Читать книгу Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson - Страница 8
ОглавлениеClass and State: Problems of Periodization
The typical institutional complex of the Absolutist State in the West has now been outlined. It remains to sketch very briefly some aspects of the trajectory of this historical form, which naturally underwent significant modifications in the three or more centuries of its existence. At the same time, it is necessary to give some account of the relationship between the noble class and Absolutism, because nothing could be less justified than to assume that this was an unproblematic one of natural harmony from the start. On the contrary, it may be argued that the real periodization of Absolutism in the West is at bottom to be found precisely in the changing rapport between the nobility and the monarchy, and the multiple attendant political shifts which were correlated with it. At any rate, a provisional periodization of the State and an attempt to trace the relationship of the dominant class to it, will be proposed below.
The mediaeval monarchies, as we have seen, were an unstable amalgam of feudal suzerains and anointed kings. The extraordinary regalian rights of the latter function were, of course, a necessary counterweight against the structural weakness and limitations of the former: the contradiction between these two alternate principles of royalty was the central tension of the feudal State in the Middle Ages. The role of the feudal suzerain at the summit of a vassal hierarchy was ultimately the dominant component of this monarchical model, as the retrospective light shed on it by the contrasting structure of Absolutism was to show. This role dictated very narrow limits to the economic base of monarchy in the early mediaeval period. In effect, the feudal ruler of this epoch had to raise his revenues primarily from his own estates, in his capacity as a particular landlord. The dues from his demesne would initially be delivered in kind, and then increasingly in cash.1 In addition to this income, he would normally enjoy certain financial privileges from his territorial lordship: above all, feudal ‘incidences’ and special ‘aids’ from his vassals, tied to investiture in their fiefs, plus seigneurial tolls exacted on markets or trade-routes, plus emergency levies from the Church, plus the profits of royal justice in the forms of fines and confiscations. Naturally, these fragmented and restricted forms of revenue were soon inadequate even for the exiguous governmental duties characteristic of the mediaeval polity. Recourse could be had, of course, to credit from merchants and bankers in the towns, who controlled relatively large reserves of liquid capital: this was the earliest and most widespread expedient of feudal monarchs when confronted with shortage of income for the conduct of affairs of State. But borrowing only postponed the problem, since bankers normally demanded secure pledges from future royal income against their loans.
The pressing and permanent need to acquire substantial sums outside the range of their traditional revenues thus led virtually all mediaeval monarchies to summon the ‘Estates’ of their realm from time to time, in order to raise taxes. These Estates became increasingly frequent and prominent from the 13th century onwards in Western Europe, when the tasks of feudal government had become more complex and the scale of finance involved in them correspondingly demanding.2 They nowhere acquired a regular basis of recall, independent of the will of the ruler, and hence their periodicity varied enormously from country to country, and within countries. However, these institutions should not be regarded as contingent or extrinsic growths on the mediaeval body politic. On the contrary, they constituted an intermittent mechanism that was an inevitable consequence of the structure of the early feudal State as such. For precisely because the political and economic orders were fused in a chain of personal obligations and dues, there was never any legal basis for general economic levies by the monarch outside the hierarchy of mediate sovereignties. In fact, it is striking that the very idea of universal taxation – so central to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire – lapsed altogether during the Dark Ages.3 Thus no feudal king could decree imposts at will. Every ruler had to obtain the ‘consent’ of specially assembled bodies – Estates – for major taxation, under the rubric of the legal principle quod omnes tangit.4 It is significant that most of the direct general taxes which were slowly introduced into Western Europe, subject to the assent of mediaeval parliaments, had been initially pioneered in Italy, where the initial feudal synthesis was most tilted towards the Roman and urban heritage. Not only did the Church levy general taxation on the faithful for the Crusades; municipal governments – compact councils of patricians without investiture or rank stratification – had no great difficulties in imposing taxes on their own town populations, still less on a subjugated contado. The Commune of Pisa actually had property taxes. The peninsula also initiated many indirect taxes: the salt monopoly ovgabelle originated in Sicily. Soon a variegated fiscal pattern developed in the main West European countries. English princes relied mainly on custom duties because of their insular situation, French on excises and the tattle, and German on intensification of tolls. These taxes, however, were not regular grants. They normally remained occasional levies down to the end of the Middle Ages, during which few Estates ever yielded to royal rulers the right to raise permanent or general taxation without the consent of their subjects.
