Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

What is a state? Do we count merely the agencies under the state’s purview and the activities that directly relate to the state? Do we take Weber’s definition and only look at organizations with a monopoly of force over an area? While these are seemingly abstract questions, they often have a very real force. We live in an age where states posture as ‘small’ while creating massive militaries and all encompassing surveillance apparatuses. The trick is that many of these groups are not a part of the ‘state’, they are contractors. But is a private firm which only takes contracts for the government, which takes orders from and is fully regulated by the government, truly a private organization?


Such a question faces one when surveying the monarchy of Louis XIII. While the reputation de Tocqueville gave him as a proto-liberal remains with him, even three centuries later. While this reputation is not wholly deserved, he did create one general innovation which has remained with the modern state to this day. He created a regularized interaction between the market and the state, which can be seen by the creation of a schooling system and set of regulations monitoring government-approved lawyers, especially the Notaire profession.




Since Louis XI, entering the law had been a relatively simple process: a man seeks the reference of two lawyers already in the profession, and once those references were processed, the man was allowed to buy a lawyer’s certificate and practice as a lawyer. Since judges had seniority requirements and had to be appointed by Minister of the Law, this meant that court cases were generally self-regulating (though the story of the poorly versed young lawyer who fails his clients existed all over France, and bribery was rather common). However, the notarial profession, which dealt exclusively with non-contentious cases (IE, the writing of contracts between clients or between an employer and employee) was rife with corruption. Paris was teeming with forgers providing fraudulent certificates, and even beyond this, it was an easy task for young aristocrats to find two references.


Louis XII’s policy of selling venal (IE inherited) offices just worsened the issue. Now the son of lawyer could enter the law on a whim, and many aristocrats bought venal titles in order to speculate on the market for government positions. Thus, while 10,000 positions existed nominally, only 4,574 positions were filled when Louis XIII came into power. It cannot be precisely determined whether the unfilled positions were taken up by speculators or aristocrats who died or were exiled during the Fronde, but the Trial of Jaccome de Montserrat, a serf and a soldier who had stolen the certificate of his officer and went on to practice law in southern France, drew a great deal of attention to the issue of fraudulent lawyers.


While the explosion of lawyerly positions had benefited the north of France a great deal, with the average Fleming living within four kilometers of a courthouse, but the south and the colonies suffered a massive deal from the growth in fraudulent lawyers certificates. In a region that was just barely shifting away from serfdom and manor based economics, the mass of easily bribed and untrained notaires led to thousands of peasants finding themselves in ‘short term’ contracts which placed them in sharecropping conditions. The lack of a legal infrastructure to challenge these contracts meant that many of these contracts remained dominant, and that Henri II’s major policy project of destroying serfdom failed spectacularly in the French south.




This was more than a minor issue; it both invalidated Louis’ focus on the south (via a series of scandals involving the bribery or fraud of notaires) and weakened Louis’ attempts to develop France via market institutions. However it intersected with a series of entrenched policies which made ‘fixing’ it problematic at best. Louis could not undo the venality of offices anymore than he could abolish the aristocracy, office venality affected tens of thousands of men at the heart of the French kingdom’s policymaking apparatus. Nor could Louis completely reform the way that the lawyerly profession functioned, for many of its aspects involved laws which regulated the trades around all of France. Furthermore, the decentralization of power meant that any reform of the law had to pass in every municipal province (especially the southern provinces of Toulouse, Bordeaux, Aix-Marseilles, and Nice) or else it would be invalidated.


Due to this, Louis’ overhaul of the legal system took more than a decade, with the Enforcement act first coming to the Paris parliament in 1658, and the Legal Testing Act passing in the Nice parliament in 1673. However, the methods by which Louis regularized the legal profession is key because it shows the means by which he reformed the Army, Navy, and the Clergy. And while Louis’ reform of the army and clergy are more often remembered (due to the notion that military history is a far more interesting concept and due to the Janesist Controversy of the 1680s), Louis’ regulation of the law is far more important because many aspects of it remain to this day. In fact, the Legal Testing Act represents the first attempt to set up a standardized testing system for the legal profession in Europe, a tradition which remains with us via the French CAPA, the Louisian JBE and the Quebecois ALE.




