Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

The Parliamentary Fronde, or the Urban Revolts, was the true opening of our modern era. It set up the kind of municipal rights which formed the beginning of French Constitutionalism, and the revolt’s end in 1656 created the modern French monarchy as we knew it until 1767. What is so astonishing is that this event which has done so much to craft our current moment has had so little attention. This lack of attention has been done to the degree that the Revolts have been seen as a Parisian movement rather than a movement by and for the periphery, and even the Jacobins have forgotten what, exactly, they are rebelling against. Such a moment must not be forgotten in our times, for in knowing the precise flaws of the past we can discover how to transcend these flaws.

The Urban Revolts, known as the Parliamentary Fronde, began over the issue of religious rights in the Huguenot areas of Flandres, Bordeaux, and Lyon, but they soon spread to Marseilles and Paris when it was revealed that the new Estates would be composed entirely of patricians--that is, that the ‘Heroic Res Publica’ championed by Jean II was a noble republic first and foremost. These calls for parliamentary agency came from the urban merchants and the ‘new aristocracy’, yes, but they also came from the marginalized, the people who cared least about the heroic aesthetics of Jean’s Crusaders, the people who most obviously saw that a return to the past meant a return to serfdom and religious intolerance. The revolts began when Jean II sent his soldiers looking for the Inquisitors who disappeared in Flandres and Picardie, and soon afterwards Bordeaux also revolted, this time behind the pretender Gaston. Only after this, and after Jean sent his ministers to Paris to replace the parliamentarians, did Paris, which had once greeted Jean with open arms as a good Catholic, revolt.

Each time, the events followed in a predictable manner. The parliaments first responded to Jean’s ascendence with a worried resignation; they strongly disliked the breach in precedent that Jean’s kingship would represent and, after all, precedent was all they had. But after four decades of Henrian Absolutism they had come to accept that they would need to respect the power of an army in the tens of thousands. But the merchants and the guilds knew what a reinforcement of the aristocracy would mean: a loss of their power in the countryside and the destruction of their autonomy in the cities. Within two months, riots would break out across the city, and when Jean sent a delegation to impose martial law (along with his suggestion that the cities lose their autonomy to the local aristocracy), the parliaments fell in and the city gates would shut.


It had been the peripheral elites which had most benefitted from Henri’s policies. The massive agglomeration of lands which has characterized the last hundred years could only have been done in areas without recourse. For instance, the lands around Paris were kept by smallholders over the whole of Henri’s reign, while this was the period when the d’Albret family came to own the whole province of Auvergne. These people, the d’Albret’s, the de Saint Tropez’s, the de Cumenges’, had all gained amazing amounts of wealth from their rapid growth in land ownership, as well as their connections to the colonies, but at this point their names had no honor associated with them, they would find no place in de Bourgogne’s order. It was the old families in the French center, the de Champagnes, the Guise’s outside of Paris, the Comte’s, who allied with Jean.


So both the ‘loyalist’ movement and the Parliamentary Fronde were peripheral movements by the people most advantaged by the creation of new commerce, while the crusaders were by the old elite which desperately sought to retain to its power.

Yes, my reader might say, but what of their armies? Bomische, for all his failings, was absolutely correct that to simplify all of history to the relations of elites is to create a story that is not a history at all. Such a history always obscures the People who carry such a history on its back. To write such an elite centered history is not to write a history at all, but to write a bloody romance, where all the violence occurs off-stage, hidden behind lily white decoration and the pointless politeness only felt during familial disputes.

The People did what they had always done during such disputes, over the rights of noblemen hidden under such broad concepts as ‘liberty’, over who accumulates the tariffs taken from them, in a battle over who gets to draw the lines they cannot see and take their property from them under laws they do not understand: they accepted the money offered to them and died by the droves. Recently, Volney wrote a text that stated that all the time which occurred before the Revolution was merely time, that history, history being the conflict between peoples, within peoples, only truly started when the People took power.

I think that this is foolish. The Revolution did not start history; conflicts between classes have been a constant throughout our age. And it did not end it, for I must say in the decade I have lived in Auvergne, as a doctor, when the peasant comes to my door and I ask him how he’s felt about the Revolution, he answers, “what revolution? The Duke is still in power, I still pay rent to his sons, still sell my livestock to his daughters, still mine iron for his armies. He has a different title, he says he owns us because he elected himself instead of divine right, but what has changed?”

