Absolute Monarchy & the Ancien Régime

The Huguenot stronghold falls

After fourteen months of siege and a famous sea-wall built by Richelieu across the harbour mouth to bar the English relief fleet, the Huguenot port of La Rochelle surrenders. Of the city's twenty-eight thousand inhabitants, perhaps five thousand survive. The political and military rights granted at Nantes are stripped two years later by the Peace of Alès.

France declares war on Spain

After two decades of subsidising the Protestant powers against the Habsburgs, Richelieu brings France openly into the Thirty Years War. The Spanish capture Corbie and reach Compiègne in 1636 before the tide turns; the war will run for twenty-four years and bleed France white.

The same decade saw the foundation of the Académie française (1635) to standardise the language, Descartes publish his Discours de la méthode (1637), Corneille première Le Cid (1637), and the financial expedients — taille, gabelle, élus, intendants — that built the bureaucratic state Richelieu willed to Mazarin and Louis XIV.

Rocroi and a four-year-old king

Five days after the death of Louis XIII, the young duc d'Enghien — the future Grand Condé — annihilates the Spanish tercios at Rocroi in the Ardennes. The new king, Louis XIV, is four years old; the regent is his mother Anne of Austria, and the government passes to Richelieu's Italian protégé, Cardinal Mazarin.

Peace abroad, civil war at home

The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years War; France keeps Alsace less Strasbourg, and emerges the leading power of Europe. Within weeks the parlement of Paris rises against the wartime taxes of Mazarin. The Fronde — first of the lawyers, then of the princes — will paralyse the regency for five years.

Twice the boy-king and his mother fled Paris by night; once they hid at Saint-Germain. The memory of the Fronde shaped Louis XIV's lifelong distrust of Paris and of the great nobles, and his determination to take the court out into the country and lock up the princes in a court of his own making. Versailles is the answer to the Fronde.

The king takes the helm; Fouquet falls

Mazarin dies in March. The twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV announces that he will rule without a first minister: 'L'État, c'est moi'. In September he has the over-mighty superintendent of finances Nicolas Fouquet — whose château of Vaux-le-Vicomte had eclipsed any of the crown's — arrested by d'Artagnan at Nantes. Colbert takes the finances.

The fifty-four years of Louis's personal rule were the longest in European history. Under Colbert mercantilism — manufactures royales of Gobelins and Saint-Gobain, the East and West India Companies, the Code Noir, the building of the navy — sought to make the kingdom self-sufficient. Le Vau, Le Nôtre, and Le Brun, the men of Vaux, were taken into royal service to build Versailles.

Aix-la-Chapelle and the Spanish frontier

Claiming the Spanish Netherlands through his wife's right of devolution, Louis XIV invades in 1667. Turenne's army takes Lille, Tournai, and Douai in weeks. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gives France twelve Flemish fortresses — and starts a half-century of pushing the northern border outward.

The king and court settle at Versailles

On 6 May Louis XIV transfers his household and the government from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the great new palace at Versailles. Some ten thousand courtiers, servants, and guards crowd into the gilded barracks. The most magnificent court in Europe is open.

The Galerie des Glaces of Hardouin-Mansart, the gardens of Le Nôtre, and Le Brun's plafonds proclaimed France's ascendancy in stone, water, and paint. The court — Saint-Simon's hothouse of grades, étiquette, factions — neutralised the great nobles by making proximity to the king the only road to honour. The whole apparatus is the political theatre of absolutism.

Edict of Fontainebleau

Louis XIV revokes his grandfather's Edict of Nantes. Protestant temples are demolished, pastors exiled within fifteen days, the laity forbidden to follow them; royal dragoons quarter on Huguenot households until they convert. Perhaps two hundred thousand French Protestants flee to the Netherlands, England, Prussia, the Cape, and the American colonies.

The Refuge took French manufacturing, printing, banking, watch-making, and silk skills abroad and turned much of Protestant Europe permanently hostile to the Sun King. In the Cévennes the Camisard war of 1702-1710 would show that the Huguenots had not been wholly broken at home. Vauban, Saint-Simon, and even Mme de Maintenon's confessors would in time call the revocation a colossal mistake.

The League of Augsburg against the Sun King

Louis's invasion of the Palatinate triggers a great anti-French coalition under the Dutch stadholder William of Orange — who in the same year sails to England, deposes James II, and joins the British crown to the coalition. The Nine Years War (1688-1697) sees French frontiers strained from Catalonia to the Rhine; Vauban's fortresses hold the line.

Disaster at Blenheim

On the Danube near Höchstädt, Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy annihilate Marshal Tallard's army at the Battle of Blenheim. France loses thirty thousand men in a single day and her Bavarian ally. Defeats at Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) follow.

