Campbell P. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745
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alone, there would be a denunciation in the chambers which would be the start of a
serious conflict with Rome; there was a danger of an appeal comme d’abus by the
curés if nothing was done. Fleury was furious. Attacking the President personally,
he accused him of not being master of his company, saying that the simple fear of an
assembly of chambers would make him do everything that a denunciation itself
could produce, that he had neither firmness nor credit! Le Peletier riposted that the
previous year had shown he was not afraid of the assembled chambers, and argued
that the Bull was dangerous and that if someone in his company did not denounce
it he would do so himself, as his duty. Furious but afflicted, the Cardinal was too
exhausted by the interview to continue, and the gens du roi left, the First President
saying, ‘All this is a nuisance for M.le cardinal, but when this affair is completed in
a measured and wise way, he will be quite satisfied, he’ll thank us—we cannot make
an end of it soon enough’.
They retired to Plainmont’s room to debate their couse of action. The First
President was for taking action against the Bull, and Gilbert de Voisins and Joly de
Fleury dared not contradict him. Young Plainmont made the sort of speech a young
hothead would have made, namely that they were magistrates not church mice, that
they should act according to the dictates of their conscience, to give in was to
dishonour their offices and become slaves to the ministry, that he had had enough
of waiting on the orders of the court before taking action, that they had already
been in favour of action, and that if they waited till the Monday an order from the
court would stop them. At which the attorney-general declined to opine and Gilbert
joined with the First President. They then went up to see Chancellor Daguesseau,
where the First President appears to have misrepresented the situation, by saying
that he had won over the Cardinal and that he now expected the parlement to act
swiftly—at which the Chancellor appeared rather surprised but said that it was their
affair, though a delicate one.
Plainmont remained alone at Versailles, taking care to avoid his father, but
managing to see Maurepas, whom the First President had confided in. The
Secretary of State was on his way to the Chancellor, ordered by Fleury to write to
the First President forbidding him to do anything about the Bull. The young
attorney persuaded him to delay until the next day, which Maurepas appeared to be
willing to do, either because he was happy to see problems arising between the
President and the Cardinal, or because he was prepared to allow the parlement to
take a step he might be able to control. Thus the very next morning the parlement
had time to issue two arrêts against the Bull and the letter only arrived in the
afternoon.
Fleury was furious. For some time now he had suspected Le Peletier of changing
tack and wanting to favour the pretensions of his company on these issues in order
to make up his differences with it. Now he was totally convinced of it, the more so
because there were always others in whose interest it was to foment discord. Just at
this time the controller-general was fighting off a jealous attack by Maurepas on his
office of controller of the buildings and the parlement was making difficulties about
the renewal of the lease on the General Farms, and so Le Peletier may have been
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289
supporting Maurepas by creating problems. All this was reported to the Cardinal. In
the event, the Jansenists made an error by having their curés complain, by means of
a consultation from their barristers, about the royal letters patent in favour of the Bull,
on the grounds that the King had been ‘surprised’. When the curés’ petition was
published with a consultation signed by ten Jansenist barristers, it was so obvious to all
that the aim was simply to provoke a scandal, in a manner rather unbecoming
supposedly prudent and moderate curés, that there was hope that the other
magistrates would not follow the Jansenists’ lead. The other judges were by now not
prepared to be too obviously manipulated by the parti.
Soon after, the abbé Pucelle denounced a case of the refusal of sacraments in
Chablis, producing a procès verbal, and on 16 January the gens du roi conferred with the
First President. They had to decide if there was a case to answer, and if so what
grounds the courts would use for intervention. In this exchange we can see the
dilemma for magistrates about whether to act purely according to the law, or act in
recognition of the fact that legal politics was the art of the possible. Gilbert de Voisins
spoke of schism making its way in France, but felt that a direct complaint on the
grounds of ‘public scandal’ was too precipitate a course; but he thought that an
alternative of simply making representations to the King would not satisfy the zeal of
those who had brought up the issue. He therefore wanted to encourage the relatives of
the deceased Jansenist to petition the Bishop’s court, to which the parlement could
reply by condemning the ecclesiastical judges. Joly de Fleury, the procureur general,
warned that the affair did not lie within the competence of the parlement, and
observed that the best way to favour schism was to support this request. Next came
Joly de Fleury’s son, now one of the three avocats généraux, who was non-committal.
