Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

Jape said:

The fig leaf of autonomy seems ready to be blown off! Excellent as always Merrick. I'm looking forward to details on the Olive Oil Bust even if it sound like a Greek Noir Novel. Or even because!

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Hah, I'm hoping that it'll please!

volksmarschall said:

Soldiers, especially grenadiers, are not complete without a muscular mustache, or a giant beard!

Psychological warfare at its best.

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I mean how else do you think Major Armstrong got promoted?

robw963 said:

Impressive mustaches on these guys! I'm imagining all 40,000 of them with handlebar mustaches

It's impressive how diligent you've been with this AAR Merrick Chance'. And just the right blend of graphics with narrative. Really nice work.

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Danka!

Hey guys, sorry that this entry took so long, as you can see it's pretty long but beyond that I'm now in a hella weird schedule (I have one class left in my grad school but it's impossible for me to live in DC, cost of living wise, and furthermore I prefer NYC to DC [and my job choices point towards NYC]), so I've been commuting to DC from Long Island. So expect less frequent, but longer, entries (because the last class is realllllyyyy easy so I have time to focus on this AAR even if I won't have a lot of time to write).

Also I've been playing Dark Souls for three days straight, so there's that.

volksmarschall said:

FMA reference ftw!

You're not sinking into the holes of the incredible world of anime now are you?! Cowboy Bebop is the best (well, that's my opinion anyway)...

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'Sinking' suggests that I haven't been there for a decade, and FMA:B is one of the best animes ever don't even front (my personal list is Ghost in the Shell 2nd Gig, FMA:B, Cowboy Boopboop)

Jape said:

Outside of Akira and Studio Ghibli I'm pretty ignorant on the old anime, any suggestions for a novice?

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Satoshi Kon is always a good place to start, he's done what's perhaps the most socially conscious anime I've ever seen (like Tokyo Godfathers is a feelgood movie starring three homeless people which is not something that I've ever seen before).

Ghost in the Shell standalone complex does the navel gazing stuff really really well, like you have episodes where it's just discussing the social impacts of cyberpunk stuff and I live for that.

Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood is the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist just boiled down to plot elements. It's insanely well crafted (I've seen the series 3 times and it's still pleasurable because all the stuff they set up has a payoff), and has a pretty subtle shift from typical military action anime to having this interestingly anti-state message.

volksmarschall said:

I've been lost in the world of anime for the last 9 years. It's probably not healthy for me, especially since I'm too involved in the humanities and make a career out of reading, writing, and trying to explain things!

What are your thoughts on Avatar the Last Airbender, granted that its technically American and for strict aficionados who only accept Japanese productions may not be worthy of such discussion?

Oh great, now you've got me going on a discussion of anime on a thread that's supposed to be about France!

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It seems good, it was one of those shows where so many friends suggested it to me that I just decided "I'm never gonna watch this show". I need to get on it eventually but working/the commute has made it hard for me to watch anything (because I have BETTER THINGS to waste my time with!).

How did you guys like Saint Simon?

The south of France was long the economic laggard of France. While the north-east of France was long a proto-industrial powerhouse, southern France remained stranded in the Middle Ages. Henri II’s construction policies, which strongly benefited Picardie, Normandy, Paris and Flandres, hardly interacted with southern France, and the tumultuous 30 years from Henri II’s revocation of serfdom to Louis XIII’s reinstatement of it barely touched the facts of life in Occitania, Gascony, Provence and the area of the Rhone. And while the creation of the municipal districts did lead to some development in areas such as Marseille, Lyon, Montpellier and Bordeaux, the average farmer in the south of France could have been born in any time in the last thousand years and lived a roughly similar life. Few roads lined the Midi*, and canal development was sparse outside of the Rhone.




This can easily be seen in population figures in southern France. In Gascony and Occitania, the countryside was so disconnected from the rest of France that the peasantry still used the two-field method of farming, and the introduction of root plants (such as potatoes) which could recultivate fallow soil (a method already in use in Flandres and England) would only come during the reign of Henri III and Louis XIV. Due to this (and the existence of de facto serfdom in Occitania via sharecropping arrangements), the average peasant in southern France only lived for 30 years, and in the peasants surveyed by early physiocrats in the early 18th century, it was found that the cost of taxes (to the parish, king, and their lord) accounted for 90% of the French peasant’s yearly income, a figure we can easily extend back to Louis’ reign. The southern peasant saw little to no means to change their status, and seemed stuck in a mire of constant debt.