Naturally, the social definition of ‘subjects’ was a predictable one. The ‘estates of the realm’ customarily represented the nobility, the clergy and the urban burgesses, and were organized either in a straightforward three-curia or a somewhat distinct two-chamber (magnate/non-magnate) system.5 Such assemblies were virtually universal throughout Western Europe, with the exception of Northern Italy where the urban density and absence of feudal suzerainty naturally inhibited their emergence: the Parliament in England, fitats-Generaux in France, Landtage in Germany, Cortes in Castile or Portugal, Riksdag in Sweden, and so on. Besides their essential role as the fiscal faucets of the mediaeval State, these Estates fulfilled another critical function in the feudal polity. They were collective representations of one of the deepest principles of feudal hierarchy within the nobility, the duty of the vassal to provide not only auxilium, but consilium to his liege-lord: in other words, the right to give his solemn advice in matters of gravity affecting both parties. Such consultation did not necessarily weaken the mediaeval ruler: in foreign or domestic crises, it might well strengthen him by providing welcome political support. Outside the particular nexus of individual homage relationships, the public application of this conception was initially confined to the small number of baronial magnates who were the tenants-in-chief of the monarch, formed his entourage, and expected to be consulted by him in important affairs of State. With the growth of Estates proper in the 13th century because of fiscal exigencies, the baronial prerogative of consultation in the ardua negotia regni was gradually extended to these new assemblies, and came to form an important part of the political tradition of the noble class as a whole, which naturally everywhere dominated the Estates. The ‘ramification’ of the feudal polity in the High Middle Ages by the growth of Estates institutions from the main trunk, thus did not alter the relationship between the monarchy and nobility in any unilateral direction. These institutions were essentially summoned into existence to expand the fiscal base of the monarchy, but while fulfilling this aim, they also increased the potential collective control of the nobility over the latter. They should not therefore be regarded either as mere checks or tools of royal power: rather they reduplicated a pristine balance between the feudal suzerain and his vassals in a more complex and effective framework.
In practice, the Estates remained sporadic occasions, and the taxes levied by the monarchy relatively modest affairs. One important reason for this was that the problem of an extensive paid bureaucracy had not as yet interposed itself between the monarchy and the nobility. Royal government throughout the Middle Ages relied to a considerable extent on the services of the very large clerical bureaucracy of the Church, whose top personnel could devote themselves full-time to civil administration without a financial charge on the State, since they already received ample salaries from a separate ecclesiastical apparatus. The higher clergy who century after century provided so many of the supreme administrators of the feudal polity – from England to France to Spain – were themselves, of course, mostly recruited from the nobility, for whom access to episcopal and abbatial positions was an important social and economic privilege. The stepped feudal hierarchy of personal homage and fealty, the corporate Estates assemblies exercising their rights of voting taxes and deliberating on affairs of the realm, the informal character of an administration partly maintained by the Church, a Church often staffed at its summit by magnates – all these formed a legible and intimate political system binding the noble class to a State with which, despite and through constant conflicts with specific monarchs, it was at one.
The contrast between this pattern of the mediaeval Estates-Monarchy and that of early modern Absolutism is marked enough for historians today. It was naturally no less – far more – so for the nobles who actually lived through it. For the great, silent structural force impelling a complete reorganization of feudal class power was inevitably concealed from them. The type of historical causality that was at work in dissolving the original unity of extra-economic exploitation at the base of the whole social system, by the spread of commodity production and exchange, and recentralizing it at the summit, was not visible within their categorial universe. For many individual nobles, it meant new opportunities for fortune and fame, which were avidly grasped; for many others, it signified indignity or ruin, against which they rebelled; for most it involved a protracted and difficult process of adaptation and conversion, across succeeding generations, before harmony between class and State was precariously restored. In the course of this process, the late feudal aristocracy was obliged to abandon old traditions and acquire many new skills.6 It had to shed military exercise of private violence, social patterns of vassal loyalty, economic habits of hereditary insouciance, political rights of representative autonomy, and cultural attributes of unlettered ignorance. It had to learn the new avocations of a disciplined officer, a literate functionary, a polished courtier, and a more or less prudent estate-owner. The history of Western Absolutism is largely the story of the slow reconversion of the landed ruling class to the necessary form of its own political power, despite and against most of its previous experience and instincts.
