Feudalism, venality, and revolution: Provincial assemblies in late-Old Regime France

By Stephen Miller

According to Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential work on the Old Regime and the French Revolution, royal centralisation had so weakened the feudal power of the nobles that their remaining privileges became glaringly intolerable to commoners. This book challenges the theory by showing that when Louis XVI convened assemblies of landowners in the late 1770s and 1780s to discuss policies needed to resolve the budgetary crisis, he faced widespread opposition from lords and office holders. These elites regarded the assemblies as a challenge to their hereditary power over commoners. The king’s government comprised seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices. Lordships and offices upheld inequality on behalf of the nobility and bred the discontent motivating the people to make the French Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526148360

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller was born in the USA and now lives in Canada. After graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 1968, he moved to Vancouver to concentrate on creative writing and theatre, starting as a stage carpenter and working his way up to becoming an actor and scriptwriter. A Game of Soldiers is his first thriller. He is presently working on a second book which will again feature Pyotr Ryzkhov, this time in the immediate aftermath of World War One.

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Introduction

Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Régime and the French Revolution has long been the starting point for students of this era. Tocqueville argued that a centuries-old process of royal centralization stripped the nobles of any role in the government. Nobles no longer levied taxes, published edicts, or called out the militia to uphold the law. France thus differed from Austria and Prussia, where the coercive aspects of feudalism continued to bind the peasantry to the manor. France also differed from England, where the great landowners administered the country and settled disputes as justices of the peace. In France, the nobles’ defining attributes were ranks, titles, and privileges, which did not create common interests with other royal subjects. Their lack of power made it impossible for them to do anything constructive on behalf of their compatriots, shape public opinion, or lead the rest of society.¹

Jonathan Dewald, in a recent essay in the American Historical Review, argues that Tocqueville correctly discerned the nobles’ long-term decline. The nobles’ land rents collapsed after the mid-1600s and stagnated for the next century before finally regaining their former value in the 1770s. At this time, the nobles sold pieces of their estates to commoners, thus reducing their overall share of the land. The nobles’ relationship to the monarchy deteriorated as well. The crown not only forced them to share new taxes with commoners, but also undermined the value of their military and judicial offices. This erosion of the nobles’ standing led them to plan their births, inheritances, and marriages with the aim of ensuring the future of their lineages. The result was a decrease in their numbers from 1.2 percent of the population at the end of the seventeenth century to 0.5 percent at the end of the Old Regime. Following Tocqueville, Dewald argues that the decline the nobility made it possible for commoners to conceive of a society composed of citizens equal in rights, a society without nobles.²

Whereas Dewald argued that the decline of the nobility explains the widespread embrace of the concept of equality before the law, François Furet went a step further, using Tocqueville’s thesis to explain the radicalism of the Revolution. Starting from the premise of royal centralization, and the resultant weakening of medieval bonds and lessening of seigneurial burdens, Furet argued that the anti-feudal patriotism of 1789 and the ensuing ideology of the Jacobins did not arise out of iniquities of the Old Regime. Rather, the revolutionary system of ideas and ideals served to integrate a population of atomized individuals deprived of their customary social bonds by the state. Imbued with an ideology of equality, the revolutionaries took a weakened and disorganized nobility, incapable of resistance, and turned it into a monstrous enemy of the people. The Revolution invented formidable enemies for itself, for every Manichean creed needs to overcome its share of eternal evil. The adjective ‘aristocratic’ brought to the idea of a plot a definition of its content.³

The argument elaborated in this book contests this idea that the crown stripped the nobles of power. The book instead starts from the premise that the monarchy and nobility formed a social and political configuration – what Perry Anderson labeled a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination – combining hereditary lands, lordships, and offices under the aegis of the king. ⁴ Royal subjects living under this domination – from the middle classes down through the mass of artisans and peasants – rose up against it in revolution when the crisis of the monarchy afforded the opportunity in 1789.

To understand the crisis of the monarchy, one must take note of Tocqueville’s estimation that the French monarchy’s main international rival, England, had already become a modern nation in the seventeenth century. England thus succeeded in arresting the French monarchy’s phase of expansion during the wars of the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign. Dewald is thus correct in maintaining that the monarchy no longer sustained the value of the nobles’ military and judicial offices. During the eighteenth century, facing stiff international competition, the monarchy could no longer bring elites into its fold – through tax exemptions and rights to state revenues – like it had in the past.⁵ The nobles had to manage births, dowries, and inheritances in order to maintain their social standing.

