- 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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If historians are not yet agreed on the political motives of Louis XIV, they all accept, however, the cultural and artistic significance of the epoch over which he and his two 17th-century predecessors reigned. In their different ways—Henry IV’s interest lay in town planning, Louis XIII’s in the visual arts, and Louis XIV’s in the theatre and in landscape gardening—they all actively stimulated the emergence of great talents and were aided by such royal ministers as Richelieu and Mazarin, who were considered patrons in their own right.
From Henry IV’s reign dates the rebuilding of Paris as a tasteful, ordered city, with the extensions to the Louvre, the building of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine, and, outside the capital, the renovations and extensions at Fontainebleau and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Henry succeeded in making Paris what it had never been before—the centre of polite society—and, though he was not personally interested in such matters, he must therefore be given some credit for the atmosphere that later led to the establishment of the famous salon of Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, which flourished from 1617 until 1665. There men of letters mingled with the great nobility to the mutual advantage of both. The guests at her salon included the statesmen Richelieu and the Great Condé; the epigrammatist the duc de La Rochefoucauld; the letter writer Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, and Mme de La Fayette; the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry; the poet François de Malherbe; and the dramatist Pierre Corneille.
Richelieu also was a key figure in the artistic and architectural development of Paris during his years in power. He was fortunate to employ the great architect Jacques Lemercier, who built for him, close to the Louvre, the Palais-Cardinal, later the Palais-Royal; it contained two theatres and a gallery for the cardinal’s objets d’art. Under the same patron, Lemercier also built the church of the Sorbonne, where Richelieu is buried. In the world of painting, the cardinal supported Simon Vouet, who decorated the Palais-Cardinal, and Philippe de Champaigne, whose surviving portraits include famous representations of Richelieu himself. The cardinal’s most notable contribution, however, was in the field of letters, with the establishment in 1634 of the Académie Française to regulate and maintain the standards of the French language. One of its first tasks was the production of a standard dictionary, a massive work published in four volumes in 1694. The Académie succeeded over the years in making the pursuit of letters socially acceptable, though still inferior to the pursuit of arms. Richelieu’s great interest in the theatre persuaded him to patronize a number of dramatists, including Corneille and Jean de Rotrou.
Richelieu’s patronage of the arts was taken over by his great pupil Mazarin, who collected some 500 paintings. In 1648 Mazarin established the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which encouraged artists to follow the examples of Nicolas Poussin, the greatest French exponent of the Classical style, and of the landscape artist Claude Lorrain. Mazarin housed his own art collection in the Palais Mazarin (now the Institut de France and home of the Académie Française), which itself was enlarged for Mazarin by the architect François Mansart. Mazarin also commissioned Louis Le Vau to rebuild part of the medieval castle of Vincennes, thus setting him off on his successful career.
Louis XIV’s patronage centred on Versailles, the great palace that also played such an important part in the political life of 17th-century France. There André Le Nôtre designed the formal gardens, which still attract a multitude of admiring visitors, as they did when they were first completed. There Jules Hardouin-Mansart added the long, familiar garden facade, and, with unforgettable magnificence, Charles Le Brun decorated the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) and the adjoining Salon de la Paix (Salon of Peace) and Salon de la Guerre (Salon of War). There the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully devised and directed a number of musical entertainments with such success that Louis granted him noble status and the office of a royal secretary. There, too, the comic genius Molière was encouraged by the king’s support; after the dramatist’s death, Louis was directly responsible for the establishment, in 1680, of the Comédie-Française. There, finally, Louis recognized the genius of Jean Racine, whose great tragedies, from Bérénice (1670) to Iphigénie (1675), earned him membership in the Académie Française and a noble office, that of trésorier de France (treasurer of France), from the king.
