Introduction

Summary

This book is designed for readers interested in the rise of absolutism in seventeenth-century France, as well as those interested in language and political discourse of this period. It demonstrates how the political discourse in the late Middle Ages, based on ancient Roman ideas that government existed for the common good (le bien public, or la chose publique, a French translation of the Latin res publica), began to evolve in the 1570s. Though references to the common good continued to be used right up to the French Revolution, they began to be overtaken by the language of the State (le bien de l’État). This evolution in language existed at every social level from the peasant village up to the royal court, and they accompanied the rise of absolutism in France, as the book demonstrates by analyzing scores of local, regiona,l and national lists of grievances presented to provincial estates and the Estates-General.

Estat que c’est

That which one rightly calls State is nothing other than an order, by means of which are governed several households and communities, having for a goal the good of all in general. But we may also call State these households and communities assembled together under the same Government; and be it the one or the other sense, we may say that all general considerations that can serve in the handling of public affairs, regard either the establishment, or the conservation, or the expansion of the State.¹

Philippe de Béthune, Le Conseiller d’Estat, 1633.

Introduction

Cité – Ainsi anciennement on exprimoit ce qui est auiourd’huy desnommé Estat. Jacques de la Guesle, procureur general, May 27, 1588, Parlement of Paris.²

Toward the end of this project, when reading the inventory of the town archives of Avallon, I came across a phrase related to a lawsuit over a rente of 13 l. owed to the canons of the city: “l’empire de la crainte,” the empire of fear. Reading the original from the town archives revealed that the phrase came from the editor of the inventory, L. Prot.³ The original phrase, in a plaidoyer [legal brief] for the town’s échevins was in Latin, in a document written otherwise in French: summo metu et tempore bellorum civillum quæ in se metuin includunt, or in great fear and in a time of civil war; the final phrase might best carry the sense that a civil war does not simply include fear, but encourages it. The deceased husband of the widow seeking reimbursement, Renée d’Aulenay, had been a Protestant. His nearby chateau of Girolles housed a contingent of Protestant soldiers which created a climate of fear that the town échevins claimed had coerced their predecessors to agree to pay Philippe de Loron’s debt to the canons.⁴

Three great fears dominated French political life at the birth of the royal State: fear of civil war, exacerbated by dynastical instability; fear of the democratization in politics, which climaxed in the 1570s, and had a second wave in French towns between 1588 and 1594; and fear that the monarchical commonwealth could no longer provide the political framework needed for reforms and stability – not simply the physical “repos” [calm] everyone craved, but an institutional structure that could carry out needed reforms. Henry IV’s reform of the French episcopate – eschewing the method proposed in cahiers of 1560 or 1576 but implementing the policy changes that the cahiers had suggested – offers an ideal example. French subjects at multiple levels, between 1576 and 1614, would call upon the king to use his “puissance absolue” to carry out their desired reform.

The new political framework would become the royal State. Philippe de Béthune, one of France’s leading diplomats, knew the workings of the French State as well as anyone. His two definitions of “Estat” differed greatly. He first paraphrased the standard definition of “respublique,” drawn from Jean Bodin and Cicero as a group of households and communities living together under a single order (law), seeking the common good. His second meaning takes us into the realm of the State as practical political unit: the government of those multiple households and communities.⁵

Many – above all those running governments – sought to combine the two meanings, to claim that the terms res publica (and cité, the French translation of civitas) meant the same as the State, a usage English speakers connect to the opening words of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.⁶ Governments all over the world today use the same strategy, especially to neutralize opposition to government policies: if the State and the republic are one and the same, then anyone opposed to a State’s ill-conceived military action is a traitor; if they are separate entities, then someone defending the interest of the republic against the will of the State is a patriot. This precise scenario has played out for US citizens of my age, from Vietnam in the 1960s, under a Democratic President, to Iraq in the 2000s, under a Republican one: the State does not care about your partisan political affiliation.

Local political figures, like the syndics of Bergerac, writing to Henry of Navarre in May 1588, illustrated the profound confusion of the late sixteenth century. In a single document they referred to the “state of a republic,” with state clearly meaning governance; to religion as one of the pillars to “stabilize and assure a republic”; to justice as “another bond to conserve every state or republic”; to seeing “a State troubled by those who perturb the public peace”; and to Cicero’s dictum that “finances […] are the sinews [nerfs] of republics.”⁷ A writer like Pierre de Belloy, in his 1587 defense of Salic Law and the Bourbons, also used a bewildering variety of combinations, from describing the Salic Law as a “Law of the State and Crown” and a “subject that touches the common Law of the Kingdom, and the State of our republic,” to the loyalty royal officers owed to the “State of his Majesty.”⁸ In June 1593, during the critical dynastic moment when the Catholic League convoked an “Estates General” to determine who should be the Catholic king of France, the judges of the Parlement who had remained in Paris pronounced the Salic Law as a fundamental law of the kingdom. In his biography of his friend Pierre Pithou, the great jurist Antoine Loisel claimed Pithou as the main author of this text, defending the inviolability of the Salic Law, “to which we owe a part of the conservation of the State.”⁹ Mention of the Salic Law clearly introduces the gendered element of the creation of this recharged patriarchal system, a matter to which we shall turn in Chapters 1 and 5.

In this book, I continue my examination of the evolution of French political ideas and discourse from the days of Charles V to the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal reign. Rather than use the traditional methods of intellectual history, like the perpetual dialogue with the dead that justifies all political orders, or a context drawn from the best-known political treatises of the given time, I want to step back from the intellectual context to understand its social and political context. I believe the relationship between these contexts to be a symbiotic one. Rather than a history of a concept’s influence on the social, I want to understand their reciprocal relationship, keeping in mind the wise counsel of Quentin Skinner, that we must think about the universe of texts of a given moment to understand “the intellectual context in which the major texts were conceived.”¹⁰ Here I will begin my reading with the political context in which authors like Jean Bodin conceived their works.

