Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

The myth of the Hudson Bay frontier is etched into the very fabric of Quebecois politics. A world of free men, living away from the prejudices and tyrannies of the old world, making their way in the silver mines and salmon fisheries without the injudicious interventions of government, has become the origin myth of Quebec’s History. Which is appropriate, given that the Hudson myth has nothing to do with the history of the region.




The Hudson Bay was discovered by Henri Hudson, an English explorer hired by Henri II to discover a northwest passage which would connect Quebec directly to the Kingdom of Min. When he did not discover a northwest passage, the area was largely forgotten, with two minor outposts created in Secours and Saumon Baie. From 1643 to the 1660s, the region was mostly a port for fur traders and for a series of fisheries.


No one knows where or when the rumors of silver mines began, but the rumors coincided directly with the end of the Fronde. Due to this, the Baie d’Hudson became a destination for thousands of Frondeur seigneurs and their serfs. We can estimate that in the period of 1650-1680, the population of settlers in the Hudson Bay expanded from 300 to 23,000, mostly in the newly found gem mines to the west of the region.


This underscores the myth of the freed Hudsognard. The settlements of the Hudson Bay were not settlements of freely interacting subjects, but retained serfs. Studying the tax records of Severn or Richelieu gives us a picture of an economy which functioned more like a Caribbean slave plantation than a functioning town. Furthermore, the nature of the Hudsognard workplace was a hellish one--fur traders, salmon fishers, and lumberjacks alike all died by the hundreds each year, to be replaced by ever more men lured to the area with promises of easy pay.


The rapid growth of a new population within Quebec inevitably led to tensions. The Hudsognards saw themselves as being closer to the mother country, more independent, and less zealously religious than their southern counterparts. But these stereotypes--the arrogant Husognard and the country bumpkin Quebecois, emerged from a deeper conflict over the Husognard’s relation to Amerindians.


Early Quebecois relations had been bloody, without a doubt. The capture of the ‘empty’ Sacremont led to the destruction of some twelve Iroquois villages, and the whole St.Omer river had been cleared of Amerindians as the area became developed. But as Quebec turned into the main fur trader of the world, the Viceroy in Sacremont adopted a policy aimed more towards conciliation and trade with the First Nations. This could not have contrasted more with the exterminationist view of the Husognards. The harsh weather meant that shelters were few and far between, and the Husognards started conflicts with Cree Amerindians along each of the major rivers of the bay, with the aim of expanding their influence.


The Hudson Bay became even worse when Francois Hubert was elected mayor of Secours. Hubert was a Frondeur general through and through, and his crusading spirit, if anything, was hardened by his experience in the frozen north. Like many of the seigneurs living in the Hudson Bay, Hubert was bittered by the lack of diamond mines in the area, and felt betrayed when he discovered that the area was far less forgiving than he had been led to believe in France. His bitterness was only met with his solid belief that there were silver mines in the area, if he were just to find them. This belief, along with a his hatred of the Cree tribe, which he viewed as less than human, led Hubert on four expeditions into the interior of Quebec. The “Diamond Wars” obliterated the whole population of Amerindians on the path to the Great Lakes, which is now approximated to be in the several ten thousand. But all the blood led to the success of Hubert’s wish--in the ruins of a village he had burned to the north of Lake Superior, he found a diamond the size of his fist. He went further into the mountains, and on the next day, he returned to his men with a bounty of gems,





The news of the Diamond Wars reached the Quebecois Viceroy not from the Husognards, but from the Cree indians who came to the city petitioning the government to cease their attacks. This came as a shock to Viceroy Chalans, who sent the 2nd Sacremont Infantry to Lake Superior to stop what he believed to be a British incursion. When the troops reached the shore, what they found was amazing. A town had sprung up overnight, led by Hubert, who was now calling himself “Viceroy of the Hudson Bay”.


What followed were three straight years of administrative confusion, with the Quebecois and Husognards sending hundreds of letters to Paris, where Louis was bemused by the whole situation. He had resolved a similar problem in Gascogne by splitting the province in two, but the arguments of the Quebecois Viceroy, that two companies would be unnecessary for a single area and that they would prompt questions of consistency among the Indians, who viewed the two companies to be a part of the same group. What Louis decided was that the Hudson Bay Company would become an autonomous company within the Quebec Royal Company, with ownership of 33% of the company.


