Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

thewiseone42 said:

Not quite finished yet, but this is a fantastic AAR! The historical focus and level of detail is great. It makes the differences from reality fairly plausible - there is much less anachronism in this than most that I've read. Great stuff.

I will, however, nitpick on something: your description of music under Henri II's reign shows some major divergences from the reality of the time. Some of it could be explained by the huge level of funding for the arts at the time, but there are definitely some things that aren't quite period-accurate. I won't go into detail, but if you'd like some specifics just for general knowledge and maybe future writing, you can PM me or something.

Regardless, that's probably the first time in this AAR that I've really questioned the accuracy, so I wouldn't be particularly concerned. It only bothers me because I have pretty extensive classical training and I know the history.

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It's the huge funding of the arts and the events of the thirty years war occurring significantly earlier. My idea of Henri II is heavily taken from Henri IV, combined with the challenge off roleplaying what a 9/9/9 king would be like in real life. I do agree with you, though, that Henri's reign does look more like the reign of Louis XIV than anything that happened in the early 17th century.

But yeah, there are things that (from a gameplay aspect) I couldn't help but do (like, say, join Scandinavia in the carving up of China). And they've been difficult to write. But please tell me what I could do to improve the period, via PM or publicly I don't mind either way.

Derahan said:

Can't say anything but that it is getting very interesting, very captivating. You are very good at these AARs Merrick

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Thank you!

SerialCereal said:

Damn. I really want to know what it's like since the furthest I've made it before is 1800 as Prussia.

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Understandable, but we are probably going to get pretty late.

Having been raised in the wake of that war and its after effects, Henri came into power with one overwhelming intention--to eliminate the need or possibility for a European war enacted on the scale of the 40 Years War. This goal animated every policy Henri maintained as king, from his focus on French trade, to his militarily defensive mindset, to his funding for the arts and his establishment of a professional diplomatic corps. Henri’s general goal was a Europe bound by culture and trade, and embroiled in constantly shifting alliances so that even if war did break out, it would never be the decades long slog of the 40 Years War.

Henri’s regime led to a massive increase in trade. Goods shipping from Elsass, Bruges, and Marseilles reached every corner of Europe, and though trade remained a small overall part of the French economy, Henri’s colonial acquisitions and his support for merchants (not to mention his key legislation which allowed aristocrats to engage in finance and trade) led to a threefold increase in trade over his reign, and a massive rise in France’s production, especially in agriculture and textiles.

(PLACEHOLDER FOR A POSSIBLE GRAPH. does anyone know of any free graphing software by the way?)

The rise in French exports brought French trade and values to countries which France had little positive interaction with in the past. French trade in the Levant, the Baltic, and in England led to a massive growth in relations between France and these countries, and soon the Ottomans, Italy, England and Poland all had massive French expatriot communities. These communities further facilitated the expansion of French as the European language and of France as the cultural capital of the world. The later 17th century would feature the furtherance of these cultural ties by the opening of several French-styled and run schools in these countries, starting with the Universität der Feineren Gedanken in Kassel.

France also began a program where she would act as the neutral body which would negotiate treaties between major warring powers at war. The first attempt at such an arbitration occurred in 1629, when Henri himself traveled to Lubeck to help Scandinavia and Prussia negotiate a treaty that ended the Northern War. The successful treaty led to the first period of peace in northern europe after eighty years of nonstop war, and after the treaty’s success France overtook Austria as the diplomatic center of Europe. Versailles became the originator of eighteen arbitrations during the 1630s and 40s, and a professional corps of diplomats was formed. These envoys set up embassies throughout Europe, allowing France to move easily from one alliance to another, always maintaining the balance of power.

The idea of the ‘balance of power’, where France would maintain a system of balancing alliances such that no side would be able to see an advantage in a war, was first conceptualized in Italy in the early 16th century. But the unification of the French, Spanish, and Austrian crowns under the aegis of the Habsburg dynasty scuttled any concept of ‘balance’ and replaced it with a total solidarity among Italians--a solidarity which led a century later to the formation of the Italian Commonwealth. The concept of a balance of power, which in the 16th century used the science of early mechanics as its metaphor, was revived in the 17th century by Henri II.