Last in seniority, young Plainmont spoke like a real hothead: ‘Time was short and
they should act with the greatest urgency’; according to him it was a case of ‘public
scandal’, and the magistrates would be dishonoured if they did nothing, their arrêt
would surely be followed by an annulment by the royal council, against which they
would remonstrate, and the King would have to give in because he could not be seen
to favour schism! He concluded: ‘There is nothing for it but to act, and act as soon as
possible’. Joly de Fleury was furious, said he was too young to decide whether it was
a ‘public scandal’; Le Peletier agreed with Gilbert de Voisins, and said they must
confer with the abbé Pucelle. Nothing more was heard about it.
An issue which began in January 1738 and which also prefigured a later bone
of contention between the ministry and the parlement, was the remodelling of the
Grand Conseil. This court dated from the late fifteenth century and had jurisdiction
over the whole of France, mainly for whatever cases the King might wish, but also
cases of ecclesiastical benefices. There being no one quite suitable to become
president of the Grand Conseil, it was decided to alter its composition and functions
to make it a useful rival to the parlement itself. A royal edict suppressed the offices
of First President and the eight other presidencies, and they were replaced by a
councillor of state and eight masters of requests. Such a composition of its upper
echelons would make the court a pliable instrument of royal policy.
41
As
Daguesseau de Plainmont recounted, ‘the cardinal was furious with the
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290
parlement and the First President, about the arrêt against the canonisation of
Vincent de Paul. It was suggested that displaying singular affection for another
company whose rivalry the parlement feared would terrify the parlement; it was
even added that [the Grand Conseil] could be used on occasions when the
parlement did not wish to be helpful, that it was sure to register what the
parlement would refuse, that even some of the jurisdiction of the parlement could
be transferred to it if the parlement gave occasion by some enterprise, and so
on…The edict was drawn up… The First President was not so worried about the
edict itself [which reiterated an aspect of the court’s existing jurisdiction] but more
so about a clause permitting the bailiwicks and seneschalcies to register and
publish edicts—this was to undermine the basis of power of the parlement. He
decided to write a circular letter to these lesser courts.’
42
Everything we have seen in previous chapters shows how jealous the parlement
was of its corporate jurisdiction, and how zealous it was in defence of this. The
president and many others in the parlement were said to be embittered by this edict.
Many years later the crown did indeed try to exploit the Grand Conseil in the service
of its religious policy, in 1753–4 and 1756, by having edicts registered there. The
spectre of a rival court actually depriving it of a significant part of its role (actually as
opposed to theoretically, because the court did already have such powers by earlier
royal edicts) was enough to spur the judges to an irate protest, which under
Jansenist influence escalated to a major confrontation.
43
Whereas royal policy failed
to intimidate the parlement successfully in the 1750s, in 1738 an already chastened
parlement was further unsettled by the implied threat. Not only did the disciplinary
regulation of 1732 still hang suspended over their heads, but now the Grand Conseil-
was all set to usurp the parlement’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as it was widely
rumoured. When at the end of the year the marquis d’Argenson’s brother, the
comte d’Argenson, was the councillor appointed to fulfil the role of First President
of the Grand Conseil, as he was known to be a dévot it was thought that his period of
office would see the parlement deprived of its jurisdiction over appeals comme d’abus,
and that justice, surrendered to the Court [of Versailles] would fall foul of all the
intrigues of the dévots and the hypocrites’.
44
This would of course leave the parti
janséniste almost entirely devoid of any convincing legal recourse to attack the status
of the Bull Unigenitus. Far better to await the Cardinal’s death than precipitate such a
calamity, they must have thought.
On 30 January Pucelle told the gens du roi at the buvette that he was going to bring
to the next assembly of chambers a matter of the refusal of sacraments to a dying
Jansenist. In the event, though, the parlement had so much on its plate that the
matter was not pursued. Pucelle was cautious because at the time of the fray over
the two previous matters, both the King and the Dauphin had fallen ill and the
parlement had forgotten to send for news. This was, of course, remarked upon as
bordering on disloyalty.
The next affair was about another thesis passed by the Sorbonne, which had
regarded the Council of Florence as ecumenical, while the parlement chose to
condemn it as injurious to the laws of church and state. Distinguished protectors of
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291
the Faculty of Theology, the cardinal de Rohan and the archbishops of Rouen and
Embrun, complained to Fleury. Negotiations had gone on all winter, but on 16
March 1738, on the advice of the Chancellor the council quashed the parlement’s
arrêt and the parquet recommended remonstrances. At this, ‘the chiefs of the parti
[janséniste] met together the day before and decided on something stronger than
simple remonstrances. Their resolutions were always secret, at least from the First
President’.