This changed, albeit for less than a decade, with the discovery of olive oil in northern France. When the Suez passageway was in its earliest stages, the courts of northern France were wholly ignorant of olive oil’s culinary attributes, and lard was still used as the main cooking oil. But in 1657, a French merchant in Alexandria who had grown to love Arab cuisine traded his silk for a couple hundred bottles of olive oil, which he then brought to northern France. Olive oil soon became a major staple in the aristocrat’s diet, and the Italian practice of washing with olive oil was also adopted by the aristocracy.


As the price of olive oil swiftly grew, northern French merchants discovered that there was not only an olive industry in their own country, but that there were acres upon acres of land that could be used for olive production which were laying fallow.


As the price of olive oil grew, northerners steadily offered loans to farmers on the Mediterranean coast towards the cost of planting new olive trees. The areas around Nice and Montpeliers both became massive centers of the olive trade in a very short span of time, with many of Montpelions giving up the planting of indigo plant dye to plant olive trees.




The olive boom really began during the War of the Rhine. As a part of the Habsburg’s play to intervene in the war, they closed their ports to the French and began directly attacking French shipping. Furthermore, Italian and Spanish pirates began attacking Arab communities on the Levant and in Egypt, who in turn closed their ports to all Christians. This included the Suez Passageway which already figured deeply in French trade. Even the smuggling trade was nearly impossible, as the deeply depreciated French Livre meant nothing to the merchants of Alexandria and Constantinople. With Arab and Italian olives cut off from the French market, and French colonial wares taking far longer to reach France, French capital dove deep into the French olive trade. In the space of a single year, a hundred thousand olive trees were planted on the French Mediterranean, leading to a massive increase in southern French debt to northern France. At the peak of olive prices, merchants from Marseilles sold half of their estate for ten olive trees.




This massive investment in olives came due to the price of olive oil in early 1666, which was five hundred livres per cask of olive oil. Beyond this, even the pits of olives sold for massive amounts, as the form of speculation in further olive trees. But as autumn came, and with half of the olive trees still not producing, the price in olive oil went down dramatically. This reduced price dragged down all prices involving olives, and when trade with the Ottoman Empire resumed, the price in olive oil returned to 1650s levels (twenty livres per barrel), which was the lowest they had ever been accounting for inflation. Southern France was left in a brutal depression and a constant cycle of debt and bankruptcy for the Occitans and Provencals. Nice and Montpellier only dragged themselves out of the massive levels of debt and unemployment brought by the olive boom seventy years later.


The collapse of the southern French economy following the lowering in the cost of prices lled the French court into an immediate state of panic. Colbert made a great number of concessions in order to keep production constant and to avoid the bankruptcy of the French economy. The successes of these efforts can be seen as the point where Colbert became the major mover in the French government, as he was soon given several other stations. Colbert’s dirigiste policy was a marked change from Henri’s more laissez faire approach, and with a King who cared little for economic matters, Colbert was de facto France’s sole economic policymaker.


The Olive Oil Bust had other far reaching effects. The collapse in land prices following the bust allowed for a colossal consolidation of land into the hands of a few aristocratic and merchant lenders, and de facto serfdom further entrenched itself during the 1670s as these lenders used the inability of their peasants to pay their debts to extract further privileges from them. Southern France went from a lagging economy to a colonized one, all in the space of a year.


*A term for Southern France which I just now discovered, after being confused for a long time every time i came across it in my French history texts

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the greatest economic actor in 17th century France besides Henri II. Born the son of common merchants, his family’s fortunes rose when his father entered the services of the Tocqueville’s Postage Company, and from there moved to the Ministry of the Treasury. Jean-Baptiste followed his father’s footsteps in the 1640s, joining the Treasury and later the Ministry of Trade in the early 1650s. Over the course of the Fronde he remained in rebel-occupied Paris, and at the end of the Fronde he negotiated on the side of the Parisian parlement and proved instrumental in the creation of the municipal provinces, although his original documents show a far more wide ranging set of reforms which rested on the idea of a degree of autonomy for the cities, reforms which did not reach the king but remained in Colbert’s head. For this, he was given an estate in Burgundy, the title of Marquis, and the undersecretariat of the newly formed Ministry of Taxes & Trade.