We need to stop congratulating ourselves for the abstract changes we have made to our government. We need to stop accepting the ‘minor tyrannies’, as Bomische calls them, in order to promote the far more grandiose ‘major freedoms’. The minor tyrannies Bomische dismisses are the part and parcel of the everyday life of the masses of France. And if we keep pretending that the People are not weighed down with the ‘minor’ tyrannies they place on them, they will shrug us off. And it is for this that I announce my running for the National Senate.

Thanks for all the comments!

GulMacet said:

I must say I really like those ideas for other AARs, and I would greatly enjoy reading any of those. Then again, it's mostly the author, not the topic - so I suspect I would also enjoy instructions for setting up a washing machine, if they were written by a man of your talent!

Regarding the map, it looks much more like our history than the usual game of EU, but with enough differences to mark a unique and distinct history. The Scandinavian Empire is very interesting, as is the early Germany! How about a closer look at the state of the HRE? Austria looks huge!

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Yeah the Ottoman Empire has several strides and lulls in this game, this is at their lowest point, with the highest rise (and last one) being around 1700 when they were #1 for income.

DensleyBlair said:

An interesting look at the ideology behind the revolt – the ideas behind the ideas, if you like. It'll certainly be something to bear in mind as we move to more "action-packed" updates.

Very good stuff indeed!

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It's something I've been thinking about for a while, more from reading stuff on the Fronde (which was a year ago, my god), 1930s France and (even earlier), 1920s Germany. It's also been brought about by the weird resurgence of reactionary ideologies on the internet now.

Derahan said:

This felt like a very deep chapter. As DB mentioned it seems like something of a ideaception and I like that!

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Thanks! I was really worried that the chapter wouldn't be taken well, or that it wouldn't garner many responses.

Thoctar said:

Another awesome update! Personally I'd love to see the third and fourth, although the second one sounds promising too! I also love these strangely plausible and almost futuristic borders, especially in Austria.

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Thanks! And the borders are weirdly futuristic, aren't they? I'm going to try to remedy that soon (mostly by talking about how these states which we find recognizable--Italy, Prussia--are not nearly as centralized as the map makes them out to be). I'm worried that I'm getting ahead of myself, history wise, which was a major problem with Lords of Prussia.

Derahan said:

I'd say go with the third option! This is a almost never traveled territory of AARs and I'd love to see it.

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I suppose it depends on how this AAR goes and what I'm most exhausted by, but thanks for the input!

blsteen said:

"decontextualization"
I shudder every time this word gets used...I had a prof who decontextualized everything.

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That and abstraction are my two most hated words right now (if you haven't realized that from Marat's writing, him and Bomische are great for letting me air grievances with academic history and policy studies)

Rifal said:

See!!! I can only dream of writing something as deep and detailed as this! You sir have once again raised the bar for AAR´s everywhere. Can't wait for the next update.

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To be honest I got really lucky and found a really rare book on the society of the Ancien Regime and found a way to translate that style of writing and thinking into a character in the AAR (though I'm not sure if he counts as a character if he lived three centuries after its events...). And a lot of this comes with practice, I'm sure that can write something like this in short time!

Jape said:

The breakdown of 'Heroism' was very good. I remember writing an essay on the nature of Fascism that led me to similar conclusions. It is interesting how ephemeral reactionary-populists can be when it comes to policy. But as you hinted its most likely because their actual end game wouldn't be very popular if it was spelled out.

Dropping some interesting hints about the future in the last update too. It also seemed almost a meta critique of AAR writing, the danger of turning history, even fictional history into a romance of big wigs. Something many writers here, including myself, can easily fall into.

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Yes! That's my intent with the path to the Revolution and with using Revolutionary sources, to give the reader a sense of a consensus torn apart, of a society that can't agree on its history. But yeah as I said, Marat and Bomische also let me rant about writing histories (and thus writing AARs)

DensleyBlair said:

Of course, one can find some instances in which such has been done on purpose.

