Campbell P. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745

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POWER AND POLITICS IN OLD REGIME FRANCE

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know how to advance someone, give an impression of being useful to

others while sustaining your own position. Everything is subordinate to the

exchange and calculation of private interests, and the more our courtiers

have become witty and refined, the more the trade in protection has

become horrible and fraudulent.

To be a courtier was a full-time occupation and one for which it was constantly

necessary to wear a mask. The coded language of the court was more than

nuanced: every word, every phrase, posture, gesture and expression was significant.

To let the mask slip for a moment was to reveal yourself, and this would enable

more subtle minds to add to their knowledge and subsequently to triumph over

you. Fleury never made this mistake. Knowledge was indeed power. Although there

are numerous stories of fits of anger and mistakes, it is remarkable how stereotypical

so many descriptions of individuals are, and consequently how little is known about

the character of individual courtiers, especially those destined to be successful.

Complete discretion was essential for success and every mood was adopted in

public in the full knowledge of its possible interpretations. This masking of feelings

and ambitions means that observers learned to scrutinise faces with skill in order to

detect signs of anger or pique that might enable them to deduce the result of an

interview or a council meeting. Only long experience and hindsight would show

contemporaries if they were right, but they had to act before such confirmation was

available. If it was hard for the actors themselves to be sure of a situation, it is

equally so for the historian.

The sources are often highly allusive or ambiguous. A recurrent theme in this

book is the unreliability of many of those sources that appear to offer clear-cut

explanations for the events, conflicts and controversies of the period. It has been

shown that published memoirs often contain falsehoods, while ambassadorial

reports are frequently suspect because of both the diplomatic deceptions practised

by their writers and their inadvertent misreading of the situation. But it is still

possible by careful sifting to extract valuable testimony, while their assumptions and

language themselves provide a different and often neglected perspective. The

following chapters show how the Journal of the lawyer Barbier often becomes

clearer with close investigation, especially on the subject of the lawyers, the

Jansenists and the parlement of Paris. The reports of ambassador Walpole, and the

explanation of the parlementaire conflict of 1737 given by Daguesseau de

Plainmont both need careful evaluation. When an investigation is carried out of the

factional intrigues and government policies which were known only to a few, it

becomes possible, by comparing such apparently reliable sources with obviously

suspect ones like those of the police spies, to show how unreliable they all can be. Of

course, historians generally assume that memoirs and reports are suspect, but it is

usually difficult to establish the veracity of individual examples. Furthermore, it

should be remembered that most of the memoirs published in the eighteenth

century were written probably with a view to creating a certain impression of

individuals, groups or factions who might be past or potential enemies or allies, and

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that, as in the memoirs of Berwick and Millot’s memoirs of Noailles, it was not

uncommon to find misleading revisions introduced to the published text.

Most of the evidence thus reflects in some degree the strategies of ambition that

were employed by members of the elite. The traditional routes to power by

magistrates and ministers are well known to historians, who have, for example,

drawn attention to the career steps of counsellors in the courts who hoped to

become intendants and councillors of state. The exploitation of the prevailing

discourses to acquire credibility and to show ministers a suitable mastery of the

ministerial discourse was another important dimension of the search for place.

D’Argenson’s memoranda to Chauvelin in the early 1730s may not have

influenced ministerial policy, but they revealed that he could wield the traditional

discourse into which ministers were locked by virtue of their function. In this sense

at least, politics was about languages and rhetorical positions.

The present study also raises the question of how we should categorise or

integrate the expression of ‘private’ concerns in ‘political’ life. This is a question

which, since the sociological insights provided by Elias and (from very different

perspective) Habermas, has also become fundamental to the study of political

culture at its centre. If the court was a socio-political configuration, then in some

sense courtiers were also political whatever their ‘social’ aims, in that their existence

and interests influenced or circumscribed ‘grand policy’. It was just as necessary to

play the same roles and participate in faction in order to safeguard a position of

dignity, as befitted an elevated station, as it was to acquire more influence over

decisions of policy. While some houses of the peerage had little taste for influence in

the council, preferring their military tradition, others not only had clans to protect

but also harboured ministerial ambitions.

