The Birth of Absolutism: A History of France, 1598–1661

262 Pages·1996·26.09 MB·English

by  Yves-Marie Bercé (auth.)

EUROPEAN STUDIES SERIES
General Editors Colin Jones
Richard Overy
Series Advisers Joe Bergin
John BreuiIly
Ruth Harris
This series marks a major initiative in European history publishing
aimed primarily, though not exclusively, at an undergraduate
audience. It will encompass a wide variety of books on aspects of
European history since 1500, with particular emphasis on France
and Germany, although no country will be excluded and a special
effort will be made to cover previously neglected areas, such as
Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe.
The series will include political accounts and broad thematic
treatments, both of a comparative kind and studies of a single
country, and will lay particular emphasis on social and cultural
history where this opens up fruitful new ways of examining the
past. The aim of the series is to make available a wide range of
titles in areas where there is now an obvious gap or where the
existing historical literature is out of date or narrowly focused.
The series will also include translations of important books pub
lished elsewhere in Europe.
Interest in European affairs and history has never been greater;
European Studies will help make that European heritage closer,
richer and more comprehensible.
EUROPEANSTUD~SEruES
Published
Yves-Marie Berce The Birth of Absolutism: A History of France,
1598-1661
Janine Garrisson A History of Sixteenth-Century France, 1483-1598
Michael Hughes Early Modem Germany, 1477-1806
Martyn Lyons Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French
Revolution
Pamela M. Pilbeam Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century France,
1814-1871
Forthcoming
Robert Aldrich Greater France: A Short History of French
Overseas Expansion
Nigel Aston Religion, Revolution and the Churches in France,
1780-1804
Christopher Black The Counter Reformation in Italy
Gail Bossenga The Ancien Regime and the Coming of the French
Revolution
Mark Greengrass Continental Calvinism: The Shaping of a
Confessional Identity, 1541-1618
Susan Grogan A History of Women in France, 1750-1914
Gregory Hanlon Grandeur and Crisis in Early Modem Italy,
1560-1800
Stuart Jones A History of France, 1870-1924
Richard Mackenney The Renaissance Italians, 1300-1600
Hugh McLeod Secularisation in Western Europe, 1848-1914
Richard Okey The Habsburg Monarchy, 1780-1918: The
Improbable Empire
Richard Overy Nazism
Jonathan Powis Office-Holding in Old Regime France
Roger Price A Social History of Europe, 1750-1914
Helen Rawlings Church, Religion and Society in Habsburg Spain
Stephen Salter Imperial Germany, 1871-1918
Tom Scott A Social and Economic History of Early Modem
Germany
Richard Vinen A History of France, 1934-1970
L. White Early Modem Portugal
More titles are in preparation
The Birth of Absolutism
A History of France, 1598-1661
YVES-MARIE BERCE
Translated by Richard Rex
© Editions du Seuil 1992
English translation © Macmillan Press Ltd 1996
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied
or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London WIP 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
Published 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Originally published by Editions du Seuil, Paris, under the title La naissance
dramatique de l'absolutisme, 1598-1661 (1992)
ISBN 978-0-333-62757-0 ISBN 978-1-349-24383-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24383-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Typeset by Nick Allen/Longworth Editorial Services
Longworth, Oxfordshire.
Contents
Foreword vi
1 Henri IV and the Years of Peace 1
2 The Succession Crisis of 1610 27
3 The Regency of Marie de Medici 43
4 The Estates General of 1614 53
5 The Government of Concini 65
6 The Regime of the Young Louis XIII 75
7 The Protestant Churches and the Last Wars of
Religion 85
8 The Good Times End: 1624-1631 103
9 Richelieu and the Beginnings of an
Interventionist Foreign Policy 117
10 France in Open War 135
11 France, the Fronde and the Ministry of Mazarin 157
12 The New Balance of Power in Europe 183
13 Hopes and Beliefs 193
14 Artistic Life 215
15 Material Life 231
Chronology 247
Bibliography 253
Index 259
v
Foreword
You have in your hands a work which I would certainly never have
undertaken of my own accord if the publisher had not approached
me to do so. It has turned out to be an incomparable way of dis
covering a period of history which I reckoned I knew well. I have
had to spend time reflecting on whether to include this battle or
that edict, whether they deserve a place in a necessarily brief
account, or whether they illustrate some general trend, in order to
assess the significance of particular events and individuals within
their historical context.
The work is a history of France, a genre with a long ancestry,
and one which arouses certain almost stereotyped expectations in
readers. It must of necessity contain the tale of the fortunes of
France, the collective entity and national community embodied in
its State structure, the monarchy (the most ancient in Europe), the
nursery of all the political developments of the country's future. It
seems as though, in the case of France, the State begot the nation,
or at least that the two developed in parallel. The French people
of the early modern period looked to the Crown and its symbols,
and to the person of the king, when they wished to evoke the
essence of their communal existence. They had no doubts as to its
inherent excellence and its capacity to transform the customs and
welfare of its people. They showed no hesitation in extending its
institutional structures and laws to each new territory conquered
