Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

franckfuck said:

Ah, the good years.. But beware! i once almost got kidnaped by an old Beninese couple; don't accept food from these people.

Thank you again for the top notch story you've given us! And now that you have more time to think between chapters, wouldn't you want to reconsider your refusal to project a Montaigne-rooted enlightenment? But don't let anything bad happen to your brain.

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It's not a refusal--France's intellectual history will develop in interesting ways and Saint Chaumond's return to Parisian politics is going to be a blast, however I felt that

A)Vigny wasn't going to let a more tolerant, innovative society emerge without a fight
B)Simply transitioning directly from Vigny's dictatorship to an Enlightenment is unrealistic and the sort of 'without a hitch' writing that I did with Lords of Prussia, which leads to an unrealistically modern country and leads you to a place that you can't really continue writing from (I ended my last AAR with a nearly 19th century Prussia fighting an even more overtly religious version of the 30 Years War, a version which I would say was even more brutal and sectarian than LoF's 40 Years War--simply not realistic, immersive, or historical). Lords of France was really written as a reaction to the mistakes I made with Lords of Prussia--an understandably common mistake for people writing their first AAR's considering that most histories are written in a highly linear fashion, so I didn't want to make that mistake again.

And Jape, I don't know how systemic the training is for the charity you're working with, but I found that opening with an icebreaker like "Are you having a nice day" or something more specific, and then saying "Just really quick my names ____ and I'm here today with ____" gets a lot fewer doors slammed in your face because you're starting the conversation off by getting them to relate to you as a person and quickly saying why you're there (as someone who's doing pretty well with this job and as someone who's petitioned before). (I don't even know if I'm supposed to say that or if I'm giving away trade secrets or something)

and thank you guys so much for the responses!

At the dawn of 1620, Vigny seemed completely victorious. He had defeated the Montaignards, he had exiled his greatest potential rival from Paris, and (starting in the summer of 1619) his glory had achieved its peak, as he built the Palace du Vigny four kilometers from Paris. The Palace was a colossal monument to Vigny’s ego—it was the largest palace in Europe before the expansion of Versailles. It was also a tremendously expensive affair created with state funds—Vigny’s records show that it cost 20 million livres, of which 15 million came directly from state coffers (mostly the tribute extracted from the Rhineland). But Vigny’s newfound power was built on sand. He still had no control over the Prince, and the widespread acceptance of his absolute ministerial power came from the fear of the reopening of old conflicts, a fear that was disappearing as the War of Religion faded from public memory. New social trends were weakening public support for Vigny, and a series of conflicts during 1620 led to the collapse of Vigny’s reign and the beginning of a new era in French History.


The first crisis was the unfolding conflict between Vigny’s Inquisition and the new monastic orders which were cropping up around Paris. Far into the 18^th century, joining a monastic order was seen by young Frenchmen and women as a way to escape the confining system of French familial relations. But the way that these monastic orders behaved over time changed greatly over time—many monks in the 1610s for instance moved to active participation in the renewed Inquisition. But at the start of the 1620s, a new set of social norms led to a whole new crop of friars and monks, especially at the lowest levels.

This new generation of clergymen was exemplified by Saint Vincent de Paul, who set up a group of charities aimed at helping the Parisian homeless and poor. These charities helped anyone in need, regardless of class, religion, or philosophical bent. This quickly led to a conflict with Vigny’s Parisian Inquisition.


The Case of Clichy involved Vincent’s work in the Clichy Parish. Vincent believed that the best way to convert the remaining 10,000 Parisian Huguenots (who were mostly in the fauxbourg of Clichy) was to conduct charitable acts, preach in a language understandable to them, and to reform the French Church to make it less corrupt.

This ran directly against Inquisitorial policy, ie that the Huguenots could be converted by force alone, that engaging with Huguenot concerns was heresy, and that to reform the French church would be to capitulate to a barely human foe. This conflict was kept under the surface through the 1610s, but in the wake of the Artois Affair, Vigny felt that he could make his move to defeat what he saw as yet another dissenter. He was supported in this decision by the Jesuits and by the Roman Church, who worried that a reformed French Church would lead to an even greater divergence between French and Roman Catholicism.

In the February of 1620 Vigny had Vincent de Paul arrested and sent him to the Bastille, and later to the Papal States, on charges of heresy and of inciting a revolution against the French state. While this act was popular in the upper ranks of the Gallic Church and with the Roman priests, it was massively unpopular with the younger clergymen (which was key because the younger clergymen were the ones who actually gave sermons), and especially unpopular in the Parisian parliament.