This blossoming of the arts was aided though not inspired by the patronage of kings and ministers. The artistic creations evince a strong element of order and simplicity, culminating in the Classical grandeur of Racine’s plays and the facade of Versailles. Thus, they might seem to reflect the growth of political stability and order over which Louis XIV presided. The monarchy continued to expand its support for culture during his reign. In 1663 the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres was founded; originally intended to compose inscriptions for royal medals and monuments, it eventually became a centre for historical research. Three years later Louis XIV sponsored the creation of the Académie des Sciences and a training centre for French artists in Rome. The Académie d’Architecture and the Académie Royale de Musique began in 1671. It is, however, dangerous to tie creative achievements in the arts and sciences too closely to their political environment. Moreover, there are significant counterpoints to the theme of Classical order. The philosopher René Descartes’s doubting, rationalist approach to the fundamental questions of God’s existence and man’s relationship to God undermined the rigid adherence to revealed truths propounded by religious orthodoxy. The Jansenist Blaise Pascal, one of the most versatile geniuses of the century, represented and defended a minority religious movement that Louis XIV believed dangerously subversive. Toward the end of his long reign, Louis encountered the fierce social criticism of Jean de La Bruyère and the skepticism of the exiled Huguenot Pierre Bayle, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary") raised questions about the sacred status of the Bible and foreshadowed the secularism of the Enlightenment. These discordant elements draw attention to the fact that the absolute state which Versailles was intended to represent concealed tensions that would surface after the king’s death. Nonetheless, the splendour of Versailles and the Classical simplicity of Racine’s tragedies represent a high point in creative human achievement, and it is to the king’s credit that he chose to be identified with them.
J.H. Shennan Jeremy David PopkinFrance, 1715–89
The year 1789 is the great dividing line in the history of modern France. The fall of the Bastille, a medieval fortress used as a state prison, on July 14, 1789, symbolizes for France, as well as for other nations, the end of the premodern era characterized by an organicist and religiously sanctioned traditionalism. With the French Revolution began the institutionalization of secularized individualism in both social life and politics; individualism and rationality found expression in parliamentary government and written constitutionalism. Obviously, the English and American revolutions of 1688 and 1776 prefigure these changes, but it was the more universalist French Revolution that placed individualism and rationality squarely at the centre of human concerns.
Because the revolutionary events had such earthshaking power, the history of France in the century preceding 1789 has until recently been seen as a long prologue to the coming drama, a period marked by the decay of the ancien régime (“old regime”), a locution created during the Revolution. Some contemporary historians, however, reject this view and present 18th-century France as a society undergoing rapid but manageable social, economic, and cultural change. They perceive the French Revolution as a political event that could have been avoided if the French monarchy had been more consistent in its effort to modify political institutions in order to keep up with the new needs of its people.
The social and political heritage
The social order of the ancien régime
To understand the developments of the 18th century and to follow the scholarly debates, one may begin with a definition of the ancien régime. Its essence lay in the interweaving of the state’s social, political, and economic forms; the term itself, though primarily a political concept, has also always had a clear social and economic resonance.
In the society of the ancien régime, all men and women were, by birth, subjects of the king of France. In theory always and in practice often, the lives of French men and women of all ranks and estates took shape within a number of overlapping institutions, each with rules that entitled its members to enjoy particular privileges (a term derived from the Latin words for “private law”). Rights and status flowed as a rule from the group to the individual rather than from individuals to the group, as was true after 1789.
France itself can be conceived of as an aggregate of differentiated groups or communities (villages, parishes, or guilds), all of them theoretically comparable but all of them different. In many respects the kingdom was an assembly of varying provinces, a number of them endowed with vestigial representative institutions. In some important ways France was not truly a unit of government. Unlike England, for example, France was not a single customs union; more tariffs had to be paid by shippers on brandy floated down the Garonne to Bordeaux than on wine shipped from France to Britain.
The concept of national citizenship was not unknown in France under the ancien régime, existing in the sense that all Frenchmen, regardless of their rank and privileges, had certain legal rights denied to all foreigners. There was, however, no French nation whose citizens taken one by one were equal before man-made law, as was true after 1789. Laws were in the main inherited, not made.
This is not to say that France, though structured around the “premodern” concept of the guild, or group, or corps, was a static or, materially speaking, a stable society. For many artisans, peregrination was a way of life, and many years of their young manhood were spent on a tour de France, which took them from city to city in order to learn their trade. Serfdom was practically unknown (only 140,000 serfs remained in France in 1789, none of them on crown lands, where Jacques Necker, the comptroller general, had abolished serfdom in 1779), and peasants were free to move as they wished from one village to the next. Indeed, such large numbers of people were moving around that the fear of unattached vagrants was strong in prerevolutionary France.
