Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  France Goes to War

  France's efforts to dominate northern Italy failed in part because extreme climatic events produced another economic crisis. A sequence of unusually wet winters and summers between 1625 and 1631 (including the ‘year without a summer’: 1628) either reduced or destroyed the crops, culminating in a famine that coincided with a plague epidemic. Lyon, France's second city, lost half its population, and hundreds of thousands died in the countryside.4 The catastrophe also reduced the demand for industrial goods and paralyzed trade, making it far harder to mobilize the necessary human and material resources to win the war. Developments within Italy also worked against effective French intervention. Exercising his rights as feudal overlord of Mantua, Emperor Ferdinand II diverted 12,000 soldiers from Germany to fight in northern Italy alongside 25,000 Spanish troops, far outnumbering France's forces.

  Richelieu also undermined his own foreign policy by provoking a new domestic crisis. Convinced that the provincial Estates were shirking their fiscal responsibilities, the cardinal sent special commissioners into Burgundy, Dauphiné, Languedoc and Provence with orders to raise taxes. In addition, he threatened to suspend the Paulette when its nine-year term ended unless the senior judges provided full support to these commissioners. This was a dangerous gambit. The central government depended absolutely on the services of its 25,000 officiers (civil servants) and especially on its judges. Despite the similar name, the Parlements of France (law courts filled by judges who had either purchased or inherited their positions) differed significantly in composition from the Parliaments of England, Scotland and Ireland (with nobles and bishops in one chamber and elected representatives from towns and counties in another); and yet the institutions also possessed some important similarities. First, both assemblies conducted their business in public view. Just as the English Parliament met in the same building as the central law courts, and their debates could normally be heard by anyone who chose to listen at the door (see chapter 11 below), so could the cases before the French judges: only two doorkeepers stood outside the court. Second, although smaller than the English Parliament, the Parlement of Paris was still a considerable body (indeed, larger than most representative assemblies). Normally some 200 judges, sitting in ten different ‘chambers’, heard cases referred to them by inferior courts that covered almost half the kingdom; but they could also meet in plenary sessions, presided over by the senior judge (the premier président: the only judge directly appointed by the crown), in which every member possessed the right to speak and to vote. The premier président controlled debating and voting protocols, and (just like the Speaker of the English House of Commons) when necessary liaised with the monarch; moreover (again like the Speaker) unless the premier président presided, all debate ceased. Finally, much as the English House of Commons claimed that no tax could be legally collected without its approval, so in France no tax legislation could be enforced until the local Parlement registered it – and both before and after registration the judges had the power to ‘interpret’ (i.e. modify) government edicts in the light of legal appeals concerning exemptions and exceptions.

  The king in person could override the obstruction of any Parlement by making a personal appearance in court to enforce the registration of any law or edict he had issued, in a process known as a lit or ‘bed’ of justice; but such action demeaned the power of the monarchy and could cause embarrassing confrontations. At a lit de justice in 1629 at the Parlement of Paris, Louis XIII forced his judges to register some contentious tax edicts, but they reminded him that ‘Great in the law though he is, the king will not wish to overturn the basic laws of the kingdom … Our power is great too.’ As harvest failure and plague caused widespread hardship, others emulated the defiance of the Paris judges. One regional Parlement commandeered royal funds held by tax collectors to pay their own wages; another ordered the grain collected for the army to be sold to starving civilians; two more encouraged popular riots against royal policies and refused to punish those who took part.

  Alarmed by this domestic unrest and infuriated by France's wars against Catholics abroad, the dévots determined to get rid of Richelieu. They argued that unless France withdrew from all foreign commitments and allowed time for retrenchment and reform, the monarchy would collapse. According to one of their papers of advice:

  France is full of sedition, but the courts punish no one. The king has appointed special judges for these cases, but the Parlements prevent the execution of the sentences so that, in consequence, they legitimize the rebellions. I do not know what we should hope or fear in all this, given the frequency of revolts, of which we learn of a new one almost daily.