Countries France maintained relations with through the early 17th century. Lighter colors indicate countries which were within France’s ‘sphere’, which gradually adopted French as their courtly languages. Darker colors indicate countries wherein France maintained roughly equal relations, and many of these countries did not form an alliance with France until the reign of Louis XIII​

While the ‘balance of power’ concept of the 16th century was an analogy to early mechanics, with the idea that constant shifting had to happen to maintain ‘the balance’, Henri’s view of international relations came more from the growth of physics. The idea of ‘equilibrium’, that is a point at which no further pressure need be applied, haunted Henri throughout his lifetime. Indeed we must see the whole of French foreign relations through the 17th century as an attempt to find such a political equilibrium--such a point, such a combination of alliances, that peace would be found and maintained. Thus while we see the concept of the ‘balance of power’ as a realist concept now, we must understand that it started as a concept fueled by idealism.


Ultimately, Henri’s balance could never be found. This was as much a product of Henri’s continuing rivalries with the dynastic foes of the Bourbons--the Huguenot Valois and the Austrian Habsburgs--as it was of the number of aspects out of Henri’s control. Three major insecurities fueled conflict during Henri’s reign--the inherent geographic insecurity of the north German protestant states, the preexisting European dynastic rivalries and the growth of Italian nationalism. As I dealt with the northern German conflicts earlier, I will now move to a discussion of the radicalization of Italian politics.


The Italian Reconquista was a pair of wars Spain and Austria fought against the heretical states of Venice, Milan, and Savoy. The wars ended with Savoy and Milan annexed by Spain and with the destruction of the short lived Venetian Orthodox Patriarchate*. It also led to a reaction within the Despotate of Modena, which had for a long time maintained a policy of isolation. The Catholicos and Italianos battled throughout the Modenan bureaucracy over whether Modena should see itself firstly as an Italian state or as a Catholic state. In 1637 the appointment of the young and charismatic Romagnan mayor, Alfonso di Borgia, to the head ot the Italian bureaucracy signalled a crucial change in Italy’s history--from that point forward, Modena would cease to be a supporter of the status quo, and would seek to unite every corner of Italy. This change was shown by Borgia’s alliance with the Reformist Valois, signed in 1648.

The final collapse of Henri’s mostly peaceful system began in 1649. For while Henri had maintained France’s fortifications and expanded his defensive system in the lowlands, the French army of the 1640s was paltry, connected to this defensive system, and utterly incapable of performing offensives. Philippe VII de Valois’ realization of this, and the increasing isolation of France as she was forced to juggle alliances with fundamentally opposed parties (by taking a ‘mediator’s place’ in the Northern War of 1645 between her allies Sweden and Poland, and the War of Milano in late 1648, France had lost a great deal of prestige as well as her alliances with Spain, Modena, and Sweden), set the scene for the Dutch War of Integration in 1649. Philippe’s declaration against the Bourbon County of Luxembourg put France in a bind--she had to defend her dynastic territory, but she had an army utterly unsuited to the task, and allies who were mostly unable to do little but stand back and watch while their countries were invaded. The last straw was Philippe’s Declaration of Utrecht--that any Huguenot who rebelled against their ‘Bourbon occupiers’ would be given a pension and a title when France was integrated into the Dutch realm. With this, Protestant Frenchmen who had remained on the sidelines of Henri's commercial revolution rose up (especially noblemen who hadn't any work since Henri's massive downsizing of the French army), and many of the Rhenish states which France had retained a hold over through Henri's reign rebelled against her.




*If you’ve read Lords of Prussia you know that Venice, for some reason, tends to go Orthodox in my games. Venice also went Orthodox in my first EU4 game, go figure

Derahan said:

You're venice is a conspriacy from paradox

No but seriously now, that war seems to be very big! Good luck

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Right? I mean I guess the explanation I gave for Venice's conversion in Lords of Prussia (that it was part of a military coup by ethnically Greek admirals) was so convincing that my games have accepted it since, or something.

And yeah, this war is pretty massive, though Spain, Poland, and I are all WAY under capacity, Poland because it just lost a war, Spain because it's going through a trade crisis, and France because I decided to see if I could function with only 50,000 soldiers in continental France.