Louis’ personal experience of the Chinese Imperial Examination system irrevocably changed his view on French policy. Trained in classic Aristotelian philosophy, Louis saw the Imperial Exam as a far more valid form of ‘aristocratic government’ (which originally meant rule by the best) than the form he had experienced in France. His personal anxiety over his place as a pretender and the fact that, due to his birth, he had been given both (what he felt was) unjust importance and an unjust punishment was wholly validated by the existence of (what he saw as) a perfectly meritocratic system. His journal notes show a deeply empathic response to his discovery of the exam system: “Had it been that Henri and I had merely been tested for our abilities! So much suffering, so much bloodshed, would have been averted by such a test existing in my home land.” Louis showed that he was still thinking on this topic, when he brought up the idea of an examination system to solve the Notaire Crisis during the 1650s: “To the far east, the state of China recruits its men of letters via a system of examinations. I believe that this is a more effective, and less expensive, solution than the common idea of a school designed to train men of the law. It provides its own enforcement, and rather than relying on an expensive set of schools to train our notaires, it will instead push the subjects of France to find ways to teach themselves the elements of our legal code.”


This testing system was revolutionary, but it would not be implemented until the early 1670s. The first set of solutions to legal fraud and bribery was a set of regulating courts which would verify that a legal title was being used. On a bi-annual basis, lawyers would have to check in to show the trials they had served in, which would include notes and stamps from the purveiling court. This law was relaxed in the colonies, but it was easily passed, and by 1667 the number of empty legal titles had been nearly eliminated.


Louis was then able to create a certification exam which was slowly passed through the municipal provinces, which would test lawyers-to-be on Classical Philosophy, Logic & Rhetoric, and the legal precedents of France. This test was required before a student could buy a legal certificate, and it ensured a level of quality among all branches of law that was not previously there. It also allowed for Louis to legislate the expansion of markets deep into southern France. Whereas the number of notaires had only allowed for a strong market system in the north of France (with the villages of the south having annual or bi-annual markets), the new system allowed for a massive expansion of intra-national trade. Propelled first by the olive oil boom and then by the trade of wares and finished products, the regulation of the legal profession can be linked directly to the development of market structures in Occitania.




Louis’ reaction to the exam system and his constant advocacy for it (extending to his reforms of the military and the clergy) show an interesting aspect of his personality. In his journal entries there was little arrogance, and little besides hatred for his birthright as pretender to Henri. There is none of the talk of divine right which would play such a large part in the reigns of Henri II and Henri III. While the childhood trauma of being personally responsible for a potential civil war led to an insecure and aggrandizing personality in Henri, in Louis it led to a deep humility and a feeling that neither he nor anyone deserved, by right of birth, the title of ‘king’. This personality trait gets to the heart of what made Louis a different sort of monarch than any of his predecessors, successors, or peers. While other kings spoke of their divine right as a means to conduct absolutism, Louis established a different sort of absolutism, which rested rather on the idea that no inherited title was intrinsically valid. This shows both why he was christened the arch-despot by the Hapsburgs and north Germans while being met as a liberator by the English revolutionaries and 18th century liberals.

GulMacet said:

Interesting. The Chinese perception of their system being intrinsically superior is still valid.

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(wiggles hand while saying 'eehhhhh')

Certainly the Chinese were great at propagandizing their own system, but the tendency in China to compare the imperfect present with an idealized version of the past has tripped up a lot of Western historians regardless of whether they criticized or advocated for the efficacy of the Chinese system. And regardless, you see a similar process occurring in Ming China, of financialization and commercialization, that you see in contemporary Western Europe.

volksmarschall said:

I remember reading that the Ming word for diplomat or ambassador or something with the body politic was associated with Sinocentrism and the Chinese cut themselves off from the outside world, which Jared Diamond believes is one of the reasons that set China back during the Ming Dynasty and allowed Europe to become the great colonizers of the world and SE Asia instead of the Chinese, who had ships trading as far as East Africa two centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese.