From this position, Colbert was able to deal with the new kind of French economy he had created in his Parisian negotiations. Focusing on several key cities, Colbert worked from the 1650s to the 1680s, sometimes alone, sometimes with the cooperation of other ministers (particularly Vauban), sometimes in conflict with other ministers (particularly Louvois the Elder), in order to increase the production of France in order to compete with her Medici and Habsburg rivals. In some cases this involved the continuation of Henrian policies, such as the Rhone Canal project, but in many cases it involved the repudiation of the Henrian spirit alongside a focus on Henrian letters.




It is ironic, then, that Jean-Baptiste would not have succeeded if it weren’t for Henri II. His father’s position in the treasury only came to him via the passing over of several aristocratic candidates, an event which would not have happened under previous monarchs. Furthermore, the Ecole d’Administration was created only a year before Jean Baptiste came of age, and he was able to rise so swiftly because the narrative of the ‘new man’, the intellectual bureaucrat who had such a strong imaginary presence in Henri’s regime, had already set up the rise of man such as Jean Baptiste.


On the council, Colbert faced the stubborn resistance of the Comte de Louvois, who viewed him as a bourgeois upstart and who opposed Colbert’s economic schemes, preferring more money be spent in the army. Furthermore he faced the resistance of the Duc d’Anjou, the secretary of Taxes & Trade and a friend of Louvois. This meant that Colbert rarely got anything, from taxes to spending, through the council, and after an outburst when he accused Louvois of Frondeurship, d’Anjou asked him not to attend the council meetings and instead assigned him to the Rhone Canal project. During this project Colbert met the already illustrious Vauban, and the two young (relatively, they were in their thirties which made them very young for the Council) reformers soon grew to appreciate each other’s skills. The lack of resources for the two men had for their respective projects (Vauban’s building of a star fort in Bresse and Colbert’s canal project) led to a form of barter between the two, wherein Colbert would petition local cities for funds to the star fortress and get a brigade of engineers for his canal.


The canal project did more than garner connections between him and Vauban, he was also able to see up close the way that the provinces were ruled, the relationship between the provincial rulers and the intendants, and he was able to experience the sheer number of ways one could make money if one were to give up some of their scruples. One of the ways that Colbert was able to fund the canal project on such a tight budget was the creation of an informal set of tolls which would allow traders to ship their wares along government ships. Through this and the use of Vauban’s engineers, Colbert was able to build the Rhone canal far ahead of schedule, and just in time for the beginning of the War of the Rhine.




The War of the Rhine led to both the Duc D’Anjou and Louvois the elder leaving the Council (along with Louis XIII) to lead the French Army. The removal of Colbert’s rivals just as he was called back to the capital allowed Colbert to finally show his mettle to the King, though most of his efforts became embroiled in reinforcing the French army, but as he did that he was able to implement several of Louis’ proposed changes of the army. The creation of a set of regulators (lieutenant colonels) who made sure that each brigade and company were actually the size reported to the government cut down massively on fraud by colonels who artificially expanded their company rosters in order to line their pockets with the crown’s money.


This was hardly enough, though. The cost of both rapidly increasing the army, of transporting nearly 30,000 reinforcements to the frontlines, and of feeding the French army during a bad harvest (in all areas outside of the South, which was now going moving into the beginning of the Olive Oil Bust), swiftly ate into what savings the French state had and by the spring of 1666, the French state was already several hundred thousand livres in debt. By the end of the war, the debt would balloon to four million livres, but this was not the largest event for Colbert.


