Thanks to the publication of the collection of Le Monde “The Great History of the Kings of France”, from Wednesday August 23, the historian and political scientist Jean-Christian Petitfils, specialist in the Bourbons and author, in 2021, of a biography of Henri IV, explores the legacies of the Old Regime and the cogs of a power inscribed in a historical continuity, still readable today.
If contemporary history attracts their attention, with of course a particular tropism for the two world wars, they are also passionate about the history of kings, less out of nostalgia for ancient royalty than out of attraction for its historical heritage and for the “long term” dear to the historian Fernand Braudel. Their feeling of the country’s decline no doubt also feeds their nostalgia for its past greatness (we know Talleyrand’s famous phrase: “Who has not lived in the years around 1780 has not known the pleasure of living” ). They know that France does not begin with the revolution of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Anxious to rediscover their roots and their national pride, or, if they have become French more recently, to root themselves in the history of their country, they need to understand its slow formation to better perceive the data of the world. current. History, in fact, never repeats itself identically. However, how can we deny that historical experience provides most of the keys to understanding the present?
For me, it is clear that the Merovingians and the first Carolingians do not belong to the line of the kings of France, even if Clovis and Charlemagne played a capital role in the construction of the monarchical imagination (the first by his Christian baptism , the second by its crown). Francia occidentalis, from which today’s France emerged, was born in 843 at the Treaty of Verdun, on the ruins of the Carolingian Empire, not before.
If we want to draw up a list of the great kings who have marked the destiny of France, we must first rule out any moral judgment on their person. Some are saints, some are cynics or even bloody rascals. But all of them more or less worked, as good Capetians, to increase the national territory, to curb feudalism or its resurgence, to reinforce the monarchical authority, to affirm the independence of their kingdom in relation to the temporal authority of the pope or to the pretensions rulers of the Holy Roman Emperor. I will mention Louis VI le Gros, Philippe Auguste, Louis IX (Saint Louis), Philippe le Bel, Louis XI, Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV… I put aside François I, great builder and remarkable patron, often extolled , but poor policy.
All French monarchs before the Revolution were, strictly speaking, “absolute” kings. “The king is emperor in his kingdom,” a 13th-century adage goes. It receives from God alone its full legislative sovereignty. He held, as Louis XIV would say, “his sword only from God”. From the reign of Henri IV, more exactly from the Edict of Nantes (1598), we witness the blossoming of another phenomenon, that of “absolutism” properly speaking, which is built on the last ruins of feudalism. This concept, however, is deceptively simple, which has most often led to serious historical misinterpretations: it has been made synonymous with despotism, dictatorship, even tyranny or totalitarianism. In reality, it corresponds to the effort of the central power, from the 17th century, no longer simply to cover the plural, abundant and anarchic society that emerged from the Middle Ages, but to transform it, to unify it, to build a state, within the framework of modern sovereignty.
To avoid any ambiguity, some historians have been right to prefer the term “administrative monarchy”. In this titanic work, the royal power came up against the resistance of social bodies, Church, nobility of the sword or robe, local institutions, regional parliaments, state assemblies, corporations. This absolutist system was not specific to France (it can be found in the England of the Stuarts or in the Spain of the Bourbons in the 18th century). Its great weakness has been, at least in France, the absence of any representation of the peoples. The Estates General, a body created in the 14th century, but largely obsolete due to the sociological evolution of society, was not convened from 1614 to 1789.
Because of my training as a historian and political scientist, I wanted to do what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie calls “the political science of the Ancien Régime”. It was a question of understanding how social relations and their turbulence functioned in these institutionally unequal societies. We discover, for example, that under the Ancien Régime, at the heart of the socio-political structure of the kingdom, the mechanisms of loyalty, of clienteles, the bonds of man to man, derived from the feudal order, occupy a dominating place. , in the absence of a modern bureaucracy extending over the whole territory. I showed in my biography of Louis XIV how the king, who had so to speak no relay in society, but who refused to depend on an omnipotent prime minister, initially relied on two clans , the Colberts on one side, the Le Tellier-Louvois on the other, themselves having vast and sprawling networks of creatures. Thus widening his political space, he governed by arbitration until the death of the last grand vizier, Louvois, in 1691, when, having brought all the clienteles and loyalties back to him, and attracted the high nobility to Versailles, he became finally his own prime minister.
Like any good Capetian, he played on contradictory registers, bringing together social groups as a loving family man, while taking care to maintain a minimum of tension and to clip the wings of the powerful. Divide and conquer was the condition of its survival. Disorder could harm him, but the too perfect understanding of his subjects risked making him lose control of the situation, particularly among the nobility. It was therefore up to him to maintain, even maintain, the rivalry of coteries, to play on susceptibilities of rank and prestige. It is up to him to regulate, by the distribution of “graces”, the ennoblements or the creation of offices, the emulation of families and individuals.
At the same time, the royal power, pushed like any other power by a hegemonic tendency, sought to trim the moles of resistance, to ward off potential rivals, in short, to weaken the too powerful aristocratic families, to prevent the rise of certain greats who were too view. Absolute monarchy, said historian François Furet, never ceased “to weave a dialectic of subversion within the social body”.
However, unlike Tocqueville, who, in my opinion, overestimated “Louisquatorzian” centralization and overlooked the vigor of the centrifugal forces of the last decades of the Ancien Régime, the monarchy by no means achieved the strong state to which it aspired.