The war began with the Bourbon claim to the Spanish empire — the duc d'Anjou as Philip V — and threatened to enthrone Louis XIV's grandson over half the world. The combined Anglo-Dutch-Imperial coalition came near to invading France; the famine winter of 1709 was the bleakest in living memory. Yet the kingdom held, and at Denain in 1712 Villars at last broke the allies.

Louis XIV dies; the Regency begins

On 1 September Louis XIV dies of gangrene at Versailles, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday. His son and grandson having predeceased him, his great-grandson — a five-year-old Louis XV — succeeds. Power passes to the dead king's nephew, Philippe d'Orléans, as regent; the court drifts back to Paris.

The Treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714) had already settled the long war: the Bourbon Philip V kept Spain and the Indies on condition the crowns would never unite, but Spain's European empire was broken up — Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia went to the Habsburgs; Gibraltar and Minorca, and a slice of the slave trade through the asiento, to Britain. The price of glory had been paid.

John Law's system collapses

The Scottish financier John Law's experiment in paper money and Mississippi Company shares — backed by claims on Louisiana — collapses in panic in the rue Quincampoix. The first French paper-money bank fails; investors are ruined; and Frenchmen will distrust banknotes for a century.

The Encyclopédie appears

Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert publish the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. By 1772 it will run to seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates. Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d'Holbach, Quesnay — the great names of the French Enlightenment — contribute.

Twice suppressed by the royal council, the Encyclopédie was the great public face of the philosophes' campaign against superstition, privilege, and arbitrary power. Montesquieu's Esprit des lois (1748), Voltaire's Lettres anglaises (1734), Rousseau's Du contrat social (1762), and the Physiocrats' laissez-faire economics were the manifestos of a public opinion that the monarchy did not know how to answer.

The Treaty of Paris and the loss of New France

By the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years War, France cedes Canada and all her holdings east of the Mississippi to Britain, and Louisiana to her Bourbon ally Spain. New France — Quebec, Montreal, the Great Lakes, the Ohio country — is gone. The defeat at Quebec on the Plains of Abraham (1759) had already been decisive.

France kept the small but valuable sugar islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the slave fortress of Gorée, and fishing rights on the Grand Banks. Voltaire's famous dismissal of 'a few acres of snow' captures the misjudgement: the loss of empire would feed the revanchism that drew Vergennes and Louis XVI into the American war fifteen years later.

The well-meaning king takes the throne

Louis XV dies of smallpox at Versailles on 10 May. His grandson, the nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, succeeds, with the young Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette as queen. He recalls the parlements, appoints Turgot to the finances, and is hailed as the king of a new beginning.

France enters the American war

After Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, the foreign minister Vergennes signs treaties of alliance and commerce with Benjamin Franklin's American commissioners. The fleets of Suffren in the Indies and de Grasse at the Chesapeake, the army of Rochambeau in Virginia, give the Americans the victory at Yorktown in 1781.

The peace of Paris (1783) returned to France little more than Tobago and Senegal, but it had broken Britain's American empire and avenged the Treaty of Paris of 1763. The price was financial ruin. The veterans came home as enthusiasts of an American liberty their own king did not yet know how to grant; Lafayette would soon command the first National Guard of revolutionary Paris.

The Montgolfier brothers fly

On 21 November Pilâtre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes ascend over Paris in the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon. Benjamin Franklin watches from the Tuileries. Twelve days earlier the Treaty of Paris had been signed with Britain. The kingdom is full of light, and broke.

By 1786 Calonne reckoned the deficit at a hundred and twelve million livres on revenues of four hundred and seventy-five. Half the budget was service on the war debt. Calonne and his successor Loménie de Brienne tried to make the privileged orders pay; the Assembly of Notables refused; the parlements followed. By 1788 the only way to raise taxes was to summon the Estates General — and that was, in the end, the political end of the Ancien Régime.

The Estates General meet at Versailles

On 5 May, in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs at Versailles, Louis XVI opens the Estates General — the first since 1614. Twelve hundred deputies in three orders, six hundred for the Third Estate, hear a lacklustre speech on financial reform. The cahiers de doléances of the spring sit beside them, full of an angrier program.

Within six weeks the Third Estate would proclaim itself the National Assembly, take the Tennis Court Oath, and refuse to dissolve; within two months Paris would storm the Bastille. The Ancien Régime — fifty thousand judicial offices, fifteen hundred forms of weight and measure, three hundred forms of personal status, all the carefully accumulated privileges of a thousand years — would be swept away in a single August night. But that is a story for another period.