The Noailles and the Belle-Isle were by

no means untypical of their century. By way of an example, the moderately

successful career of the due de Richelieu (1698–1788) has been worth studying in

so far as he revealed very clearly in his early correspondence his attitudes and

ambitions. We have seen how Richelieu was to achieve these ambitions, but in later

years he lost influence and never succeeded in entering the council of state. He then

pursued a different strategy, channelling his energies into the advancement of his

family, the protection of the Académie française and patronage of the theatre.

It is

difficult to disentangle these threads of his life one from the other, and call one

political [or public] and another social [or private].

The political culture of court society is still a neglected dimension of the

political culture of the old regime. It is important to recognise the ways in which it

conditioned and interacted with what historians have more conventionally

described as politics, namely foreign policy and the relations between the ministry

and the parlement of Paris. Of equal interest is the further question of how the

political culture of the old regime (now including the court) was related to its final

collapse. One way to come to grips with this problem is to ask in more detail

about the nature of political crisis and the way it could occur in the political

system. Here again, because our late twentieth-century perpective is as distorted

as was that of the late nineteenth century, it is important to discover what

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contemporaries thought was at stake. The detailed reconstruction of events is

therefore the only way to avoid a tendency to rationalise contemporary

behaviour. We must, for example, question rather than assume that the crucial

part was played by ideological motives, as some historians of the Maupeou coup

and the origins of the Revolution itself suggest. The study of the parlement is

particularly instructive here. It is hard to say what the crises of 1730s were really

‘about’ except in the case of the small groups manipulating the situation. The

study of crises also permits an assessment of the significance of outside influences

upon a form of politics that was usually restricted to a small elite. Part 2 will

therefore examine the management of the Paris parlement and the growing

influence of the parti janséniste upon the character of politics.

Part 2

JANSENISM, POLITICS

AND THE PARLEMENT

OF PARIS

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INTRODUCTION

This second part of the book explores the relations between the ministry and other

groups and corporations. Attention is focused on Jansenism and the parlement of

Paris. From 1713 to the 1760s, religious conflict played a vigorous role in France.

Jansenist resistance to the royal policy of enforcing the Bull Unigenitus, which sought

to condemn the movement, was to pose a serious and long-running challenge to the

exercise of royal power. The movement developed two strategies, both of which

were to have a profound effect upon the nature of French politics. First, the

Jansenists’ appeal to public opinion in numerous publications, including their

clandestinely published ecclesiastical gazette, was to play a part in educating a wider

public in the politics of religion. Church and state were so closely interwoven in

theory and practice, that the issue of the relations between the two powers raised

questions about the nature of monarchical authority and the rights of the people.

Unjust persecution was seen as evidence of ‘despotism’ and the Jansenist public

began to view the monarchy in this light. It will, therefore, be argued that the

politicisation of the literate public and creation of public opinion that is usually

situated in the 1750s, at least begins in the 1720s and 1730s, if not well before.

Second, the Jansenists’ attempt to defend themselves against persecution through

the courts in turn led to a widening of the sphere of political participation in the first

half of the century. The movement was responsible for bringing the parlement and

the order of lawyers into politics in more active and militant ways.

Most historiography of the Paris parlement has had its eye firmly fixed on the

causes of the Revolution, with good reason. The reluctance of the parlement to

resistance to Brienne later that year and the turmoil generated by its hostility to the

May Edicts in 1788, all helped to precipitate a revolutionary crisis in 1788–9. To

most historians, therefore, the long series of disputes with ministerial policies from

1718 onwards has suggested a rise of parlementary opposition, judiciously quashed

by Maupeou in 1771 and unleashed again after the restoration of the courts in 1774.

Some have argued that the courts championed noble reaction and the defence of

privilege, while at the same time unwisely exploiting philosophic ideas of national

sovereignty and constitutional rights, culled, it is usually thought, from

Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois. As we shall see, there are good grounds for

194

believing that up to the 1750s, the direct influence of Jansenists was perhaps more

important. The parlement thus appears to have been less militant in its own right,

politically much more complex and harder to categorise, and more a vehicle for the

ambitions of opposition groups within the French polity.