Nevertheless, although the wealth and power of the state and nobility no longer expanded as robustly as in the seventeenth century, the essence of their relationship remained. In fact, a series of eighteenth-century reformers identified this relationship as the fundamental weakness of the state. They developed plans for provincial assemblies as a means of inducing the nobles to relinquish their hereditary lordships and offices and instead join the king’s project to rationalize and strengthen the administration and economy.

Ultimately, what is at stake here is not any momentous reforms achieved by the provincial assemblies but what they reveal about the nobles’ place within the monarchy. First, the reformers made clear that the nobles’ spheres of authority embodied the root cause of the monarchy’s problems. They hoped that the king could govern more efficiently through a uniform network of participatory assemblies rather than relying on the willingness of the owners of autonomous jurisdictions. Second, when Louis XVI acted on the reformers’ plans, initially on a limited scale in the provinces of Berry and Haute-Guyenne in 1778 and 1779, and then over the greater part of the realm – the pays d’élection governed directly by the crown where medieval estates, representing the clergy, nobility, and townspeople, no longer existed – in 1787, the nobles declared that the assemblies undermined their rights over commoners. These rights, they maintained, constituted the foundations of the monarchy. Third, the nobles made evident their authority by obstructing the reforms, which the crown pursued through the assemblies.

Thus, my primary argument runs counter to Tocqueville and Furet. When studying revolutions, particularly the French exemplar, one does not observe a populace motivated by ideology against imaginary foes. Tocqueville’s historiographical legacy, we have seen, portrays the nobles as shadows of their former feudal selves. A revolution against the nobility would thus amount to unnecessary violence. In this book, by contrast, the reader will see that, in 1789, the people looked up to the nobles’ tangible heritable authority. This authority weighed on royal subjects economically and prevented them from participating in government.

My argument owes much to the findings of historians, since the mid-1980s, that the monarchy did not correspond to the centralized state depicted by Tocqueville. The king held the realm together by offering loyal nobles lucrative positions at the head of the Church, tribunals, military units, and provincial estates. Elites benefited financially as creditors of the king by placing their wealth in royal treasuries in return for control over municipalities, tribunals, and financial administrations.⁶

Tocqueville was thus right to distinguish France from the serf system upheld by the monarchical regimes of eastern Europe as well as from the parliamentary system controlled by gentry legislators and justices of the peace of England. However, he seems to have been on more dubious grounds when defining the French nobility as a privileged caste shorn of power by the state. The nobles in fact owned positions, mostly on a hereditary basis, at the head of the Church, tribunals, military, and several provincial estates. As Rafe Blaufarb has shown, eighteenth-century critics defined the Old Regime as feudal because of its confusion of property and power.⁷

The Marxist scholars William Beik and David Parker have portrayed the nobles’ continuing reliance on both landed property and political power as an enduring legacy of feudalism. The property of the English gentry, by contrast, consisted solely of the economic variety, independent of, though protected by, the state. Robert Brenner dated this divergence between the two countries to the social conflicts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the peasants succeeded in establishing heritable plots over much of France. Although the peasants thus limited the resources the nobles could take from the realm and its people, many of the nobles secured compensation in the form of hereditary positions – affording valuable privileges – within the monarchy, as it took shape over the course of the early modern period. ⁸

This process lasted several centuries. The nobles living through it did not perceive or understand it. Many of them rebelled against what they experienced as dishonor and ruin at the hands of royal absolutism and its wealthy financiers. Dewald, to reiterate, saw the late seventeenth century as a turning point, when the nobles’ situation began to deteriorate, not only in how they perceived it, but in measurable indices. Louis XIV drove the highest magistrates, known as parlementaires, into debt by selling thousands of new offices in an effort to fund the military campaigns of the last decades of his reign. The parlementaires had to purchase the new judgeships in a futile effort to shore up the value of their offices. For the parlementaires, and the thousands of office holders below them, the monetary returns on judicial posts remained poor throughout the eighteenth century. Many elites felt stuck in subordinate undignified ranks.⁹