Plus, I spent time in China in 2013 doing research and loved the country, minus the pollution when I was in Beijing... :glare:

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I'd say that had a lot more to do with the Qing dynasty. After all China remained the economic powerhouse of the world during the Ming dynasty and a massive portion of Spain's silver was being exported to pay for Chinese goods. Beyond that, China got a lot of the positive effects of the discovery of the new world simply because new world goods were one of the few things the Europeans could trade to the Chinese (notice the popularity of, say, peanuts in Chinese cuisine, when the peanut is a new world plant).

There's a book which I think is in the bibliography, the Confusions of Pleasure, which argues that Ming China was far more advanced than most histories depict it as, although yes, most of the problem was from insanely awful policy established by the dynastic founder (cutting off sea travel was one, disallowing people from leaving their villages led to the official chinese population 'declining' for ~200 years)

GulMacet said:

I didn't mean to kick off that many comments with an off-hand remark, but am pleased a discussion has grown out of it nonetheless.

As for the Chinese system, I think its greatest fault was the insane amount of traditionalism, making it unable to respond to changed circumstances. I remember reading that the yearly amount of graduates from the Imperial examination system was fixed at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, but when population tripled, the number still remained the same, even though the officials were unable to handle their now far larger workload...

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I'm in a weird place with regards to government systems. Personally I think that it's hard to qualify a whole government system as anything with any precision--the US has both elected and unelected positions while being a democracy and the Soviet Union had the same set of elected and unelected positions while remaining authoritarian. What we can do is look at the specific aspects of a system in order to gauge its qualities, pros and cons. The testing system was an ingenious discovery, but as you noted it existed within a larger system which was hostile to change. Beyond that, the testing system on its own isn't a total solution to the issue of unequal opportunity. We can see this in the way that standardized tests exist today, but the cons of a system are most apparent when they're first introduced. Louis is going to be introducing a lot of tests, and the consequences of that are going to start playing out over the course of his reign.

She's gonna go further then that, I haven't been writing LoF for two years in order to just recreate the events of the OTL Revolution

One cannot help but be astonished at the idealism of Henri II. As a king, he believed that he could create an empire from a patchwork of good will and high culture. As a man, he believed that his vision of the world was so perfect, so exquisite, that the nations of the world would beg to be a part of its periphery. Henri had the dream of any imperialist; he dreamed the he would build an empire sans force, an empire not built on power but rather on peace, and trade, and the beauty of abstract thought.


But me be blunt; I am writing to soldiers. We have seen the war which empires fight at their periphery so that those at the centre may enjoy ‘peace’. We have seen the bloodshed spilt for the ‘monde de lettres’, and cried tears for fallen comrades on newly ‘embraced’ peripheries. All empire relies on bloodshed, war, and death. To pretend otherwise is not a sign of idealism so much as it is an acceptance of the logic of empire.


Louis understood this. He himself fought in Henri’s colonial wars, and he saw the invisible force by which Henri kept his empire together. And with that experience, he built the army which served France for a hundred years, the greatest army of its time. And while it was the greatest army which Renaissance principles could have built, it is still an outdated organization. I am writing to you, the General Staff of the Army of the Republic, to tell you how to destroy the army that I have spent my whole life serving. But to dismantle a thing to its core, we must understand its purpose. And the purpose of Louis’ men was to put tens of thousands of men on the battlefield to fight and die for his kingdom.




From the start, Louis knew that France would remain a peripheral power (and a target for conquest) without an army which could fight off potentially all of France’s enemies at once. And so he knew, from the start, that the French army would have to be changed in order to increase its size ninefold over the course of the next several decades. This would require a robust officer corps, a massive expansion of the role for the infantry, and a degree of discipline not seen in any army since ancient Rome.


Louis already had the foundation of a skilled army in 1656, though it wouldn’t seem like it. The end of the War of French Succession had brought with it the retirement of a massive number of conscripted soldiers, and the professional ‘army’ that Louis had at the beginning of his reign scarcely amounted to the size of a single corps today. But it was a highly experienced group of veterans, some of whom had been with Louis since his time as a mercenary in the East Indies.


