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Beginnings of the Enlightenment Part One: Amelot de la Houssaye and the beginning of the Enlightenment
Article from “The Journal of Human Sciences”, 1987
All progressions in the history of Western thought have coincided with two combined factors: the discovery of another tradition of thought, very different from the West’s own (classical Greece with the Renaissance, Asian societies with Impressionism, African ones with Modernism), and the recontextualization of European thought which came with some traumatic event (the Black Plague, industrialization, the First Great War). Generally the discovery of the foreign line of thinking came first, as it did in the early Enlightenment.
Dating the Enlightenment is a difficult task, for there were many ‘Enlightened’ ventures which sputtered out in the environment of the Renaissance, from Galileo’s astronomy to the early ventures towards encyclopedias to Henri II’s ‘Gentlemanly Society”. Some historians have placed the Enlightenment’s beginnings in the 1670s, some in the 1710s. While all of these are defendable, I would suggest a new point of departure; the creation of the “Prince’s Syllabus” created a new literary canon for those who would engage in statecraft, and opened a new selection of terms which would dominate the 18th century.
The Ecole de Philosophe, the school which would produce a colossal amount of the intellectuals and bureaucrats of the 18th century, which accepted the Prince’s Syllabus as its core material
At the center of this was one very unlikely figure: Abraham Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye, or Amelot de la Houssaye. While we do not know much about Amelot de la Houssaye, we can presume, given his name and first position, that he was born to a Huguenot family in Orleans on 1634. This position put him in an awkward place; while Henri II nominally accepted Protestants within his realm, outside of the overrepresented Flemards few Huguenots were able to enter the governmental service. Regardless, we know that he gained a position as the vice-ambassador in Lisbon by the 1650s, which suggests that he converted at some point early in his life. This luckily placed him well outside of the horrors of both the War of Unification* and the Fronde, and for seven years he honed his skills and attended the Jesuit School of Lisbon while representing a country which was in freefall.
This ended in 1656, with the War of French Succession leading to the annexation of Portugal by Habsburg Spain. De La Houssaye was tossed out of the country alongside all of France’s other diplomats, and more importantly to de la Houssaye’s intellectual path, he was thrown to Bordeaux and his Jesuit teaching was rudely interrupted just as he was finishing his studies. Intellectually starving, de la Houssaye turned to the great local philosopher of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne**. This included a dusty old copy of Montaigne’s History of the Wars of Religion, which would mark de la Houssaye’s outlook for the rest of his life. While we cannot definitively say anything about his early writings, de la Houssaye’s actions suggest a man who accepted things as they were and did little to change them: his conversion to Catholicism, his acceptance of a government job in a deeply intolerant government, and his continued working in the government despite its failure to either pay him or provide him with an actual job. This contrasts strongly with the deeply critical later de la Houssaye.
Michel de Montaigne, known primarily for his Essays, also contributed greatly if inadvertently to republican thought
In 1561, sometime after de la Houssaye read the History of the Religious Wars, he was reassigned to the Venetian consulship where he personally ran the consulate. Venice ended up being the perfect target for his newfound ire; it was a city whose government was corrupted to the core, whose corruption was furthered and deepened by constant Medici-Habsburg sparring over position in the city. And so, for the next decade, de la Houssaye worked as the consul of Venice while gaining ever deeper access to Venice’s archives. This archive trawling led to one of the first modern historical projects of the era, “A History of the Venetian Republic and Its Downfall”.
The book, which promised and gave its readers a detailed description of Venice’s fall from independence and republicanism into a corrupt city state within the corrupt Habsburg Empire. De la Houssaye went deep into the language of the Venetian court, the kind of language which it used to simultaneously legitimize Habsburg rule of the city while obscuring their total lack of independence. “It seems that the more titles the Doge of Venice accrued, the less power he had. The Doge alone among the lords of the German Empire had the Emperor present at his election, a serene tradition meant to show the importance that Venetian affairs had above all other cities. On closer study of the archives, however, I found that this was a ruse. The Emperor was present at Venice not to show Venice’s importance, but to cement her subservience. Each of the last four elections had involved vast sums of money being channeled into the Senate; the growth of the Imperial faction has coincided with the growth of senatorial manors which rival anything seen in France or Iberia.”