This book picks up where I left off in The French Monarchical Commonwealth with the transition in 1560–1561. The earlier volume traced the dominant political vocabulary and framework between the crisis of 1356–1357, when the rhetoric of the “bien de la chose publique” took over French political discourse and the meetings of the Estates General at Orléans in 1560–1561. Although this vocabulary obviously existed in parallel with royalist arguments that have been carefully documented by scholars like Jacques Krynen and Jean Barbey, I argued that the main political discourse, evident in local and regional political debates, focused on a monarchical commonwealth.¹¹ The first book ended with the Estates General of December 1560, where the deputies tried to create a viable institutional framework for such a commonwealth: they failed.

In mid-century the government shifted to a new phrase, the “good of the king’s service” [bien du service du roy]. That phrase gave way to the “good of my/our/his/your State,” in the 1570s, but a phrase privately adopted by royal secretaries like Pomponne de Bellièvre, “the good of the State” [bien de l’Estat], emerged as government’s formula of choice. Those writing to the king, invariably seeking some favor or service, naturally shifted their terminology to the royal preference. The new orthography shows us the conscious choice for a neologism, just as the shift in modifier to the definite article, “the,” marked the birth of the State as an abstract concept tied to a specific governmental model.¹²

French legal elites created the State as the solution to three interlocking practical problems: dynastic instability, religious conflict, and the democratization of commonwealth politics.¹³ Trained lawyers that they were, they sought arguments to justify the case of their new client, the State: in reading them, we must first remember the purpose, tactics, and strategy used by early modern lawyers in their plaidoyers, because so many of these writers – Bodin, Étienne Pasquier, et al. – had been or still were practicing avocats.¹⁴ The great texts of Classical Antiquity provided some help, but their vocabulary did not entirely suit the new reality.

Jacques de la Guesle made explicit the transition of the political community, the cité, turning into the State; he reminded the judges that the restoration of good order and the “reestablishment of the authority of the sovereign Courts” were “useful and necessary for the bien de l’Estat.”¹⁵ In capitalizing the word “State” for this meaning, I am following the usage of those who began this practice. Jacques de la Guesle, born in 1557, was part of a new generation of jurists raised in Bodin’s rhetorical universe; men like his father, Jean, or Achille de Harlay, came to maturity in the dying days of the commonwealth and clung often to its vocabulary, as we see regularly in Harlay’s speeches.¹⁶

From Monarchical Commonwealth to Royal State

Glossing Nicole Oresme’s 1373 statement that a kingdom was a large “cité” containing several partial ones, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, in a pamphlet written for the Estates General of 1576, declared that the kingdom was “one Cité, one house, one body, which has but one King, one Father of the family, one head, which ruins, burns, dies all together.”¹⁷ His pamphlet provides an example of the shift between an earlier discourse centered on the “bien de la chose publique” or the “bien public” to one focused on the “bien de l’Estat,” and built on the definition of sovereignty we associate with Jean Bodin’s Six Livres de la République (1576). He blends the newly favored metaphor, of the king as the father of his people, with the old favorite, the king as the head of the body politic.

Bodin reminds us that sixteenth-century people used the term “respublique” in a variety of ways. The Provins priest Claude Haton, referring to the Huguenot captain François La Noë’s feigned conversion to the royalist cause in 1573, said it “turned much to the damage of the king and the respublique françoyse,” a term meaning the larger political unit in which he lived.¹⁸ Haton spoke regularly of the “respublique” of the town of Provins: the Latin civitas or, in Oresme’s formulation, cité. In a small number of cases, Haton referred to the “respublique” of Provins’s pays, particularly with respect to any meeting of bailiwick estates. He believed in a “respublique chrestienne,” which mainly focused on Western Christianity. In one unusual case, he referred to “the respublique de l’eglise de Prouvins, by which I mean the faithful [fidelles] of the town.”¹⁹

The town government of Toulouse, in a meeting held on March 31, 1561, complained about assemblies of “students and artisans both inhabitants of the town and foreigners [estrangers] to preach and to dogmatize to the great scandal of the Republic faith and Christian religion.”²⁰ For them, Toulouse was a res publica, a term they had adopted in place of the more accurate civitas, but illustrating the deliberate effort to combine the meanings of the two in precisely Oresme’s dual usage of cité. At the other end of France, the town government of Boulogne-sur-Mer attacked (1573) Gilbert Monet, the substitute for the royal procureur, who was trying to “offend against and molest the community and republic of the town” by means of “inventions.”²¹ Even in 1614, the arquebusiers of Paris, in their cahier, would refer to the “bien and utility of the chose publique” and warn against “those ill-intentioned to the Republic.”²²

International relations reflected this transition in vocabulary. In its preamble, the 1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis said Henry II and Philip II had acted “principally for the honor of God, spread of His holy name, propagation of our holy faith and religion, repulsing of the enemies of the Christian republic, and for the common good, relief and repose of their peoples and subjects.” Article 19 of the treaty, however, contained a key new political word: Philip II would keep his father’s county of Charolais “under the sovereignty of the said king of France.”²³ The term “bien public” obviously had public relations value even in 1598, when Henry IV, in a rare break from his usual wording, used it in multiple documents about the Peace of Vervins.