45
In the assembly, the presidents of the grand banc were for
remonstrances, but Pucelle proposed adding a long arrêté to them, enunciating all
the proofs against the Council of Florence.
This second avis was too forcefully put not to be followed; it drew greater
strength from the reasons alleged by president Ogier to confirm it; its credit
increased still further by a vehement declamation by Titon that I heard in its
entirety from the door of the grand’chambre that leads to the parquet… (I have
since learnt from this occasion that these celebrated republicans wrote down
(or had written for them) their speeches beforehand, and that they had them
passed on to the Ecclesiastical Gazette, and in fact this speech by M.Titon is
reported almost word for word in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques.)
46
But it was the proposal by another of the parti, president Thomé, that was to carry
the day: by forty-seven votes to forty-three, the courts produced a ‘most insulting
and vexed’ arrêté. An equivocal phrase saved it from being a direct contradiction of
the royal council, for it referred to the ‘maxims of the kingdom and the liberties of
the Gallican Church’.
47
At this point the parlement was beginning to make a real nuisance of itself—the
King was said to be upset by the constant resistance of his parlement, and Fleury
and the bishops were said to be hoping to withdraw all ecclesiastical affairs from the
parlement. Young Daguesseau de Plainmont seems to have been bluffed into
convincing the parti janséniste that they were going too far. He was told that the the
hardliners at Versailles intended to provoke the parlement to some indiscretion that
would provide a suitable occasion to convince the more moderate Fleury to strike
hard. They let it be known that this latest affair might just be the excuse they were
looking for. This must have had its effect, for at the end of April Pucelle actually
warned the parquet in advance of a plot to denounce another thesis in the assembly
of chambers. Plainmont warned the parti via a M.Roulleau of the danger, and the
parti decided to do nothing.
48
In June 1738 the parlement sent a deputation to Versailles to hear the royal
reply to the remonstrances on the case of the Jansenist magistrate Carré de
Montgeron who during his exile in Viviers had been refused holy communion.
49
Fleury had little appetite for a deputation. The First President pressed him, telling
him that to refuse one would only embitter the judges, while a firm reply from the
King himself to their instances would ‘restrain them by mortifying them’.
50
In
fact, Fleury felt sure that the courts would choose the most determined Jansenists
as deputies and the last thing he wanted to do was have to invite them to dinner
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292
afterwards, as was the custom according to the codes of civility. Perhaps he felt
this was to confer too much honour on them, according to the scheme of things,
for he did not want Chancellor Daguesseau to receive them either. To the fury of
the Cardinal, Plainmont encouraged his father to offer them hospitality. On the
Wednesday of the deputation, the King’s reply to the remonstrances was harsh,
and when he spoke of the statement about the refusal of communion, he said he
did not believe it: ‘Les faits sont faux’. During the afternoon, however, when
Fleury was discussing the matter with the gens du roi, a courier arrived with the
news that the Viviers affair was all true! Naturally, the King could not be seen to
make erroneous accusations of falsehood so, since he had spoken too softly for
most of the deputation to hear in the large antechamber, it was decided to change
the reply, and report it only verbally.
The next day the First President assembled the chambers in the expectation of a
reply, but none came, nor a reply to a courier. On Friday, there being no news and
this being an insult to the magistrates, the most intemperate motions were being put
forward. At last a letter from Fleury arrived and a fairly moderate arrêté was passed:
tempers calmed and the affair was as good as over. The lawyer Barbier, speculating
on appearances in his journal, thought that the reason for avoiding a written reply
was to save the courts from the dishonour of having harsh words transcribed into
the registers. The episode is a reminder that government was very much a matter of
ad hoc responses on many occasions, even though the general forms and ceremonies
were adhered to.
51
The running battle against the refusal of sacraments and the Bull Unigenitus
was still fought in law and in print, but to no avail. The affair of the catechism of
Sens provoked a number of consultations, but by now the parlement was for a time
at least, defeated. For more than a decade, the policy of Fleury against Jansenism
had been reasonably effective. The parti was much diminished in influence, and
many of its strongholds had been reduced to silence or acceptance. The outbreak
of war again in 1740 made it difficult for the parti janséniste to indulge in disruptive
parlementary opposition, so there was little activity on the religious front in the
courts before the death of Fleury. Even the fiscal demands of the war were
handled skilfully by Le Peletier, and after his resignation in 1743, by Maupeou the
elder. Minor changes to royal demands were negotiated, the parlement was
allowed to remonstrate to defend the people, a few changes were made and face
was saved all round.