This conflict remains to this day. Hudson was transformed after the Quebecois Revolution into the center of a belligerent settler’s liberalism, supporting each of the wars against the United States, use of violent force against unions, and the suppression of the Manhatta and Sacremont Communes. Today the region produces the reactionary officers who seem to play a greater and greater role in our government.

volksmarschall said:

A French North America!

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Yeah! And with the mostly French speaking Louisiana to its south (and the destruction of a pesky and unstable Anglophone neighbor), the whole of North America & the Caribbean is Francophone!

Which has become steadily less positive the more time I've put into it

No, I figured that I'd start reading it during LoF2, because I've been jumping the gun on developments anyways.

But yeah canonically all of these writers are writing in French, and all the modern day characters are going to be Quebecois, with the exception of Malika Robb, who was born in the American south.

Hey guys sorry for the lack of entries I got sick at the beginning of this week and it's escalated until today (not being able to get a full night's sleep until last night prolly played a part).

And yeah, volks, I never considered LoF to be a fully divergent history up until I started really getting into the literature of the French Revolution. After a certain point I realized that I couldn't have a different French revolution leading to the same 19th/20th century history, and that the massive difference in the histiography of the French Revolution across the Anglo-Franco divide means that a world which is primarily French speaking would see the revolution in a very different way. With those ideas internalized (and a desire to show, in LoF, how modern events reflect on our idea of history), I decided to bring 'contemporary' writers in (though the cast could certainly use some expansion)

Jape said:

The greater Quebec of the *modern era doesn't sound like a very nice place, I take it it has a bit of the Latin American junta to it?

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Yes, the Americas never really get over Bonapartism, Quebec especially.

volksmarschall said:

Yeah, I added a few excerpts from 'contemporary' history books for my Presidents AAR too to reflect some of the changes going on, although, I prefer to stay close to how things developed and when they occurred, mostly because I can use all my books as references to try and present a more 'realistic' approach.

Since you thought you were once going to be a science-fiction writer, who would have guessed you would have ended up in alternative history!

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I dunno man! All I know is that one of my best friends (who does really in depth fanfiction) is aghast at how much stuff I've put into this!

volksmarschall said:

So? I'm a historian and philosopher by trade, actually write several articles a year, am currently trying to piece together a historiography book on the Byzantines -- somewhat in preparation for my PhD application so I can say, "Hey, I have a large track record of published work in the field..." Yet, I also spend time here on the forum writing AARs! Perhaps too much time, I should get back to middle 2011-January 2014 when I was totally absent from the forum!

I'm pretty sure we're all happy you've spent so much time in this 'fiction' work too! Plus, I got two new books for my library from reading this.

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I mean I'm really against the idea of commodifying one's hobbies but I wouldn't say that LoF has been a waste of time. I've learned a lot about history from my research on the topic and my analysis is immearusably better for it. Beyond that, having something outside of anything I could say was for a job to consistently read allowed me to avoid getting sucked into the more nonsensical aspects of DC.

At the same time it is kinda silly when ya take a step back, but hey, so's everything.

blsteen said:

That's an interesting North America...

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Yeah North America is messed up ITTL, partially because of the way that they gain independence, partially due to the South's massive dependence on slave (and later, sharecropper) labor, and partially because since the region was cut up into three roughly equal powers at start, you never get the rise of an idealistic, hegemonic power like you did in our timeline.

The recent renunciation of Bordeaux’s municipal rights has taken many by surprise. It should not have--Bordeaux has always had a tenuous hold over its municipal title. But the shock that the renunciation has produced in the French public underscores a worrying habit in our current politics--to take legal protections at face value, to assume that the state will always play by the rules it has established. The monarchy has always viewed the ‘rights’ of the municipal provinces as privileges, which were to be retained only so long as they served their role in diverting dissent.


To look at the Renunciation of Bordeaux in a legalistic vacuum is to mistake the situation in its entirety. If we were to understand that from the beginning, provincial rights have routinely been subjugated to royal desires, then this event would seem far less of a transgression and more like yet another event in a long-going trend of the government strengthening itself.




The creation of the municipal provinces led to a conflict between the provinces and the crown. The decision to give autonomy to several cities (some of whom were not in revolt during the Fronde), as well as Flandres, was a positive way to end the Fronde but seemed more arbitrary as time went on. Twenty years later, a large portion of Frenchmen who had never experienced the Fronde asked themselves: why is it that Parisians, Lyonnais, Marseillois, were all given immunity from conscription, lower taxes, and duty free privileges on some goods while they were not?