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Yeah I'm not attacking the general idea of a history based on those lines (because in the end it's the elites who wrote the most and thus who's thoughts are most accessible to us), what Marat and Bomische attack was generalizing those elite histories and saying that those people drove the whole of history.

The Parliamentary revolts made clear Jean de Bourgogne’s greatest weaknesses--politically, that he had no support among the cities, and militarily, that he had access to none of the artillery which would have expedited the putting down of those rebellions. This was related to the structure of the French army: the artillerymen had been contractors who only had indirect links to the Royal Army, and the artillery officers had largely been members of the bourgeoisie. Hence when Gaston declared himself Louis XIII, true heir to the Bourbons, most of the artillerymen defected, leaving Jean de Bourgogne with only twelve pieces of artillery, only three of which were long range siege weapons. Immediately after this defection, the Parliamentary Revolts started, and Jean was forced to split his army in four parts to defeat the Flemish, Parisian, Norman and Lyonnais rebellions.


This gave Louis time to form his army, which had only been comprised of the four brigades of his personal guard. Over the summer and fall of 1653 Louis built his forces, starting primarily with the bourgeois portions of the old French army which had been thrown into exile by Jean. This meant that by the first snowfall, Louis had an army comprised almost wholly of light cavalry, militiamen, and artillery. But this did not trouble him--instead he used his overwhelming superiority in messengers and skirmishers to cut Jean’s communications with the south of France, and began discussions with the major governors and dukes over the terms by which they would defect. Several minor rights were given to the Dukes in exchange for their loyalty--the Duke of Auvergne gained permanent mining rights to his province, the Occitan Governors gained funding for religious schooling within their borders, and the Duke of Provence gained Louis’ promise to focus more on Mediterranean matters once he gained his kingdom. Each of these Dukes gave large portions of their personal guards, until in 1654 his army was 40,000 men strong, with 12,000 horse and 26 cannons, and large enough for offensive operations. And so with the first melt of 1654, Louis moved into the Vendee.




Louis’ campaigns in the North West marked his first time leading a full sized army, though the new Royal Guard was lacking in many key respects: it was comprised most of light infantrymen and cavalry, and in a time when heavy cavalry were still considered the king of the battlefield, Louis had a mere three brigades. What Louis did have, more than any of the other actors in the Fronde, was a keen strategic mind and a willingness to compromise. The Northwestern Campaigns are emblematic of Louis’ usual strategy--while he was direct and often highly aggressive in maneuver warfare, he always sought the tactical defensive, which he achieved by deft administration and attempts to dislocate his enemy with skirmishers. While this strategy went back as far as Louis XII’s earliest campaigns, it had not been taught in the increasingly conservative Army Academy, and the Crusaders, who had gone to war in search of glory, were utterly unused to fighting such a deft opponent.


There was one last aspect of Louis’ strategy which was wholly singular in the era: he always offered terms of surrender. The VIscomte de Saraf was the first to discover this tendency, getting a message in April telling him that the Royal Army was just across the Loire, and that de Saraf was to accept Louis as his king and surrender, or face the defeat of his whole army. De Saraf had been a classmate of Louis’, and Louis knew that de Saraf was a zealous, headstrong, arrogant man, who would never willingly surrender (especially to a ‘heretic’ like de Bourbon). Upon getting the letter, de Saraf moved his army across the Loire looking for his foe.


What he hadn’t realized was that Louis expected him to become incensed by the letter, and before he had sent the messenger with the offer of surrender, he had begun moving his troops across the Loire, slightly downstream. The Battle of Oudon occurred as de Saraf’s forces caught Louis just as the last of his men were crossing the river. De Saraf, headstrong as ever, ordered that the whole of his heavy cavalry charge Louis’ infantry hoping to cause a rout. What he didn’t realize was that Louis had positioned his cannons right across the river. Now, while the artillery of the 1650s was inaccurate, Louis had a battery positioned a mere 150 meters away from his enemy lines, and the charging cavalry presented a massive target. Twenty cannon shots later, massive holes had been cut into de Saraf’s line. And just then, Louis’ infantry formed up and laid in a concentrated volley. Within the hour, de Saraf’s forces had been destroyed, and the Vendee had been won.




