L’Empire chapter 3: Paris under Vigny
In the last two chapters I have discussed the intellectual trends which dominated Paris in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Mainz. I have also discussed the growth of the Univerites in Paris and the interaction between Europe and Ming China which will come to a head in the 1640s. But now I will return to the ‘present day’ of Paris in 1612, because the ideas of the Enlightenment had a strong countervailing force in the regency period. I am talking, of course, of the Comte de Vigny, who became regent on Louis XII’s deathbed by force of arms.
The Comte de Vigny, who was the Recruitmaster of Louis XII’s later reign, attained critical significance in the 1610s through his control of the Gardes du Paris. Note that he was usually depicted with Louis XII-style wig.
You will recall that during the Religious Wars in France, the provincial garrisons were centralized under the Crown’s authority, and that in order to protect the capitol, a small army was formed—the Gardes du Paris. However, with the King’s failing health, this power was soon delegated to the Duc de Tilly, who used his power to attack Hugenots and cut down on dissent by Germanophonic Frenchmen in Paris and throughout the Kingdom. These acts earned Vigny the title of tyrant, but it soon became clear that Tilly had actually underestimated the kind of power that the Milice Declaration could bestow to the Recruiting Master.
Joachim de Vigny was a career officer. He was the youngest son of the tyrannical Duc de Mobil, who had built himself an empire within central France by marriage, blood ties, and his position as governor. By the birth of Joachim, Mobil had inherited nearly all of the land in his province, and Vigny found himself critically neglected in a family which must have numbered in the 100s. Raised by his nannies, de Vigny grew into a pretentious, thin skinned man with an inflated sense of importance and a deflated confidence. In 1580, with the destruction of the Armee de Bourbon on the Alps, Joachim moved to Orleans and studied in the French Army Academy, where he was a mediocre student. Indeed, his hardline views and his suspicious nature led to his assignment to recruitmaster in the province of Bruges, an out of the way title for someone as well-born as Vigny. On the way to Bruges, the young Joachim expressed a fear that he was destined to nothingness. This fear melted away once he realized that he would be serving under the Duc de Tilly.
The Inquisition made a comeback under Vigny, and for two decades they persecuted Huguenots and, later, free-thinking philosophers
Vigny was instrumental to the oppressive policies created by Tilly, going so far as to revive the Cosmopolitaine Inquisition to deal with the ‘Huguenot threat’. His zeal and his willingness to skirt the fringes of French law gained him much respect among the Catholic hard-liners, and in 1594 Vigny became the government’s unofficial ambassador to the Catholiques faction and the leader of the Parisian militia after the assassination attempt on Louis XII. Through his control of the Parisian militia, Vigny was able to eliminate several rivals, including the Duc Vaintesse, the government’s chief judge. In 1612, Vigny was able to use his connections in both the government and the Catholiques faction to become the Regent of the Prince Henri, and through the first half of the regency period, he maintained an iron grip on Paris.
Vigny is remembered in French history as a Catholic zealot for his oppression of the Huguenots and the Philosophes faction. But recent scholarship on Vigny’s attack on the monasteries gives a different image—Vigny was a died-in-the-wool autocrat the likes of which France had not seen since Charles VII was killed by a cobblestone. Many of Vigny’s policies throughout the regency period make far more sense when one realizes that his only goal was accruing more power to the French state. I will give a series of examples of the policies Vigny enacted in the early regency period, which is generally defined as being from 1612-1616.
The Deportation of the Huguenots
The War of Hispaniola, and the subsequent colonization of the southern Brazilian coast, left France with a huge amount of new territory in the previously unadministered areas of the Caribbean and South America. This led to a conflict between the French and Quebecois governments. During the 40 Years War, Louis XII had devolved a certain level of governance to the Bishop of Quebec, a position now filled by the fire-throated master of realpolitick (the man later known as the ‘Father of Canada’), Bishop de Richelieu. Richelieu argued that, as Quebecois soldiers had liberated Hispaniola and were now serving in the garrisons of Antartique Sud*, that the Quebecois government (meaning the Jesuits) had the right to govern France’s new territories in the New World.
The Bishop Richelieu’s achievements included building a religious-bureaucratic state in Quebec (that would become the foundation for the later Canadian government) and integrating the last of the Indian tribes under Jesuit rule[
Vigny would have none of this. Haiti (as the French viceroyality in the Caribbean was called) was already one of France’s richest colonies, while Quebec’s self-governance had led to a weakening of commerce and lowered tariffs. Furthermore, even in the early 17
th century there was a separatist movement within the Quebecois Jesuits, who wanted to complete their Catholic-Utopian project by completely severing ties with the Old World. Vigny knew that giving Richelieu control over the entirety of the new world colonies would mean the slow easing of the grip the French government had over her territories. However, the Quebecois Jesuits were already de facto administrating France’s South American colonies, which left the question of how to break the Jesuit rule.