52
After Fleury’s death in 1743 good management and consistent royal policy
continued, probably under the influence of the King himself, the brothers
d’Argenson and Maurepas. In 1749, the marquis d’Argenson, speaking as the
‘republican’ he was in private, could still comment thus:
In this reign, the Court has tried to corrupt and win over the parlement of
Paris and some of the provincial ones, as the Kings of England have done in
their national parlement. The First President is nothing more than a base
and needy courtier…the great bench [grand banc] is made up of great idiots
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293
and the parquet of children; the grand’chambre is only a great collection of
sheep in their dotage or just interested in judicial profits, and the greatest
speechmakers of the enquêtes have had their heads turned by a few favours
from the court.
53
That was how to manage the courts. By August 1751 it appeared to Barbier that the
prestige of the parlement had suffered a serious long-term setback as a result of
ministerial policy. As it had been refused a voice in public affairs, and candidates
preferred to purchase financial offices, the price of parlementary offices had fallen
and many remained vacant.
54
Not until the Hôpital Général affair in 1751 did the Jansenists have an
opportunity to renew their assault on the status of Unigenitus. Once again the
religious issue was presented as a question of jurisdiction. ‘They are depriving the
courts of an administration that is essentially its own’, wrote Barbier, and the abbé
Chauvelin wrote a memoir to prove that very fact.
55
They were however on shaky
ground here as the Hôpital was run so corruptly, and a firm response by the
ministry led to a defeat.
56
For the ministry, however, worse was to come. Several
factors were responsible for this change of fortune. According to the evidence of a
leading member of the parti janséniste, Philippe-Augustin Robert de Saint-Vincent of
the fifth enquêtes, Maupeou, the First President since 1743, covertly gave the parti
janséniste full rein in order to create problems for the ministry that he alone could
solve.
57
He was on particularly bad terms with Chancellor Lamoignon de
Blancmesnil, having himself hoped to succeed Daguesseau as Chancellor in 1750.
58
On several occasions he did nothing to prevent Robert de Saint-Vincent and his
Jansenist colleagues from proposing motions that were bound to be passed by the
hotheaded members of the enquêtes and were sure to provoke the ministry. Matters
were made worse by the increasing hold gained by the parti dévot over the ministry.
Boyer, bishop of Mirepoix and holder of the feuille des bénéfices since the death of
Fleury was now inclined to favour the Jesuits in ecclesiastical appointments, and the
new archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, was a committed
constitutionnaire.
59
His policies tended to raise all the old issues of the respective
limits of the two powers, and instead of quashing his incendiary pronouncements
the court at first supported him. This was to hand the Jansenists a golden
opportunity on a plate, because the jurisdiction of the parlement was clearly being
attacked. Thus two key elements for successful management were lacking. As in
1732, but for a different reason, the linchpin of royal control, the First President, was
not helping to manage the courts; and royal policy was beginning to vacillate and
side with the dévots.
The decision of Christophe de Beaumont to institute a policy of refusing the
sacraments to penitents who could not produce a certificate of confession (billet de
confession) from an authorised priest was enough to rekindle the fires of theological
rage. Using a loophole in the edict of 1695, the barristers of the parti janséniste
characterised the refusal of the sacraments as a threat to public order and Unigenitus
as liable to produce schism. When the courts were prevented from intervening on
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294
these grounds, the crisis of 1752–4 saw the usual factors leading to escalation and
confrontation; it was almost a re-enactment of 1732, as the parlement was denied
jurisdiction and ministerial management broke down.
60
The Grandes
Remontrances of 1753 were written by counsellors Lambert and Robert de Saint-
Vincent with help from Le Paige, Durey de Meinières and the abbé Mey. They too
led to an extended period of exile for the magistrates that lasted until a royal
declaration of silence on 2 September 1754.