The Parisian Parliament was, by 1620, devoted almost entirely to local affairs, and while it presented a threat to Louis XII’s absolutism, he ignored it and other local parliaments because they were mostly quiet through his reign. This is because while Louis XII was a great reformer in national issues, the French locality remained almost completely unreformed through the 16^th century, and Parisian politics were still mainly corporatist and medieval in character. The Parliaments’ politics were dominated by squabbling over taxes and the allocation of taxes, uniting only when they felt their interests were threatened. Immediately after Vincent’s arrest, the parliament called for his release—they saw this as a surrender of religious sovereignty by Vigny.

This clash lasted until late March, when Vigny gave the order that Vincent de Paul should be exiled to Savoy rather than sent to the Papacy for trial. This ended this scandal, but completely soured the relationship between Vigny and the Parliament. The news that Vincent was tortured while in the Bastille turned the clergy against Vigny even further, setting the stage for a series of desperate moves by the former regent.

Sorry for the long wait, my job was killing me (long hours, little pay), but I ended up quitting due to a better offer for a salaried position with less hours (which would let me get back to my studies, my girlfriend, and of course, Lords of France. And I'm sorry that this entry is cut in half, but I wanted to get this out as quickly as possible and the next 'half' should be very very long because I'm going to be explaining the complicated situation of Parisian politics and introducing a character who will become increasingly important as time goes by. Also! I contributed to the AARlander last month, a short 'statement of purpose' explaining why I'm writing Lords of France. I'd love for you guys to read it! And I'm so happy that this AAR is getting such a wide readership now!

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Lets put it this way-there will eventually be a major divergence but I'm going put it in a plac e where I won't have to deal withthe consequences

While Vigny was engaged with an ever escalating battle with the clergy, another conflict was swiftly emerging on the Seine Valley. Although France was one of the most developed economies in the world at the time, the Parisian economic system was still one based entirely around agriculture--grain would be made in the Seine valley, which would then be traded in Paris for money. This money would then be taken back in the form of taxes.


This economic cycle precluded any extensive growth, and meant that even as Antwerp was developing into a financial center and London was building a fledging shipbuilding industry, Paris remained the governmental center and university town it had been since the Capets. This dominance of agriculture warped the rest of Paris’ socio-economic structures: what small manufacturing base there was in Paris was dominated by a luxury goods market, and the hope of every socially mobile merchant* was to become a nobleman.




It also meant that Paris’ whole economy was just as controlled by the weather as it was in the times of antiquity. Bad harvests would lead to massive deaths, and Paris only avoided major riots through the 16th century out of the force of will and good governance of Louis XII. Because the French peasant was used to God’s punishment--to one or two famines a decade, perhaps a drought etc. What turned a famine into a general rebellion was when famine was combined with high taxes, governmental cruelty, and the perceived haughtiness of the ruler. All of these factors would come together multiple times through the 16th and 17th centuries, but the first major revolt happened in 1620.


The event would have different names through the centuries: the modern term, “Le Journée des Barricades”, was invented by Jacob de Bomische and reused by Marx and the Communards. The modern conception of the event, as a spontaneous revolt by the poor which the ruling class had to react to, would be completely unfamiliar to contemporaneous Frenchmen. The term that Ancien Regime historians used was “Le Bataille des Régents”, and the Ancien Regime histiography focused on the conflict between the two men who declared themselves regents and their princes--Saint Chaumond and Henri Bourbon engaged in a war of wits against Vigny and the prince he announced in the summer of 1620, namely Gaston d’Orleans.



Gaston D’Orleans was the eldest surviving nephew of Louis XII. This fact alone meant that, technically, Gaston was the heir to the throne. However, Gaston’s father (also named Henri) had been the leader of the Huguenot line of the Bourbon family, and owing to this the Orleans line had been excommunicated and disavowed from inheriting the throne (even after Henri d’Orleans reconverted after the Treaty of Mainz--this ostracization led to Henri d’Orleans suicide in 1613). This was pleasing for Vigny in 1612, when Henri Bourbon had seemed controllable and Protestantism was a horrifying force. But 8 years later, Henri was clearly directly under the thumb of the liberal Saint Chaumond, and was nearly at the age of majority, after which, Vigny feared, his legacy would be destroyed by a King who “had no interest in enforcing what was right, who was instead concerned with philosophy, the arts, and the imagination”. Things became worse during the Case of Clichy. The turning point of that crisis was a letter, sent by Saint Chaumond, telling Vigny that if he continued on his path, Saint Chaumond would rescind Vigny’s authority on behalf of the prince Henri.


