definite regrouping of politically significant elements at court, in the church, and in the army, around the high nobility of the robe. It follows from this interpretation that the term ’“’feudal” is best employed in this connection to indicate not that the original feudal class regenerated itself from within, but that an infinitely more potent group had become in fact a new feudality, which under Louis XV lent its strength to the old. This process was well under way, though obscured, even before 1715, became apparent at the surface of political events in the first years after Louis XIV’s death, and was essentially complete by the time Montesquieu published his Spirit of the Laws in 1748….

Just what factors have emerged as the essential agents underlying these dynamics? First was the fluid situation arising out of the end of a long, personalized reign and the accession of a five-year-old child. An important element in this situation was the confusion bequeathed by a king who had stripped the nobility of political power during his lifetime but had not destroyed its ability to rebound after his death. From this in turn followed the need to examine the legal boundaries of a noble order composed of almost two hundred thousand soldiers, churchmen, magistrates, municipal officers, and country gentlemen; and to take note of the variations in wealth, prestige, and influence which further subdivided that class. In order to be prepared for the subsequent progress of events, it was necessary to pause for an institutional analysis of the thirty-one sovereign courts whose officers made up the high noblesse de robe, then concentrate for the space of a chapter on the special legal and social position of the superior magistracy within a nobility of which it constituted scarcely more than one percent. The age-old line between robe and sword proved to be still sharp in 1715.

But the sovereign court officers possessed attributes destined to give them a place of honor within the Second Estate. Associated in the public mind with Jansenist Gallicanism, with opposition to new taxes, and with the defense of regional privileges, they added a growing body of popular support to their newly recovered weapon: the right to remonstrate while delaying the registration of new laws. They owned their public offices outright. They belonged to families many of which had by this time been noble for several generations….

Thus, in place of the seventeenth century’s characteristic triangle of tension–the crown, the sword, and the still half-bourgeois robe– there had now appeared a triangle composed of the crown, the middle class reformers, and the noble defenders of existing privileges based on birth and office. The last-mentioned group, speaking through published tracts, through the resolutions of the First and Second Estates in provincial assemblies, through the pastoral letters of bishops and the whispered suggestions of great courtiers, above all, through the remonstrances of the sovereign courts, showed a solidarity which seems to me more important for subsequent history than was the residue of old differences. Not even the Fronde offered a precedent for what was happening under Louis XV; for in 1650 the high robe had still been a narrow professional fraternity with aims distinct from those of the feudal class. Now it emerged as the self-conscious, recognized standard bearer of a nobility which without its institutional strength would have lapsed into atomized, voiceless impotence…. 

The noblesse de robe sprang from the bourgeoisie and never wholly lost its stake in the capitalist development; but over the last century of its existence it identified itself increasingly with the landed aristocracy, so that in the end it was leading the battle of the declining class against the forces of national monarchy and capitalist liberalism…. The process of its transformation in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries involved prestige values which did not correspond at all to its economic interests….

What this study has described is the case of a group which in the course of a marked rise in status not only shifted its own economic base, but also abandoned many of the characteristic features of its previous way of life, adopted others from the aristocracy it was invading, and bequeathed its originally bourgeois values to strata of French society which it now considered beneath it. If the argument should be concentrated on strictly intellectual manifestations, if I were to be called upon to compare feudal and parlementary influences on Montesquieu, I should have no hesitation in saying that the former were infinitely the more important for his synthetic formulation. 

But no such choice is forced upon us, any more than it was forced upon Montesquieu. By the time he wrote, the sovereign courts were pouring scorn upon financiers, defying the royal reformers, and defending the seigneurial rights and fiscal exemptions of the noblesse in general. Landed prestige, military connections, pride in family had come to dominate the political outlook of men whose ancestors had helped Henry of Navarre bring order out of anarchy. In the very process of conquering the feudal nobility, the robe had succumbed to the standards of the older status group….

By the mid-eighteenth century the government was faced with a situation in which high robe power had become the crux of the aristocratic problem. On the crown’s response to this challenge would ultimately depend not only the settlement of the question of privilege but its own fate as well. History had a solution to recommend. The age-old technique of the Capetian house when defied by an entrenched class of officials had been to transfer the original delegation of authority to a new and more dependent stratum. 

But this time there was lacking the firmness which had neutralized provosts in the twelfth century, bailiffs and senechals in the thirteenth, and lordly governors general in the seventeenth. As late as 1771, when Chancellor Maupeou announced the suppression of the parlements and the substitution of appointive judicial boards, it appeared for a moment that the old expedient was being successfully re-applied. Just three years later, however, the new King Louis XVI inaugurated his series of surrenders by reinstating the magistrates. Their return was greeted by joyous public demonstrations; and to many historians of the sovereign courts that fact has sufficed to make the events of 1774 appear as a popular victory over despotism. 

But the freedom which had conquered was the freedom of the medieval nobleman, clutching his special bundle of prerogatives, crying “Liberty” and meaning only ’’mon droit." It was to this doomed conception that the crown was henceforth hopelessly committed.