Henry III and his contemporaries transformed political discourse in an unusually public forum, because the Estates Generals of 1576 and 1588 discussed openly the king’s sovereignty, defined in a sense most associated with Bodin’s formula in the République – the power to give public law to all those living in the kingdom. French political rhetoric, at all levels of government, shifted fitfully but permanently from a discourse built on the “respublique” to one built around “the State.” If, as Richard Tuck has pointed out, “On the eve of the civil wars in the Netherlands and France, Ciceronianism in one form or another […] was still the dominant approach to politics,” during the late sixteenth century, the political shift to a State involved a change in rhetorical register, from Cicero to Tacitus, from republican to imperial, not just in vocabulary but in structures of thought.²⁴

Imperial vocabulary brings to mind the key role of the colonial enterprise in the development of European ideas on international sovereignty, but in the French case that took place primarily after the period examined here.²⁵ References to “empire,” in the sense of territories outside of Europe, began to filter more often into political discourse in the late sixteenth century; a few speeches used the term and started to develop a discourse of the king of France as ruler of an “empire” outside of France’s own boundaries, and outside of Europe. De la Guesle, in his speech about the Edict of Union in July 1588, lauded the fact that the French now braved the “faithlessness” of the sea, and had come to know Guinea, the Moluccas, the Straits of Hormuz, the Rio Plata, and places even more distant, “from which one can take profit.” He warned the Parlement that a change in the “State” could only end in the thunderous collapse of “this powerful Empire.”²⁶ Going back to Francis I, the monarchy had shifted its iconographic representation to this imperial motif, first in the use of the closed, imperial crown for the king, and then in the use of “exotic” staging at events like Henry II’s famous entry into Rouen in 1550, with its cast of fifty Brazilian warriors, and an equal number of Rouennais notables pretending to be Brazilians. Other royal entries would also feature indigenous Brazilians, above all Tupinambá, and battle scenes – both land and sea – involving forces from all over the globe.²⁷ Pierre Mathieu, in his 1598 edition of two triumphs of Henry IV at Lyon, would refer to the king as “insignis imperator” (distinguished emperor).²⁸ In internal politics, however, the colonial enterprise began to take on much more importance under Louis XIV, whose contemporaries often emphasized French global dominance specifically in the realm of language.²⁹ Jean-Baptiste Massillon, being inducted into the Académie Française in 1719, would claim that “no French person found himself a stranger anywhere, because his language was the language of all the courts, and not being able to vanquish like us, our enemies wanted at least to speak like us.”³⁰ Massillon, a renowned preacher, was not alone in recognizing the imperial power of language.

The new politics of the 1560s and 1570s generated a fundamental problem because, going back to Oresme’s definitions – and the actual illustrations created for the two original manuscripts of his Politiques – the “citizens” of the kingdom-as-cité were the upper clergy, the military nobility, and the men of counsel. For Oresme, merchants, artisans, and peasants were not citizens. That division created enough problems in Oresme’s own lifetime, because those first two non-citizen groups were most assuredly citizens in many of the local cités that made up the larger one. In the climate of the Estates Generals of 1560 and 1576 and the massive contemporaneous meetings about redacting customary laws, excluding merchants and guild masters – even, in 1576, in much of the kingdom, peasants – was literally impossible within the framework of the monarchical commonwealth.

In most of the kingdom, the structure of the Estates General process exacerbated this tension. Village and castellany assemblies, numerically dominated by peasants, composed cahiers de doléances – invariably under the supervision of a member of the legal elite – and elected a deputy to the bailiwick assembly. In towns, urban general assemblies, which usually included artisans, to say nothing of merchants, received cahiers from individual guilds and even anonymous suggestions from individual citizens, generated their own cahier, and elected several deputies to that bailiwick assembly.³¹ Bailiwick assemblies, except in Normandy, had relatively few merchants, and the Estates General had virtually none, let alone artisans or peasants who made up the overwhelming majority of the population. The successive chapters look at each level of political participation prior to 1589: Estates General, provincial estates, bailiwick assemblies, and town and village councils and assemblies.

The Estates General of 1614 I believe to have taken place in a political system fundamentally different from the meetings of 1560, 1576, and 1588. Contemporaries almost all viewed the 1588 Estates as illegitimate; they focused on the meetings of 1560, 1576, and 1614. The 1560 meeting at Orléans and the follow-up small meeting at Pontoise in August 1561 demonstrated a coherent monarchical commonwealth framework of governance and rhetoric built around the principle of election – of prelates by the cathedral chapters or monks/nuns of an abbey; of parish priests by the parishioners; of judges, by the local legal elite; of tax officials by local merchants; of the bailli by the local nobility. The Blois meeting of 1576 introduced the new vocabulary of State but remained rooted – especially at the local level – in the old commonwealth rhetoric of elections. As we shall see, the tensions between the two systems – a monarchical commonwealth, built around elections, and a royal State, relying on the king’s judgment – stand out clearly in the documents of 1576–1577.

The Estates General of 1614, in contrast, took place within the royal State; the bailiwick and governorship cahiers focus almost entirely on detailed administrative matters, not on fundamental political issues like ending the Concordat of Bologna (1516) or creating a new structure for the king’s council. In 1560 or 1576, most deputies thought the king should share power with elected assemblies, and so devoted considerable energy to the specific powers of such assemblies; in 1614, deputies knew the commonwealth model had given way to a royal State, in which elites would share power within the government, not in representative assemblies.³²

Both the upper nobility and the legal elite unequivocally rejected, on a practical level, the principle that merchants should play a significant role in an Estates General.³³ Town governments had long had a small, oligarchic council that ran the city, but which consulted on certain matters – like a new tax – a general assembly whose composition varied widely from town to town: in Lyon, that usually meant a council made up of two members from each of a varying number – from thirty-six to sixty – of guilds and associations, whereas in Dijon it meant all male heads of households. Town elites in Dijon or Rennes and many other cities petitioned Henry IV to restrict the suffrage in their town, a clear example of the anti-democratic urge that played so great a role in the creation of the royal State.³⁴

In order to keep control of the polity that Oresme’s formulation had justified, his three groups of citizens had to transform the “respublique françoyse” into the royal State, and thus to insist that Oresme’s general cité should now be called l’Estat, just as la Guesle told the Parlement in 1588. The men of counsel running the central government, the military leadership, and the prelates – all of whom benefitted from this transition – effectively throttled efforts by their subordinates to share central power outside the framework of the central government, which included, let us remember, the Court, where high nobles lobbied for their rewards.³⁵