Parlementary conflicts were rooted in jurisdictional rivalries rather than

constitutional conflict, although constitutional questions were sometimes, and

dangerously, provoked. It was thus extremely important for the ministry to

maintain good political control of the courts. Both the strategies of opposition

within the courts and the monarchy’s own techniques of management are closely

analysed by focusing on the crisis of 1730–2 and the more peaceful years that

followed. Much can be learned about the structure of crises between the crown and

parlement, which in turn helps us to understand the nature of the regime itself.

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THE PARTI JANSENISTE IN THE

1720s AN D 1730s

Introduction; the history of Jansenism; Figurism; who were the Jansenists?; the organisation of the

parti; Jansenist strategies; ministerial attitudes to Jansenism; the political activity of the parti

janséniste; magistrates and lawyers; Jansenism and political theory.

Early modern politics is full of reports of cabals and conspiracies, and it was once

widely believed that the Revolution itself was caused by a masonic plot. Conspiracy

theories are not usually regarded as a convincing form of explanation in history,

and have often been dismissed by modern historians, more or less on principle. It is

therefore fascinating to examine more closely one group whose activities might

indeed be characterised as conspiratorial, and thereby gain deeper insight into

political conduct. If the practices revealed could hardly be credited with single-

handedly causing the Revolution, their prevalence and effects do help us to

understand why it was that contemporaries were so willling to lend credence to

such theories.

In response to assertions of Jansenist complicity in the Revolution, Augustin

Gazier, the leading historian of the Jansenist movement, wrote in 1924: ‘To

maintain, as is so frequently done, that the Jansenists allied with the parlementaires,

with the philosophes, and, later, with the Constituants [deputies to the Constituent

Assembly of 1789–91] to combat the papacy and royalty, is clearly an error and

even pure calumny’.

Such a strenuous denial of Jansenist involvement in the crisis

of the monarchy was reinforced by the assertion that there were hardly any

Jansenists in the Paris parlement, that focal point of opposition in the monarchy.

Many historians have since taken him at his word, and few had access to the

archives on which he based much of his work. This was unfortunate, since those

very archives contain clear evidence of exactly the opposite of Gazier’s argument—

and there must be a strong presumption that M.Gazier, ‘the last of the Port-

Royalists’, and custodian of the vital documentary collection, was well aware of this.

Gazier made his assertions in the early 1920s, when there was a flurry of

research into Jansenism and several other important studies appeared.

These

books were destined to hold sway for the next half-century, invested as they were

with all the aura of standard works. Since the later 1970s, however, the issue of

Jansenism and politics in the eighteenth century has once again moved out of the

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shadows. Indeed, if the question of the ideological origins of the French Revolution

has presently moved centre-stage, then it could be said that the debate on Jansenism

now has more than a passing role. Historians have known for a long time that the

lower clergy of 1789 were influenced in their democratic ideas and opposition to the

bishops by what had by then become an inextricable combination of Jansenism and

Richerism. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1791 was very much in a

Jansenist mould. However, the argument that Jansenism was an essential element in

the rise of oppositional politics earlier in the century is more recent. The role of

Jansenist lawyers and magistrates was shown to have been crucial in the sectarian

politics of the Hôpital Général affair of 1749–51, minutely explored by Légier-

Desgranges in 1954.

Twenty years later a fascinating and detailed work by Van

Kley argued that the sect was responsible for the expulsion of the Jesuits—an

achievement once thought to have been the work of the philosophes—and that it was at

the heart of the debate around the Damiens affair. It was the Jansenists who

organised the attack on their arch-enemies the Jesuits which culminated in the trial

and banning of the Order; just as, significantly, it was the Jansenists who revived

conciliarist theories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and constitutional

arguments of the sixteenth century, to reapply them to the political debate of the

1750s.

The group, the parti janséniste as it was known to contemporaries, possessed

a closely organised inner corps and operated as a highly effective pressure group in

politics. Part of the Jansenists’ strategy was to appeal to constitutional ideologies in

their defence, and in their highly partisan publications they made a key

contribution to the development of political debate in France.