In reality, in the 18th century, the royal power died, not from an excess of power, but from extreme weakness, embarrassed by its internal contradictions, stifled by the gigantic aristocratic reaction which arose from the death of Louis XIV and by the selfish coalition bodies and orders under the following reign, braced on the defense of their fiscal privileges.
Certainly, these men were not without faults. The cardinal-ministers accumulated considerable fortunes (a third of the annual state budget for Mazarin!). It is true that they had to prove themselves richer and more powerful than the princes and the great to better thwart their actions.
Many people today criticize Colbert, and with good reason, for drafting the dreaded Black Code (ordinance on the condition of slaves in the West Indies, which in fact contributed to the development of the Western slave trade). Louvois, Louis XIV’s secretary of state for war, was made responsible for the sack of the Palatinate in 1688, during the war against the Holy Germanic Empire, which involved the coalition of German princes against France. .
As for Talleyrand, a great director of silence in politics, he has been accused of being, as Emmanuel de Waresquiel says, “the traitor of all causes”. But all of them were talented and remarkable servants of the state, even the sinuous “lame devil”, who always kept an intellectual coherence without being really a man of a system, as Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire thought.
Certainly. This is due to the famous Salic law, taken from the legal code of the Salian Franks, reused in a biased way by certain jurists of the 14th century on purpose to exclude women from the succession to the throne and to reserve it for males by order of primogeniture. . “Lilies neither weave nor spin,” it was said, relying outrageously extensively on a phrase of Christ in the Gospel of St. Matthew. In other words, the monarchy of the lilies could not fall to those whose main activity was weaving and spinning!
That said, during periods of regency, corresponding to the minority of their eldest son (until the age of 13), several queens played a significant political role: the energetic Blanche de Castille, mother of Louis IX (Saint Louis), who also exercised the regency during the Seventh Crusade, the very questionable Isabeau of Bavaria during the madness of Charles VI, the skilful and authoritarian Catherine de Médicis, whom recent historians have largely rid of her sulphurous reputation, Marie de’ Medici, mother of Louis XIII, whose action remains marked by a number of blunders, finally the very remarkable Anne of Austria, entirely Spanish at the start of her marriage to Louis XIII, who surprised by her political abilities and who, to say even of his son Louis XIV, “deserved to be put in the rank of our greatest kings”.
The rupture introduced by the Revolution is immense. In the history of France, there were undoubtedly several crises of legitimacy, but only one and unique crisis affecting sovereignty, that of 1789. On June 17 and 20 of that year, in fact, faced with the lack of royal power to propose a financial recovery plan, the States General proclaimed themselves the National Assembly and monopolized the fullness of sovereignty hitherto exercised by the king alone, including the constituent power. It was a coup d’etat in terms of law and monarchical institutions. From this founding event, which saw an immense displacement of power, it was the entire Old Regime, not only the society of orders, but also the secular edifice of the Capetian mystery, haloed by the coronation of Reims, which is put down. We are moving from an old-fashioned representation of the nation to that of a modern nation, based on a unified body politic, encompassing all citizens. The rupture was accentuated, of course, under the “second Revolution” – that of August 10, 1792 – by the trial and beheading of Louis XVI.
And yet there is a certain cultural continuity between monarchical France and republican France. A large part of the monarchical symbolism has been preserved or reconstituted around the republican state, particularly under the Fifth Republic. As for political continuity, it is even more flagrant in the work of unification and centralization of the Republic in the 19th century, carried out with even more energy, and even brutality, because of the clean slate carried out by the Revolution, which had destroyed all the old intermediate bodies inherited from the Middle Ages. Charles Péguy was right to say: “The one and indivisible Republic is our kingdom of France!” »
You are right, apart from the Vatican State, which constitutionally is an absolute, elective monarchy by divine right, the European monarchies – Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Sweden… – are constitutional and democratic monarchies whose sovereigns exercise a power of representation and a strictly regulated political role. Their king or queen embodies both their country in its historical continuity and, at the same time, comes from families who are the guardians of the most ancient national traditions. This is a definite advantage over the republic. The extraordinary enthusiasm of the French for the recent coronation of Charles III in the United Kingdom, which highlighted the power of royal symbolism, is there to testify to this. This does not mean that they would be ready to accept the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. This, as we know, narrowly failed in October 1873, when the Count of Chambord refused to recognize the tricolor flag, in the name of his counter-revolutionary convictions. The establishment of the Fifth Republic, endowed with a strong executive power, closed the door, no doubt definitively. Even if they are now quite critical of the current institutions and their excesses, the vast majority of the French hold to this “republican monarchy” desired by General de Gaulle, which allows them to directly elect the president. of the Republic.
France has a long history, built patiently, but not always methodically, by generations of men and women, by the sweat of their work or by their bloodshed. She is the bearer of ancient traditions, spiritual in particular (“the eldest daughter of the Church”), which cannot be forgotten, but also of an open, generous, universalist, assimilating project. It is the adventure of this slow construction of the State, of a State of justice at the service of the common good, above individual ambitions, factions and feudalisms of all kinds, that we must strive for. to read through the biographies of our kings, their exceptional successes but also, it must be recognized, their errors and their tragic failures. It is this historical continuity of the nation that seems to me the most remarkable. “Old France, wrote Charles de Gaulle, bruised by wars and revolutions, going and coming from greatness to decline, but straightened from century to century by the genius of renewal. »