Everyone used commonwealth terminology in 1560 or 1576: the royal government, the nobility, the Parlementaires, the legal men, the Estates General, the local and provincial estates, the town councils, and ordinary people, like Haton, in their private writings.³⁶ This commonwealth rested on the principle of election, so that the two great evils mentioned in most of the cahiers of 1560–1561 and 1576 were the Concordat of Bologna, which gave the king the power to name bishops, and most abbots, abbesses, and priors, and the legalized venality of judicial office (1523).³⁷ The Burgundian historian Pierre de Saint-Julien de Balleure went so far (1580) as to accuse the mastermind of these two acts, Francis I’s chancellor, Antoine du Prat, of separating the king from the “bien public.” The bailiwick cahiers sent with deputies to the Estates General demanded a return to election of both bishops and judges; local cahiers, and some of those from the bailiwicks, also demanded that parishioners elect their curé.³⁸

The clergy’s procès-verbal at the Estates General of 1560–1561 at Orléans makes clear that the term “estat” had long been in use to describe types of political units – they feared recognition of “sacramentals” would lead to the end of the monarchy and the creation of a popular state [estat populaire].³⁹ The nobility at the “Estates General” of Pontoise, in 1561, spoke of the “pernicious inconveniences” that divisions in religion could bring to “the state of this kingdom” [l’estat de ce royaulme].⁴⁰ The phrases “affaires d’Estat” and, starting in the 1550s, “secrétaire d’Estat,” were in common parlance, using the capital “E”, but the abstract concept, “the State,” would spread outside a tiny circle only in the last quarter of the century. The political scientists Colin Hay and Michael Lister put this change into a definition of the “modern state”:

What is invariably taken to characterize the modern state is the simultaneous combination of, on the one hand, its claim to act as a public power responsible for the governance of a tightly delineated geographical territory, and, on the other, its separation from those in whose name it claims to govern.

⁴¹Hay and Lister turn to Skinner for three key elements of this “state,” as it developed after Bodin and Hobbes: (1) individuals, as subjects, owe service and loyalty to the state, not the ruler; (2) the authority of the state is singular, that is, sovereign in the post-Bodinian sense; and (3) the state is the highest civil authority. This first point is problematic for the France discussed here, because nobles, in particular, believed they owed loyalty and service both to the king and to the State or, in some formulations, the patrie. Marshal Vauban’s definition of nobility (c. 1691) emphasized valor “and blood spilt for the State,” in one formulation, and blood spilt “for the service of the King and the salvation of the Patrie” in another.⁴² For a noble, royal service translated into the king’s bienfaits for one’s family and clients, so the loyalty and service had to focus on the king, yet the noble also served the political community – the patrie – now deliberately confused with the State, just as Vauban’s writings make evident. If anything, the relationship between the king and the high nobility and the ministerial and judicial elite became more, not less personal under Louis XIV.⁴³ Those syndics of Bergerac, in their 1588 cahier for Henry of Navarre, cited Solon as the source for the principle that “the grandeur and conservation of all republics consists in two things: the remuneration of the good and the punishment of the bad.”⁴⁴

The early, halting uses of the word “Estat” cannot hide the overwhelming dominance of the old vocabulary in 1561. When the clergy sought to justify given articles, they still wrote that “it would be greatly useful for the bien public that justice be administered by the men of the three estates, especially in the Sovereign Courts” (art. 100). When they sought reform of the universities (art. 86), they informed the king that:

Because from Universities and Schools proceed all light and all doctrine, both in regards to religion and other things – good letters serving for the administration of the respublique when they are well conducted.

Jean de Serres, later a royal historiographer, in his 1572 account of recent French history, would use the title Commentariorum de statu religionis et reipublicæ in regno Galliæ.⁴⁵ Local documents show the ubiquity of the term “respublique.”

The Aristotelian idea of “each member doing the estate and office to which he is called,” as a speaker at the 1560 Estates put it, permeates all the sources. From the town council up to the Estates General, speakers extolled the virtues of the stable society, in which each person knew his or her place, accepted that place, and sought to carry out his or her functions to the best of their ability.⁴⁶ This practice defined justice, a point made by the cahier of nearly every Parisian guild in 1614, as they complained about other guilds infringing on their right to a specific economic activity. As garde des sceaux Guillaume du Vair put it to the Parlement of Toulouse in 1621, “His Majesty has always believed that this justice of which he has been since his birth so enamored, consists in rendering to each that which belongs to him.”⁴⁷ Du Vair sounded exactly like the Protestant François Grimaudet, avocat du roi at Angers, speaking to the estates of Anjou in October 1560: he told them “the soul of this monarchy, is the prince, true image of God, the power [puissance] of whom is fortified and supported by justice […] the end of which is to render to each that which belongs to him.”⁴⁸ Bodin, in his Juris universi distributio (1578), defined jurisprudence itself as the “art of giving to each his own, in a manner to safeguard human society.”⁴⁹

Arlette Jouanna has argued that the Politiques – above all the legal elite – made the conscious decision to opt for the strengthened definition of royal sovereignty, precisely because they feared the chaos of the civil war.⁵⁰ She emphasized the shifts in the writings of men like Louis Le Roy,⁵¹ the historian Bernard du Hallan, and Guy du Faur de Pibrac between 1570 and 1580: all three moved away from the principles of the monarchical commonwealth, with its elements of aristocracy and timarchy,⁵² and toward a unified version of lawmaking “sovereignty” and the power of the “Souverain,” terms that took their new, broadly accepted meaning from Bodin’s République, a book dedicated to Henry III’s mentor, Pibrac.⁵³