To many a commander, a unit of veterans is simply that: a unit of highly skilled soldiers who can be sent into ever more dangerous situations. Louis saw his men, especially the men of the 1st Bordeaux Cavalry and the 5th Toulouse Infantry, as men who had known command in five consecutive wars (with him in Ceylon and Min, with General de Freyes during the War of Unification, and again with him during the Fronde and the War of French Succession). These were men who had known war, and who understood the need for discipline. They were thus also men with the capacity to lead. Louis personally drilled the seven companies of these two regiments for two months straight, before enrolling those he picked for command into the French Army Academy (which had been similarly enlarged with thirty new instructors from Germany, Italy, and France). The Army Academy was also changed, with a new focus on the science of war: logistics, siegecraft, and lower level tactics. This ended with a test on a specialized branch of the military and turned the Army Academy from a hodgepodge school into a training ground for low level officers.


These low level officers were supplemented with the new rank of the sergeant. The sergeant served under the colonel (who were the senior officer of a regiment), and worked both to stop corruption, working out the secondary aspects of command, and to keep track of rationing. Even the miniature army which Henri maintained in Europe faced a massive amount of corruption, with colonels inflating the number of troops in their regiment in order to receive extra pay. The creation of the sergeant began to undo this, and continued the rise in discipline in the new army.




A word is necessary on discipline, for I have mentioned it multiple times. There is a specific form of discipline that was used in the army of the Ancien Regime, and this form was the discipline provided at the top. While a great deal of variety was allotted to the drills of specific regiments due to backlash from older officers (to the degree that a centralized training manual was only provided in the 1730s), troops were seen in only one regard--as soldiers who accept the orders given to them and who fight for those orders to the last man.


While this concept allowed for a massive concentration of force, it is the key element which crippled Louis’ army. While he could see the potential in the men he had fought with for a decade, he could not see the leadership potential in the later generations of soldiers who fought for him. The highest rank a private could rise to was a sergeant or a specialist, and the higher ranks were filled with bloodless aristocrats. And while the Army Academy provided some of the best lower level officers in all of Europe (as evidenced by the high price fetched by French mercenary regiments), the decade period between the transformation of the Army Academy into a training ground for lower officers and the creation of a War College for senior staff led to a French Army which was deeply capable in the science of war but wholly incapable in the art of war. For its generals the French army had only three options: generals of earlier generations such as Turenne, foreign officers such as Eugen de Savoie, and Louis XIII himself. This weakness can most brutally be seen in the War of the Mediterranean, where the Army of Italy was sorely underled by the simultaneously over-aggressive and uncreative Boufflers and was lost in its entirety.


We can do better. If we were to organize our troops into smaller units while creating larger organizations we would be able to tap into the potential of even the rank and file. If we were to connect the ranks (an oversight in Louis’ reforms which he never corrected) and allow a capable private or sergeant to rise fully up the ranks, we would have a general staff which has experienced war at its fullest. And if we were to abandon the linear tactics and the bloodless theory of Louisian times and adopt skirmishing to its greatest extent, we would be able to fulfill the name which Louis first gave to the force he was creating. We would truly create a Grand Armee.

volksmarschall said:

Outside of the practical (at least written) reasons for the army's reduction in size (to have better concentrated fire from smaller units), I'm curious for the actual in-game reasons for the reduction of your armed forces?

Manpower perhaps? Or are you just trying to keep the game balanced, which - I confess, I reduce my military size in certain games after a war ends just because I think it would be the acceptable approach that would have been taken if not for the fact I'm playing a computer game that drives one to conquer the world! Once more, a nice update. It's refreshing to see work talking about military reductions in AARs from time to time!