This move by Saint Chaumond was a clear show of force, telling Vigny who actually had power in their relationship, and it set Vigny on a clock--Henri clearly preferred Saint Chaumond and Henri would be king in only two years. Saint Chaumond hoped beyond all hope that this move would end his old friend’s tyrannical and paranoid behaviors. Instead it set Vigny looking for a way out of his situation. In March, Saint Chaumond saw his friend’s response--Vigny had invited Gaston d’Orleans to Paris and arranged for the Bishop of Paris to remove the excommunication on Gaston. The stage was set--France could not have two princes.




While Gaston and Henri were both, without a doubt, geniuses, their genius had manifested in very different ways. Henri had spent his whole conscious life under the tutelage of Saint Chaumond, and had been taught in the liberal arts. He could play the flute masterfully, knew Latin, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, and at the age of ten worked with Saint Chaumond to write a book on Roman history. Fabula historiae Romanae, or The Myth of a Roman history, argued that the history of Rome was constantly being changed depending on what period and perspective the historian writing it had. Drawing on readings of Plutarch, Cicero, Livy, and Tacitus, the work was ahead of its time, and while much of the work was doubtlessly done by Saint Chaumond, parts of the book bely a flowery writing style which Henri retained through his whole life.




Gaston, on the other hand, was a soldier through and through even as a child. Through his influence and his intelligence (which was earthier, if just as keen, as Henri’s), Gaston was able to enter the French military academy at the age of 10, which was five years early. Even as young as he was, Gaston was one of the best horsemen and fencers in his class, and understood wars of maneuver better than any mind of his time. Gaston’s rapid ascent to the top of his class, and his Huguenot birth, led to many conflicts between Gaston and his older classmates. These conflicts ended after Gaston challenged and killed one of his classmates in a duel (an event which was not uncommon in the Military Academy during the 17th century). The young Comte d’Orleans who rode to Paris on his thoroughbred was a deeply troubled, highly inspiring figure with a desperate need for a new father figure to replace his embarrassing own. From Vigny’s perspective, Gaston was a perfect prince--with more potential to be loved and feared than the distant and intellectual Henri but also more potential to remain loyal to Vigny.


As spring turned to summer, it became obvious that the bad harvest of the previous fall would be repeated. A sharp drought through March and April had killed off much of the crop, and the granaries had been exhausted by the famine of 1619. But neither Vigny nor Saint Chaumond paid much attention to this--as land owners they weren’t affected by the change in bread prices, and either way they had larger concerns to attend to. Over the month of March, Vigny built influence with Gaston until he believed that he had an effective puppet. The young Comte’s letters to his mother revealed the extent to which Vigny had gotten into his head--”Vigny is the father I have never had and, perhaps, under his tutelage I will become a great King.” On the ides of April, Vigny revealed ‘the new King’ to France--namely, the Comte d’Orlean.


*Social mobility being a hugely different thing than it is today--up until the deaths of the Armee de Bourbon and the mass die outs in the ranks of the nobility in the 40 Years War it would take as many as five generations for a well off merchant family to transform into a family of the robe nobility. Bosquet’s reforms changed this but it still generally took two generations for a merchant to gain enough money to buy a noble title.

Seelmeister said:

Good to hear that you've found a better job - its amazing the difference that makes when you're trying to juggle your studies and other commitments!

Another great update, Vigny's star seems to have waned, I am looking forward to seeing who emerges in the next update.

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Seriously! And I know that Gaston and Henri may seem Gary Stu'y, but I'm actually going off the contemporary conception of Grande Ames (a literary idea similar to ubermensch or superhuman. Basically people who are born Grande Ames [like Caesar, or Christ, or Louis XIV] have stronger desires, stronger drives and are greater people in all respects. It's also ok if they kill people and 17th century France was obsessed with violence. I'm going to have a later entry dealing with how messed up that is but seriously there are a weird number of similarities between Ancien Regime France and the modern day or maybe I'm just looking for them)

Thoctar said:

Great update, can't wait for more!

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Thank you for your continued readership! Sorry that the entries have been short this week I'd like to get back in the swing of writing asap rather than waiting on a massive entry.

General_Hoth said:

I'm really loving your work Merrick! Keep up! Vive le Roy!