No, the most important event was the death of both Colbert’s rival and his superior, Louvois and d’Anjou, on the field of battle. These deaths both made Colbert the acting head of the Council, and with Louis’ permission, the right to fill the missing seats on the council with anyone he wished.
Colbert filled the council with men close to him, from Ponticherry for the Navy and the Colonies, to Rouissins for Forestry & Mines, to Vauban for the army. But his first issue was the imminent bankruptcy of France, which he managed to avoid in a flurry of activity which became his only mode of being. Bonds were released at 12% interest, which funded a large portion of the immediate French debt and were paid off within the next year by a new run of bonds at 10% (filled with another group of bonds at 8% and so on). Titles were sold, amneties and tax relief sold, and outside the municipal districts even mayorships were auctioned off. When Colbert reached the last outstanding debt, he paid it off via an old trick used by Finance Ministers through France’s history; he devalued the currency while taking out new loans and then immediately revalued it in order to pay those loans off. Colbert rose inflation to a massive degree in the last four years of the 1660s, but while the Livre was worth a half of what it was in 1650, he still managed to get through the decade without bankruptcy.




The next crisis involved the creation of the province of Perche and the governorships system, and ended with Colbert’s total subsumption of his longer term goals into the service of the state. Colbert had stepped into the Parisian parliament with an idea; that the French government would be simplified, and that its medieval institutions would be eliminated in order to create a more efficient and liberated government. What Colbert ended up seeing, in the south of France and later in his life, was that things were not so easy. The provincial rulers, being picked from the local nobility, were deeply connected to other power structures, and to empower those below them or create power structures above them would provoke rebellion.


And so Colbert, who sought an efficient and simple government above all else, participated in the creation of a new structure of provincial government, the military governorships, who became the acting lords of France in the time of Louis XIII. France, in fact, became even more byzantine, with provincial lords being steadily weakened, both in the council, where their ministries were made smaller and replaced with other ministries which were either more broad [such as Colbert’s ministry which overlapped with the Treasury and the Trade Ministry], or more narrow [the army was actually given four separate ministries for the four branches of the French army--the infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineer groups], and in their provinces, where many of their roles were replaced by Governors (who gained the ability to pay for projects via tolls), who while more powerful and rich than their lordly counterparts represented a lower level of government. Beyond this, the intendants were given slightly more power while not having any connection to localities or provinces.
In time, this would lead to Henri III’s ability to remain a detached though absolute monarch via his manipulation of provincial and governmental authorities. But Colbert had fully realized that this was a temporary fix, that the creation of a new elite would not fix the problems of the old, and that a retrenchment would soon come to the fore.


But in the meantime, he had more authority to do as he wished.



Sorry for lack of response to comments, my internet's been shoddy the last two days.

GulMacet said:

And once again, the peasants suffer while the highlords play their power games. Seems like real history to me!

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Thank you! Yeah I'm trying to show how messed up the history of the Ancien Regime was, like if it wasn't messed up then why would there even be a revolution, ya get me?

blsteen said:

Ah commodities boom and bust. Interesting segment on an area of France that hasn't seen a lot of attention...with Paris being worth a mass and all

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It'll get more attention, I feel like I gave it so much attention with Louis XI that I'm still making up for it. But it's place as France's economic frontier will make it an important place indeed for the 18th century.

Also, question, should I do d'Artagnan's later travels or some diplomatic / war stuff next?

Discussions on the beginnings of the Enlightenment have been dominated by discussions of Newton, Descartes, Spinoza and Rinello. But with the exception of Descartes, each of these thinkers would be nothing if it weren’t for a larger environment of criticism of commonly held beliefs. We can see this in the twenty year gap in scholarship along Cartesian lines, after Descartes’ rather ignominious passing during the Fronde his research agenda fell into disrepair and the more conservative generation that characterized Louis XIII’s early reign paid his thought little mind (excepting the occasional fringe ‘refutation’ of his works). Similarly, Pascal, who had spent the first half of his life writing philosophical texts which blazed the way towards the creation of the idea of the scientific method, found himself censored under the new laws against Jansenism and ended his life as a minor city official in his native city of Rouen.


A similar path could have been charted by Newton, Spinoza, and Rinello. Why didn’t it? What began the move from mere disillusionment with things as they were to an active criticism of the system which supported it? We can see the beginnings of this in the merest, most humble of things: the growth of the travelogue, which was begun by D’Artagnan the younger and which came shortly after the publication of Newton’s first works.


D’Artagnan’s Early Travels in Europa, which was published in the 1660s and detailed his travels to Italy, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands and showing intense disillusionment towards each of these countries. These travelogues proved to be deeply popular, both in France and, oddly enough, in the countries he criticized. In particular, the Dutch, who had always had a bit of a taste for self depreciation, adored d’Artagnan’s writings, and his critiques of Italian and German courtly culture (that they were thoroughly provincial and in their holding on to traditional elements of their cultures, doubled down on their provinciality) proved deeply important for Francophile eAndlements of these courts in the years to come.