’The Most Serene Republic had once been the most powerful and independent nations of Italy, once had commanded prestige and glory, but not it is the corrupted rump backwater of a desolate Empire. The Venetians every day swear ever greater fealty to the rival their forefathers had fought and died in opposition to.”
The book led to an irreversible change in de Houssaye’s career. The diplomatic incident over A History of the Venetian Republic led to the expelling of de Houssaye and a short period in the Bastille. However, the book also represented a major snubbing of one of France’s greatest foes, which delighted the court of Louis XIII. Beyond this it was a best seller; a journalistic account of an age old tale of moral decline and corruption. After two weeks spent in the Bastille, Amelot de Houssaye found himself released and under the patronage of Francis, Duke D’Orleans.
Francis was a man ahead of his times; a courtier in Henri II’s court who fully accepted Henri’s idea of a “Gentlemanly Society”, he had become vice-chancellor for Germany under Louis XIII and was in a perpetual attempt to rise above his rank. Perhaps, earlier in his life, d’Orleans would have charmed de Houssaye, but now his whole world of flamboyant social risers disgusted him. “I have left one world of lies and entered another”, he wrote in his journal.
Francis d’Orleans
However, de Houssaye was not one to turn down patronage until he had established his next stepping stone. And so he spent his time reading d’Orlean’s library, focusing particularly on Tacitus. It was at this point that de Houssaye found the second rare book which would change his life: an exceedingly rare copy of Machiavelli’s early works, reserved for the elite of French society. Reading the two at once led to the next ‘phase’ of de Houssaye’s work, and he began translating Tacitus into French.
Since Henri II, France has had two sets of censors: one for the broader public, which still censored subversive material (including Machiavelli’s works and A History of The Religious War) whose methodologies and messages were dubbed too dangerous for the masses. The other was far looser, and regulated what books the inner circle of the court could consume. Unlike the masses, it was often considered of chief importance that courtly officials would read subversive texts in order to analyze the flaws in France’s opponents and within France itself***.
Amelot de Houssaye was a classically trained man who, by fortune and skill, discovered the beginnings of the modern historical tradition. The goal before him: to repackage these subversive ideas so that they would be fit for mass consumption, was daunting to say the least. He would find an ally in this, in the form of Pierre Bayle.
Pierre Bayle, author of one of the first dictionaries of philosophy
Pierre Bayle was one of the giants of that phase between the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment. He had also read Montaigne and Machiavelli as well as other modern works, and he applied this new means to his analysis of classical philosophers. It was this innovation--getting past the censors by ascribing your views to the Ancients--that Amelot de Houssaye utilized.
The idea of utilizing an Ancient’s words to justify one’s ideas was not new: one could see it in Europe as far back as Roman times, and it was a commonplace in Chinese thought up until the Shanghai Enlightenment. While de Houssaye’s “Tiberie”, “The World of Flattery”, and “Rules for a Courier” were not definitively the step into Enlightenment social theory which concerned itself with studying contemporary events and thought, it was the last bridge between the Medieval and Enlightenment traditions.
Tiberie was a combined translation/commentary on Tactitus’ history of Tiberius’ rule. Tacitus had long been the official historian of the Bourbon’s, and his positive portrayal of the rule of the Caesars had been used as the justification for centralization since Louis XII. This was supported by an illicitly Machiavellian reading of Tacitus, which put a version of Machiavelli’s words in Tacitus’ mouth, and used Tiberius as a standin for Il Principe.