Grimaudet defined law as “a sovereign reason, imprinted by God in the good esprits of men, which commands the things which are to be done, and forbids the contrary, made and published by the one who has the power [ puissance] to command.”⁵⁴ What was the purpose of this law? “The end of the law is the bien public and the salut of men in general, to conserve all the inhabitants of a Monarchy or Republic, and not to make some happy by the oppression of the others.” Grimaudet thus brought together the traditional commonwealth purpose of the “bien public” and the term “salut,” which meant health both physical and spiritual (as in salvation). If the purpose of the law was “salut,” then the true religion could not be separated from the purpose of civil government, and virtually every writer or political speaker argued – as the syndics of Bergerac did in 1588 – that religion, obedience to one’s superiors, and justice were the firmest columns supporting the commonwealth. For Grimaudet, edicts made for the benefit of those who command, or of specific people, were not laws, “because in them there is lack of divine reason,” and were instead “Tyrannical commands.” The “vertu” of the prince led subjects to obey his laws, just as his laziness (lacheté) led them to disobey the law.⁵⁵ Grimaudet expressed contempt for counselors who told Princes their “sovereignty” meant they had power [puissance] over the persons and goods of the people. Such men were worse than “tigers and wolves, because they know how to enact injustice under the color of justice” and pretend to act for the bien public.⁵⁶

The failure of the Orléans Estates made the impracticality of the old system apparent to many politicians, but local cahiers in 1576 show that the vast majority of the local elites who wrote them still thought in terms of reviving the monarchical commonwealth as a practical system of government. The Estates General of 1576 offers a classic example of the coexistence of two vocabularies – of the monarchical commonwealth and the royal State – in a dangerous moment of transition. Moreover, the long tradition of the former meant it had a coherent formulation and core principle – election – whereas the novelty of the latter meant its champions struggled to find, and effectively impose, a precise vocabulary, a task achieved under Henry IV.

The new political circumstances demanded the use of the new vocabulary of State, which made the Estates General of 1614 radically different from its predecessors. The main religious question shifted away from the place of the Huguenots in French society, and toward the king’s relationship to the pope. The bailiwick cahiers focused almost exclusively, often in several hundred articles, on administrative reforms – on making the State function more efficiently – rather than demanding the restoration of the monarchical commonwealth’s principles and practices, as the cahiers of 1560–1561 or 1576 had done. The 1614 Estates debated an issue central to the development of the king’s puissance absolue: the independence of the king, as king, from papal jurisdiction. The Code Michau of 1629, which its printed title page insisted was based on “the complaints and grievances done by the Deputies of the Estates of his kingdom” in 1614 and “on the advice given to His Majesty by the Assemblies of Notables held at Rouen in the year 1617 and at Paris in the year 1626,” showed that this jurisdictional dispute included not simply the pope and the king, but all of the royal judiciary: article 23 specifically forbade prelates and ecclesiastical judges from “using any censures against our Judges and Officers.”⁵⁷

In the 1590s, the Parisian avocat Antoine Arnauld, arguing for the University of Paris against the Jesuits, would formulate a clear statement of lay supremacy, tied directly to religiously motivated “parricide,” both actual and attempted. In 1614, Arnauld would craft the first draft of the controversial first article of the Third Estate about this issue, which thus tied their debates directly to the concomitant controversy in political theory associated with Cardinal Robert Bellamine and William Barclay.⁵⁸ What might have been an arcane philosophical dispute took on sinister practical meaning with the assassination of Henry IV. As we shall see, jurists throughout the kingdom drew up similar articles for the Estates General.

Where others have sought to trace this change through the writings of political philosophers and legal scholars, here we will focus on the vocabulary of practical politics, and its symbiotic relationship with political theories and their expression.⁵⁹ Many of these theoreticians, like Bodin, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, or the legal scholar Guy Coquille, were also major politicians. All three of these men were deputies to the Estates General – Pibrac in 1560, when he wrote the local cahier at Toulouse; Bodin in 1576, when he helped write the local cahier of the Vermandois and led the Third Estate at Blois; Coquille as a deputy in 1560, 1576 (when he was part of the twelve-man commission that wrote the Third Estate’s general cahier), and 1588.⁶⁰ Their practical concerns – as local judges, as royal commissaires, as agents for great aristocrats, as deputies, as municipal officers – formulated the political problems they sought to solve; their intellectual formation provided the range of theoretical justifications to which they could turn. I argue here that they began with the practical and only then turned to the theoretical, but I understand that each of them sought to develop theoretical works that would then shape the practical workings of the French monarchy by establishing the langage in which political discussions took place.⁶¹

My special focus will be nearly 1,000 cahiers de doléances [grievances] generated at multiple levels of estates, and the municipal deliberations of a score of French towns. Regent Anne of Austria called a meeting of the Estates General for 1649, but then postponed it due to political unrest; she reissued, and again rescinded this call in 1651. A few cahiers de doléances survive even for these two aborted meetings, and a comparison between those documents and the well-known Mazarinades – the thousands of political pamphlets produced during the Fronde – provides an appropriate epilogue to my story.

I begin my inquiry in the history of the State as social fact; I interrogate the quotidian reality of a political life, often dirty and malodorous, and always disordered. I want to situate these ideas in their political reality, that is, the practical needs of the moment. These ideas have a sense in a practical context and in the balance of power of the forces of their political system. Annabel Brett has emphasized that the “boundaries of political space were fundamentally contested not only at a practical but at a theoretical level,” in her examination of the theoretical roots of that contestation in the evolving meaning of natural law; here we will focus on how the practical conflict of interests affected the theoretical contestation.⁶² I want to examine how the extra-language elements interacted with language, influencing choices of vocabulary, rhetoric, and ideas, but then, in turn, was influenced by those choices thereby limiting the range of subsequent practical, not just linguistic, options.⁶³ Cary Nederman has rightly suggested that we move beyond Skinner by means of “a more intelligible relation to the actual contours of historical practice.”⁶⁴ I begin here precisely in the realm of historical practice, at multiple levels of governance and political action; my approach seeks to complement, not conflict with the inquiries of these intellectual historians.⁶⁵