These issues came to a head in Normandy, an area known both for its culture of rebellion and its burgeoning textile industry. However over the course of Louis’ reign, Normandy began facing increasing competition from the tax-free products in Paris and Flandres. This was fine so long as Normandy remained a cheaper source of labor, but the Olive Oil Boom, and the dearth of capital it brought to Normandy, meant that slightly cheaper wages could no longer overcome the massive price difference between Parisian/Flemish and Norman goods became too large, and the region fell into a brutal depression, with the charities of Rouen supporting half again as many men in 1666 as they did in 1667.


The Normans responded to their poverty in the classic French style--the tax populaire. The forcible redistribution of food supplies has been a part of French political culture since the Black Plague, but this was the first time since the Forty Years War that the majority of a province was up in a tax populaire. Daily functions in Caen and Rouen were ceased, aristocrats called their levies, and the bourgeoisie moved to their Paris estates.


By the late Spring of 1667, Normandy was in a full civil revolt, with militiamen fighting both the royal regiment stationed in Caen and the levies raised by the rural nobility. Louis sent the Royal Army, now fresh with recruits, to Normandy to crush the rebellion. And while it only took three months before the revolters were put down, the mobilization of 30,000 men into arms during a bust strained France’s budget to the limits, and as a punishment against the Normans the cost of the rebellion was paid for by taxes placed on the Norman towns, taxes which in the end remained permanent. The economic cost of the Olive Oil Bust, which Norman traders were greatly involved in, the collapse of Norman industry, the ongoing revolts in the providence, and the taxes levied after the intervention made Normandy a backwater for two generations; it was only in the early 1730s that the area reemerged as a center of the cotton textile industry.


The tax had other effects, though. In the immediate wake of the revolt, Louis was sent a rather odd request: that the people of Alencon be allowed to separate from Normandy and constitute their own separate province. The area of Alencon had never rebelled, and the Alencoise were good and loyal Frenchmen, said the request, who did not deserve to be lumped in with the Normans. Seeing an additional opportunity to punish Normandy, Louis allowed for the creation of the province of Orne, which would not be subject to the additional taxes levied on Normandy (which in time became permanent).


Over his reign, Louis allowed for or purposefully changed the boundaries of many of his provinces, allowing Montpellier and Occitania to combine to form the older provincial borders of Languedoc, Gascogne and Saintes to combine to form Guyenne, and the several provinces of eastern Brittany to combine to form the Loire province. He also separated many provinces, directly undoing Henri’s second main accomplishment (the first being the abolition of serfdom), that is the creation of a pseudo-rational form of local governance in France. And, like Louis XIV, he directly attacked the municipal rights of a province when he formed the Lille-et-Nord province in order to counteract the power of the increasingly independent Flemish.




Why did Louis do this? He must have been aware that doing this weakened his ability to govern the people of France. He must have realized that he was undoing an aspect of the French government which brought in tax revenue, which lowered tolls within the regions of France, which allowed for a more economically rational system. So why did he weaken the structures put into place by his immediate predecessor?


The answer is: to slowly degrade the ability of Frenchmen to revolt. Before Louis XIII, revolts were a common occurrence in France, and they were mainly aimed squarely at the centre of the French government. Afterwards, regional rivalries, between Guyenne and the Languedoc, Loire and Brittany, Lille-et-Nord and Flandres, were more apparent, while rivalries between the marginalized peoples of France and the government of France waned immeasurably. Since the reign of Louis XIII there has been only one center of anti-royalist revolt in France and that is Paris. The provinces, delighted with their legal protections which were so honored by Henri III, assume that they are safe from any transgression.




There is another reason why Louis allowed for the fragmentation of the provinces. The massive military buildup over his reign came with the creation of a massive system of barracks, forts, and other staging areas. As he rationalized his military, Louis also set up a system of military governorships over his provinces, which, unlike the provinces, were rationally organized. As the French military grew in size, it gradually became tradition that a part of training involved serving in the Royal Guards under the military governor of a province not your own, where one’s role was suppressing dissent, maintaining the line of fortresses (if one was in the artillery), attacking smugglers (if one was in the cavalry), capturing fleeing serfs (again if one was in the cavalry), and administering France’s anti-piracy squadron (if one was in the navy, whose administrative capital was built in Saintes). This policy allowed Louis to make the most of his manpower while indoctrinating his army into the royalist cause. No longer would the military split, as it did during the Fronde and the Wars of Religion.


