- Merovingian and Carolingian age
- The emergence of France
- France, 1180 to c. 1490
- The French Revolution and Napoleon, 1789–1815
- France, 1815–1940
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The 18th-century French monarchy lacked both the ambition and the means to pursue a foreign policy as far-reaching as that of Louis XIV. From the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), when France had been invaded and nearly beaten, French statesmen pursued a double goal—the preservation of the balance of power in Europe and, in the world at large, the expansion of the French colonial empire and the containment of England. In the first decades after Louis XIV’s death, French leaders sought to avoid a renewal of large-scale conflict. After 1740, when Prussia’s aggressive monarch Frederick II (the Great) attacked Austria, France was drawn into a war against its traditional Habsburg foe and Vienna’s ally, Britain. The end of this War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) brought France little. By 1754 France was again fighting Britain in North America. On the Continent, Prussia’s rapprochement with the British drove Louis XV to break tradition and ally with the Austrians in the "diplomatic revolution" of 1756, leading to the Seven Years’ War. Frederick the Great’s army inflicted humiliating defeats on the poorly led French armies, while the British captured French possessions in Canada, the Caribbean, and India. After the peace settlement of 1763, the foreign minister, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, began military reforms that laid the basis for French successes in the Revolutionary era, but France was unable to stop its Continental rivals Prussia, Austria, and Russia from seizing territory from its traditional client Poland in the First Partition of 1772.
The one French success in the century-long competition with Britain was the support given to the rebellious North American colonies in the American Revolution (1775–83). French military officers, most notably the young marquis de Lafayette, fought with the American forces, and for a short while the French navy had control of the high seas. The real victor of the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia (1781), in which the British were defeated, was less General George Washington than Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse (1722–88), whose fleet had entered Chesapeake Bay. The American victory enhanced French prestige but failed to bring any territorial gains or economic advantages.
Regardless of defeat or victory, colonial and naval wars were problematic because of their prohibitive cost. In Bourbon France (as in Hanoverian England and the Prussia of the Fredericks) a high percentage of the governmental income was earmarked for war. Navies were a particularly costly commodity. The crown’s inability to manage the ever-swelling deficit finally forced it to ask the country’s elites for help, which, for reasons unrelated to the various wars and conflicts, they were unwilling to extend unconditionally. Money thus was a large factor in the collapse of the monarchy in 1789.
Ultimately, to be sure, it was not the crown’s inability to pay for wars that caused its downfall. Rather, the crown’s extreme financial difficulties could have led to reforms; the need for funds might have galvanized the energies of the monarchy to carry forward the task of administrative reordering begun during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. A more determined king might have availed himself of the problems raised by the deficit in order to overwhelm the defenders of traditionalism. In so doing, the monarchy might have satisfied enough of the desires of the Enlightenment elite to defuse the tense political situation of the late 1770s and the ’80s. Although in 1789 a program of “reform from above” was no longer possible, it might well have succeeded in the early 1770s.
Domestic policy and reform efforts
As stated above, in the context of 17th-century absolutism, Louis XIV had already initiated many rationalizing reforms. This statist and anticorporatist program was now embraced, but in a more liberal register, by the Enlightenment partisans of meritocratic individualism. Though Montesquieu had defended intermediary bodies such as guilds as guarantees of civic liberty, thinkers of the Enlightenment attacked them in the name of public utility and of what would later be called the rights of man. In an article written for the Encyclopédie, Turgot denied the sanctity of what he called foundations: “Public utility is the supreme law, and cannot be countervailed by a superstitious respect for what has been called the intents of the founders.” Most foundations, he thought, had as their only purpose the satisfaction of frivolous vanity. At the other end of the social spectrum, the Protestant Rabaut Saint-Étienne, later president of the National Assembly (Assemblée Nationale), argued that “every time one creates a corporate body with privileges one creates a public enemy because a special interest is nothing else than this.” No distinction was made between private interest and factional selfishness; in 1786 the future Girondin leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot was expressing what had become a commonplace when he wrote that “the history of all intermediary bodies proves, in all evidence, that to bring men and to bind men together is to develop their vices and diminish their virtues.” Private benevolence applied to public purpose was loudly praised in the 1780s, and Louis XVI’s finance minister, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), did a great deal for his reputation by endowing a hospital for sick children, which stands to this day. By 1789 public and charitable concern had become the themes of countless didactic works of literature and painting.
Many of the monarchy’s efforts to institutionalize this new sensibility were often significant. The crown encouraged not only agriculture but also manufacturing and commerce. It allowed tax exemptions for newly cultivated land. It subsidized the slave trade, on which much of the prosperity of the Atlantic seaports was based. It improved communications and in 1747 founded the School of Bridges and Roads to train civil engineers for the royal engineering service that had existed since 1599. In the provinces, many intendants took an active role in road building and in the modernization of urban space. The crown’s administrators also gave sustained thought to the abolition of internal customs and to the creation of what would have been the largest free-trade zone in Europe at the time. Social mobility was made possible; after 1750 many successful merchants and bankers were ennobled.
These were important steps. But the royal bureaucrats tried to go much further in regard to both the rationalization of the state’s financial machine and the meritocratic individuation of social and economic forms.