The Renaissance epoch thus witnessed the first phase in the consolidation of Absolutism, when it was still comparatively close to an antecedent monarchical pattern. Estates persisted in France, Castile or the Netherlands up to mid-century and flourished in England. Armies were relatively small, mainly mercenary forces with only seasonal campaigning capacity. They were led in person by aristocrats who were magnates of the first water in their respective realms (Essex, Alba, Condé or Nassau). The great secular boom of the 16th century, provoked both by rapid demographic growth and the advent of American bullion and trade, eased credit for European princes, and allowed great increases in outlay without a correspondingly sound expansion of the fiscal system, although there was a general intensification of taxation: this was the golden age of the South German financiers. There was a steady growth of bureaucratic administration, but it was typically everywhere prey to colonization by grandee houses competing for the political privileges and economic profits of office, and commanding parasitic clientages of lesser nobles who were infiltrated into the State apparatus and formed rival patronage networks within it: a modernized version of the late mediaeval retainer system and its conflicts. Factional feuds between great families, each with a segment of the State machine at their behest, and often a solid regional base within a tenuously unified country, constantly occupied the front of the political stage.7 In England, the virulent Dudley/Seymour and Leicester/Cecil rivalries, in France the murderous three-cornered war between the Guise, Montmorency and Bourbon lineages, in Spain the brutal backstairs struggle for power between the Alva and Eboli groups, were a keynote of the time. The Western aristocracies had begun to acquire university education and the cultural fluency hitherto reserved for clerics:8 they were by no means yet demilitarized in their private life, even in England, let alone France, Italy or Spain. The reigning monarchs generally had to reckon with their magnates as an independent force, to be accorded the positions appropriate to their rank: the traces of a symmetrical mediaeval pyramid were still visible in the approaches to the sovereign. It was only in the second half of the century that the first theorists of Absolutism started to propagate divine right conceptions that elevated royal power totally above the limited and reciprocal fealty of mediaeval kingly suzerainty. Bodin was the first and most rigorous of them. But the 16th century closed in the major countries without the accomplished form of Absolutism in existence anywhere: even in Spain, Philip II was impotent to send troops across the border into Aragon without the permission of its lords.
Indeed, the very term ‘Absolutism’ was a misnomer. No Western monarchy ever enjoyed an absolute power over its subjects, in the sense of an untrammelled despotism.9 All were limited, even at the height of their prerogatives, by the complex of conceptions designated ‘divine’ or ‘natural’ law. Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, which dominated European political thought for a century, eloquently embodies these contradictions of Absolutism. For Bodin was the first thinker systematically and resolutely to break with the mediaeval conception of authority as the exercise of traditional justice, and to formulate the modern idea of political power as the sovereign capacity to create new laws, and impose unquestioning obedience to them. ‘The principal mark of sovereign majesty and absolute power is essentially the right to impose laws on subjects generally without their consent. . . . There is indeed a distinction between justice and law, for the one merely implies equity, while the other implies command. Law is nothing other than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his power.’10 Yet while enunciating these revolutionary axioms, Bodin simultaneously upheld the most conservative feudal maxims limiting the basic fiscal and economic rights of rulers over their subjects. ‘It is not within the competence of any prince in the world to levy taxes at will on his people, or seize the goods of another arbitrarily’; for ‘since the sovereign prince has no power to transgress the laws of nature, which God – whose image he is on earth – has ordained, he cannot take the property of another without a just and reasonable cause.’11 Bodin’s passionate exegesis of the novel idea of sovereignty was thus combined with a call for the reinvigoration of the fief system for military service, and a reaffirmation of the value of Estates: ‘The sovereignty of a monarch is no way altered or diminished by the existence of Estates; on the contrary, his majesty is the greater and more illustrious when his people acknowledge him as sovereign, even if in such assemblies princes, not wanting to antagonize their subjects, grant and permit many