Monarchy and church
In the 18th century, justifications of royal authority drew on many traditions. The king still claimed the status of a feudal suzerain of his subjects. Familial imagery was an important component of royal rhetoric; the king of France was father of his subjects. His right to reign echoed all husbands’ right to rule over their wives and all fathers’ right to rule over their children. His messages, however draconian and confiscatory they might be, were invariably couched in a rhetoric of religious and paternal solicitude.
The king, moreover, was a Christian monarch and as such was endowed with quasi-priestly functions. He was anointed at his coronation with holy chrism said to have been brought from heaven by a dove. It was thought that, as evidence of his special status, he could cure scrofula by his touch. The relationship of church and state was complex. Oftentimes the king did not hesitate to exploit the church, over which he held extensive power by virtue of the still-valid Concordat of Bologna of 1516. Monarchs used their right to appoint bishops and abbots to secure the loyalty of impoverished or ambitious nobles. The crown asserted its right to regulate church policies, limit the authority of the pope over French Catholics, and abolish or consolidate monastic orders.
Nonetheless, until 1788 the Roman Catholic Church retained in France unusually broad doctrinal rights and social prestige, even by the standards prevailing in central or southern Europe, not to speak of what held true in the far more tolerant countries of northern Europe (Prussia, Holland, and Britain). French Protestants were denied religious toleration until 1787. Jews were tolerated only as quasi-foreigners until 1791. Of considerable symbolic importance was the fact that before 1789 it was the church that kept the registers of births and deaths that marked the beginning and end of each person’s earthly existence. The church, the police, and the courts collaborated closely to maintain the prestige of religion; until at least the 1780s the church severely condemned licentious or irreligious books such as Rousseau’s Émile, which was burned in 1762 by order of the Parlement of Paris, a measure that did little to stop its circulation.
The monarchy basically respected the various rights of the church accrued by tradition, as it did the civil and property rights, or “liberties,” of its subjects generally. Continuity ordinarily seemed to be the first principle of the French state, and it was inherent in the concept of king itself: the king was held to have two bodies, a physical one, which necessarily decayed, and a spiritual one, which never died. In this view, the main purpose of the French state was to defend vested interests—i.e., to maintain continuity rather than to change the existing order.
Commitment to modernization
The great peculiarity of the ancien régime was that a system committed to preserving tradition also contained within it powerful forces for change. The absolute monarchy developed between 1624 and 1642 by Richelieu and later by Mazarin, Colbert, Louvois, and Louis XIV was guided by a modern raison d’état, in which the state was eager to further changes of all kinds for its own purposes. Administratively, its absolutist will, formulated at Versailles in a complex array of governmental councils, was enforced in the provinces by the intendants and their subordinates. The monarchy favoured modern manufacturing and, more desultorily, modern finance. It protected and firmly guided intellectuals through the Académie Française. With greater hesitation, the monarchy also promoted France’s drive to obtain economic and military supremacy not just in Europe but overseas as well, in North America, India, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Divided in its goals, some of them traditional and others modern, the state was also ideologically double-minded. In the 17th century many intellectuals (some of them clerics such as Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet [1627–1704]) developed a Hobbesian justification of absolutist rule, which was renewed throughout the 18th century. Religion and tradition went hand in hand, but absolutist theoreticians went further. They justified the state’s right not only to legislate and tax more or less at will but also to imprison arbitrarily without due process of law. The lettres de cachet, which allowed the king to have individuals committed to the Bastille and to other prisons forever and without any kind of trial, were seldom given out, usually to fathers who wished to correct their wayward children. But they did exist, as liberal or scurrilous propagandists knew full well, sometimes firsthand: about one-fourth of the 5,279 people imprisoned in the Bastille between 1660 and 1790 were connected with the world of the book. Royal proclamations often stressed, however, the king’s obligation to govern in the interests of his people. The parlements, frequent critics of arbitrary rule, spread the notion that subjects’ rights were protected by a fixed, if ill-defined, constitution that could not be altered without the consent of their representatives.