Over the years the governorships have stepped into the role Louis intended for them--as the real center of power in French local politics. The Royal Guards have collected taxes, broken strikes, and deposed mayors when necessary. We must shrug off these legalist chains we have created for ourselves; what we see as rights are guaranteed by no more than the whims of our overlord, who feels that he can take them away with the swipe of his wrist. We must agitate--not for the return of these privileges, a canard which plays directly into the hands of the King, who would see us struggle for decades to return to a status quo ante--but for the deconstruction of privileges and the royalist government who gives and takes them for their own goals. We must fight--not for change of this or that policy, but for the change of the whole apparatus of government!

Written by Henri de Saint-Simon, Undersecretary of the Bureau of Machines and the Arts. Presented to the National Treasury on the 6th of June, 1787, Year VIII​

I. Introduction


The prolonged economic crisis of the Revolution has spurned some to ask: why has France remained such an economic laggard? Why is the most culturally, intellectually, and military advanced country in the world incapable of supporting a steel industry large enough to arm her armies, incapable of paying her debts even though she borrows at ludicrously low rates from her sister republics, incapable of competing with the insignificant island-nation to her north?


In short, why has France no industry for herself, why is commerce still such a weak element of the French economy, why does France not possess the modern economy which Britain has crafted for itself over the last thirty years?


This is a difficult question, but I will do my best to explain the industrial situation in France, going back to the origins of French commerce during the reign of Louis XIII. This section will be both a broader discussion of the nature and limitations of the French economy, as well as a discussion of elements specific to Louis XIII’s reign. It will be the first in a five section report on the state of the French economy, historically, and what can be done to solve it’s problems.


First, I will argue that the nature of French ‘non-industrialization’ is overstated, and argue that we often compare ourselves to an idealized view of both contemporary and historical England. Secondly, I will give a tripartite discussion of the limitations in the French economy, limitations which were exacerbated by Louis XIII but preceded him.


II. French Industrialization


The first issue one must tackle when one asks ‘why has France not industrialized’ is what exactly the question means. The presumption that France remains the wholly agrarian feudal society of the 14th century is certainly not true now, nor was it true a century ago. France is a highly diverse economy, and to characterize the whole of it is to make an egregious mistake. Those who say that France has not industrialized are surely not speaking of France’s artisanal workshops, or her luxury goods industries which remain the most advanced in the world. No they speak to a specific form of industrialization, the industrialization which we imagine has occurred in Britain.


What does this mean? What do we imagine in Britain when we say that it has industrialized? When we speak of industrialization we speak of the British textile industry, the British steel industry, we imagine vast factories which employ hundreds of workers, all working in specialized tasks, all powered with coal. In short, the proponents of the English model assume that Adam Smith described the British economy as it was in 1775, rather than describing the kind of economy he thought it should move towards.




So let us say that, firstly, the English economy is no where near as advanced as we have led ourselves to believe, and secondly, that France’s economy is not as much of a laggard as we fear. We imagine Britain to be populated by massive factories, but our spies have found only five textile and steel firms which employ more than five hundred workers, located in Manchester and southern Wales. Yes, France retains the same rural industry that she has had for centuries but that has led to a highly diversified labor market. In the countryside, households are not merely agrarian actors but also work in arms manufactories, finish textiles, and create a large number of other minor but necessary goods such as leather, spades, and furniture.


Furthermore, in the cities France has a highly educated and skilled set of artisans who have provided the world with some of the best craft items. Our fine glassworks, silk industry, and construction industries all benefit from an unmatched level of craftsmanship. Lastly France’s industrial technology is not lagging as much as we fear in Paris. The last five years have seen the opening of chemical plants, soda factories, and machine works throughout France, all of which are mostly new inventions. Furthermore, in specific areas such as Normandy we have seen the beginnings of widespread use of industrial machines such as carding machines and looms. Lastly, French labor is as much as 47% cheaper in France as in England, and the French worker, bolstered by their well trained brethren, produce fine goods.


This is not to say, however, that France does not have considerable setbacks. And many elements of the French economy which have been her strength since the rule of Louis XIII are now chokepoints in French industrialization.


III. Elements of Backwardness in the French Economy


Ironically, many of the elements furnished by Louis XIII, which helped France become the strongest economy in the world in the early 18th century, are elements which now hold us back as we enter the 19th. These include many elements which I will attempt to disaggregate, but they include the dependence of the French economy on artisanal and luxury goods which is related to the lagging consumption levels of the French worker, the system of tolls, and lastly, the system of guilds and corporations which both survive due to and promote the first two systems.