things to which they would not have consented without the requests, prayers and just complaints of their people. . . .’12 Nothing reveals more clearly the real nature of Absolute Monarchy in the later Renaissance than this authoritative theorization of it. For the practice of Absolutism corresponded to Bodin’s theory of it. No Absolutist State could ever dispose at will of the liberty or landed property of the nobility itself, or the bourgeoisie, in the fashion of the Asian tyrannies coeval with them. Nor did they ever achieve any complete administrative centralization or juridical unification; corporative particularisms and regional heterogeneities inherited from the mediaeval epoch marked the Ancien Régimes down to their ultimate overthrow. Absolute monarchy in the West was thus, in fact, always doubly limited: by the persistence of traditional political bodies below it and the presence of an overarching moral law above it. In other words, the sway of Absolutism ultimately operated within the necessary bounds of the class whose interests it secured. Sharp conflicts between the two were to break out as the dismantling of many familiar noble landmarks by the monarchy proceeded in the next century. But throughout them, it should be remembered that just as no absolute power was ever exercised by the Absolutist State of the West, no struggle between these States and their aristocracies could ever be absolute either. The social unity of the two determined the terrain and temporality of the political contradictions between them. These, however, were to have their own historical importance.
The next hundred years witnessed the full emplacement of the Absolutist State, in a century of agrarian and demographic depression and downward-drifting prices. It was now that the effects of the ‘military revolution’ made themselves decisively felt. Armies rapidly multiplied in size, becoming astronomically expensive, in a series of ceaselessly expanding wars. Tilly’s operations were not so much larger than those of Alva; they were dwarfed by those of Turenne. The cost of these massive military machines created acute revenue crises for the Absolutist States. Tax pressures on the masses generally intensified. Simultaneously, the sale of public offices and honours now became a central financial expedient for all monarchies, and was systematized in a way that it had not been in the previous century. The result was to integrate a growing number of arriviste bourgeois into the columns of State functionaries, which became increasingly professionalized, and to reorganize the links between the nobility and the State apparatus itself.
For the sale of offices was not merely an economic device to raise revenue from the propertied classes. It also served a political function: by making the acquisition of bureaucratic position a market transaction, and vesting ownership of it with rights of inheritance, sale of offices blocked the formation of grandee clientage systems within the State dependent not on impersonal cash equivalents, but on the personal connections and prestige of a great lord and his house. Richelieu stressed in his Testament the critical ‘sterilizing’ role of the paulette in putting the whole administrative system beyond the reach of tentacular aristocratic lineages like that of the House of Guise. Of course, one parasitism was only exchanged for another: instead of patronage, venality. But the mediation of the market was a safer one for the monarchy than that of the magnates: the Parisian financial syndicates who advanced loans to the State, farmed taxes and bought up offices in the 17th century were much less dangerous to French Absolutism than the provincial dynasties of the 16th, who not only had sections of the royal administration beholden to them, but could field their own armed troops as well. The augmented bureaucratization of office in its turn produced new types of ruling administrators, normally recruited from the nobility and expecting the conventional benefits of office, but imbued with a rigorous respect for the State as such and a fierce determination to uphold its long-term interests against short-sighted cabals of ambitious or disaffected grandees. These were the austere reforming Ministers of the 17th century monarchies, essentially civilian functionaries, with no autonomous regional or military base, directing the affairs of State from their cabinets: Oxenstierna, Laud, Richelieu, Colbert or Olivares. (The complementary type in the new era was the feckless personal intimate of the reigning sovereign, the válido of whom Spain was to be so prodigal, from Lerma to Godoy; Mazarin was a strange mixture of the two.) It was these generations which extended and codified the practices of bilateral 16th century diplomacy into a multilateral international system, of which the Treaty of Westphalia was the founding charter, and the magnified scope of the wars of the 17th century the material crucible.
