Introduction
Politics
and Society in the Ancien Regime
By
the time of the death of Louis XIV in 1715, France no longer threatened to
overwhelm the rest of Europe. Indeed, during most of the eighteenth century a
rough balance of power developed amid the shifting diplomatic alliances and
wars. There were two major sets of rivalries among states between 1715 and 1789.
In Central Europe, the older Hapsburg Empire was pitted against the newer,
assertive Prussia. Although Prussia acquired the status of a major power as a
result of this competition, the Hapsburg Empire managed to hold on to most of
its lands and to expand at the cost of weaker states such as Poland and the
Ottoman Empire. Outside of Europe, England and France struggled for supremacy
over colonial territories in the Great War for Empire.
During
this period preceding the French Revolution, referred to as the "Ancien
R6gime," most of the same political and social trends that had
characterized the second half of the seventeenth century continued, namely,
aristocratic dominance, strong monarchies, expanding central governments, and
traditional ways of life. Important changes that were initiated-such as
agricultural, commercial, and industrial developments that strengthened the
middle classes and led to urban growth-were limited in scope and area.
The
sources in this chapter center on three aspects of the Ancien R6gime between
1715 and 1789. First, the nature and position of the stilldominant aristocracy
is examined. What was its life style? What were its responsibilities? What was
the position of women within the aristocracy? Is it true that the aristocracy
was frivolous? How did the aristocracy react to pressures from the monarchy on
the one side and the middle classes on the other? Second, the development of the
eighteenth-century state, with particular focus on Prussia, is analyzed. What
role did Prussia's monarchs play in making her a major power? What institutional
developments helped Prussia gain this position? How did wars contribute to and
reflect the growing importance of the state? Third, the importance of commerce
and the middle class in England is explored. What were the connections between
commerce, the middle classes, and the English aristocracy? What was the
relationship between the development of commerce and industry and England's
colonial concerns and growing nationalism? What were some of the effects of the
commerce in slaves engaged in by the English and others?
The
sources in this chapter stress the relative political stability that
characterized much of the period between 1715 and 1789. Stability was not the
rule in intellectual matters, as will be seen in the next chapter.
The
Prussian Bureaucracy
Walter
Dorn
Although
lacking many of the historical and geographical advantages possessed by other
powers such as France and England, Prussia had become a major European power.
Traditionally, Prussia's kings and military have been credited for this
accomplishment. While not completely disagreeing with this view, Walter Dorn
argues that it was the bureaucracy that most distinguished Prussia from other
states and that accounted for Prussia's position of power in eighteenth-century
Europe. The following selection is from Dorn's Competition for Empire:
1740-1763, an early effort to apply a comparative approach to eighteenth-century
history and still a useful analysis of the period.
Consider:
How the apparent disadvantage of general poverty in Prussia was turned into an
advantage; why it made such a difference that the Prussian bureaucracy was
staffed by the nobility as well as the middle class; whether Dorn s
interpretation is supported by the views of Frederick the Great.
The
unique role of Prussia among the states of Europe lay not so much in its
peculiar mixture of despotism and feudalism, but in the fact that it
accomplished
the impossible. A small, poor, still half-feudal and notoriously underpopulated
country that was neither a geographic nor racial unit, with a retarded middle
class that suffered from both lack of enterprise and capital, Prussia was
suddenly thrust into the position of a European power. After his Silesian Wars
it was no longer possible for Frederick to retreat from this European position.
His only alternative to destruction by stronger neighbors was to mobilize the
resources necessary to support his ever growing army, without which his European
influence was utterly negligible, by means of superior organization and an
unprecedented degree of social discipline. Whatever the cost, the experiment
proved successful. In 1750 Prussia was the only large continental state which
managed not only to balance its budget but to produce a steady surplus of income
over expenditures. This was not due to an equitable distribution of financial
burdens among the various classes of Prussian society nor to an intelligent
system of taxation. In these matters Prussia was not more advanced than other
continental states. The Prussian peasant, who paid about forty per cent of his
net income to the state and owed often unlimited services to his feudal lord,
had no advantage over the Austrian or French peasant. What made the difference
between Prussia and other continental states was the moral force that emanated
from the greatest of the Hohenzollern and the superb quality of the Prussian
bureaucracy, one of the first great modern civil service systems of Europe. . .
