The War of Wars Read Free Page A

France, the nobility. After bitter exchanges, the King was forced to summon the Estates-General, a kind of national assembly of the three estates, which had last been convened at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to get his way. At that stage the dispute was between the modernizing centralized royal court and the reactionary nobility – not the popular image of the people against King and aristocracy.
    France was in the throes of a social and economic revolution – a huge increase in population and in property: unfortunately the new prosperity was not well distributed among the expanding population. Worse, the economic boom was disrupting existing social arrangements: an urban working class had sprung up in the cities, in particular Paris, estimated at around 300,000 or around half the population of 600,000. Many of these benefited from the economic revolution, but this new concentration was also a powerful force in its own right. While the new property created a large urban bourgeoisie, the inequalities between the bourgeoisie and the workers also became obvious where they rubbed shoulders together.
    In the countryside there existed a large independent peasantry which possessed few of the feudal characteristics of its English neighbours: the peasants had for centuries been emancipated from serfdom, although a few traits lingered as well as their obligation to do military service. Whereas in Britain huge landholdings and a paid agricultural workforce were, in many ways, an extension of serfdom, the French peasant was afiercely independent proprietor: but he was also poor, with a landholding barely capable of supporting him. This naturally conservative class was baffled by two aspects of the economic revolution France was unleashing during the mid-eighteenth century: bread shortages caused by the archaic and corrupt system of regulation and distribution of grain, which Calonne was determined to reform, as well as by the increased appetites of the cities; and taxation at a time when purchasing power was diminishing. To the peasant it seemed that Calonne was preparing further to exacerbate their problems by levying new taxes and instituting a free for all on prices (which would actually have improved supply but lowered prices for the peasant producer). Thus another class was added to those with grievances against the
ancien régime
.
    A third class of malcontents came from the lower ranks of the nobility – of which Napoleon Bonaparte was himself to be a rather atypical example. The nobility in France was very different from that in Britain where it consisted of a select group of around 1,000 hugely wealthy landowning families. There were no fewer than 400,000 ‘nobles’ in France out of a population of some 23 million, with perhaps a fifth of the land. With the exception of the ‘nobility of the robe’ – high court officials of bourgeois background ennobled by the court – they were a caste.
    A large part of the nobility, however was extremely poor and would lose status if they worked for a living. For these people, the King and his court were an enemy, the new moneyed classes a source of envy, and the new wealth injected into the country something of which they were not a part.
    Thus France in the dying days of the
ancien régime
was a paradox – a newly enriched and developed society in which large numbers of people were alienated from the new prosperity – among them many of the squirearchy, most of the peasantry and part of the new urban working classes, as well as that part of the bourgeoisie with more or less fixed incomes. Meanwhile the newly prosperous merchant class – such as lower civil servants, professionals and lawyers – made up the overwhelming bulk of the elected members of the Third Estate in the newly convened Estates-General. The great French historianGeorges Lefebvre has brilliantly summed up the bourgeoisie on the eve of the Revolution:
    For centuries the bourgeois, envious of the