With the Vendee won, Louis moved on to Brittany, and a far more dangerous foe. Marechal de Gurvand had not been an army officer at all, but had instead been the Admiral of Henri II’s Atlantic Fleet. A deft man, he had helped create a system of flags which allowed for rapid communication within his fleet. However, his standing as a Breton and as a Huguenot had placed a glass ceiling over his career, and the time he had spent in Brest during the War of Unification had awakened him to the problems suffered by his compatriots. Although the Henrian regime had nominally advocated for equality and acceptance of the Huguenots, in practice Henri had acted to crush the local (Huguenot) nobility in Brittany, and in 1641 he had opened the region up to land buyers from outside. The majority of Brittany was now owned by Parisian traders looking to gain titles, and they had brought with them a foreign private police force, known locally as Les Occupants. The Occupants had retained the same brutal methods of past regimes, going on hanging sprees at the slightest provocation and imprisoning those peasants who were late on their rents. Furthermore, the new landlords of Brittany had brought over nearly a hundred Jesuits who were working hard to convert the Breton Calvinists (and, of course, they were supported by Les Occupants). Thus, with the chaos brought on by the death of Henri, de Gurvand and his men chose to rebel in support of an independent Brittany, and de Gurvand’s men transformed his flag-communication system into a means of relaying information across land. Unlike the revolt in the Vendee, which was based around a small coterie of pro-Frondeur locals, the Breton revolt had popular support, had recruited a relatively large army, and was led by a man with a large degree of competence.




And thus, unlike his maneuvers in the Vendee, Louis knew that he could not defeat de Gurvand with a simple battle, and even if he did defeat him in a bloody and glorious fight, this would only weaken his forces (which would force him to wait before facing the Frondeurs), and then leave him with a still rebellious Brittany.


Hence, he chose to pursue a conservative strategy, keeping his forces close together and slowly pushing the Bretons into an untenable position where they would be forced to negotiate. This took a long time--four months--due to the massive number of light infantry and cavalry at de Gurvand’s disposal, which allowed him to move quicker than Louis’ army. But eventually Louis was able to capture the majority of Gurvand’s forces on a small peninsula close to Brest, where the two generals met to discuss the conditions for Breton surrender.


These two men met in an abbey on a wet autumn day by the roaring Atlantic Ocean, and over bread and cheese they discussed the relationship that Brittany would have to France over the next century. De Gurvand began with the claim he had been making all along, that Brittany had a colonial relationship with France, that this relationship was inherent in their position and that thus, Brittany must be separated. Louis countered with a speech which would become famous in French history, which would be echoed by politicians conservative and liberal alike for centuries to come:




Outside of Flandres, Brittany gained the most from its negotiations with Louis. Replacing Les Occupants was a Military Police, which helped administer the French periphery and keep order, through non-violent means as often as possible. De Gurvand was placed as the head of this Regiment, and thus the head of all policing forces within France. It was also put into law that the Captains of the Military Police could only be headed by a Breton or Gascon. Furthermore, Louis disallowed all land speculation within Brittany, confiscating the lands bought by Parisians. For these conciliations, Louis gained the loyalty of the Bretons and the forces of the Army of Brittany. With his forces increased by more than fifteen thousand he was now able to march against the Frondeurs.

Rifal said:

So far so good for Louis then. Can't wait to see John's perspective.
Slight nitpick, you call the Chapter the Northeastern Campaigns, But Brittany is in the Northwest of France

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oh shoot touche

Note: I'm retconning the events of the last chapter just a slight: De Gurvand isn't made the head of a Department, instead he's made head of the newly created Military Police.

GulMacet said:

And once again, the only thing preventing France from conquering everything is also France.

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Of course! It's actually really funny when you actually play the BBB and realize just how precarious a position you're in--you have 'effective government' at best (in a practice game I had to lose all my colonies and change to revolutionary government to be able to 'expand the bureaucracy' and 'enact scales and measures') and you're constantly pulled into land wars which prevents you from taking trade/tolerance/colonization ideas.

DensleyBlair said:

It does indeed seem that France is seldom allowed respite from internal turmoil.