.
In
this Prussia, devoid of wealth and prosperity, the burdens and obligations of
the masses stood in inverse proportion to their economic circumstances. Indeed,
it was from the very poverty of its inhabitants that the Prussian state drew its
greatest strength. The proud junker, living on an estate too diminutive for a
decent standard of life, was constrained to seek public employment,
notwithstanding the forbidding severity of its discipline. The ambitious
bourgeois intellectual discovered in the Prussian civil service his best, indeed
his only, opportunity for advancement. It was not wealth but connection with the
army and civil service that guaranteed social position. It was the general
poverty that produced the unprecedented concentration of resources, the furor,
as Mirabeau was later to call it, of regulating and regimenting every aspect of
public and private life, the onesided emphasis on Spartan virtues and social
discipline, in a word, what we generally call Prussianism. It is unthinkable
that this Prussianism could ever have sprung from the soil of free, wealthy,
parliamentary England. In England the island, as it were, replaced the state; in
Prussia the state of the old regime attained its maximum expansion. While
England was becoming constantly more individualistic, Prussia remained a
collectivist state in which the individual was expected to sacrifice himself for
the whole. The only freedom for the eighteenth-century Prussian was the libertas
oboedientiae - the freedom to obey.
The
Resurgent Aristocracy
Leonard
Krieger
Historians
have at times exaggerated the importance of the rise of the middle class and the
decline of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Recently, historians have
begun to emphasize the middle of the eighteenth century as a period during which
the aristocracy was actually resurgent, making efforts to regain its position
and increase its influence -often with considerable success. This view is
illustrated in the following selection by Leonard Krieger of the University of
Chicago.
Consider:
The evidence Krieger offers for a resurgence of the aristocracy; the ways in
which the aristocracy adapted to eighteenth-century political needs; how Dorn's
analysis of Prussia relates to Krieger's argument.
In
the eighteenth century, surprisingly, aristocracies -or at least important parts
of them -were resurgent. Appreciating the principle of what would later become a
proverbial prescription for men to join what they could not beat, nobles in the
several countries of Europe picked themselves up and began to appropriate
commanding positions in the governmental structures of the new states and even
in the network of commercial relatio-1.1s. The Whig oligarchy that ruled Britain
without serious challenge between the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty in
1714 and George III's assertion of royal influence after 1760 represented a
landowning aristocracy that was sponsoring a capitalized and scientific
agriculture in response to demands of the market and that had economic ties with
merchants and bankers of the City. The French peers, refueled by Louis XIV's
calculated infusion of subsidies, made a serious bid to refashion the monarchy
in their own image after the death of the Sun King in 1715, and when this
attempt failed, a more economically progressive and modern-minded judicial and
administrative aristocracy (noblesse de robe and noblesse doffice) rose to
continue the counteroffensive on behalf of the privileged. In Russia various
sections of the military and landed nobility dictated the succession to the
throne - in general they preferred tsarinas in the expectation that they would
behave consistently as members of the "weaker sex" - and dominated the
social policy of the government from the death of Peter the Great in 1725
through the accession of Catherine the Great in 1762. The long period from 1718
to 1772 that the Swedes euphemistically called their "era of liberty"
was actually an age of aristocratic sovereignty, exercised constitutionally in a
nominal monarchy through the nobles' oligarchic control over both the Riksdag,
or parliament, and the bureaucracy. The Dutch gave the same high-flown label to
the period from 1702 to 1747, when the small but influential class of Regents,
an oligarchy comprised of urban patricians, resumed its sway after the death of
William III and kept the office of stadholder vacant. The seven provinces that
made up the Dutch "Republic" were, in this respect, expanded versions
of the independent city-states in Europe. Concentrated mainly in Switzerland and
Germany, they too were stabilized during the first half of the eighteenth
century under the rule of exclusive patrician oligarchies. . . .