Strife over the same issues continued into the middle of the decade, when the
Seven Years’ War began (1756–63) and the courts’ compliance was required for
the registration of much needed taxes and loans. In 1756 ministerial policy,
influenced by Machault and d’Argenson, was harsh towards the parlement; the
year culminated with the declaration of 13 December 1756 reforming the courts
and restricting its right to interfere in ecclesiastical matters. In January 1757 the
ministry overplayed its hand by exiling sixteen ‘troublemakers’, namely the parti
janséniste: the reaction was too harsh, and provoked corporate solidarity. After the
dismissal of the two hardline ministers, royal policy under the cardinal de Bernis
therefore changed to seeking a compromise with the courts—a compromise that
soon came to look in late 1757 like capitulation on the question of religious
jurisdiction.
61
The dismissal of the intriguing First President Maupeou helped the
cause of moderation for two years. Then the court faction of Mme de Pompadour
and Choiseul decided to give the parti janséniste its way on the Jesuits, as that group
formed the core of the parti dévot which opposed them, and for reasons of foreign
policy. From there it was but a short step to the Jansenist victory over the Jesuits in
the trial of 1761.
62
The debate occasioned by these issues combined with the
victory of the parti janséniste to bring the firm and relatively consistent policy of
Fleury crashing down in ruins. The 1760s even saw the Jansenist magistrates
collaborating with L’Averdy and Choiseul for the success of the ministers’
policies and, from 1768, working against d’Aiguillon and the younger Maupeou
who had become Chancellor.
By the 1760s the small parti républicain, of whom d’Argenson had first written in
1732, had grown to be a clique of magistrates around Michau de Montblin and
Durey de Meinières. The papers of Durey show them meeting together to discuss
‘droit public’, the emerging notion of public law. The parti janséniste still existed, and
to some extent its publications had begun to share a patriotic rhetoric and ideology.
The parti patriots employed the same opposition strategies that had been developed
by the parti janséniste since the 1720s, and there is a strong sense that 1718 to 1771 is
one coherent period of crown-parlement relations. The appeal to constitutional
ideology used by the Jansenist barristers and judges to defend the parlement’s
jurisdiction had proved to be an education. In a sense, the vigour of the anti-
Maupeou rhetoric published by the parti patriote shows that in many ways the
magistrates were reactionary and conservative. They attacked the Chancellor for
factionalism and ministerial despotism, while defending the ancient traditions of the
parlement. After all, the complex system of crown—parlement relations could work,
if handled properly.
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295
In contrast with these later episodes, the ministry of Fleury appears as a period of
successful management. The whole repertoire of techniques that were at the
disposal of ministers, was exploited in the interests of royal policy. Police
surveillance, a flow of expert information to the council, informal discussions in
preparation, attempts to divide and rule the chambers in the parlement, the use of
patronage, firm responses, rumours, bluff, threats of the reform of the parlement, of
the reimbursements of offices, of a disciplinary regulation, of the transferral of an
important part of its jurisdiction to the Grand Conseil, discreet negotiation and
compromise; all these stratagems and more were employed to control the excessive
ardour of the courts. Good management clearly required considerable and close
attention from ministers, and it could be rendered ineffective by that important
characteristic of court politics, faction. It was extremely difficult to prevent the
parlement being manipulated by faction in such a way that ministerial policy was
undermined in the courts on legal issues. When the ministry was united under a
determined monarch or first minister control was possible if difficult; when
divisions opened up between ministers their conflicts would spill over into the
parlement. The courts had within their power the means to disrupt policy, as
happened in the Brittany affair of the 1760s and with fiscal policy in the 1780s. In all
this the parlement was behaving in the same manner, for the same sorts of
considerations. It was not the growing militancy of the courts that led to conflict
(their behaviour was remarkably consistent) but failures of management resulting
from divided and ill-prepared ministries under a vacillating monarch.
Looking back on the parlements’ pre-revolutionary opposition, Sénac de
Meilhan did not regard them as an insurmountable obstacle for the government.
He emphasised the limitations in their outlook and the possibilities for ministerial
control.
The parlements, attached to their old forms, sometimes gave rise to
opposition, but they were easy to defeat, by negotiation and by favours
secretly offered to those who had the most credit. This grand corps was
characterised by ignorance of affairs of state, their wisdom was always far
behind their century, and it was easy for an adroit minister to present affairs
to them in a favourable light; their remonstrances were often agreed in
advance with the Court and the reply ready prepared, and the most eloquent
of them were quite commonplace.
63
Legitimate doubts may be raised about whether the activities of the parlement
during the eighteenth century can be described as a rise in parlementary opposition.
Perhaps the key to the pre-revolutionary situation was a failure in the system of
royal control?
296
14
CONCLUSION
Interpretations of politics reconsidered; the political system of the ‘baroque state’; the crisis of
the 1780s.