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Unless, of course, she's taking it out on some external enemy (or the Algerians, that always works)

While Louis took his time campaigning in Brittany, the Crusaders were busy consolidating their gains against the pockets of resistance in Champagne and Ile De France, and were slowly making progress against Paris, Lyons, and Caen. But the greatest amount of progress was made by the Crusader general Frederic de Roissins.




A graduate of the artillerist school, de Roissins was the only artillery officer to join the Crusaders, and was promptly given command of the majority of de Bourgignon’s cannon, an army of 30,000 men, and the mission to take Flandres.This was the perfect mission for de Roissins, a Flemish Catholic who had developed a unique hatred for his Huguenot kinsmen. He immediately embarked on a brutal salted earth campaign, attempting to starve out the numerous fortified cities of the region. But unlike Louis, de Roissins was not aiming for surrender by his foes. The fate of Amiens displays just the kind of fate Flandres looked forward to--after the city surrendered de Roissins asked the city’s Huguenot and Jewish communities to convert to Catholicism and give up their ‘riches’ to their proper rulers. When they chose not to, de Roissins burned the ghettos to the ground and destroyed the farms directly outside the city. It is estimated that 12,000 Frenchmen died in de Roissin’s destruction of the Jewish and Huguenot quarters of Amiens, and many contemporaries commented that he was attempting to restart the wars of religion.




But after the destruction of Amiens, none of the fortified cities of Flandres would surrender, and soon the Flemish peasantry had started giving de Roissins trouble. This guerrilla war would go on for the next several months, until suddenly, de Roissins’ flow of reinforcements and supplies trickled to nothing. Soon after, the scouts de Roissins sent south didn’t appear, but de Roissins captured a man who didn’t speak Flemish, Walloon, or Picard. It turned out that the man was a Breton scout, a member of de Gurvand’s troop allied with Louis. Under torture, the Breton revealed that the war was going poorly for the Crusaders: Louis had taken the Vendee and Brittany and defeated von Camfille at Caen. Hearing this, de Roissin withdrew many of his men from the countryside and began to advance south to reinforce de Bourgogne’s position in Lyon, sending a letter with his best messenger to the Duc du Berry (the commander of the force besieging Paris) telling him he should do the same. In the wake of de Roissins, the highly mobilized Flemish populace turned to a fully fledged independence movement, vowing to each other that they would never again become the subjects of French violence.




Jean was not stuck in place during this time; the slow siege in Lyon came mostly because Jean was constantly searching for foreign allies, and convoys had to be organized to bring him to Geneve and Savoy so that he could negotiate with foreign delegations. What he got was a series of empty promises from the Austrians, the Italians, the Prussians, and the Spanish. The delegates of Charles I of England agreed to send troops and a substantial war subsidy, but Charles I was soon thrown out of London and replaced by a Republican government. In place of this, and without cannons with the range to strike against Lyon’s defenses, Jean had retained a strategy of slowly starving the city out while keeping links to his armies to the North and his power-base in Burgundy. When the messages from his northern generals stopped he knew that something had gone wrong, and by late August he finally got a letter telling him that Louis was coming to him from the northwest, and that reinforcements were only a week’s march behind him.


Louis must have known that he was marching into a deadly situation. Jean’s troops were highly trained, and Louis was outnumbered in heavy infantry, heavy cavalry, and worst of all he was marching into a potential encirclement. This was a situation he had been on the opposite side of for so long, but it was the first time he had knowingly encircled himself. For the one great advantage Louis had was in light and ranged troops. While Jean’s army was mostly formed of reformed Tercios of the like seen in Spain, Louis’ army was comprised of mostly light and line infantry, and while Jean had more cannon than Louis did, Louis knew that Jean would not break the siege and would instead break his army in two to meet the Royal Army. This was his only hope: to defeat Bourgogne in a quick battle, move his troops around, and defeat the incoming northern forces. It was a slim chance (Louis had a mere 35,000 men against a combined rebel force of 80,000), but it was all he could hope for; though the new English Republic had agreed to ally with Louis on the provision that Louis accept the recreation of the Edict of Bruges, Louis could not risk the loss of Lyon (which would also lose him the opportunity to negotiate with the Parliamentarians), and he could not allow Jean to combine his forces, which would surely lead to the loss of a massive swathe of land and an increase in Louis’ dependence on English subsidies. And thus, Louis sent the subsidies to the lands under his control asking for 80,000 new recruits by the end of the year and marched into the Rhone Valley.