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The timeline ends at the end of the War of the Mediterranean is the hint here. There aren't going to be military reductions, at least not under Louis' reign

In my last report I spoke harshly of the native French officers during the reign of Louis XIII. I will stand by it; by and large France had produced few great generals in the last hundred years excepting the great group of men who have joined the tide of the Revolution. Part of this issue was that, despite Louis’ laissez faire approach with almost all other elements of policy, he remained a domineering character in the army, and almost all of the officers promoted to higher ranks were merely worsened versions of himself, while foreign officers were able to find commissions for higher ranks despite their differing views on strategy and tactics. Thus, France produced officers like Turenne, Norilet, and Mazarin, all of whom were flawed copies of Louis XIII’s form of offensive strategy, while the French Army was able to recruit such great men as Charles de Lorraine, Eugen de Savoie, and Jean Churchill du Berry.


There is one exception to the rule of uninspiring and unimaginative native French officers: the Viscomte de Vauban. With the exception of Louis himself, Vauban is likely one of the most influential military men of his time, developing both a new style of star fortress and a grand strategy which Louis XIII and Henri III pursued for the next seventy years.




Although Vauban almost entirely avoided the politics of the Louvre due to his constant travel between the corners of France, he still deeply depended on events occurring within Paris to continue his work. The Siege of Paris had led to the destruction of much of the Right Bank, and the shelling of many of the town’s churches and mansions. The impoverished state could only partially fund the rebuilding effort, and Notre Dame was only fully reconstructed in 1693. The destruction of many mansions led to increased pressure on Louis to rescind the ban on building outside the city walls, a ban which Louis allowed. The growth of the faubourgs outside of the city was a development which Vauban (and many other military engineers) decried on the grounds that it compromised the city’s defenses. But it led to several useful developments. As Paris’ defensiveness weakened, she placed more faith on the strength of her frontier, and provided more and more funding to military engineering. By the time Paris’ walls came down in the 1780s, she was providing 20% of revenues to the creation of military fortresses and was singlehandedly funding every fort built in the lowlands.


The lowlands were, of course, the main nexus of Vauban’s building efforts. The Valois’ easy march to Paris had shown the weakness of French defenses, and the necessity to defend the lowlands both as a center of trade and as a pathway to Paris showed the need to militarize the area. Over the course of Vauban’s career, he built seven star fortresses in the Lowlands, from Mons to Dunkirk to Troyes to Ghent and Lille.




But Vauban was wholly aware of the small effect his work would have if France retained her current borders. And unlike other French officers, who were taught not to speak above their position, Vauban had no worries about presenting the problem directly to the king in a letter dated 15th of February, 1663: “I can continue building fortresses forever, I can festoon the whole landscape with forts, and that will not change the fact that France’s borders are fundamentally indefensible. So long as Lorraine exists, Alsace will remain a peninsula of French land into the Imperial realm. So long as the Netherlands holds Luxembourg, they will be able to ferry supplies to Lorraine and block any French influence in north-western Germany. So long as Italy retains the County of Savoie, she will threaten the whole of southern France.”


He then explained what was at stake: “There are only two options with borders such as ours; accept that a large portion of the kingdom are indefensible and accept its loss, or strike out to fix the problems of our borders and expand into the whole of our frontier naturelle. He then drew two maps, which he labelled ‘The Kingdom of France in 1800’, which presented the stark contrast the King faced; in one map, titled “The Grand France”, France had reunited with Lorraine and Savoy, taken Luxembourg, Turin, the Vaud, and Ghent, and had annexed several areas on the border of Spain. In the other, titled ‘The Small France’, France had lost Alsace, eastern Provence, much of Franche-Comte, and the northern lowlands. The map was striking, and Louis kept it in his office for the remainder of his reign. This goal, to achieve a ‘natural frontier’, bordered by the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic, became the touchstone of French foreign policy for the next century.




Vauban was the greatest engineer of his time, but he was something more than that. He was a unique creature, a man who was old enough to be taught by the old system but young enough to not pose a threat to Louis. Due to this he was able to take an outsized role in the creation of French policy, and he became one of the few great native French generals in the kingdom of Louis XIII.

Next up, the growth of the Parisian Faubourgs and the rise of Jansenism!

Stupid google translate...

there is a nice easter egg though, if you catch it