Van Kley has shown

that no fewer than half of the anti-ministerial pamphlets published from 1770 to

1774 were the work of the circle around Le Paige.

All this immensely effective work

of legalist self-defence against religious persecution (which came in the form of the

Bull Unigenitus and the refusal of sacraments), and political persecution (in the form

of authoritarian measures against the Paris parlement), was organised or co-

ordinated by a smallish group of ‘Friends of the Truth’. These included theologians,

barristers and magistrates in the courts of the realm. The most famous of their

number was Louis Adrien Le Paige, avocat au parlement and specialist in canon law, a

fervent Jansenist and believer in the divine significance of the convulsionary

movement of the 1730s.

The Jansenist movement was politically most effective in the 1750s and 1760s,

when it used the parlement to fight the refusal of sacraments to dying Jansenists,

attacking on the one hand the papal Bull Unigenitus of 1713 as the root of the evil

and on the other hand the episcopacy as the perpetrator of the iniquitous

persecution and repressive practices. Confrontation between the courts and the

ministry most notably gave rise to judicial strikes and exiles in 1732, and to the

parlement’s Grandes Remontrances of 1753, famous for its constitutional ideology—

and written by Jansenists. So influential was the parlementaire group of barristers

and magistrates that ministers had to take it into account in factional politics at

court. The weak ministerial leadership of the late 1750s, combined with the need

for good relations with the courts during the Seven Years’ War, as fiscal measures

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197

needed legal registration, all led to a policy of capitulation to the parti janséniste,

and Choiseul later chose to develop close links with it in his role as a political

manager.

Although the role of the Jansenists in the 1750s has been well investigated of late,

their earlier activities and particularly the growth of their partly clandestine

organisation in the 1720s and 1730s have not been paid sufficient attention.

Yet this

early period is crucial, because it is the formative period. The Jansenists’ early lack

of success has understandably obscured the fact that their opposition strategies were

first developed then. The parti was better organised and larger in the 1730s than it

was later. It is not too much to say that the roots of their organisation, the nature of

their motivation, the deployment of their strategy and their innovations in

constitutional argument, can only be fully understood by examining this earlier

period. Indeed, in terms of parlementary history, it is true to say that the role of the

parti was so important that the period from 1730 to the Maupeou coup of 1771 is

one coherent period, with homogenous characteristics. There is scarcely a

technique or strategy of opposition employed in 1770 or in the 1750s that was not

already fully developed by the early 1730s. These same strategies would be

employed by other magistrates in 1787 and 1788—with more far reaching

consequences.

* * *

Many historians have characterised this eighteenth-century Jansenism as essentially

political, but this is to mistake the strategy for the motives. It is important to

recognise that even in that age of Enlightenment, religion remained a powerful

force. Fully to understand the problem of Jansenism in the 1720s, its theology must

be considered. In fact, the generally employed term ‘Jansenist’ conceals a more

multifarious set of tendencies than is often recognised. This is as true of the famous

period of Port-Royal in the seventeenth century as it is of the eighteenth century.

The general tendency in Jansenism has its origins in the dispute over the nature and

extent of divine grace given to man. The Christian doctrine of original sin has it

that salvation could come only with grace given freely by the Saviour—but is grace

given to all, or to some, and if so how is it earned? If it is argued that God accords

grace to all, or that some are predestined for salvation, then what becomes of our

free will? If divine grace can be earned too easily, by the exercise of free will, then

what becomes of Christ’s sacrifice, for does it not become less necessary? If, on the

other hand, some are predestined for salvation then free will is clearly superfluous

to them. In the fourth century, Saint Augustine and Pelagius held different opinions

on these matters, and Pelagianism had been condemned because it accorded too

much to free will and not enough to divine grace. Eight hundred years later,

Thomas Aquinas espoused a middle position, to be held in the seventeenth century

by some Jansenists and also adopted by Bossuet in his Treatise on Free Will. The

debate had been reopened in the mid-sixteenth century and was still one of the great

questions left unresolved by the Council of Trent.