But overall, venal offices continued to confer prestige and social standing, which their owner could pass on to descendants. Offices thus regained some of their former value by 1789. Their owners received annual payments from the crown (gages), collected fees from the populace in the exercise of their functions, enjoyed tax exemptions and honors, and, above all, possessed the property value of the offices. All of these advantages, like the heritable jurisdictions of lords, depended on the capacity of the monarchical state, its administration, constabulary, and military, to uphold law and order.¹⁰

We will see in Chapter 1 that a series of brilliant reformers portrayed this configuration of property and power as the main weakness of the monarchy. The reformers included René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson, author of Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, published posthumously in 1764, though it had already circulated for decades. They included, above all, writers associated with the school of economic thought known as physiocracy, such as Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, author in 1775 of Mémoire sur les municipalité on behalf of the controller general, or the finance minister, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. These writers argued that venal offices and lordships were investments in spheres of governmental authority and that it was only natural for elites to defend the value of their investments. Yet in doing so, they precluded precisely what was necessary for the revitalization of the monarchy: a degree of public participation in the administration.

The reformers settled on provincial assemblies as the medium for such participation. A standardized network of assemblies would allow the landed classes to play a constructive role in government. Assemblies would encourage them to see the universal benefits of administrative and fiscal reforms rather than focus on their particular interests in venal and seigneurial rights. Assemblies, furthermore, would put elites under scrutiny in the public view and thus prod them to work conscientiously for the general interest. With a more reliable administration, the crown would not have to intervene so often in public affairs. The nobles in charge of the venal judiciary would then no longer have the opportunity to defend the people from royal policies and to win their support at the expense of the king.

Chapter 1 demonstrates, however, that high nobles of the king’s court in Versailles watered down these plans. They made the same point as the reformers, albeit with opposite goals, that offices and lordships led elites to focus on protecting private jurisdictions. It was this focus, they argued, that permitted the king to maintain absolute power. If royal subjects were to concentrate on common interests, through discussions in provincial assemblies, they might develop a civic program at the expense of the king’s power. To forestall such an outcome, the high nobles used their influence with Louis XVI to ensure that the assemblies did not undermine the time-honored particular rights of the privileged orders.

Pierre Renouvin arrived at the same conclusion in a book on the provincial assemblies published in 1921, still the standard work on the subject. He showed, first, that the assemblies did not have much autonomy. Louis XVI appointed the members rather than permit elections. He named high clergymen, nobles, and prominent townspeople, who then selected additional members to found the provincial assemblies. In 1787, the provincial assemblies invited other leaders of the three estates to convoke further elites and, with them, form district assemblies within the provinces. The crown denied the assemblies financial resources and liberty of expression and failed to support them when they took on vested interests. William Doyle maintains that, for these reasons, public opinion favored the revival of provincial estates. Representative estates in the provinces would have more autonomy than would the assemblies and could thus defend the interests of taxpayers.¹¹

Nevertheless, in the eyes of nobles across the country, even provincial assemblies lacking government power seemed subversive. Nobles created obstacles to what they portrayed as a participatory system dangerous to royal authority and to their traditional positions within the regime. Renouvin thus showed, second, that the privileged orders blunted the reformist edge of the assemblies. The titled justices of the Parlement of Paris saw the assemblies as a threat to their rank in the monarchy and influenced the king to limit the scope of the reform. The assemblies consequently did not affect the pays d’état such as Brittany and Burgundy, which retained medieval estates. Nor did they affect the pays d’état of Languedoc and Provence, thus leaving much of the south of France unaltered. In the pays d’élection, the crown organized the assemblies in a manner suited to assuage the prejudices of the privileged orders, dividing them according to the traditional estates, with high-ranking clergymen and nobles in positions of leadership. The assemblies thus did not take on major reforms, infringe upon particular rights, or permit much popular participation.¹²

And yet, scholarly judgments on the provincial assemblies have always been divided. Tocqueville had affirmed back in the 1850s that the assemblies occasioned one of the greatest upheavals that have ever taken place in the life of a great nation. Local government, which directly affected the people’s lives and impressed upon them the permanence of the regime, was thrown into turmoil by this sweeping reform.¹³ Jean Egret, Peter Jones, and Jeff Horn have argued that the crown created the assemblies with the aim of courting the leaders of the Third Estate. The crown summoned the peasants to gather autonomously and elect a syndic and deputies to meet in municipalités (called rural municipalities in this book) with the local priest under the presidency of the parish seigneur. Although the assemblies were composed hierarchically, their members were to be replaced in the coming years through elections from the rural municipalities to the district assemblies, and from these bodies to the provincial assemblies. The king, moreover, asked the three tiers of assemblies to expand participation in government, distribute taxes equitably, and abolish the corvée labor required of rural commoners on the roads. By bringing together royal subjects to deliberate on such issues, the assemblies contained the seeds of constitutional monarchy and enabled the emergence of grievances against privileges.¹⁴