Escalation of war, bureaucratization of office, intensification of taxation, erosion of clientage, all led in the same direction: towards a decisive elimination of what Montesquieu in the next century was to theorize nostalgically as the ‘intermediary powers’ between the monarchy and the people. In other words, the Estates systems progressively went under as the class power of the nobility assumed the form of a centripetal dictatorship exercised under the royal ensign. The actual power of the monarchy as an institution, of course, in no way necessarily corresponded to that of the monarch: the sovereign who actually directed administration and conducted policy was as much the exception as the rule, although for obvious reasons the creative unity and efficacy of Absolutism was always at its height when the two coincided (Louis XIV or Frederick II). The maximum florescence and vigour of the Absolutist State of the grand siècle was necessarily also a stifling compression of the traditional rights and autonomies of the noble class, which dated back to the original mediaeval decentralization of the feudal polity and were sanctioned by venerable custom and interest. The last Estates-General before the Revolution was held in France in 1614; the last Castilian Cortés before Napoleon in 1665; the last Landtag in Bavaria in 1669; while in England, the longest surcease of Parliament in a century occurred, from 1629 to the Civil War. This epoch is thus not only that of a political and cultural apogee of Absolutism, but also of widespread aristocratic disaffection and alienation from it. Particularist privileges and customary rights were not abandoned without a struggle, especially in a time of pervasive economic recession and tautened credit.
The 17th century was thus repeatedly the scene of local noble revolts against the Absolutist State in the West, which often blended with incipient sedition by lawyers or merchants, and sometimes even utilized the suffering rage of the rural and urban masses themselves, as a temporary weapon against the monarchy.13 The Fronde in France, the Catalonian Republic in Spain, the Neapolitan Revolution in Italy, the Estates Revolt in Bohemia and the Great Rebellion in England itself all had, in very different proportions, something of this aspect of a nobiliary revolt against the consolidation of Absolutism.14 Naturally, this reaction could never become a full-scale, united aristocratic onslaught on the monarchy, for the two were tied together by an umbilical class cord: nor was there any case of a purely noble revolt in the century. The characteristic pattern was rather an overdetermined explosion in which a regionally delimited part of the nobility raised the banner of aristocratic separatism, and was joined by a discontented urban bourgeoisie and plebeian mobs in a general upheaval. Only in England, where the capitalist component of the revolt was preponderant in both the rural and urban propertied classes, did the Great Rebellion succeed. Everywhere else, in France, Spain, Italy and Austria, insurrections dominated or infected by noble separatism were crushed and Absolutist power reinforced. Necessarily so. No feudal ruling class could afford to jettison the advances achieved by Absolutism, which were the expression of profound historical necessities working themselves out right across the continent, without jeopardizing its own existence; none, in fact, ever was wholly or mainly won to the cause of revolt. But the regional or partial character of these struggles does not minimize their significance: factors of local auto-nomism merely condensed a diffuse dissatisfaction that often existed throughout the nobility, and gave it a violent politico-military form. The protests of Bordeaux, Prague, Naples, Edinburgh, Barcelona or Palermo had a wider resonance. Their ultimate defeat was a central episode in the difficult travail of the whole class in this century, as it slowly transformed itself to fit the new, unwonted exigencies of its own State power. No class in history immediately comprehends the logic of its own historical situation, in epochs of transition: a long period of disorientation and confusion may be necessary for it to learn the necessary rules of its own sovereignty. The Western nobility in the tense age of 17th century Absolutism was no exception: it had to be broken in to the harsh and unawaited discipline of its own conditions of government.
This is essentially the explanation of the apparent paradox of the later trajectory of Absolutism in the West. For if the 17th century is the noon of turmoil and disarray in the relationship between class and State within the total system of aristocratic political rule, the 18th century is by comparison the golden evening of their tranquillity and reconciliation. A new stability and harmony prevailed, as the international economic conjuncture changed and a hundred years of relative prosperity set in for most of Europe, while the nobility regained confidence in its capacity to direct the fortunes of the State. A polished rearisto-cratization of the higher bureaucracy occurred in one country after another, making the previous epoch seem by illusory contrast assorted with parvenus. The French Regency and the Swedish Hat oligarchy are the most striking examples of this phenomenon. But it can be seen in Caroline Spain and even in Georgian England or Periwig Holland, where bourgeois revolutions had actually converted state and dominant mode of production to capitalism. The Ministers of State who symbolize the period lack the creative energy and austere force of their predecessors: but they were serenely at peace with their class. Fleury or Choiseul, Enseñada or Aranda, Walpole or Newcastle are the representative figures of this epoch.