The available language, and the concepts it expresses restrict to some degree both language and extra-language actions.⁶⁶ Actors fighting against those restrictions reveal to us the strains on the political system and its language. The creation of new vocabulary, either by means of neologisms, or by orthographic modifications (estat → Estat), or by assigning new meanings to existing words (souverain), makes manifest the strains new reality placed on old vocabulary and concepts.⁶⁷ Some words common in sixteenth-century elite political discourse, like timarchie (for Aristotle’s legitimate form of “popular” government), proved ephemeral. Other key words, like liberty or democracy or republic/commonwealth, had contested meanings: in the case of democracy, the two primary meanings were antonyms. Many of those attacking more “democratic” political forms associated democracy with ochlocracy – mob rule.⁶⁸ Robert Schneider is certainly right that the “civil wars,” as they called them, only made matters worse: “the wars were important in fashioning a social vision that held the ‘people’ in contempt as an ever-threatening, turbulent, wayward force whose proclivities can only be described as mindless.”⁶⁹ The excesses of the League raised this distrust to a fever pitch, but the far more democratic process of the Estates General of 1576 and the concomitant mass participation in the redaction of customary laws had already soured elites – above all the Parlementaires – on widespread popular participation in politics. Pierre de Belloy made a remarkable claim in this regard: “the first institution of Kings was founded on the protection and defense of subjects, in fault of which Kings are no longer Kings, just as the people is no longer a people if it refuses obedience and the natural subjection it owes to its Seigneur.”⁷⁰

De la Guesle, in his May 1588 speech, referring to the mixed reputation of the Estates General, claimed that only once did the Estates lead to “poison”: the sessions that took place during the captivity of John II, that is, when the bourgeoisie of Paris, led by Étienne Marcel, seized effective control of the government.⁷¹ Two months later, presenting the Edict of Union, he launched into an explanation of why a State like France, with a large nobility, could never be a Republic; he asked “Do you think that this beautiful city [Paris] consists of its palaces and houses or in this mass of rubble [amas de mouëllons]?” For la Guesle, societies had governments appropriate to their social configuration; in France, that meant a monarchy, with its numerous nobility, a situation that was not compatible with the equality needed in a Republic. The meaning of these Classical political terms depended on local political reality, and when the shared political heritage splintered in the late sixteenth century, political vocabulary became both more heavily vernacular and more difficult to translate from one polity to another.⁷² La Guesle shows the shift in meaning of “république” between Bodin’s use in 1576 to mean a legitimate political body, of which monarchy was one form, and la Guesle’s usage just twelve years later, in which “république” and monarchy had become antonyms, because the form of political organization was now the “State.”⁷³

A far-reaching political and theological dispute of the 1630s can illustrate well the immediate practical consequences of the effort to make the State a synonym for the commonwealth. The controversy began as an exchange about the French war with Spain. Offering a justification for France’s pending declaration of war (1635), Besian Arroy spoke of the “laws of the State” and divine laws in his Questions décidées Sur la Iustice des Armes des Rois de France (Paris, 1634).⁷⁴ This forgettable work generated a more famous response, the Mars gallicus (1635) of Jansenius (Cornelius Jansen), which lay behind one of the great controversies of French monarchical history. Cardinal Richelieu viewed Jansenius always in a political, not a religious context. Louis XIV, Cardinal Fleury, and Louis XV felt the same way.⁷⁵

Arroy insisted that kings of France held God-given “puissance absolue” and “sovereign authority,” but added that “the intention of a Sovereign who makes war for the advancement of the bien public is just.” Unjust royal action led in the opposite direction: if “Kings are the Mediators between God and men,” and if kings take their authority from God, then “the evil abuse this authority in converting it into tyranny,” by following their passions. Jansenius (rightly) replied that neither Thomas Aquinas nor Augustine – both cited by Arroy – had spoken of “sovereign authority,” but only of the authority of the Prince. Jansenius reprised a phrase from Isaiah (5:20) long cited by French orators, going back to Jean Gerson’s Vivat rex sermon of 1405: “Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.” The French translator of Jansenius offers us a perfect example of French thinking in the 1630s: when Jansenius speaks in Latin of the res publica, the translation speaks of “l’Estat” – the same linguistic legerdemain performed by Philippe de Béthune. Bodin himself in the 1586 Latin version of the Republic, to translate “souveraineté,” would revert to the phrase he had used in 1566, summum potestatem, abandoning the term maiestas he had preferred in 1576.⁷⁶

The neologism “Estat” created problems. In 1642, the historian Louis Chantereau le Febvre, when refuting the claims of the dukes of Lorraine to descend in the male line from Charlemagne, attacked many pretensions of the Lorraine-Guise family, including the title taken just prior to the death of Henry III by the duke of Mayenne, “lieutenant general de l’Estat de France”; on the next page Febvre used the correct title, “l’Estat et Couronne de France.”⁷⁷ This title reflected a series of resolutions by the theology faculty at Paris, starting with the January 7, 1589 affirmation that the people of France were no longer bound to their oath of loyalty to Henry III. A month later, they specifically stated that Henry had broken the tie of “mutual obligation,” and they henceforth referred to him as “Henri de Valois.” By early April, they issued an arrêt to the effect that parish priests should no longer offer prayers for the king at each Mass. The new oath of the Catholic League spoke of the “conservation of the catholic religion and the State.”⁷⁸

He attributed to the Catholic League the creation of this “quality that shocked all Physical and Political rules.” Febvre then contrasted a king, who can create one or several lieutenants, because he is an entity [suppost]⁷⁹ both physical and political, and a State, which is a purely moral being, and cannot so act.⁸⁰

But a State, a Crown, cannot create them [lieutenancies] because it is only a nakedly Moral Being, which has no action: and when a Republic or other political Community creates and establishes Officers, it is as a Political and Physical Body long recognized and received in the pais.