Derahan said:

Only 50.000 soldiers? Even the revolutionary republic needed millions of soldiers to hold on the france...what were you thinking

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It's even worse than that, I'm a generation behind the Dutch

Also guys I'm sorry that I've been lax in updating. Life has taken priority as I've been desperately looking for a new career which isn't connected to the discretionary budget.

On the plus side I got an article published recently (A critical history of management), and I'm writing another one which is very publishable (attempting to bring Clausewitz's theory of war into the 21st century using a dialectical method)

I reiterate that I intend to continue with LoF, and that I see finishing it as a duty.

The Fronde, which went through three stages (Protestant, Parliamentary, and Aristocratic) was a civil war which tore France apart from 1652 to 1660. These revolts, which were against differing aspects of Henrian France, started with the Dutch call to rebellion and only ending with the total restructuring of French society.

At the rebellion’s heart was a discontent with the kind of government being built by Henri II. But even more emphatically, it was a discontent with the kind of ruler Henri was. Henri commonly referred to his title as “Absolute King of France, Quebec, Min...[etc]”. But the title bestowed upon him by the Frondeurs, a phrase he only used once in private correspondence but which came to define him, is “the Bourgeois Monarch”. Henri was an unabashedly, unashamedly, urban king, who renovated the Louvre to include a public opera house, who attended mass not in any of the exclusive chapels of the Right Bank but rather in Notre Dame, who was even known to walk to the Paris market and pick out his own food. All of these made him the most adored king Paris had ever had, but it also isolated him from the aristocrats of Southern and Western France.


The problem is that Henri was never able to shake his association with the mercantile and bureaucratic urban elite, and because his rule was identified as being ‘connected’ to one of the groups of French society he was never able to achieve the Absolutism he aimed towards. Furthermore while many of Henri’s reforms were ahead of their time, they by and large had the effect of isolating massive parts of the French population. These are especially true of the reforms Henri enacted after the death of St.Chamand in 1642.

St.Chamand, Henri’s tutor and his one true life companion throughout his life, was widely known as a moderating force. His correspondence with Occitan, Breton, and Basque intellectuals gave him a connection with southern France which Henri lacked. And despite all of the centralization which occurred during Henri’s reign, southern French notables felt they had an ‘in’ at the Louvre due to St.Chamand’s equanimity when it came to patronage. St.Chamand also made sure that Henri’s ‘crusade’ against ingrained systems (such as serfdom) were scaled back. When St.Chamand died of pneumonia in the winter of 1642, this moderating force died with him.

The truth is that though Henri was ‘a man ahead of his times’, he just did not have enough supporters in France to succeed in his goals to ‘drag France, kicking and screaming, into modernity’. Because of his lack of support, and his lack of regard of the interests of the French nobility, the two most comprehensive ‘successes’’ of his reign turned into largest reasons for the Fronde. These two massive programs of reform were Henri’s attempted abolition of serfdom, and his connected ‘rationalization’ of the French economy.


One of Henri’s great causes was towards the abolition of serfdom. Serfdom had been in decline at during the reign of Louis XI, but the rise of the Hapsburgs to the throne brought France more in line with the German standard, and Louis XII was too preoccupied with other matters to make a concentrated attack against the system. In 1630 millions of Frenchmen remained in incredibly brutal feudal contracts, and familial servitude (that is a feudal contract which expanded multiple generations) were still common, especially in the German-influenced area of Lorraine and in the deep south of France. Henri saw this not only as a horrid assault on the liberties of his subjects, but also as a threat to the stability of his kingdom and as a regressive and ‘irrational’ economic force.

What Henri soon realized was that simply abolishing serfdom would not be as easy as he had thought. The first step--the emancipation of every generational serf employed by the Kingdom--was relatively easy and was enacted in 1636. After this St.Chamand advised that the king remain moderate in his attempts at emancipation, because to attack serfdom in the provinces was a whole other matter. In many areas (Lorraine and Bourgogne), the ability to interfere with contracts rested in the provincial parliaments. Worse still, much of the southern French provinces were decentralized to the degree that contract law was dealt with at the town level and lower. This was especially true of Auvergne which was still, essentially, a collection of thousands of baronies. To attack serfdom, therefore, would require an attack on all the remaining privileges the provinces retained.