by French arms. The reader's first priority in approaching this
book will therefore be to find an account of the ups and downs of
the French State between 1598 and 1661. But political history can-
vi
FOREWORD vii
not be restricted to the chronicle of central government, a proces
sion of kings and ministers, and a balance-sheet of their successes
and failures. It must also cover the political and intellectual alter
natives: different opinions; institutions and powers other than
those of the central State; the influences of other corporate
bodies and social groups, such as churches, families and cities;
expectations, dreams and hopes; the thousand and one ways of
escaping the grasp of politics, of living outside official history
with its conventions and restrictions. Of course I can hardly hope
to have fulfilled such a manifesto, but this is where I find the justi
fication for some original and perhaps surprising observations.
The years from 1598 to 1661 were crucial in deciding the politi
cal destiny of France. The still changeable and pragmatic will of
kings and their ministers, together with the constraints of the
Thirty Years War, gave birth to the 'fiscal State' and set the monar
chy on the path to centralisation, even absolutism. Yet as late as
the death of Mazarin the game was not yet won. History could still
have been written differently. The obligation of laying down my
pen in 1661, arbitrarily cutting off the chain of events at that
point, has at least provided an opportunity for considering poten
tial political alternatives. It seems to me that historians run the risk
of economising on reality when, secure in their knowledge of how
things turned out, they write history as a sort of one-way ticket to
the future. They are more faithful to the period under considera
tion when they give some thought to the stillborn alternatives, to
the other possibilities envisaged by those who actually lived at the
time. In other words, we should not look at the story of the Fronde
as if it could only have led to the State of Louis XIV. Treating the
past in this deterministic way takes the edge off it and diminishes
its significance. If one accepts that human history contains its
share of accident and contingency, then this approach, albeit
imaginative and arbitrary, ought to prove fruitful. These pages, as
it happens, were written in the summer of 1991, and the dramatic
changes which that year saw in Eastern Europe had the trivial side
effect of strengthening my taste for asking new questions and
calling into question the complacency of the fait accompli.
If the history of France is no more to be identified with that of
its State structure than is the history of any other country, neither
can it be limited exclusively to the French viewpoint. It was not
viii FOREWORD
written in the stars that Roussillon and Artois would be annexed to
the kingdom. The war aims and political views of Spanish minis
ters, Italian princes and Dutch merchants have as much historical
relevance and legitimacy as the presumption that makes the for
mation of the French 'hexagon' almost a law of nature. A brilliant
exercise in comparative history can be found in the magisterial
J.
essay by the British historian H. Elliott, setting the careers of
Olivares and Richelieu in parallel (Richelieu and Olivares, Cam
bridge, 1984; translated into French as Richelieu et Olivares, Paris,
1991).
Another taste of mine is for drawing illustrative examples and
anecdotes from the provinces, in an attempt to escape the tradi
tional short-sightedness of grand history told from Paris. Finally,
the general chapters at the end of the book, which under the con
straints of space and time are unable to offer an adequate
synthesis, attempt to sketch the life and customs of the people.
The history of the silent majority sometimes takes little account of
the more easily described course of high politics, as seen from
courts and chanceries, but it has the advantage of revealing the
slower rhythms of everyday life and, in addition, of adding new
material to the familiar contents of historical textbooks.
Yves-Marie Berce
1 Henri IV and the Years of Peace
1598, The Year of Peace
The peace which came to the kingdom of France towards the end
of spring 1598 would prove lasting. More than thirty years were to
pass before France once more found itself in open war with the
Habsburg powers, while the confessional conflicts which had con
sumed the realm since 1562 had died down, and would not
rekindle in the following decade. The fair prospects for peace are
not detectable only with hindsight, but were perceived and felt by
contemporaries. The farewell to arms arising from the Edict of
Nantes inaugurated a period of pragmatic religious toleration,
while the Treaty of Vervins which brought an end to the Franco
Spanish war on the frontiers of Picardy was no fragile outcome of
short-term calculation or princely whim. It was imposed on the
participants by the logic of events and circumstances. With their
resources exhausted and war-weariness everywhere apparent,
neither side saw any prospect of victory, and both realised that
further military efforts on the scale of the 1590s would not be
feasible for many years.
The traditional midsummer bonfires which that year celebrated
the feast of Stjohn the Baptist in the Place de Greve outside the
Paris Hotel de Ville saw bundles of weapons and drums ritually
consigned to the flames. Municipal authorities across the land
had Te Deums sung in the major churches and bonfires lit in the
squares. The routines of peace were quickly resumed. Merchants
once more took to the roads, and market-stalls and fairground
booths went up. Holidays once more rang with youthful dancing
1