And for a year the people of Europe heard not a peep from d’Artagnan. Rumors spread that he had been killed, perhaps by some jilted provincial, perhaps in some heroic duel. And then, on the 3rd of May, 1670, d’Artagnan’s primary publisher in Paris released his newest travelogue, an article which from its first line horrified and enthralled the intellectuals of all of Europe.




D’Artagnan had crossed the Austrian border into the Ottoman Empire in 1668, and fearing the potential dangers he would face as a Catholic in a country that had recently closed its ports to Christians, he sent five articles with instructions to publish them once a month. What he found in Turkey, however, wholly shocked him. While he saw a degree of prejudice in the Courts of the Turkish Balkans, this wasn’t worse than what he’d experienced in Italy or Austria. But as he came closer to Thrace, he found that he was met with more and more interest, and when he reached Istanbul, he found both that his Greek was highly useful and that he was a highly sought after person in the capital. D’Artagnan’s first article from the Ottoman Empire was actually written from Tokapi palace (1) after having had a conversation with the Turkish Emperor.




Now, Suleiman IV was one of the first Enlightened monarchs, a man who had reformed the Ottoman Empire’s institutions in order to solidify and simplify his administration of the provinces. His reign began with his support for Greek and Ancient Greek culture; he had long been an avid reader of the Ancients and he decorated the palace with Greek statues, quoted Socrates and Aristotle in court, and set up a printing press to publish the Ancient Greeks translated into Arabic. He had also come to accept the Riafi variant of the Hanafi religious school which believed that the will of Islamic law could only be expressed through the strengthening of the ‘advising board’ into a Court of the Ulema. Furthermore Suleiman went a step further with the creation of the Islamic Assembly, a parliamentary organization which consisted of Islamic scholars from each of the Ottoman provinces, who brought information from their jurisdiction and passed laws proposed by the Emperor and his advisers.


This body was in its newest phases, and Suleiman was looking elsewhere to finds precedents for means to organize this body, which, like the French municipal provinces, was mostly comprised of marginal groups (Egyptians, Arabs, and Maghrebis together outnumbered the Turkish parliamentarians). And the sudden appearance of a well traveled French noble in Istanbul was a godsend to Suleiman and his court, and so D’Artagnan was summoned to the palace.


The conversation between D’Artagnan and the Emperor was both disappointing and enlightening. D’Artagnan, being a rural aristocrat who was born far from Bordeaux, knew very little about the intricacies of French provincial rule or parliamentarianism, but he knew a great deal about the rest of Europe and was a clever man. He soon became a common fixture in Topaki Palace, and he wrote several articles on Istanbul alone. Articles on the Emperor’s view of Christian pirates, the Orthodox community of Istanbul, the merchants and courtly politics of the Ottoman Empire were all published, and when d’Artagnan discovered that an envoy from the Kingdom of Min was to come to Kuwait, he made the trip across the Bosphorus, and began what would become a four year long travel across the Islamic world.




His trip across the Bosphorus brought him to Uskudar, an area that is now a suburb of Istanbul but was a separate city which housed the Islamic Assembly in the 1600s. D’Artagnan’s comments on the trip, and on the current disputes in the Assembly (on the correct level of interest rates), did much to stir up parliamentarianism in a Europe who associated parliaments with failure and collapse (note that he published this a mere five years after the collapse of the Republic of England). His matter of fact tone as he described the crossing bears repeating: “To cross the Bosphorus is to cross from the Emperor’s city to the city of Parliament. And while this was created to give parliamentarians the embarrassing necessity to leave their city if they are to speak to the Emperor, some day soon we may see the Emperor crossing to speak with the parliamentarians.” This meeting with parliamentarians also began d’Artagnan’s love affair with the Maghrebis, who tended towards a more classical form of education, with some even attending parliament dressed in togas. Aliki, who was one such man, became d’Artagnan’s traveling companion and in the years ahead would become a major publisher in Istanbul.