This clearly was not popular, and Saint Chamand was able to keep Henri’s efforts limited until his death in 1642. The only major move in the interim was the creation of four new ‘urban provinces’ (Toulouse, Bourdeaux, Lyons, and Nantes), which would be administered by a royal appointee in exchange for some minor trading privileges. Even this provoked an outroar, and solidified French urban-rural hatred into an institutional form, and made sure that this tension between city and estate would remain for a century. After 1642 Henri went even further, beginning a concerted attack on the rights of villages and provincial parliament, with further steps being implemented in 1648 and one last step (the replacement of the syndics and consuls, that is the elected positions of the French village, which royal appointees) planned for 1654. While these massive moves towards centralization were widely hated by nearly every Frenchman outside of Paris, it was Henri’s second major policy of the 1640s which planted the seeds for the Fronde.

The ‘rationalization’ of the French economy, that is the accumulation of the majority of French land into the hands of very few, was achieved with multiple means all provided by Henri. Henri ended much of the limitations towards the buying and settling of land. He began selling titles which allowed certain noblemen to get involved in commerce and finance. And he gave monetary support to the families who were moving quicker in buying up the land around their farms if they converted their estates into mono-crop areas and implemented some form of rural industry. The reasons for these policies are many and a great many academics then and since have tried to parse exactly why Henri implemented these reforms. Many agree with Fukuyama’s argument that Henri was predicting and implementing an early form of capitalism. Contexttually, it seems more likely that this was merely one of Henri’s steps towards his gentilhomme concept, of creating a French elite concerned with the state, with trade, duty, and culture, rather than war. Regardless, these policies meant that French land was quickly accumulated in the hands of some .1% of the population, who owned a fifth of French land by 1650 and a third by 1700.


Both of these trends, the abolition of serfdom via an immensely encroaching state, and the creation of the class of Grande Seigneurs, pressed hard on the middling gentry. Normally employed by the army, the lower aristocrats were facing huge decreases in their dues and the loss of their land (and thus their titles) to the hated bourgeois-aristocrat class. And no group felt the squeeze worse than the Protestant aristocracy, who had few job opportunities in the city or the government due to Henri’s continued discrimination against Huguenots, who were most likely to live in the areas (like Lorraine, Gascogne, or the Languedoc) which were losing all their provincial rights and becoming mere departments of the Henrian government’s largess, and who were most likely to be kicked of their land by insanely rich Grande Seigneurs. So while the Protestant Fronde was kickstarted by Valois actions, it was in the making already, through the 1640s.

Note that while serfdom had been eradicated by the Renaissance monarchs of the 15th and 16th centuries in OTL, in Lords of France what minor moves were made against serfdom by Louis XI were retracted by Henri I, and that level hadn't been changed since. I am also aware that by having Henri move to create a noble/merchant class I'm changing French pre-revolutionary history by a massive margin

Next up, another update by Jacob de Bomische, and a short entry by a new character on the campaigns in the Lowlands!

This essay, on the Peasant’s Fronde, is one of the two essays (the other being the Charlatan King) that led to Jacob de Bomische’s expulsion from the Sorbonne and his move into radical politics. It also shows us a different kind of de Bomische than we are used to: not the characteristically blunt revolutionary who tore down both the institutions and the traditions of the Age of Wit, here we see a Bomische who is less confident, less sure of himself. These and other essays are not available on Amazon in a compilation called De Bomische: the early writings (1744-1752) from the Jacobin Publishing Company for the low low price of 50 USD!


While the Fronde has gained a great deal of recent attention due to the coming centennial of the event and the well circulated article by Monsieur Tocqueville on the Three Frondes. But what I feel he missed was the fourth, and arguably most important of the Frondes: the Peasant’s Fronde, that is the period of countryside unrest from 1649-1659. That unrest was the underpinning of the whole Fronde period, from its combination with Huguenotism leading to the particularly virulent revolts in Lorraine and Brittany, to the way it affected the rise of the two great personalities of the period: Gaston d’Orleans and Juan de Bourgogne.


