The Problem with Necker’s Compte Rendu au roi (1781)

Despite its iconic status, Necker's Compte-rendu au roi is one of the most debated but least understood historical documents of the Ancien Regime. This chapter challenges the assumption that the Compte-rendu was the first of its kind to be published and shows how it fitted within an established administrative tradition. It also rejects the classic interpretation according to which publication of the Compte-rendu was part of Necker's attempt at deceiving the public and justifying his popular but unsustainable policy of funding the American war without taxes. It is shown that the Compte-rendu's main objective, which drew heavily on the British fiscal system described by Necker as best practice, was to justify the necessity of additional fiscal resources — and fiscal transparency — for raising new loans to pay for the war. Rejection by Louis XVI of tax increase for fear of parlementaire opposition partly explains Necker's resignation.

From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’

The absolute monarchy was a personal monarchy and during the reign of Louis XIV, the king established a tradition that the king should act as his ‘own first minister’, coordinating the work of his ministerial servants. In the course of the eighteenth century that tradition was undermined by a series of social, administrative, and cultural changes to such an extent that by the 1780s ministers were increasingly behaving as independent political figures, courting public opinion and claiming to act in the name of public welfare or even the nation. By examining these changes, this chapter argues that the political culture of the absolute monarchy was in constant transition and that the failure of Louis XVI, in particular, to manage its effects was one of the principal causes of his loss of authority in the period preceding the Revolution of 1789.

‘Complaints Lost in the Wind’— French India and the Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy

In recent years, historians have become increasingly drawn to consider what were once thought of as national problems in a global context. This chapter is inspired by that approach and seeks to analyse the interaction between the crisis in mainland France and that being experienced by the French colonies in India. The crisis in India directly affected French imperial and commercial aspirations: the circumstances on the subcontinent show how the relationship between the crises around the world overlapped and affected each other, and not necessarily in a single direction emanating from Europe. India was one of the absolute monarchy's greatest lost opportunities for the triumphant assertion of imperial power and for the economic and fiscal rewards which empire and trade might have brought.

Franco-British Naval Rivalry and the Crisis of the Monarchy, 1759–1789*

Did the immense investment in the French Navy in the context of the crisis of the monarchy outstrip the financial resources of the État royal, thus being a major cause or even the principal cause of the Revolution? Financially the critical period was not the War of American Independence but the years following the return of peace. The decisions made by those in charge of the French navy to maintain its expansion, while the costs of construction were doubling and while the state-funded budget was shrinking, were heavy with troublesome consequences as the monarchy was plunged into political crisis after the summoning of the Assembly of Notables.

Necker and Aristocratic Constitutionalism

Jacques Necker progressively advocated political values for the French monarchy that were broadly in line with those operative within a British constitutional nexus. He came to see the value of a bicameral constitutional settlement that would allow ‘aristocracy’ in one chamber to act as a counterweight to ‘democracy’ in another. However, he was slow to acknowledge the core difference between the tightly defined British nobility — synonymous with the peerage — and the tensions that existed within the formal, juridical unity of the French Second Estate. Necker's view of what a publicly responsible nobility might undertake within a state had its origins in his (and his wife, Suzanne's) many conversations with David, Seventh Viscount Stormont, British Ambassador to France, 1772–78, whom they saw as the embodiment of aristocratic state service. With the failure of the proposal for a two-chamber National Assembly in the autumn of 1789, Necker was forced to admit that the majority of his countrymen had turned against British models just as he had decided to embrace them wholeheartedly.

How, and How Not, to Use the Concept of Crisis in the Reign of Louis XVI*

This chapter demonstrates that the idea of a ‘general crisis’ affecting the whole of Louis XVI's reign is unsustainable. This is particularly true of the French economy, where the influence of Ernest Labrousse has long dominated our understanding of the period. Far from experiencing a general economic downturn, which made 1789 a ‘revolution of misery’, the pattern of industrial and agricultural production and colonial trade was far more positive. Problems arose primarily from the failure of political reform, especially in fiscal matters, but they only took a dramatic turn for the worst after the summoning of the Assembly of Notables in the Spring of 1787.

Introduction

This chapter examines the historiographical debates inspired by the French Revolution, discussing how the impact of the Revisionist attack on the social (or Marxist) interpretation led to a richer, but ultimately more confused picture as historians pursued a wide variety of political, cultural, and intellectual approaches to the origins of 1789. It argues that current historiography has reached something of an impasse and that in order to understand the breakdown of the absolute monarch it is necessary to reconsider the central political preoccupations of the absolute monarchy, that is to say its military, diplomatic, colonial, and financial policies, and to examine how these interacted with broader social and cultural issues, such as the need to manage social elites, to cope with the expectations of public opinion, and to cope with the broader intellectual changes that were undermining deference for a monarch still officially justified as reigning by the grace of God.

The Crisis of the Nobility at the Twilight of the Monarchy*

The history of the French nobility has long been symptomatic with that of the Revolution, and this chapter takes a fresh look at the state of the second estate in the years preceding 1789. Confronted by the problems arising from demographic decline, the pressure of the state, and a certain internal malaise as it sought to cope with internal divisions and to make sense of its own place in the world, the French nobility could be seen as a state of crisis. With some nobles even going so far as to attack the concept of nobility itself, these divisions would have important repercussions in 1789.

The Maison militaire du roi and the Disintegration of the Old Regime

For all the research that has been done into French politics and society in the fifty years before the Revolution, only a handful of serious studies have looked at the great noble families and the royal court. Moreover, the history of the army, where leading noble families dominated the upper ranks, has been integrated neither with that of the court, nor with that of intra-noble relations. This chapter therefore examines the most prestigious units of the French army — the privileged forces associated directly with the royal households — to bring together the history of the military and the court and suggest why, by the time the old regime collapsed in 1787–89, the great nobility was at loggerheads with the monarchy, and why relations between higher and lesser nobles had deteriorated a great deal since the reign of Louis XIV. The collapse of elite cohesion was ultimately disastrous for all concerned.

A Model of Conduct from the Age of Chivalry? Honour, International Decline and the End of the Bourbon Monarchy

The decline of France as a European power is an established eighteenth-century development and one that was laid at the Bourbon monarchy's door by its critics during the ancien régime. Within a worldview shaped by the aristocratic honour code, Louis XV and Louis XVI were seen as having dishonoured themselves and the country they ruled, by their political failures and especially the Austrian alliance concluded in 1756. These arguments were then adopted in the early stages of the French Revolution. Restoring that same honour, now increasingly attached to the nation and not the Bourbon dynasty, was a central objective of the members of both the National and Legislative Assemblies, and was integral to the Brissotin campaign for war against Austria, declared in spring 1792. This chapter reinforces the importance of continuities in political culture after 1789 and demonstrates the ways in which foreign policy was more central to the early Revolution than sometimes appreciated, contributing to the ‘nationalisation of honour’ (Hampson), as the nation and not the monarchy, became its focus.