Febvre argued that the Republic is a political community; the State is not. One defined a république in Ciceronian terms: a group [amas] of citizens living under a common law, seeking the common good. The State, as Paul Pellisson would say to the Académie Française in 1652, was a group of people [amas de gens] living under one ruler. No one living in Pellisson’s France believed that all people were political citizens, yet the monarchy would try its best to convince everyone that the State and the commonwealth were the same thing.⁸¹

The term “puissance absolue,” invariably translated as “absolute power” bedevils our understanding of the French monarchy to this day. In the sixteenth century, and well into the seventeenth, the term “absolue” meant independent, and referred back to the king of France’s longstanding claim to have power independent from other earthly rivals, above all the pope.⁸² When Jean de la Guesle told the Estates General, on December 17, 1576, that Henry III wished to have a “power [ puissance] sovereign and infinite” to do well, but willingly accepted that his authority and power [ pouvoir] were limited, Guillaume Taix, canon of Troyes, one of the deputies, mused to himself that la Guesle was fighting against the “murmuring” that “the king wished to attribute to himself a power [ puissance] to do whatever would seem good to him [tout ce que bon lui sembleroit], without any regard to the reason or the counsel of the Estates.”⁸³

We need to recognize the paradoxical attitude of elites toward “puissance absolue”: in 1576, the clergy asked Henry III to use it to implement the Decrees of Trent; in 1588, the Guise and their allies urged him to use it to enforce the July edict banning Protestants and supporters of Protestants from the French throne. In 1614, the drapers of Paris, complaining about the tapissiers infringing on their rights, said the latter relied on a 1612 ruling [sentence] of the Parlement in their favor, but this ruling – the drapers claimed – contradicted their statutes, issued by the king. “The said arrêt being directly contrary to the statutes and ordinances [granting their privileges], which cannot be corrected by the parlement above the will and puissance absolue of Kings who had issued” the statutes.⁸⁴ No one would suggest that the Church, or the Guise, would have been enthusiastic about puissance absolue in other contexts, like selling Church property to pay royal debts, and we surely do not think of guilds relying on appeals to puissance absolue to protect their monopolies, yet political practice put it rhetorically to such use.

These thoughts surely came to mind because of the ongoing debates about the shifting meaning of “puissance absolue,” which would become particularly prominent in the 1580s, when Henry III cited it to enforce sovereign court registration of one financial edict after another.⁸⁵ The king had the right to make law on the basis of puissance absolue, but he did not make law on that basis: edicts and ordinances of Henry III or Henry IV spoke of “pleine puissance, autorité royale et certaine science,” that is, to the power to do something, the right to order it done, and the wisdom to determine its concordance with reason. Kings referred to puissance absolue only to overcome resistance to the initial promulgation, that is, to assert that the king, not any sovereign court, was the final judge of the law in France.⁸⁶ Aside from the interlude 1673–1715, sovereign courts in France retained the right to make remonstrances, prior to registration, to the king when they found an edict or royal letters violated existing law, reason, and/or justice. The king would respond with letters (lettres de jussion) ordering the registration mandatory to make enforceable law; these letters would cite the king’s puissance absolue as the supreme lawgiver.⁸⁷ Focusing solely on the king’s view of this matter occludes the fundamental role of the legal elite in theorizing, as well as actualizing the monarchical State.

I come at this project from a rather different perspective than that of a Skinnerian expert on the development of modern political thought or even from Reinhard Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, although I keep constantly in mind his dictum that “without common concepts, there is no society, and above all, no political field of action.”⁸⁸ I am trying to find the intersecting genealogies of several related concepts, and the various “langages,” traditions of political discourse (and utterance of such discourse, in performance), and the words attached to them, but to situate my analysis at all times within practical politics.⁸⁹ Early modern political “performers” drew from many political “langages” in creating a given speech or written text: medieval Scholasticism, biblical exegesis, Patristic writings, Classical Republicanism, political Aristotelianism, Platonism, Stoicism, Renaissance emblematic, common law, Roman law, and the papal-conciliarist debate, to mention some of the more prominent.⁹⁰

Going far beyond simple “neologisms”, I think European early modern political thinkers deliberately shifted to their vernaculars in order to create a new, more accurate political vocabulary. Watching Jean Bodin try to translate “souveraineté” into other languages offers a perfect example.⁹¹ Governments, representative bodies, and political writers and orators, deliberately played with these ambiguities in terms like pays or patrie, just as they sought to use a sly linguistic modification of “public,” involving a change from adjective to noun, to help camouflage the naked brutality of the State (Estat) claiming to be the Republic. Where the monarchical commonwealth sought the “bien public” [public good], the Bourbon monarchy sought the “bien du public” [good of the public] and the “bien de l’Estat.” As Anna Di Bello has recently argued, Bodin, in “a moment of grave crisis of the French monarchy,” and indeed of general European political disorder, “grasped the necessity of rethinking the State, its foundations and its exercise of sovereignty.”⁹² Bodin was hardly alone in this enterprise, which engaged the entire French legal elite. Bodin’s English translator, Richard Knolles (1606), operated a similar linguistic shift in the first sentence of his Six Bookes of the Commonweale: Bodin spoke of “puissance souveraine,” but Knolles flipped the parts of speech, and translated the term as “puissant sovereignty,” clear evidence that Bodin’s noun – defined by him in chapter 8 of book I – had come into common currency and no longer needed to wait for a definition.

The State: Bourdieu and Foucault

Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault gave fascinating lectures on the State at the Collège de France; each of their approaches informs my work here. Creating this new State, and its rhetorical justifications, required elites to overcome a logical inconsistency between social reality and its discourse. Lecturing in the late 1970s, Foucault’s term governmentality has given us a framework for understanding the rise of the State and relied on what I view as the Annalistes’s imperfect interpretations of the nature of early modern society.⁹³ They posited a stable, sedentary society; Foucault, relying on their prodigious research, emphasized the contrast between the rhetoric of elites, obsessed with keeping everyone in their place, both physical and social, and a social reality built on immobility. My own research, and that of others, has shown that French society had both elements of stability – some peasant families long remained rooted to their villages – and of mobility.⁹⁴ Robert Mandrou suggested long ago that France was also a society in movement.⁹⁵

Foucault recognized that governmentality involved multiple layers of government, not just the central State; as we shall see, local judges sought above all to expand their own power and jurisdiction. The city of Beauvais protested the bailiwick’s 1614 cahier on the grounds that leading local judges had drawn it up with their corporate interest in mind: “Recent months betray the secret thought of the redactors of the cahiers of the bailiwick, men of the robe who, as we see better and better, under the pretext of consolidating royal authority, dream above all to establish and extend their own.”⁹⁶ The clergy fought a bitter and largely losing battle over jurisdiction with royal judges; in many ways that battle paralleled the one between the king and the pope about royal independence.