D’Artagnan’s travels across Mesopotamia and Turkey also fueled a massive series of articles, which were now published once every two weeks in Paris and were eaten up by an increasingly diverse European readership. The peak of the trip, D’Artagnan’s meeting with the Minese, was a key event in European cultural history. Despite Europe’s expansive colonies in China, there had been very little in the way of direct cultural contact with the Chinese, and d’Artagnan’s conversation with them (which he sent as a second article which had four separate publications) included questions on the Chinese view of religion, Chinese education, and the nature of their relationship with the French government. As was usual, d’Artagnan’s accepting but critical nature makes these conversations interesting to this day, and his articles on the Min spurred a new interest in East Asian culture.




From Kuwait D’Artagnan traveled to Egypt and across northern Africa, writing articles on the University of Cairo, the creation of new basic schools in Tripoli, the expansion of the Tunisian harbor and the mercantile adventures of the Algerians. He then published a book, ‘My Travels in Egypt’, which did very well, appearing in every gentleman’s library from Scotland to Savoy for much of the 18th century. The book began with him in Luxor, noting that Egypt was the first great civilization, having lasted for over four thousand years, included a performance of a Socratic dialogue in the University of Cairo, and ended with his travel to Jerusalem and his visit to Galilee. While over-sentimental, the book did much to display d’Artagnan’s love of the region, and made him quite the pretty penny. With this, he traveled back to his native France, expecting a warm welcome.


Instead he was arrested upon his arrival in Marseilles for heresy and was immediately brought to the Bastille. Such began the Egypt Controversy.






1-The Ottoman Imperial palace.

What's up, guys? How've the last two entries been?

GulMacet said:

Quite interesting. I especially like how even in the 1600s, Islamic and Chinese/Confucian civilization was still more tolerant and enlightened than the Christian one (to speak of European/Western civilization seems wrong, since they have not secularized yet). Of course, given my background, you could make the entire AAR about China and I wouldn't care!

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Danka! That may be in the works (aka in years, given that I have Lof2 and another AAR idea in between this one and that one). And interestingly enough, the Egypt Controversy is actually a part of the path towards a more tolerant France!

The Egypt Controversy is often painted as the great turn of Louis XIII’s reign into despotism and religious zealotry, with many accepting Tocqueville’s proposition that as Louis grew older, his mind snapped, and his previously laissez faire method of ruling was tossed aside in favor of a series of religious scandals (including his repeated attempts to bring down the Jansenists).


What is ironic about this was that the Egypt Controversy, as well many of Louis XIII’s other acts in the 1670s, were a product of a more tolerant France. Laws limiting Huguenot activities, were rescinded, France fought several proxy wars on behalf of German and Swiss protestants, border tolls between Ghent and Bruges were lifted, and Louis even allowed the opening of several Huguenot churches in Paris itself. So how could France seemingly be moving in a more and less tolerant direction, simultaneously?




In the early 1660s, one of Louis’ diplomats encountered a young officer of the Dutch army while in Hessen. This officer revealed himself to be the last descendant of the line of Conde, a branch of the Bourbon dynasty. This man, Louis Francois, believed that he could potentially be elected King at the death of the sonless Jean IV Valois. This possibility, of linking together the Catholic and Huguenot Frenchmen, greatly intrigued Louis, and we can view the last two decades of his life towards the achievement of this goal. Over the 1670s and 1680s, the Netherlands and Lorraine were put under a constant diplomatic siege, with French diplomats buying off, cajoling, and threatening members of the opposition with the goal of making them pro-French. The greatest achievement of these diplomats was the defection of Charles of Lorraine, the prince of Lorraine, to the French army, which assured Louis of a reunification with the death of Germaine de Lorraine.


How does this connect to the Egypt Controversy? D’Artagnan’s claims, especially his claim that Egypt had existed longer than the Bible suggested the world existed, had stirred up a huge controversy amongst both the Catholic and Huguenot clergy. All of the religious tendencies which had come out of France, from French Catholicism to Dutch Calvinism to the Banniards* all involved a deep reading of the Bible as the core of their theology. Thus an attack on the Bible was an attack on all French theology. Accusations that d’Artagnan was a converted Muslim, or worst, and atheist, were lobbed at him from such conservative publications as Le Quotidien Brabant, Le Metz Observateur, and Le Gazette. Due to this, Louis saw the opportunity to stand in the defence of Catholics and Huguenots alike, and combined with his already extant personal dislike of d’Artagnan, led to the trial which would become the greatest symbol of authoritarian largesse in the 17th century.