The civilian perrormance of the Absolutist State in the West in the age of the Enlightenment reflects this pattern: there was a trimming of excesses and a refinement of techniques, a certain further imprint of bourgeois influences, coupled with a general loss of dynamism and creativity. The extreme distortions generated by sale of offices were pared away, and the bureaucracy rendered correspondingly less venal: but often at the price of a public loan system for raising equivalent revenues which, imitated from the more advanced capitalist countries, soon tended to waterlog the State with accumulated debts. Mercantilism was still preached and practised, although the new ‘liberal’ economic doctrines of the physiocrats, advocating free trade and agrarian investment, made some limited headway in France, Tuscany and elsewhere. Perhaps the most important and interesting development within the landed ruling class in the last hundred years before the French Revolution, however, was a phenomenon outside the ambit of the State itself. This was the European spread of vincolismo – the rash of aristocratic devices for the protection and consolidation of large landed property against the disintegrating pressures and vagaries of the capitalist market.15 The English nobility after 1689 was one of the first to pioneer this trend, with the invention of the ‘strict settlement’, preventing owners of estates from alienating family property and vesting rights in the eldest son only: two measures designed to freeze the whole land market in the interests of aristocratic supremacy. Soon, one after another, the main Western countries developed or perfected their own variants of this ‘vinculism’ or tying of the land to its traditional owners. The mayoraigo in Spain, the morgado in Portugal, fideicommissum in Italy and Austria, and the maiorat in Germany, all fulfilled the same function: to preserve intact great blocks of magnate estates and large latifundia against the dangers of fragmentation or sale on an open commercial market.16 Much of the recovered stability of the European nobility in the 18th century was doubtless due to the economic underpinning provided by these legal devices. There was, in fact, probably less social turnover within the ruling class in this age than in the preceding epochs, when families and fortunes had fluctuated far more rapidly amidst greater political and social upheavals.17
It was against this background that a cosmopolitan élite culture of court and salon spread across Europe, typified by the new preeminence of French as an international idiom of diplomatic and intellectual discourse. In fact, of course, beneath its veneer this culture was more deeply penetrated than ever before by the ideas of the ascendant bourgeoisie, now triumphantly finding expression in the Enlightenment. The specific weight of mercantile and manufacturing capital within most of the Western social formations was rising throughout this century, which saw the second great wave of commercial and colonial expansion overseas. But it only determined State policy where a bourgeois revolution had already occurred and Absolutism had been overthrown, in England and Holland. Elsewhere, there is no more striking sign of the structural continuity of the late feudal State into its final phase than the persistence of its traditional military traditions. Actual troop strengths generally levelled off or dropped somewhat in Western Europe after the Treaty of Utrecht: the physical apparatus of war had ceased to expand, at least on land (at sea, it was another matter). But the frequency of war and its centrality to the international state system did not seriously alter. In fact, perhaps more geographical territory – classical object of every aristocratic military struggle – changed hands in Europe during this century than either of its two predecessors: Silesia, Naples, Lombardy, Belgium, Sardinia and Poland were among the prizes. War ‘functioned’ in this sense down to the end of the Ancien Regime. Typologically, of course, the campaigns of European Absolutism present a certain evolution in and through a basic repetition. The common determinant of all of them was the feudal-territorial drive discussed above, whose characteristic form was the dynastic conflict pure and simple of the early 16th century (Habsburg/Valois struggle for Italy). Superimposed on this for a hundred years, from 1550 to 1650, was the religious conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation powers, which never initiated but frequently intensified and exacerbated geopolitical rivalries and provided their contemporary ideological idiom. The Thirty Years War was the greatest, and last, of these ‘mixed’ struggles.18 It was promptly succeeded by the first of a wholly new type of military conflict in Europe, fought for different objectives in a different element – the Anglo-Dutch commercial wars of the 1650’s and 1660’s, in which virtually all engagements were maritime. These confrontations, however, were confined to the two States in Europe which had experienced bourgeois revolutions, and were strictly inter-capitalist contests. The attempt to ‘adopt’ their objectives by Colbert in France proved a fiasco in the 1670’s. However, from the War of the League of Augsburg onwards, trade was nearly always an auxiliary co-presence in the major European military struggles for land – if only because of the participation in them of England, whose geographical expansion overseas was now wholly commercial in character, and whose goal was effectively a world colonial monopoly. Hence the hybrid character of the last 18th century wars, juxtaposing two different times and types of conflict in a strange, single mêlée, of which the Seven Years War furnishes the clearest example:19 the first in history to be fought right across the globe, yet as a sideshow for most of the participants, for whom Manila or Montreal were remote skirmishes compared with Leuthen or Kunersdorf. Nothing reveals the failing feudal vision of the Ancien Régime in France more than its inability to perceive the real stakes involved in these dual wars: together with its rivals, it remained basically fixated on the traditional contest for land to the end.