Champenois demands in 1588 did not come from the central government but were directed to the central government.⁹⁷ Their rhetoric attacking mobility of persons, goods, and ideas was not, however, a hypocritical justification for a power grab, but rather a reaction to the exponential increase in movement across all three of those categories. Foucault was certainly right to focus on governmental control of movement, but those efforts at control took place in a mobile, not an immobile society.

If we seek to reconstruct as well as we can the reality lived by these political actors, we must better understand the roots of what Bourdieu called their political langage.⁹⁸ This langage could be an unconscious creation, but far more often it was a deliberate construction. Speeches, remonstrances, cahiers de doléances, debates, letters patent – all had their goal(s), and the vocabulary, rhetoric, and literal performance act chosen was the one that might best obtain the desired result. Speaking here as the son of two professional politicians, I take the goal of politics to be getting results, not scoring rhetorical points, yet scoring such points often provides the act needed to achieve one’s goal.

This new obsession with a specific agnatic family became obvious after 1589, when the Bourbons simultaneously insisted the Salic Law made one of them the rightful heir, yet denied the entirely legitimate claim of the Courtenay family to be in the line of succession, as agnatic descendants of Louis VI.⁹⁹ The Burgundian historian Pierre de Saint-Julien de Balleure called the king the “souverain chef de l’Estat” [sovereign head of the State].¹⁰⁰ In a classic sixteenth-century paradox, the hero king of the commonwealth’s champions, Louis XII, was universally known as the “père du peuple,” and even commonwealth-themed orations urged the king of the moment to aspire to this title.¹⁰¹ The French body politic was indeed “shattered” during the Wars of Religion, but rather than disappearing, “the corporate union” that manifested its unity shifted from the “respublique” – the collective body of citizens – to the State.¹⁰²

My previous work as an historian undergirds this book; I have spent most of the last five decades in local archives, reading tax rolls, municipal deliberations, local court records, notarial archives, civil registers, and a host of other documents generated out in the field. I have written about popular rebellions, in which those clearly outside the then-accepted definition of citizen set forth their political goals. When I first read the memoirs of royal councilors like Pierre Jeannin, I had previously looked at the reactions of those whom they sought to direct or to tax, to cajole or to coerce. I have always tried to balance the perspectives of those at each level of the process in question, from the village tax collector to the superintendent of finances.

Rather than seek the origins of the vocabulary of State in Renaissance Humanism or Reformation theology or debates about papal versus conciliar power, I seek them in the political problems facing French governments at all levels in the second half of the sixteenth century. A new concept like “the State” arose to deal with specific problems, but it then modified the behavior – and the vocabulary – of political actors who now lived in a royal State, not a monarchical commonwealth. The ties of religion and politics are obvious in the Wars of Religion, but the impact of Humanism on vocabularies, on historical understanding (and the methods of both history and legal studies), and consequently on patterns of thought, cannot be ignored.¹⁰³

Actions, words: how do they come together? As a historian, I want to find out how one got action, both in terms of the bare-knuckle brawl for power, wealth, prestige, and their accoutrements, and in terms of what one had to do and say. Language takes us back to the power of knowledge, and of the word, in which it is expressed: the edicts of pacification all contained prominent articles forbidding offensive speech. When he issued edicts related to towns returning to allegiance to him, Henry IV made sure to emphasize that he “had inhibited and prohibited, inhibits and prohibits them […] from injuring, reproaching, outraging, offending, or provoking each other […] by deed or word.” They needed to live, he told the residents of Auxerre, as “good friends and fellow citizens.”¹⁰⁴

As Antoine Arnauld, whose eponymous father literally wrote the first draft of the 1614 article, remarked: “we are no longer in the times when the Popes can use the power [ puissance] they formerly attributed to themselves to depose Kings. Christianity would be lost were they to try it.”¹⁰⁵ Jurists in the generation of Antoine Arnauld, père and Jacques de Thou created the new vocabulary of the monarchical State. As Howell Lloyd pointed out in his fine biography, Bodin constantly and extensively modified the République from one edition to the next, and the Latin version especially differs in important ways.¹⁰⁶

The printed “speech” created by the treasurers general of France for the king in 1576 suggests that the new vocabulary had already penetrated the upper levels of provincial administration. They lamented their absence from the Estates and made an interesting riff on a Ciceronian metaphor: finances became the sinews of “the monarchy,” allowing for the upkeep of the “state.” In closing, they wished for perpetual prosperity and “a happy growth of your State.”¹⁰⁷ One change in Poitiers’s preamble stands out: Henry III spoke of finding “the most appropriate remedies for the bien de nostre Estat.”¹⁰⁸ Poitiers was the first pacification edict to mention the “bien” of our/the State. In the Edict of Nantes, Henry IV would refer to the “salut et repos de cest Estat” and to “les maulx particuliers des plus saynes parties de l’Estat,” which he thought could best be healed by removing their main cause, civil war.¹⁰⁹

The mass provincial confusion in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the similar confusion about the oath for a Catholic “league” in February 1577, and the (illegal) cooperation among provincial estates in 1578–1580 all bespoke this weakened royal authority, even leaving aside the constant low-level warfare during the pauses between the eight official civil wars.¹¹⁰ As the combination of dynastic instability, religious conflict, and democratization of politics eliminated the old commonwealth as a viable form of polity for ruling elites, they turned to a new creation, the royal State, to vanquish “the empire of fear.” If we might come back to Massillon’s comment about how Louis XIV persuaded his enemies to speak his political language, we might consider that Louis’s predecessors had first to convince their own subjects to do so. Let us see how they did it.