This final chapter will address some of the more general issues raised by the detailed
analysis of political conduct in the time of Fleury. In the first of three sections, we
shall return to questions of historical approaches to the study of politics.
Administrative history, traditional narrative history and more recent theoretical
perspectives all require further discussion. Second, it is apposite to formulate some
wider views on the principal characteristics of the regime. The implications of the
earlier chapters can now be developed in the context of wider reflections on the
characteristics of the socio-political system, in order to arrive at a model of
eighteenth-century political management and crisis more in keeping with the
evidence. The third and final section sets out the argument that the collapse of the
regime resulted more from a traditional crisis ‘of ancien régime type’, displaying
traditional forms of political conduct, than from pressures created by those newer
elements that were to come to the fore in 1789, and which led to the development of
a new regime. I shall argue that we need to take seriously the proposition that the
dissolution of the old regime stemmed from its long-term structural features, and
that the collapse began at the centre—at court.
INTERPRETATIONS OF POLITICS RECONSIDERED
For the eighteenth century, politics and political activity is harder to pin down than
might sometimes be thought. For a long time, the study of politics suffered from the
stigma attached to what was derogatively called l’histoire événementielle, mere events,
and therefore was pursued more by scholars working in a traditional vein and often
in defiance of the new directions. The study of the court was no exception to this
tendency and has only recently benefited from a revival in interest. In spite of Elias’
stimulating sociological interpretation of the court, based not on a detailed study of
politics and its many sources but (brilliantly none the less) on memoirs and
definitions from the Encylopédie, historians have been slow to return to full-scale
CONCLUSION
297
studies of politics at the centre. For a long time, historians were simply not looking
for politics as it was experienced by the men and women of the eighteenth century.
They concentrated upon politics as it became in the nineteenth century—
administrative and bureaucratic, and as it was invented by the philosophes of the
eighteenth century—theoretical and constitutional. It has thus been possible to
overlook some aspects of old regime political life that were crucial to
contemporaries but which no longer strike us as important.
Much of the problem lies in the fact that ancien régime politics is not susceptible of
a simple definition. It cannot be equated with ideological conflict, nor with the
bureaucracy, nor can it be adequately studied through discrete areas such as foreign
policy, religious affairs, provincial administration and so on. The very separation of
these areas in bureaucratic and archival terms conceals their considerable overlap in
practice. Foreign policy became a field of conflict for factional ambitions; rivalries
between clans at court spilled over into provincial administration as battles were
fought out in municipalities, estates and parlements, between rival cliques who were
also clients of the courtly factions; provincial rivalries between competing groups
within urban elites acquired a courtly dimension as patrons interceded on a higher
level. Conflict at court, rivalry between institutions, differences between ministers
in council, even in foreign policy, rarely stemmed from ideological differences, and
was more usually a reflection of established, entrenched positions. Most of the
rewards sought from victory in such conflicts were ultimately social or financial.
There is no simple equation between politics and ministerial policy.
We are therefore obliged to seek complex frameworks of explanation. If it is true
that in this postmodern age all history must be seen as a form of narrative fiction,
then the key question must be what it is appropriate to include in the narrative.
Different varieties of history can provide new layers of complexity. Biography and
traditional narrative history have long operated with a restricted notion of what it is
relevant to include. Thus, within these traditions, the material forming the basis for
theories of mentalités, sociological structures, or discourses, is rarely referred to.
1
Ye t
all these more theoretical approaches have a vital part to play in building up a
picture of sufficiently rich texture. Problems arise when the practitioners of any
single approach lay claim to a monopoly of explanation. This is certainly the case
with the problem of the nature of the ancien régime and its fall.
A bureaucratic vision of politics fails to do justice to the complexities and also
tends to oversimplify the issues at stake in political conflict. Such a version of the
regime stresses administrative issues as the source of the regime’s problems. Thus,
one argument goes, if only Maupeou’s reforms of the judicial system in 1771 had
not been overturned in 1774, the parlements would not have subsequently stood in
the way of administrative reforms in the 1780s.
2
Another is that if only Necker’s
reforms of the fiscal system and its bureaucracy had been allowed to continue under
his guidance, the regime would not have had to face its fiscal nemesis in 1787–8.
3
In
fact, the very notion of a struggle between reform and reaction is based on the
assumption that the state functioned bureaucratically and that administrative
solutions would have been sufficient to the problems. Such views can be situated