  Richelieu did not dispute either these facts or the urgent need for reform, but he presented his master with a stark choice: ‘If the king resolves upon war, it is necessary to abandon all thought of peace, retrenchment and good order within this kingdom. If, on the other hand, he wants peace, then he should abandon all thought of Italy for the future.‘5

  While Louis pondered these options, the dévots made their move. On 10 November 1630, Marie publicly deprived Richelieu of all offices in her household and banished him from her presence. The next day, he returned to tender his formal resignation, as protocol demanded, to find Marie locked in conversation with her son. She immediately launched into a tirade about the cardinal's wickedness, telling Louis that he must choose which of them he wished to retain as his advisor. Richelieu left disconsolate, and his enemies flocked to congratulate Marie on her victory (and to make bids for the offices that the cardinal and his numerous relatives and clients would soon vacate.) Louis, however, spent the rest of the day sitting on his bed petulantly pulling the buttons off his waistcoat while he pondered the agonizing decision required by his mother. Eventually he summoned Richelieu and, together, they planned how to govern without Marie.

  The ‘Day of Dupes’ (as contemporaries called it) accelerated France's slide into a 30 years war with Spain. Marie fled abroad, never to return, while Richelieu executed, imprisoned or banished those who had rashly revealed their opposition to him. Nothing now restrained his resolve to check Habsburg expansion, whatever the domestic cost, and he promised large subsidies to support both Sweden and the Dutch Republic. This support required tax increases, however, which produced more protests; in 1631, another famine year, six more urban revolts rocked France; and 1632 was little better. The governor of the province of Guyenne spoke for many worried ministers when he warned Paris that ‘the misery is so general, in all areas and among all classes, that unless there is an immediate reduction [in taxes] it is inevitable that the people will be driven to some dangerous course of action’.6 Louis made some concessions – he reluctantly restored the provincial estates in Burgundy, Languedoc and Provence; and he renewed the Paulette for nine years – but in 1634, realizing that Philip IV planned to attack, the king explained to Richelieu his reasons for waging a ‘vigorous open war against Spain in order to secure a beneficial general peace’. It would forestall a Spanish–Dutch peace; it would limit imperial gains in Germany; it would reawaken anti-Spanish sentiment in Italy. Louis even claimed that, given the size of the subsidies he already paid to the Swedes and the Dutch, it would cost only one million livres more each year to declare outright war. For all these reasons, the king concluded, ‘I believe it is better for us to attack them now than to wait for them to attack us’. In May 1635 a French herald delivered a declaration of war on Spain.7

  Louis mobilized 150,000 men (at least on paper) for the new campaign – but, unwisely, he deployed them on numerous fronts: against Spain, in the Spanish Netherlands, in Italy and in Switzerland. He also built up a navy in both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. None of these forces achieved anything of note: indeed, the invasion of the South Netherlands ended in humiliation when, following an unsuccessful siege of the university town of Louvain, the French had to withdraw northwards and beg the Dutch to rescue them. One of the defenders of Louvain, Cornelius Jansen (a professor of th
eology), wrote a vitriolic book during the siege that used both Scripture and history to discredit France's alliances with heretics: Mars Gallicus sold thousands of copies in several editions and several languages.8

  War and Insurgency

  Contrary to Louis XIII's prediction, outright war increased state expenditure by a great deal more than a million livres. Apart from an immediate rise in taxes, the government had to feed and lodge its troops at a time when the war depressed trade and industry in many areas, causing widespread economic hardship. Fourteen urban revolts occurred in 1635, the year war broke out, and although a reasonable harvest helped to preserve order in the countryside, a wet winter followed by an unusually hot and stormy spring produced widespread opposition to the recruiters and tax collectors in 1636. Many prepared formal complaints to the crown. Shaken by an invasion from the Spanish Netherlands that captured Corbie and threatened Paris (see chapter 9 above), the king graciously agreed to overlook the seditious nature of these assemblies and ‘forgave’ tax arrears; but the continued military pressure soon led him to make new demands for both men and money. In 1637 these provoked one of the largest popular uprisings in French history: the Croquants of Périgord, in south-western France.9