A) Artisanal and Luxury Items


Over the last century the main product of the French economy has been high quality luxury goods. From silk tapestries and mahogany furniture to hunting pistols and watches, the luxury market has formed 24% of all purchases and 73% of all manufactures in France since the sales tax was instituted, which can be presumed to be only slightly inflated in an economy recovering from a recession. While this has been seen as a positive, it both indicates a larger problem and makes the resolution of that problem more difficult. The problem is that the French artisan economy is wholly oriented around the consumption of an elite few who can afford items like silk or mahogany rather than the people. This has its origins in the early development of our country since Colbert’s economic regime.


Colbert, looking to revive the French city, gave duty free accessibility to colonial goods to each of the French municipalities so long as they went to the artisanal industries of France. Soon, naturalized silk was used all along Flanders and in the Lyon area. Finishing gems from Quebec accounted for a third of Parisian exports during the later 17th century, while naturalized porcelain became a major aspect of the Marseillaise economy.


As the skills involved in the production of these manufactures became more and more common, a larger proportion of the French artisan population became dependent on buying from the colonies and selling to the aristocracy. We can see this issue of industries producing for the gentry and the bourgeoisie outside of these cities out of the growth of the high-end wine industries in Bordeaux and Toulouse and the development of the river yacht in Nantes. This, along with laws which empowered the corporations in the cities, strengthened the French economy and helped it become the greatest exporter in Europe from the 1680s to the 1720s.




But while this was a strength in the decades past, the reliance of a few well paid workers making products for a few well paid consumers has become a chokepoint for the development of more important mass production industries. Furthermore there has been intense opposition to the introduction of machines due to the focus on high quality craft goods.


This focus on luxury items underlines another paradoxical problem in the French economy--low labor costs has led to low consumption levels among the poor. The French peasant or proletarian, who pays most of his wages into the cost of rents, bread, and taxes, has never had the money for the finer goods produced in Flandres, Lyons, or Paris. And while the subsequent turn in the French countryside to industry as a means of furthering household income, this has meant two things:


1-It has worsened the general inadequacy of peasant finances
2-Because they are unaware of the necessity of saving, it has led to a situation where a downturn in any one industry leads to province wide effects in employment.


IV. Tolls


Tolls have always been an aspect of France; inter-provincial tolls have been in place since the Renaissance. But they have become a larger problem since Colbert, desperate for funds, allowed for tolls to be implemented at the sub-provincial level towards the development of specific projects. They began in Elsass, the Basque provinces, and Provence and each of these tolls helped fund Vauban’s planned fortresses. But as this was opened up, other towns and cities sent petitions for tolls, and soon France was split into hundreds of toll areas. And while this promoted important infrastructural projects at first, such as the expansion of the Nantes port, the development of paved roads, and the funding of the National Guard, since 1730 and the further expansion of tolls they have become the single greatest enemy to any industrial strategy Paris could conceive of.




Tolls have made the cost of long distance transport insurmountable, and have thus been the eternal opponent to economies of scale and has kept firms too small to benefit from the specialization that Smith argues for. Beyond this, the fragmented nature of the French market has made it impossible for the whole of France to compete with British goods, leaving those provinces who do directly compete for markets (notably Normandy, Flandres, and Brittany) facing a state of chronically failed industry. And though attempts have been made in the king’s lands before the revolution and in the liberal parliaments of the Gascony and Normandy afterwards to lower or eliminate tolls, most republics have retained the tolls put in place during the Colbert administration.


The tolls also relate to the strength of France’s oldest industry--smuggling. The informal “Smuggler’s Guild”, which specialized not only in shipping goods illegally across borders sans-tolls but also in counterfeit currency and goods, was formed in the decade after the dissolution of the Jansenists and included some of the most nefarious criminals that the world has ever seen. It is rumored that the fortunes of Garcon “Le Chat” de Paris, the fifth leader of the Guild, numbered in the millions of livres, to the degree that he was able to challenge the King’s Faction in the Paris parliament in a proxy war that led to his execution. Furthermore, it has become impossible to do business in many sectors of the French economy without recourse to smuggling. In certain areas of southern France, it is cheaper to import iron from Russia than it is to use iron from the mountains seventy kilometers away. Under such conditions, the goods suitable for the domestic market are the luxury goods I discussed earlier, whose dramatic price can absorb the frankly ridiculous transportation costs that French policy has imposed on the economy--even if one is moving something which has been supported, like silk, along state roads, transportation and tolls still account for 70% of the cost of manufacture.