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Thank you very much for your support! I love your AARs and I'm happy that you're reading this!

demanvanwezel said:

The news that Vigny was tortured while in the Bastille turned the clergy against Vigny even further.

should probably be vincent

great AAR!

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Thanks for the catch!

FellowNerd said:

St. Vincent DePaul. I go to DePaul university. Not that is relevant or anything It just makes me like this AAR so much more

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What can I say? The dude was a cool saint, and it would be remiss to not mention the clerical aspects of French society when the first estate had so much power and took up so much of the population of Paris.

So I have a question for the future. Not the immediate future but something that will eventually come up. I'm wondering how I should deal with the beginnings of the Revolution and the events that come up to it. I basically have two ideas for how it could go narrative wise. I could write from the perspective of the ruling class (as I have the whole time--discussion of the lower classes will start to come in over the Day of the Barricades and the administration of the next monarch) up until the first events of the revolution (storming of the Bastille etc). This would give a narrative surprise and would show what a break with the past the Revolution was--from the perspective of an aristocrat a popular uprising was just out of the picture.

Or I could present the events that link to the Revolution over time. Something problematic that I've found in a lot of histories of the Revolution is that they tend to present it as something that just kind of happened, that had bad weather and mismanagement combined at any point in time they could have created a revolution (they would have created a revolt, surely, as most of France's internal issues arose from a combination of a horrid harvest and increased taxation). This wasn't so. The Revolution had roots going back to the death of Louis XIV and it only succeeded because of the events of the 7 Years War (the leading assumption at the time being that the French Revolution was just another decaying aspect of the center and another step towards a shift to the periphery--Britain, Prussia, and Russia. Also the mistrust that all three peripheral powers sowed through their actions in the 7 Years War leading to the shaky 1st-3rd coalitions).

So I can do it either way. I'll let you guys choose

By all indications, the War of the Regents was going to explode into a full-fledged civil war. Although Saint Chaumond and the legitimate king had the support of the noblemen and a good portion of the Army, Vigny had been regent for a decade by this point and had a strong base of support himself, mostly amongst the Parisian judiciaries (though this support was greatly hurt by the Clichy Case), the ‘Imperial forces’ (ie the 30,000 men under Tilly’s control) and the bourgeoisie. This balance of power would have remained through 1620 as the two regents built up their armies, but the ensuing battle was interrupted by something unexpected—a series of intense riots that exploded through Paris.

These riots had been long in coming. A pair of famines had wracked the Seine valley led to deaths in the Parisian streets for two straight years by 1620, and emaciated beggars were streaming into the French capital starting in the summer. The granaries, which Vigny had stocked with bread in the spring, were suddenly needed for the buildup of troops that Vigny needed for his battle with Saint Chaumond, and Vigny found himself needing to raise taxes to pay for his new personal guard. This is what led to revolts, first in the estates and then through the lower classes in Paris.


The first issue was that the warning signs of the riot were all too easy to ignore to an upper class distracted by an impending civil war. The aristocrats in Paris all imported their food from immediately outside Paris and were thus unaware of the food shortages. They were only made aware of the seriousness of the situation when they were unable to return to their mansions for the summer. A roving band called the “Men without Colors” had formed in the Spring when their houses were repossessed by tax collectors, and this brigand terrorized the Seine valley through all of 1620.


The second issue was that the aristocracy assumed that the riots, the brigands, and the peasant uprisings were all the result of courtly meddling. Saint Chaumond was responsible for this, Vigny announced to his privy council. This was widely accepted—some nobleman had to be responsible for these events, someone who had something to gain from higher grain prices and pressure on the government to buy more grain. Thus, Vigny ‘discovered’ the real loyalties of the Duc Antoine de Guy, a wheat merchant who owned a massive farm to the far south of Paris, and arrested him. The Guys were the richest family in Paris and the Guy estate was one of the few areas of stability in the Seine valley. His arrest only intensified the problems in Paris. Vigny responded by moving the Armee du Paris into the Seine valley and setting up Gaston d’Orleans as its general. But moving the Armee to Paris only worsened the food situation.

Vigny’s belief that the riots were being caused by Saint Chaumond’s ‘meddling’ led to overly violent policies by the Armee du Paris. But what was Saint Chaumond doing during the period? The rumor that the Men without Colors were under the pay of Saint Chaumond (a rumor popularized by Dumas’ Three Musketeers) hasn’t been proved or disproved, though the band did attack noblemen allied with Vigny almost exclusively. What we do know is that Saint Chaumond and Prince Henri spent most of their time writing letters to noblemen throughout France asking for support, organizing their army, and that Saint Chaumond was able to enlist the grand families of Paris to his cause at the end of September.