In line with these more recent interpretations, I make a second argument, this one about the political consequences of the provincial assemblies. Having just made the case that seigneurial jurisdictions and venal offices led their owners to defend traditional rights against reforms, I now want to complicate the point by arguing that the assemblies helped change the perspective of some of these same lords and office holders. One will have occasion to observe in Chapters 5 and 6 that even some members of the Second Estate, by participating in the provincial assemblies, became aware that the sacrifice of privileges could assuage feelings of unfairness and thus allow them to enjoy a more stable form of power. They gained a foretaste of the regimes of notables of the nineteenth century, when the landed elites of the imperial and monarchical regimes could count on the peasantry as a conservative constituency in spite of occasional rebellions in the countryside.¹⁵

Of course, this idea – of the elites of all three estates joining forces in a more rational bureaucratic government for the good of the country – predated the establishment of provincial assemblies. The idea inspired the royal reformers, such as François Le Trosne and the Marquis de Mirabeau, who developed the plans for the assemblies. It is also true that a variety of experiences in the months and years following 1787, not solely the assemblies, created a spirit of patriotism and a willingness to sacrifice seigneurial rights and venal offices. In particular, the sight of armed peasants burning chateaux and seigneurial titles in the summer of 1789 spread fear and prompted the deputies of the National Assembly to abolish feudalism on the Night of August 4th in a bid to placate the rural rebels.

Yet, one must keep in mind that the decrees of the Night of August 4th maintained most seigneurial dues until the peasants reimbursed, at prohibitive rates, the lords’ right to collect them. If the decrees had solely been intended to pacify a restless countryside, then they surely missed the mark, as the recurring revolts of the ensuing three years attest. What the deputies actually abolished on the Night of August 4th – venal offices, personal and provincial privileges, and court pensions – had little to do with the rural unrest. Thus, the deputies of the National Assembly must have had some additional motive for abolishing them.¹⁶

Chapter 5 shows that, over the previous two years, virtually every tribunal of the realm defended its venal jurisdiction from the provincial assemblies and, in doing so, expressed an ideological commitment to the feudal inheritance of property rights over portions of public power. Office holders preferred to serve the king through their traditional jurisdictions rather than through elective or appointive assemblies. Their protests demonstrate that office holders still held governmental responsibilities. Royal centralization had not gone nearly as far in stripping elites of power as Tocqueville theorized.

These venal officers’ protests against the provincial assemblies show that these new bodies threatened broad strata of the social elite. The assemblies concerned not only the thousands of clergymen, nobles, and well-to-do townspeople, who met in them on the provincial and district levels, but also the tens of thousands of judges whose spheres of authority were threatened. This dispute over administrative responsibility formed part of the experience of the Third Estate in the National Assembly, the core of which consisted of venal jurists. Something must have changed in their thinking between 1787 and 1788, when they defended venality on principle, and August 4th, 1789, when they abolished it. I submit that the debates occasioned by the assemblies allowed venal jurists to glimpse the possibility of serving the nation in a more dignified fashion, out from under the crown and nobility, in a bureaucratic system based on experience and merit rather than on heritable offices.

As for the actual participants in the assemblies, one might imagine that one month-long meeting in the fall of 1787 did not have major consequences. Yet each of the twenty-two provincial assemblies, as well as the five to twelve district assemblies within each one of these provinces, left hundreds of pages of notes attesting to countless hours dedicated to public affairs. The members, moreover, selected a group of their fellow participants to gather permanently, in what were called intermediary commissions, with the purpose of implementing their resolutions. Many of them indisputably showed concern about improving their provinces and districts.