The deportation of the Huguenots to the Bahamas and Turks Islands
Vigny found the answer in the still sizable Huguenot population in Alsace-Lorraine. This newly conquered region was still mostly administered and ruled by Protestants, and was one of the few places in France where Huguenots were a majority of the populace. Vigny descended on the region, banishing Huguenots from the government offices while announcing that any and all discriminatory policies against Huguenots were to be rescinded in Haiti and Antartique Sud. This led to a massive outflow of Protestants and the swift expansion of France’s South American colonies. In the space of a decade, Haiti’s population had doubled and Antartique Sud (now renamed Bresil) had expanded to include the whole south-Brazilian coast. Most importantly, the new Huguenot migrants were far more dependent on the French government than the Jesuits were, and the Huguenot colonies remained faithful to the Kingdom of France well into the 18
th century.
The Bresil and Haiti colonies, 1650
The Monastic Acts
Under Louis XI, the rapid expansion of the monasteries was accompanied by a degree of decentralization of power—the monasteries were allowed to keep their own legal systems and courts. Clerical peasants and traveling merchants alike often found themselves under prosecution for breaking obscure religious laws or for offering loans. The control that the monasteries had over the legal system made commerce slow and difficult—especially in the south, where monasteries still dominated the landscape.
Vigny responded to this problem by crafting a series of acts aimed at weakening the legal power of the monasteries and the clergy. The first, the Merchants & Usury Act of 1614, put merchants directly under the Royal Courts system, and forbade Provincial or Clerical courts from trying usury cases. The fact that such an expansion of Royal Court responsibilities was even conceivable is evidence of Vigny’s other legacy—the expansion of a centralized court system out of the Ile de France area and into the wider French countryside. Furthermore the fact that commerce and usury were such major issues in localities far from the French mercantile core tells us a lot about the development of commerce in the Kingdom of France (a subject I will touch on in a later entry).
The Marseilles Royal Courthouse was rebuilt in 1670, but records show that there was a royal courthouse in Marseilles as early as 1617. Vigny spent much of his time doing away with the old customary law traditions and replacing them with a central legal apparatus. It was only due to these efforts that the liberal edicts of Henri II had any effect
The next major clerical legislation is the Peasantry Act of 1613, which (among other things) delegated prosecution of the peasantry to the Provincial Courts. This delegation cut down on prosecution in the provinces—the Bordeux Court had 152 cases in the year of 1615, a rise of more than a hundred from the last year, but when one considers that the Luxey Monastery, which was only a couple of kilometers from Bordeaux, had over 200 cases the year before (mostly dealing with infidelity and religious issues), we can safely say that the Peasantry Act cut down on prosecution and allowed the average subject of France to live with more peace of mind.
The last act, the Clergy Act of 1614, ended the Clerical Courts system and replaced it with a set of civic rights for the clergy, including state pensions and protections. When prosecuted, clergy were tried in the Royal Courts via a special method (and often received laxer punishments), but were not tried in a separate court system. This dissolution of the clerical courts, which hasn’t been focused on until the recent past, was highly controversial when it was passed. The Pope himself objected to the Clergy Act, and it was only after several years of increased tribute (and French patronage of the burgeoning religious arts industry in Avignon) that relations were normalized again.
The Clergy Acts
The Hiring of Joachim de Saint Chaumond
Knowing both Vigny’s and Saint Chaumond’s backgrounds, why did Vigny hire Saint Chaumond as the tutor of Prince Henri in 1616? Considering de Saint-Chaumond’s place as a minor Jesuit celebrity in the 1610s and his relatively well known academic record (not exactly ‘liberal’, which wasn’t an existent ideology in the 17
th century, but his writings, which supported freedom of speech and spoke positively of the heathen Ming Empire) would both seem to turn off Vigny, who had spent his recent career putting down the Jesuits.
However, most of the ‘rivalry’ between Saint Chaumond and Vigny was constructed in the 19
th and 20
th centuries and had more to do with their images seen centuries later. It would seem odd to a 19
th century historian that Saint Chaumond, the father of the Enlightenment, would get along with and support the actions of the tyrannical Vigny. But Saint Chaumond and Vigny got along famously well in the early regency period—they agreed on the necessity of expanding the state (which was helped by Saint Chaumond’s knowledge of the more expansive state in China), and Saint Chaumond’s position as a free thinking philosopher and a successful missionary made him a great asset to Vigny, who was aware of his poor relations with the academics and clergy**. In fact, the middle regency was characterized by a large amount of cooperation between Vigny and Saint Chaumond, who was given a Counsel seat in 1617, towards comprehensive reforms of the French clergy and state.
*The admittedly confusing name of the French colony in Brazil
**The Magna Mundi 'faction' for the academia is the 'Intellectuals Faction', which is anachronistically named--the term 'intellectual' emerged from the Dreyfus Affair. I'll call them the Philosophes faction (what they called themselves in the late 17th/early 18th century if and when they become a major factor in court politics.