Marching between the multitude of Rhone estuaries, Louis came to Lyon via the only route which meant not crossing a river. This brought him to the small town of Charbonniers Les Bans, by a plateau bordered by two rivers, on the night of 21st October 1655. Knowing that Jean would be forced to react and that his men were very tired by the march across France, he decided to rest for a night after sending a brigade of light infantry to the town to arrange for food. That night, his men feasted and prepared for their battle against Jean II while Louis concerned himself with the placement of his artillery and the reports of his scouts.


The camp awoke slightly before dawn. Jean’s force had been spotted two miles to the south, and Louis was ordering his men to take position at the most narrow point in the plateau. Louis had guessed correctly: Jean hadn’t brought his artillery with him, but in their place he had brought the entirety of his highly decorated Tercio brigades, who had been hardened from years of fighting first the Dutch and then the French loyalist forces. Against them was Louis’ motley of men, who came from all over the French periphery. Most of them couldn’t even speak French, an issue which had been solved by the adoption of de Gurvand’s flag method. Right before the battle commenced, Louis sent out his light infantry in front of his main force and ordered them into a highly loose formation. De Bourgogne’s men laughed at this--such lack of discipline!--and marched together in the tight order they had been trained in. But soon Louis’ method seemed to be working: their muskets had a longer range than that of their enemies, and as Jean’s Tercios reformed to take fire, Louis’ skirmishers were able to take cover. Soon enough the tercios were in position to take fire from Louis’ artillery, and though they were widely dispersed, they were able to shoot all at once thanks to the use of the flag system. Soon the Tercios broke into a charge with Jean’s heavy cavalry short behind them, after which the skirmishers broke and filtered into Louis’ lines.




It was then when Louis’ free shooters began firing and his halberdiers began forming up. By the time the tercios reached Louis’ lines they were much diminished, and though they did make a major dent in Louis’ halberdiers, they were soon driven off. But just as the infantry were driven off, Louis’ men heard a gallop; Jean’s cavalry was charging and not far off. Louis gave the command for his cavalry to counter-charge and for his artillery and infantry to give one last fire. The cavalry lost a great many men but they still connected with Louis’ line, and for the next two hours the battle descended into a desperate fray. But as morning turned into noon, Jean’s men began drawing back. De Bourgignon was retreating with the few men he had left to form up with his reinforcements.


Louis had definitively won the battle, and when one included the prisoners taken and the men lost to Louis’ pursuing light cavalry, he had lost a mere 5,000 men to De Bourgignon’s 18,000. The Siege on Lyon was lifted and Jean’s artillery was captured. But, as the last rays of sunlight shone out, Louis received a message intercepted from one of Jean’s messengers. The message said:


“The Habsburgs have taken your alliance offer into consideration, and after considering your generous offers, we accept your call to arms, and will be sending troops to support you after the winter’s thaw.”

Rifal said:

“The Habsburgs have taken your alliance offer into consideration, and after considering your generous offers, we accept your call to arms, and will be sending troops to support you after the winter’s thaw.”

Oh Snap!

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Yeah, now we have a real war on our hands!

GulMacet said:

Yes! My people are doing something!

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Yeah! They're at a high point with regards to the Turks so I guess fighting to restore Franche Comte seems like a good idea.

DensleyBlair said:

Hapsburgs will certainly help. What could possibly go wrong now that tens of thousands of Austrians will be helping combat the evil rebels? Somehow I get the feeling that the French may find another way to make things hard for themselves...

Great stuff, though, as ever.

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Eh, the issue that Jean is going to have to face is that he's campaigning for a stronger France, while showing obvious weakness to a pair of allies he is very much reliant on

Thank you everyone!

Thoctar said:

I love the ominousness present in this, I guess the Revolution happened right on schedule after all! More awesome chapters, yay~

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Well on some kind of schedule, but (and this is giving it away but you can see it from the dates anyway) it goes for a lot longer than our French Revolution did.