We will see in Chapter 6 that this interest in reform modified the outlook of a minority of the Second Estate. From the autumn of 1787 through the summer of 1788, the nobles, who met in the provincial and district assemblies, invoked their feudal rights to authority over the countryside and unanimously objected to peasant participation in the rural municipalities. Yet in the autumn of 1788 and the spring of 1789, many of these same nobles expressed an appreciation of the benefits of the peasants’ presence in local government. Through the assemblies, these nobles perceived, in contrast to other lords lacking this governmental experience, that they could lead more assuredly with the consent of the peasants by renouncing their seigneurial authority. These nobles hoped to bring leading clergymen and townspeople into an alliance against the crown by renouncing tax exemptions and expanding the political influence of the Third Estate. They expected that elites of all three estates would then govern the provinces.¹⁷

Accordingly, this book contributes to the growing body of research on contingent events in the origins of the French Revolution. Whereas historians previously had emphasized divergent forms of wealth, investment, and career advancement pitting the leaders of the Third Estate against the privileged orders, today they draw attention to individual decisions and unforeseen occurrences, which could have turned out differently. The eighteenth century was no doubt a time of cultural change, as commerce and consumerism spread through the fabric of urban life, and predisposed people to a regime of individual rights and civic equality.¹⁸ Nevertheless, such change affected the general population, or at least the educated stratum, and does not explain why one segment of this stratum came into conflict against another: the Third Estate against the nobility.

To explain this conflict, historians call attention to the fortuitous circumstances that prompted people to take actions hardly imaginable before the 1780s. Who could have imagined that the controller general Charles Alexandre de Calonne would seek to resolve the budgetary crisis by convoking the highest prelates and nobles to an Assembly of Notables for the first time since 1626? When Louis XVI went forward with the proposal, the Notables unexpectedly roused a national movement against additional taxes and in favor of representative government. Debate continues over whether the Notables embraced the new spirit of this movement, or whether their language expressed the traditions of former centuries. However, the fact remains that they created a public forum for opponents of the regime and demanded a meeting of the Estates General.¹⁹

People suddenly glimpsed the possibility of remaking the country and righting the abuses decried for decades.²⁰ The elections to the Estates General swept the country up in debate, in the spring of 1789, over whether the three orders should each have a single vote or whether all of the deputies should meet together and votes should be counted by head. Once assembled in Versailles, the bold speeches, the passions of the spectators, and the uncertainties over what the royal court might do propelled the deputies to call themselves the National Assembly and take other daring actions they could hardly have imagined months earlier. The peasants, for their part, had an array of grievances, especially against taxation. What inspired them to act against the lords, ransack chateaux, and destroy feudal documents were the circumstances of the summer of 1789, namely the opening created by divisions within the National Assembly over the seigneurial regime.²¹

The current book does not demonstrate that the provincial assemblies amounted to a decisive event or circumstance of these years. The assemblies had few consequences apart from the change in attitudes, described above, among certain seigneurs who took part in them and among venal jurists throughout the country. As stated above, the primary argument of this book is what the assemblies bring to light. They reveal the nobles’ persistent feudal authority over commoners. The frustration of living under the nobles’ authority – rather than an ideology obscuring the social relations of the time, as historians influenced by Tocqueville suppose – shaped the people’s interpretation of the events of 1787–89. The Assembly of Notables and the Estates General had sweeping consequences because of the people’s hopes to abolish feudalism and participate in government.²²

To explain these hopes, Chapters 2 through 4, archival studies on the Assemblies of Berry, Lyonnais, and Poitou, probe into the political and social structures of daily life at the end of the Old Regime. I selected these provinces because of their different economic and political conditions. Lyonnais had commercial and manufacturing areas, whereas Berry and Poitou had agricultural expanses and subsistence farming cut off from the commercial cities. Berry remained loyal to the Revolution through the radicalization of 1793 and 1794, Lyonnais resisted in the name of moderate republicanism, and much of the west and Poitou fought for throne and altar against the Republic. These provinces thus provide a cross-section of France as a whole.

Chapter 3 shows how the proliferation of workshops and expansion of trade put the liberalism of the members of the Assembly of Lyonnais to the test, as their hopes for economic growth confronted the vested interests bound up with the commercial monopolies and indirect tax farms of the province. Chapters 2 and 4 present evidence that enduring feudal structures in rural Berry and Poitou impeded the assemblies from working with peasant representatives to enact reforms beneficial to the rural inhabitants. Indeed, we will see in Chapter 4, on the provincial and district assemblies in Poitou, that the persistence of feudal routines prepared the ground for the counterrevolutionary War of the Vendée against the Republic in 1793.