The trial was odd for multiple reasons. On the first hand, it was a two part trial: Louis argued that since d’Artagnan had offended both the Catholic and Huguenot communities, that he should be tried in both the Catholic and Huguenot courts. Furthermore, he was to have two lawyers, one a Catholic and the other a Huguenot. The trial was to decide whether he had indeed converted to Islam or if he had become an Atheist, and occurred over the summer of 1675.


The trial itself was a farce, a point which d’Artagnan continually made in the eight weekly articles he published on his tribulations, articles which were eaten up by the French subversive press (as well as the English, who were on increasingly bad terms with their erstwhile allies). In the end, d’Artagnan’s lawyers managed to avoid both of his death sentences, and while he managed to get a ‘not guilty’ declaration from the Huguenot court, the Catholic court ruled that he should be exiled from France with the ability for a retrial in twenty years.


And so, through the 1670s, 80s, and 90s, d’Artagnan returned to his previous lifestyle of constant travel, still publishing articles (though they only came to France through underground presses; due to this, d’Artagnan’s ‘Travels in Protestant Europe’ and ‘Teaching French in Tunis’ were unavailable in French-speaking markets until the 1720s). Through much of the 1680s he lived in London, where two of the greatest theological minds in Europe, Pierre Bayle and Richard Simon, who together worked on d’Artagnan’s claims regarding Egypt. Many of d’Artagnan’s observations ended up in Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, including his discussion of Eastern philosophy included in full.


Furthermore, “Travels in Egypt”, which was popularized in Eastern Europe during the Trial, led to a series of expeditions to Egypt, also to prove d’Artagnan’s claims. These expeditions, and the intellectual work in England, Saxony, and Prussia supporting them, led to the beginnings of the field of archeology. Soon after Bayle finished his Dictionary, d’Artagnan moved to Tunis, where he taught French and classical philosophy for the next fifteen years.






D’Artagnan’s life has often been reduced to his interactions with Louis XIII and Henri III. His trial became the touchstone for a judicial reform movement in the 18th century, which combined the religious court systems into a single secular court system and banned such tyrannies as ‘double jeopardy’, that is being tried twice for the same crime. Furthermore he did much to support the growing Enlightenment in France and England. But he did far more than that. In fact, perhaps the most important role he played was his role in the growth of the Maghrebi Enlightenment, a resurrection of classical ideas and an engagement with contemporary ideas which spiraled out of Tunis into the whole of North Africa over the 18th century.


While not the greatest thinker, or the greatest writer, d’Artagnan was one of the most influential men of the 17th century. But his journey is not yet over.




*Banno was an arpitan Reformist who’s sect stretched across Provence, Savoy, and western Switzerland

GulMacet said:

History repeats itself - Islam is becoming less of a dogmatic religion and more of a secularized ideology, while Christendom tears itself down in dogmatic squabbles. It's like the 8th Century all over again!

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Well on the one hand, this is occurring specifically in France which is going through a weird combination of Louis XIV's senility-inspired zealotry and the desire to recombine Protestantism and Catholicism that occurred in the 17th century. The current intolerance towards new ideas is not going to outlast Louis XIII, though that's the place for Lords of France 2 to describe.

Next entry is going to be about the French-English relationship, from the Stuart Restoration to the rise of a distinctly anti-French House in the 1670s and 80s.

The Republic of England turned to France out of desperation--they had a common enemy, the Habsburgs, and they were both outsider states who relied heavily on their colonial income. But this turn of desperation led to an alliance that lasted through two successive governments. This was partially led by the concrete ties between the burgeoning French and English bourgeoisie (who were well represented in the French municipal parliaments and in even the absolutist courts of the Stuarts), and partially due to Louisan meddling in English politics. Over twenty years, French diplomats, intellectuals, and spies maintained a constant link between England and France, a link which only fell apart shortly before the death of Charles II.




