Power, Status and Precedence: rivalries among the provincial élites of Louis XIV'S France

Extract

During the past thirty years most historians have acknowledged that it is anachronistic to describe Louis XIV as an absolute monarch. Many of them have turned their attention towards the various elite groups whose power and privileges coexisted with those of the crown in the very different, and sometimes fiercely separatist, provinces which formed the kingdom of France. A few have attributed such great influence to local nobles and institutions that the royal government seems to have been reduced to impotence. This impression, clearly too extreme, has been created first by a preoccupation with those issues and periods where the crown was in conflict with many, or in the case of the Frondes with almost all, of its leading subjects, and a disregard for the more numerous occasions when the king and at least some élite groups had identical or compatible purposes. Secondly, it has arisen from a neglect of the informal channels of communication which were often more important than the formal administrative structure for linking the court and the provinces, and for conducting the everyday routine of government. The most important of these was the network of ‘brokers’, often influential governors and bishops, by which provincial requests for highly prized royal patronage—whether titles, orders, offices, privileges or pensions— were conveyed to the ministers and to the king himself. The possibility of personal advancement was a vital consideration for members of the upper social échelons as they calculated their responses to ministerial instructions and enquiries.