In spite of these differences, one will have the chance to observe that in all three provinces, well-to-do commoners, as well as many clergymen and nobles, embraced the assemblies as a chance for elites of all ranks to put aside particular privileges and come together for the public good. But, as the sessions of the provincial and district assemblies unfolded, it became apparent that the interest of the high clergy and nobility in reform only went so far. These elites, in charge of the deliberations, focused the attention of the assemblies on privileges belonging to the upper strata of the Third Estate. The high clergy and nobility put forward policies to diminish the tax exemptions of townspeople, the advantages enjoyed by parish priests, and the jurisdictions of the plethora of lower-level courts. Yet they did not act on the fiscal privileges of the nobles, the powers of the high tribunals, or the rights of the seigneurs. The assemblies ultimately became another frustrating experience, common to royal subjects under the Old Regime, which motived them to take revolutionary actions against the nobles with the aim of establishing legal equality.

Before going over these revolutionary actions, let us now open Chapter 1 with the projects of Argenson, du Pont de Nemours, and other royal reformers for assemblies to administer the provinces. These projects, we will see, were warped by nobles of the royal entourage accustomed to distributing the king’s domains, pensions, and offices as patronage to enhance support for their court factions in Versailles. They argued, against the reformers, that participatory assemblies undermined the absolute power of the king. What I emphasize is that they did not portray absolutism as a rational bureaucratic assertion of central authority. Court nobles argued, rather, that royal sovereignty depended on the time-honored privileges of the monarchy. Such privileges attached elites to particular rights and weakened any sense of common aspirations opposed to royal absolutism. The attachment of elites to their jurisdictional rights made them more concerned about defending their spheres of authority against possible encroachments of other lords and office holders, or against unrest among the subject population, than about universal rights that might bring them together with fellow citizens to limit royal authority. Indeed, lords and office holders would support royal authority as a means of maintaining the value of their venal posts and seigneurial rights.

Understanding the court nobles’ defense of privileges as the bases of royal absolutism is essential to the intervention of this book. That is to say, when Louis XVI introduced provincial assemblies, the precise nature of these privileges came to the fore. Lords and office holders protested that the assemblies threatened their heritable spheres of authority. The nobles’ defense of their privileges did not mean that royal centralization had shorn them of their former feudal power, as Tocqueville reasoned, but that they wanted the king to rule appropriately and uphold their power, not undermine it by creating assemblies. Moreover, when royal subjects took advantage of the crisis of the monarchy in 1789 to participate in a movement for equality against the nobles, they were not blinded by ideology to the disorganization, weakness, and impoverishment of the nobility at the hands of the absolute state, as Furet contended. Rather, their lives entailed countless experiences of subordination and stifled opportunities attributable to the nobles’ hereditary rights within the regime, and so commoners joined forces to eradicate the nobles’ privileges in the French Revolution.

Notes

1Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution , trans. Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 22, 26–7, 49, 53, 58, 78, 121, 142, 201–4.

2Jonathan Dewald, Rethinking the 1 Percent: The Failure of the Nobility in Old Regime France, American Historical Review 124, 3 (2019), 920–1, 926–7, 931–2.

3François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution , trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 54. See also pp. 25, 33–5, 97, 99.

4Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 18.

5Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution , 18–19; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State , 106. This trajectory of the monarchy and offices is documented in Martine Bennini and Robert Descimon, Économie politique de l’office vénal anoblissant and Robert Descimon, Conclusion: nobles de lignage et noblesse de service: sociogenèses comparées de l’épée et de la robe, XVe–XVIIIe siècle, both in Épreuves de Noblesse: les expériences nobiliaires de la haute robe parisienne (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) , ed. Robert Descimon and Élie Haddad (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2010), 36–8, 299–300.

6Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 54, 152, 157, 176, 225; Robert Descimon and Christian Jouhaud, La France du premier XVIIe siècle 1594–1661 (Paris: Éditions Belin, 1996), 27, 189–90; Peter Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London: Routledge, 1996), 276, 279, 299, 304; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 24, 276, 409.

7Rafe Blaufarb, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8–10.

8Robert Brenner, The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe , ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 243, 247, 290–1, 298, 312; William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 10, 13, 27, 29, 67, 98, 121, 304, 311, 335–6; David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996), 14, 45, 73–4, 93, 103, 112, 132, 175–6, 178–80, 193, 263–5; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State , 17, 33, 35.

9John Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 12,