  The trouble began when Louis ordered royal judges to sequester grain for the troops assembling to attack Spain, revoked the ‘forgiveness’ of past taxes and increased the taille by about one-third. The speed of the hostile reaction stunned everyone. According to a chronicler, ‘most uprisings of this kind tended to pass through various stages: one could see the plan take shape before the trouble broke out. But from the first, this one reached such excesses that, just like a great fire that has been covered for a long time, suddenly flames burst out that were virtually impossible to extinguish.‘10 In May 1637 men from a group of forest villages formed an army that included many local veterans who lived among them, led by the lord of La Mothe La Forêt, a retired professional soldier, who called on each parish to produce 20 recruits and 5 lives a day for their support. When the veterans had drilled and trained the rest, La Mothe led some 8,000 men to Bergerac, a largely Protestant town, which welcomed him. Several more members of the elite – including 14 lawyers, 12 ‘gentlemen’ and 4 priests – rallied to the Croquant cause and started to compose sophisticated manifestos. Many have survived, filled with complaints about the ‘insupportable, illegitimate and excessive [taxes] unknown to our forefathers’ levied since the war with Spain began, and exacted by financiers who ‘consume the poor labourers down to the bone’, coupled with laments about the loss of trade and industry caused by the war. They petitioned the king (who, they claimed, had been deceived by his evil counsellors) to restore justice and liberty by reducing their tax burden to its pre-war level.11

  The government only managed to restore order in Périgord by recalling troops from the Spanish front. Afterwards, in an attempt to discourage others from rebellion, judges arrived with instructions to seek out ‘those with something to lose’ and to administer ‘exemplary punishments’ that would ‘horrify the rest of the rebels’. A dozen of the leaders, including several gentlemen, were degraded and publicly executed; but many others (including La Mothe) faded into the backwoods from which they had come – in many cases becoming bandit leaders. Louis was so shaken by the extent of the unrest that in December 1637 he made a formal ‘vow’ placing France under the protection of the Virgin Mary – an act of public humiliation celebrated in popular processions throughout the kingdom, and in a powerful painting by Richelieu's protégé, Philippe de Champaigne.12

  Open revolts like that of the Croquants formed only the ‘public transcript’ (to use the language of James Scott) of French popular resistance. Many other communities, especially in remote areas, defied the government in ways that have left few archival traces: people delayed tax payments as long as possible and fled whenever recruiters approached. Elsewhere, the mere threat of violence led local authorities to make concessions that averted open revolts. Thus at Caen in Normandy in 1631, when harvest failure drove up the price of bread by 50 per cent, the crowds in the marketplace ‘terrorized the merchants and took their grain at the price they wanted’ – all the sources emphasize that they stole nothing – ‘and made themselves masters of the grain market, distributing the goods at a fair price to those who wanted them’. At this point the local militia intervened to maintain the new ‘fair price’, which prevented further trouble. Likewise, six years later (the year of the Croquants), faced with demands from the central government for more revenue, the magistrates of Caen imposed a tax on each serge cloth manufactured in the city. This inevitably forced up prices and drove down demand, leading manufacturers to lay off workers. One morning the new unemployed gathered outside the town hall and, in orderly fashion, placed their grievances before the magistrates: as soon as the magistrates promised to revoke the new tax, the crowd dispersed.13

  Although such tactical retreats preserved public order in the localities, they left the central government short of taxes – taxes whose yield it had already alienated to the partisans (bankers who had loaned money under a contract, or parti, which assigned repayment, with interest, from a specified source of income). So Richelieu began to appoint special commissioners known as intendants to enforce payment of the taxes assigned to the partisans, and to seize the possessions and even the persons of delinquent taxpayers. Whenever local judges showed sympathy with the taxpayers, Richelieu evoked the case from the Parlements to the king's council for judgment. He also forbade any appeal to the courts in tax disputes that involved less than 100 livres – equivalent to three years’ wages for many workers.14