The last two issues I have described are economic in their causes and their effects, but the reasons for their continuation is wholly political. The continued survival of three institutions from the Ancien Regime, the guilds, corporations, and provinces, has made any systemic reform of France’s industrial organizations all but impossible.


V. Guilds, Corporations, ‘Republics’


I may be voicing unpopular views to this court today, but I believe that the largest reason for the continuation of these irrational economic policies in our Grand Republic is the survival of provincial power in the form of the Republics, and the strength of guilds and corporations(1). These organizations, which do not serve the whole of the public but merely the interests of their constituents, lead to a polity which virulently defends unnecessary and economically irrational privileges. In order to move to a more modernized economy, we must bring these elements to heel and strengthen our criminally weak central government.


The issue is that the privileges associated with municipal or provincial rule, and the unearned power that the guilds and corporations have in our society, are both products of specific circumstances which have passed.


Colbert’s desire to help the French economy in the wake of the Olive Oil Crash led to an extra-ordinary focus on both the cities and the colonies as a means of growth. I have noted before that Colbert gave the municipal districts a massive decrease on duties from colonial goods, but that is not the whole of the policy he crafted. In order to sate the unrest brought along with increased production (and, in Flandres, to ease the pain of the province’s split between Amiens-et-Nord and Flandres proper), Colbert allowed a major expansion of the guilds as well as a major expansion of their role in the city governments of Paris, Flandres, and Lyons. The Great Corporations of Paris were unilaterally increased from 12 to 24, and the Flemish Guilds were given their own parliament with equal representation to the King’s decisions and the provincial estates! (2) The guilder syndics were thus given the authority and respect they felt they deserved, which allowed them to step production up to a large degree.


Furthermore the Syndics set up several trade schools in the skilled fields of weaponsmithing, engineering, and tapestry-making. All of these schools were excellent purveyors of age-old techniques, but as time wore on these became highly conservative institutions. While the tapestry-makers extended their field further into other forms of textiles, they have made sure that such ‘base’ industries as cotton-working and linens stayed out of Flandres, and the weaponsmiths of Bruges still teach their men how to make matchlock pistols!


The ‘pushing out’ of large-scale industry in Flandres, which is still the de facto most industrialized republic of France, is but one example of the highly negative effects that guilder and corporate power has had in France. Each of the guilds, regardless of region, has aided and abetted in sabotage of new machinery, has attacked the implementation of new techniques, and has further supported the smugglers. It is clear that they feel threatened by the new world we are increasingly stepping towards, and that they will do whatever they can to stop our progress towards that world.




The Republics are just as, if not more complicit in the reproduction of the institutions of the Ancien Regime. The continuation of the tolls in the Federation d’Auvergne was passed almost entirely through the votes of the family of Tours d’Auvergne, who personally collect the taxes levied at the customs houses. We can see other horrid examples of tolls in the Federation du Rhone’s use of them to surround the city of Lyons.


The Founding Father of this Republic, Monsieur de Boheme, has argued that the establishment of localized governance and localized governance is supportive of democracy. Well I say to hell with democracy! These democratic institutions have held our nation back, for no one can consider past their own limited views and consider the interests of the whole of the people, of the whole of our Republic! In summation, I suggest a return to the institutions of the First Republic, and the foundation of a rationalized and skillful bureaucracy to rule the nation in the name of the nation! (3)


1-Note that Guilds and Corporations refer to the same entities; guild is a French transliteration of the Flemish term Gilde, though the two began to have different connotations shortly before the revolution, as the corporations became more dominated by the radical compaignons while the gildes became more powerful in the Flemish parliament


2-Flandres had a unique governmental system under the Ancien Regime. It possessed a provincial estate which was similar, structurally, to the general estates--it had three estates consisting of the 1st estate (clergy), 2nd estate (aristocrats), and third estate (the ‘bourgeoisie’, which in this period had the specific dual meaning of city-dwellers but also meaning the whole of the population). This parliament would not be unique if it weren’t the only one of its kind until the era of the Grande Republique. Beyond this, there was another branch discussed by Saint Simon, the Syndic’s Council, which was elected by all the recognized guilds of Flandres, which was the largest electorate in the world outside of the English Republic even if it was largely limited (metalworkers, for instance, were not represented until the 1740s). The last branch was composed in the office of the Governor of Flandres, who represented the King’s will. This three branch system was largely illusory during the Ancien Regime, the Estates and Governor voted together almost all of the time.


3-This report led to the demotion of Saint Simon to national representative shortly after its release.