1. The Swedish monarchy was actually to receive much of its income in kind, both in dues and taxes, well into the early modern epoch.
2. A full-scale study of mediaeval Estates in Europe is badly needed. At present, the only work with some international sidelights appears to be Antonio Marongiu, Il Parlamento in Italia, nel Medio Evo e nell’Età Moderna: Contributo alla Storia delle Istituzioni Parlamentari dell’Europa Occidentale, Milan 1962, recently and somewhat misleadingly translated into English as Mediaeval Parliaments: A Comparative Study, London 1968. In fact, Marongiu’s book – as its original title indicates – is essentially concerned with Italy, the one region in Europe where Estates were absent or relatively unimportant. Its brief sections on other countries (France, England or Spain) scarcely constitute a satisfactory introduction to them, and it ignores Northern and Eastern Europe altogether. Moreover, the book is a juristic survey, innocent of any sociological enquiry.
3. Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, pp. 99–100.
4. Ab omnibus debet comprobari: what touches all must be approved by all.
5. These alternative patterns are discussed by Hintze, in ‘Typologie der Ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes’, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, Vol. I, pp. 110–29, which remains the best single text on the phenomenon of feudal estates in Europe, although curiously inconclusive by comparison with most of Hintze’s other essays: as if the full implications of his findings had yet to be elucidated by him.
6. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558–1641, Oxford 1965, is the deepest existent case-study of the metamorphoses of a European nobility in this epoch. Criticism has focused on its thesis that the economic position of the English peerage deteriorated significantly in the century examined. However, this is essentially a secondary issue, for the ‘crisis’ was a much wider one than a simple question of the quantity of manors held by lords: it was a pervasive travail of adaptation. Stone’s discussion of the problem of aristocratic military power in this context is particularly valuable (pp. 199–270). The limitation of the book is rather its confinement to the English peerage, a very small élite within the landed ruling class; moreover, as will be seen below, the English aristocracy was extremely atypical of Western Europe as a whole. Studies of continental nobilities, with a comparable wealth of material, are much needed.
7. For a recent discussion, see J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598, London 1968, pp. 73–7.
8. J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’, in Reappraisals in History, London 1961, pp. 45–70.
9. Roland Mousnier and Fritz Hartung, ‘Quelques Problèmes Concernant la Monarchic Absolue’, X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storici, Relazioni IV, Florence 1955, esp. pp. 4–15, is the first and most fundamental contribution to the debate on this topic over recent years. Earlier writers had perceived the same truth, if in a less systematic fashion, among them Engels: ‘The decadence of feudalism and the development of towns were both decentralizing forces, which precisely determined the necessity of absolute monarchy as a power capable of welding together nationalities. Monarchy had to be absolute, just because of the centrifugal pressure of all these elements. Its absolutism, however, must not be understood in a vulgar sense. It was in permanent conflict with Estates, and with rebellious feudatories and cities: it nowhere abolished Estates altogether.’ Marx-Engels, Werke, Bd 21, p. 402. The last clause is, of course, an overstatement.