  Much of France's war expenditure came from the yield of a single direct tax on land, the taille. As usual in the early modern world, the burden did not fall evenly. First, certain areas (such as enclaves ruled by foreign princes) and certain social groups (including university professors, judges and tax collectors as well as nobles and clergy) did not pay taille at all. As the government's fiscal needs rose, it naturally tried to reduce these exemptions, but although this strategy produced a short-term advantage in the form of increased tax yields, it brought a long-term danger because those newly subjected to fiscal pressure often favoured and sometimes fomented tax strikes and tax revolts by others. In addition, some provinces paid far more taille than others, and within provinces some areas enjoyed special exemptions – which meant that the rest had to pay more. Each round of tax increases accentuated these disparities: thus the tax burden on Lower Normandy quintupled between 1630 and 1636, and had doubled again by 1638. The following year, the chief treasury minister warned Richelieu that the region ‘pays almost a quarter of the taxes of the entire kingdom’.15 Small wonder that Lower Normandy saw the greatest of the seventeenth-century tax revolts: the Nu-Pieds (the ‘Bare Feet’) (Fig. 31).

  31. Receipts from the taille by the French treasury, 1600–47.

  The dramatic fiscal impact of France's war against the Habsburgs emerges clearly when expressed in terms of its equivalent in wheat. The spikes in 1643 and 1647 soon translated into popular revolts.

  The economic stagnation caused by the war also reduced tax yields. Many who could not afford to pay simply abandoned their homes and farms and fled – but since the government apportioned most direct taxes by community, not by individuals, the flight of any taxpayer automatically increased the burden on those who remained. Tax arrears therefore mounted: whereas the government received four-fifths of its impositions in 1629, it received less than one-half a decade later. The central government therefore supplemented the taille with indirect taxes, labour services, billeting obligations (both for soldiers and for prisoners of war) – so many new burdens that ‘their number wearies the memory’, according to a group of irate taxpayers in 1638.16 Richelieu subjected civil servants to particularly harsh burdens. He arbitrarily reduced their salaries and delayed paying the residue; he demanded ‘loans’ from them that he had little or no intention of repaying; and he both doubled the number of
positions in established institutions (which halved the months of the year when the officers could draw a salary) and founded new institutions that reduced the jurisdiction of existing ones (which reduced the income of each official from fees). This constant fiscal pressure encouraged the judges of the Parlement of Normandy to defy the cardinal in 1639: the judges refused to register a new crop of tax edicts, the prosecutors went on strike in protest against a royal edict that doubled their number, and the courts took no action when the Nu-Pieds revolt broke out.17

  The Nu-Pieds revolt took its name from ‘the poor miserable salt-workers’, some 10,000 of whom walked barefoot on the sand as they carried wood to heat the saltpans on the beaches of Lower Normandy, and then salt from the pans to the nearest town. In July 1639 they murdered an official who, they believed, brought orders to extend to Normandy a salt monopoly (known as the gabelle) that existed in other French provinces, requiring each householder to agree in advance to purchase a set quantity of salt at inflated prices. In various violent demonstrations over the summer, angry crowds in Lower Normandy murdered about one hundred people – most of them tax collectors – and maimed or threatened many others; they also burnt down tax offices and the houses of those suspected of enriching themselves from taxes. Sometimes the perpetrators numbered a few score, at other times a few hundred, and eventually they coalesced to form ‘The Army of Suffering’ with perhaps five thousand members. As with the Croquants two years earlier, a minor nobleman, the lord of Ponthébert, took charge (calling himself ‘General Nu Pieds’) and appointed some veterans as ‘Brigadiers’ to command and drill his followers. With a cleric to serve as his secretary, the ‘General’ also composed and circulated manifestoes that denounced the new salt tax and called for a return to the ‘Charter’ of 1315 that formed the basis of Normandy's incorporation into the kingdom of France.18