Henri II, for all his wisdom, greatly miscalculated the reasons for this unrest and thus took exactly the wrong policy against it. This miscalculation arose from Henri’s elite view of politics: the murders which were occurring throughout the countryside during the late 1640s and during the Fronde could not have been a response to his policies, which he saw as pro-peasant, but had to be the result of some noble manipulations of the peasantry, sadly ignorant that they were rebelling against a kingdom which was fighting for them.

Although much of the information on the life of the peasant of a century past is lost to us, what we can see gives us a far different image than the stupid beggard-revolter, who took money from some rebellious lord to storm the countryside. Instead what we see is that the Peasant’s Fronde, or the Peasant’s War, was mostly a revolt against the increasing centralization of land and the monocropping that came with this.


As Henri II helped more and more land accrue into the hands of a few Grande Seigneurs, these Seigneurs then moved towards monocropping, usually for exportable goods such as wine, silk, flour, cotton or linens. This totally changed the economy of the peasant household--rather than growing a group of crops for sustenance and using rural industry (spinning, usually) for extra money the peasant was now totally dependent on the money economy for their basic living, a money economy that was not wholly enmeshed in the rural areas. While migrant and itinerant labor is a commonality now, it had its origins in the 1640s and the Land Reform Act of 1643, and while the average itinerant laborer is in no was a militant, in the 1640s the new lack of safety and security led to a massive amount of discontent..

When moves were made in 1648 to privatize the Breton commons, this discontent moved into a general revolt against the Breton aristocratic hierarchy. This general revolt was done in the typical way that Breton revolts have been done since the 16th century--Breton Huguenot communities would turn their lathes into morning stars and kill the local notables. What was interesting about this revolt was that Brittany had been a peaceful area through all of Henri II’s reign. It was assumed that after Descartes publicly came out in favor of assimilationism, that the eras of revolt in Brittany would be over. But Descartes’ assimilationism was a flawed one, one which ignored the difficulties most Huguenots had in gaining any sort of employment.

Thus, even before the War of Integration, Brittany and Gascony had erupted into peasant warfare. And with the incitement to revolt that came in 1652, the home front and the maintenance of some form of control in the countryside gained massive importance. Thus Henri abdicated in his policy of centralized military control, and allowed three outcast noblemen to raise troops in order to put down the revolts in the countryside. These three men: Prince Clement de Lorraine, the Huguenot governor of Lorraine; Duc Juan de Bourgogne, a steadfast rival of the King’s but the man in control of the largest private military group in France, and Comte Gaston d’Orleans, the pretender of the day of the barricades, were now thrust back into the light of French politics out of their shadowed positions at the periphery. All of them would gain far more importance in the years to come, and with the exception of Gaston, all would do little but exacerbate the situation.

blsteen said:

Intriguing, the Frondes...
And really...back in the day was anyone really pro peasant???
Interesting to see that the rich still get richer while everyone else gets...dessert?
I'm sure we'll see cake eaten soon.

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Yeah I was wondering when I wrote de Bomische's section on whether it wouldn't be anachronistic to have him be so (comparatively) pro-peasant. But Henri's intentions were more about breaking up the power of the old nobility (with power based on serfdom and privileges) and creating a new one (with power based in money and loyalty to the new government) moreso than any love of the peasants (as seen by his concurrent policy of helping some aristocrats monopolize an increasing amount of land).

And yeah, Henri II's policies set the stage for the kind of France that's going to go into the Revolution.

Derahan said:

This is getting interesting, civil war is always fun and a rare element in AARs

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It's just going to get worse!

HowPow said:

Such a great AAR! Subscribed!

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Thank you!

blsteen said:

The major problem with the new power structure as I see it is that money is going to be a poor substitute for any form of noblesse oblige, especially as the next generation which has known nothing but wealth and
privilege take power. Unless the Frondes get so many of the new nobles strung up...Of course, Henri's successors may also find that this concentration of wealth does little to promote a France that will be able to withstand a large
degree of turmoil as industrialization takes hold. If indeed this France does industrialize.

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Yeah, France is going to lose a lot of the stability that OTL Ancien Regime had and who knows what effects the creation of a new class which exists above and dominates the corporate system will have

(I do)