10. Jean Bodin, Les Six Livres de la République, Paris 1578, pp. 103, 114. I have translated droit as ‘justice’ in this passage, to bring out the distinction alluded to above.
11. Les Six Livres de la République, pp. 102, 114.
12. Les Six Livres de la République, p. 103.
13. Trevor-Roper’s justly celebrated essay, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, No. 16, November 1959, pp. 31–64, now modified and reprinted in Religion, The Reformation and Social Change, London 1967, pp. 46–89, for all its merits, restricts the scope of these revolts too narrowly, by presenting them essentially as protests against the expense and waste of the post-Renaissance courts. In fact, as numerous historians have pointed out, war was a very much larger item in the State budgets of the 17th century than the court. Louis XIV’s palace establishment was far more lavish than that of Anne of Austria, but it was not thereby more unpopular. Apart from this, the fundamental rift between the aristocracy and the monarchy in this epoch was not really an economic one, although war-taxes could and did set off wider revolts. It was political, concerned with the total position of the nobility in an incipient polity whose outlines were often still opaque to all the actors involved in the drama.
14. The Neapolitan upheaval, socially much the most radical of these movements, naturally least so. But even there, the first storm signal of anti-Spanish explosion were the aristocratic conspiracies of Sanza, Conversano and other nobles, who were hostile to vice-regal fiscalism and the speculative cliques which battened on it, and were intriguing with France against Spain from 1634 onwards. Baronial plots were multiplying in Naples in early 1647, when the popular tumult headed by Masaniello suddenly burst out, and drove the bulk of the Neapolitan aristocracy back to loyalism. For this process, see the excellent analysis in Rosario Villari, La Rivolta Anti-Spagnuola a Napoli. Le Origini (1585–1647), Bari 1967, pp. 201–16.
15. There is no comprehensive study of this phenomenon. It is discussed in passing by, inter alia, S. J. Woolf, Studi sulla Nobiltà Piemontese nell’ Epoca dell’ Assolutismo, Turin 1963, who dates its spread from the preceding century. Most of the contributors to A. Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the 18th Century, London 1953, also touch on it.
16. The Spanish mayorazgo was much the oldest of these devices, dating back over two hundred years; but it steadily increased in both numbers and scope, eventually coming to include even movable goods. The English ‘strict settlement’ was in fact somewhat less rigid than the general continental pattern of the fideicommissum, since it was formally operative only for a single generation: but in practice successive heirs were expected to reaccept it.
17. The whole question of mobility within the noble class, from the dawn of feudalism to the end of absolutism, needs a great deal of further exploration. At present, only approximate guesses are possible for successive phases of this long history. Duby records his surprise at finding that Bloch’s conviction of a radical discontinuity between the Carolingian and mediaeval aristocracies in France was mistaken: in fact, a high proportion of the lineages who supplied the vassi dominici of the 9th century survived to become the barons of the 12th century. See G. Duby, ‘Une Enquête à Poursuivre: La Noblesse dans la France Médiévale’, Revue Historique, CCXXVI, 1961, pp. 1–22. On the other hand, Perroy found an extremely high level of mobility within the gentry of the County of Forez from the 13th century onwards: there the average duration of any noble line was 3–4, or more conservatively, 3–6 generations, largely because of the hazards of mortality. Edouard Perroy, ‘Social Mobility among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present, No. 21, April 1962, pp. 25–38. In general, the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance seem to have been periods of rapid turnover in many countries, in which most of the greatest mediaeval houses disappeared. This is certainly true in England and France, although probably less so in Spain. The restabilization of the ranks of the aristocracy seems equally plain by the late 17th century, after the last and most violent reshuffle of all, in Habsburg Bohemia during the Thirty Years War, had come to an end. But the subject may well reserve further surprises for us.
18. H. G. Koenigsberger’s chapter, ‘The European Civil War’, in The Habsburgs in Europe, Ithaca 1971, pp. 219–85, is a succinct and exemplary account.
19. The best general analysis of the Seven Years War is still Dorn, Competition for Empire, pp. 318–84.