The
aristocracies' new lease on life for the eighteenth century was thus predicated
upon the modernization of their premises, and they thereby shifted the arena of
social conflict from outside to inside the structure of the state. Where they
had formerly defended their privileged rights to landownership, manorial
lordship, judicial immunities, and tax exemptions by denying the jurisdiction of
the central governments, they now defended these privileges by occupying and
controlling the governmental agencies which exercised the jurisdiction. This
aristocratic penetration of the state ran counter to the standards of general
law, equal citizenship, and uniform administration which had served and
continued to serve bureaucrats as guides in extending the scope of central
government. But the hierarchical tendency was no mere atavism. Despite the
obvious and reciprocal hostility between it and the leveling tendency with which
it shared the state, the coexistence of the two tendencies, however mismatched
in logic, was a faithful response to a fundamental social demand of the age.
European society required, for the military security of its inhabitants, for the
direction and subsidization of its economy, and for the prevention of religious
turbulence and popular disorder, the imposition of unified control over a larger
area and more people than the contemporary instruments of government could
manage. Hence the employment of the traditional social and corporate hierarchies
by the government as extensions of the governing arm into the mass of
inhabitants. All people were subject, but some were more subject than others.
The
Cosmopolitan Aristocracy
J.
H. Plumb
The
cosmopolitan character of the eighteenth-century aristocracy distinguished it
from other classes as well as from the aristocracy of the seventeenth century.
Whereas the seventeenth-century aristocracy was educated at home, the
eighteenth-century aristocracy was largely educated abroad. In the following
selection, J. H. Plumb of Cambridge University describes the significance of the
Grand Tour for the aristocracy.
Consider:
The ways in which the Grand Tour made this class more homogeneous; why this
change in education might have helped the aristocracy to reassert itself as
Krieger argues; how this image of the aristocracy differs from that presented by
Dorn.
Before
the end of the seventeenth century, education in England, as elsewhere in
Europe, was confined to a narrow compass. At a very tender age gentlemen's sons
were boarded out with a country parson to learn their letters, their numbers and
the rudiments of Latin grammar - like Robert Walpole, the future Prime Minister
of England, who was sent away from home at the age of four. Holidays were sparse
- a few days at Christmas and a month at harvest time. At nine or ten the
children left the vicarage for the grammar school in the neighbouring county
town where they boarded with the master. There they rubbed shoulders with local
tradesmen's sons. They dressed alike and spoke the same dialect; in those days a
difference in social rank did not inhibit close social intercourse. At
adolescence their ways tended to part: the shopkeeper's son went to his
apprenticeship, the gentleman's son left for the university or the Inns of Court
to acquire that extra knowledge of religion and law that his station required.
After two or three years at Oxford and Cambridge (and if his home were distant,
there he stayed without a holiday), he returned to help his father with his
estate. Apart from a rare visit to London and a more frequent one to the local
metropolis -York, Bristol, Norwich, Exeter -his travelling days were over. He
lived and died in his neighbourhood. And this, with few variations, was the
pattern of education throughout North-Western Europe; it differed only for a few
aristocrats attached to courts. . . .
By
1700 all this had changed. The grammar schools and universities were no longer
crowded with gentlemen's sons; indeed they were emptying fast (Christ's College,
Cambridge, had only three freshmen in 1733, and many of its rooms were
deserted). Shopkeepers preferred the new education provided by private
enterprise, the schools and academies which taught bookkeeping, languages,
geography, navigation - the arts necessary for commercial life; gentlemen sent
their sons abroad on a Grand Tour. By 1720, no Englishman or German pretending
to a place in society could expect to be regarded as anything but a country
bumpkin unless he had spent two or three years in France or Italy. The
aristocracy of Scandinavia and Russia quickly followed suit. The effect was to
give a remarkable homogeneity of manners and taste to the nobility of
eighteenth-century Europe. . . .
To
learn manners, to learn the only trades open to an aristocrat - war and
diplomacy -to learn the culture of his class made a Grand Tour a necessity for
the young English or German peer. Fortunately the new wealth that was seeping
into Europe enabled him to afford what was the most expensive form of education
ever devised by European society. The young nobleman resided abroad usually for
three, but often for four, and at times even five years. More often than not he
was accompanied by two tutors: one for bookish study, the other for riding,
fencing, the arts of war.
Chapter
Questions
1.
in what ways did competing groups and historical conditions put pressure
on aristocrats who wanted to maintain their position and influence?
2.
What were the assets and liabilities of the eighteenth-century
aristocracy in the face of pressures to diminish its position and influence?