As opposed to Armee du Paris, which was a glorified militia, the Royal Army that Saint Chaumond and Henri were building was a far smaller but highly elite force. Made up of loyal veterans from the War of Religion and the campaigns into the Rhineland, the Royal Army only amounted to 3500 tercios, 1500 gallop cavalry, and a regiment of cannon in October when it was put under the command of the young king. But Saint Chaumond felt that this would be enough—the Armee du Paris was tied down by peasant uprisings throughout all of the estates. Chaumond sent a letter telling the great families to instigate a revolt in the end of November, which would give him and Henri enough time to raise a larger army but wouldn’t give Tilly’s armies enough time to return to France and side with Vigny. Everyone would be surprised by what came next. On the 7^th of November, 1620, the whole of Paris—the priests, the students, the bourgeoisie, the peasants and the workmen, all revolted at once and set up barricades through the whole of the city, not letting any food or information get to any government buildings. The rebels wished for a return of the ‘true king’, the abdication of the tyrant Vigny, and most importantly, that the granaries be opened. With these demands they besieged the Bastille and the Louvre.


It turned out that the lower classes of Paris had also been communicating with each other through 1620, and that rule under Vigny (which increasingly involved hangings, murders by the Parisian militia and the Armee du Paris, curfews and the arrests of major municipal and mercantile figures) was no more acceptable to them than it was to Saint Chaumond—the royalist propaganda, depicting Henri as a man with compassion for the lower classes, had clearly found an audience. But the biggest issue wasn’t abstract problems of governance or whether the prince presented by Vigny was legitimate or not. The major issue to the lower classes was the critical lack of food in Paris, and the fact that the oppressive Armee du Paris was better fed than even a well off Parisian.


Thus the food issue was the biggest problem for the masses and they put that problem front and center of their proposals. But Vigny could not see this. By this point his paranoia had reached such heights that he saw the whole crowd as being paid by Saint Chaumond or one of his confederates. “Paris does not contain enough poor to hold up one city street. These ‘poor’ and ‘starving’ masses are no more than an army under the employ of the pretender Henri and his confederates.”

Saint Chaumond, for his part, didn’t know how to react to the riots either. He had assumed that he had control over the situation and specifically over the Parisian poor and this event showed him that he didn’t at all. Yet he too wondered who was pulling the strings here. The idea that the poor had any agency of themselves simply couldn’t occur to even the greatest minds of the time. Saint Chaumond was, however, willing to capitalize on his enemy’s weakness and sent in the Royal Army on the 8^th of November.


On the 10^th of November, Vigny was stuck. The mob was besieging the Louvre, the Bastille had fallen (and with it 200 militiamen) the Royal Army was aiming its cannons at the castle walls, and his food supply was running out. He felt that he had one opportunity left. He explained to Gaston that the Armee du Paris could be concentrated to defeat the mob along the Left Bank and the Eastern fauxburgs, and could then be used in a rearguard action while Vigny, Gaston, and the major members of government withdrew to Strasbourg to link up with Tilly’s army. From there the Vigniste government would be able to prosecute a civil war with a large portion of France’s army and one of her most experienced generals behind her.

This shocked Gaston. Even as an isolated teenager the thought of killing thousands of Parisians and then sacrificing a 10,000 man army in order to instigate a civil war which would leave hundreds of thousands of children ‘orphaned by their society’ like him was untenable. And as the commander of the Armee du Paris it was in the end his decision. On the 13^th of November, Gaston surrendered Paris to the Royal Army and the Parisian mob, and opened up all the granaries. The terms of his surrender included ‘a bureaucracy which would protect the people of Paris’, an exile (rather than an execution) for Vigny, and a post in the army for Gaston.


With this, the reign of Vigny was at an end. Vigny was given a post as the governor of the Caribbean colonies, Gaston left Paris for the Army Academy, and Henri entered the capital of France as its King.

blsteen said:

Bah Humbug
New King or not, blood will be in the streets soon enough

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Definitely. While the struggle between Saint Chaumond and Vigny was totally fabricated (since regency civil wars only happen immediately, at the beginning rather than at the end or any other point which I find odd), I did get several rebels during the point when Vigny died (and he'll continue to play a minor role). Are you guys cool with this current format? Is it getting too abstract? Should I tie it back closer to the game? Should I speed up the pace?