The main thing which kept England and France together was their similar interests regarding the colonies. Quebec and America, while being massively rich colonies, were also both desperate for many necessary goods which were only provided to them from the homeland due to the Navigation Acts. A good example of this was warm clothes in America and light clothes in Quebec--since Quebec had hardly any land suitable for either cotton production or sheep herding, and so for lighter materials the Quebecois had to make to with the very scarce linen that was produced in Nouvelle Ecosse. Meanwhile, while Americans had a large quantity of cotton and produced a large amount of linen, they had to make do with the very scarce wool produced in the barely populated lands of Pennsylvania, with fur clothing being very expensive (as much as two pounds, or a month’s pay, for a full set of fur clothing*). However, a great many New World necessities (such as French sugar, English squash, or the increasing supply of slaves from the new French West Africa Company) were relatively rare in one colony while being plentiful in the other. So for ten years, both colonies were linked by a great deal of trade and the rescinding of the French/English navigation acts on French and English goods, respectively.


Direct trade between England and France also flourished, with Bruges regaining its former glory as the Venice of the north as it exported a massive amount of silk to England, while a whole industry of cannon manufactories popped up around northern France depending almost wholly on Welsh iron. French wine found major markets from London to Edinburgh, and English and French agricultures moved across the English channel, bringing money into Normandy, Brittany, Cornwall and Hampshire.






This is not to say that the relationship was equitable, or that trade was the main link between England and France. Rather, it is safer to say that France ruled England via the Stuarts. The Stuart court was made up primarily of French courtiers, many of whom had been the same agents who had gotten Philip I into power. And we cannot overlook the most obvious fact, that Philip I was a Catholic ruling over an overwhelmingly Protestant country. This led to a great degree of tension, and Philip had to recourse to force no less than seven times over his twenty year reign, and each time the soldiers were either led by Frenchman or by the Francophile Catholics who did so well during Philip’s reign. This got to the point that one ‘enemy of the Crown, of God and of England’ was executed per day during several months in 1674, including Mary of Scotland, John Milton, and Francis Bacon. Many other thinkers, including John Locke, were exiled by Philip.


This, understandably, led to a great deal of unrest in England’s lower quarters, and especially in the towns where the English bourgeoisie made their living. While many traders were breathtaken at first at their ability to trade in France and the French colonies, this sense of unity soon broke into a desperate sense of competition, with English traders enraged at the pro-French policies of their king and at the ability of French merchants to seemingly outdo them at every turn.


As time went on and Philip grew increasingly senile, these concerns started to come out more and more. The Philippine tactic of denouncing all critics as potential Republicans was starting to wear thin with the rise of a new generation who had barely experienced Cromwell’s rule, and Philip’s overwhelmingly French and Catholic court enraged the Protestant traders who comprised the majority of England’s tax base. As the 1670s shifted into the 1680s, English diplomats started putting out feelers to find someone worthy of the Crown of England. They found this man in, of all places, Saxony.




Frederick Augustus I is renowned as the founder of ‘modern’ Saxony, having set up the bicameral legislature which would remain with few changes in Saxony until the 19th century, which would later be adopted by the Americans. A Reformist Christian with a great deal of martial and diplomatic skill and a laissez faire tendency had a great appeal to the denizens of Philip’s absolutist kingdom.


What became known as ‘The Glorious Revolution’ occurred in 1678. With the death of Philip, the Regent (Francis Hobbes, the son of Chancellor Thomas Hobbes) attempted to assert power on behalf of Philip II. Immediately afterwards, the merchants of London, with the backing of the Navy, the northern aristocrats and portions of the Army, announced that they had established themselves as the Parliament of England, and that they had decided that Frederick Augustus I would be the proper King.


The revolution occurred quickly, with many of the French court members being imprisoned, and soldier’s revolts putting a quick end to the possibility of civil war. With that, Francis Hobbes and the young Philip II were exiled to France, and a new reign began in England.


The Glorious Revolution was one of the most important events in English history. It began England’s shift from an outlier on the continent who had very little influence in European matters to one of the great powers of the world, and from a relative backwater with little in the way of cultural interaction to an engaged member of the European community. Most importantly from the perspective of France, the Glorious Revolution turned England from a minor Francophile country to what would become her greatest rival, on the continent and the colonies.


*Yeah I went out of my way to not say fur suit, so sue me

Note: We only have one topic to go over before LoF1 is finished. It is a large topic, however, but just wanted you guys to know!