De Houssaye turned this on its head, arguing that Tiberius was a tyrant whose centralizations led to a decadent and morally degenerate Rome, where the “senators scurried, trying in any way they could to side with their Emperor, like children begging for a treat”. De Houssaye went a bit too far in parts, using Frondeur imagery of an infantilized populace but going yet a step further: “this state of affairs is not a unique attribute of Empire; rather, it is the nature of all monarchs to weaken liberty, morality, and genius”.
”One is tempted to say that the growth of a eunuch class in the Eastern Roman Empire was merely the last step in a process which had begun with Augustus: that all servants are halfway to being eunuchs already”
The printing of Tiberie in 1678 led to a month long stay in the Bastille and de Houssaye’s loss of his patron. He gained a new patron and yet another escape from the Parisian prison from the Breton merchant Clemente Rousson. Rousson, a middling ship builder and cosmopolitan, had patronized a number of translations/commentaries, including a French edition of the Quran and the Tao de Jiang. De Houssaye’s third book, “Rules for a Courier”, aimed to be far less controvercial, and merely supplied Machiavellian analysis for the servants of the Bourbon court. The book was just as popular as A History of Venice, and put de Houssaye on the radar of far more important figures.
De Houssaye ended up moving to London to live with his friends Bayle and d’Artagnan the younger, where he continued to write translations of Tacitus and Machiavelli into French. And while his books were popular, he was never able to live in true comfort and died in 1686 from disease, and in his estate included several finished books which he, out of a fear of imprisonment, had not published yet. The explosion of interest around de Houssaye following his death coincided in the death of the man who had pushed him from France: Louis XIII. The regent, Colbert, had to find a way to swiftly educate the young dauphin while managing the massive administrative enterprise he had made out of the French state. In doing so he created the ‘prince’s syllabus’, which were to be read by the dauphin in order and under the eyes of a trained tutor. This was not a unique event, excepting Colbert’s release of the syllabus to the general public, creating a massive market for the texts listed. In place of Machiavelli, de Houssaye’s least controversial work, “Rules for a Courier”, was published under the auspices of the Syllabus, turning it into a massive success. I will discuss the affect that the Syllabus had in a later article, but I will shortly discuss the effect that de Houssaye’s work had on later French intellectual history, because as a man who primarily translated and commented on works, he has been largely forgotten.by the Quebecois academic establishment.
Machiavelli is remembered, in North America, as a manipulative mastermind, the progenitor of tyranny, the forefather of a Machiavellianism with ‘the ends justify the means’ as his watchword. This comes from a perception of his work as comprised of positive statements to be repeated. A significantly different tradition has surrounded the thinker in France. In it he was a republican and libertarian thinker whose works described Italy as it was at the time, that is he described a situation to be deplored. This tradition began with de Houssaye and formed the beginnings of the revolutionary canon in Europe.
*Between the Huguenot powers, which includes Lorraine and the Netherlands which I will note now was the primary location for Huguenots after the War of Religion and is thus thoroughly Frenchified, Italy, and France. It led to a massive loss, the death of Henri II and his children, and the Fronde, which was a civil war which lead to the rule of the Orleans branch of the Bourbons. These conflicts went for a decade and ended French dominance of the continent for thirty years.
**While OTL Montaigne was mostly known during his lifetime for his moderate position in the War of Religion and his support for Henri IV de Bourbon, ITTL the ‘moderate’ position was already in charge during Montaigne’s lifetime, and was one of the most violence forces during the War of Religion. So, beyond writing the Essais, Montaigne also led the first project of modern history, the History of the Religious Wars. This history included a discussion of politics which was rather blatantly anti-establishment, and a methodology based on primary resources. The group of nobles who wrote the History of the Religion Wars were murdered shortly afterwards and the book went into disrepute alongside the far better known Essais.
***This is actually true, Machiavelli was read by Richelieu and by officials within Louis XIV’s court in order to develop their skills, and archive trawling was often used to the purposes of propaganda.
Note: De Houssaye is an actual really cool guy and the book Publishing the Prince is amazing and you should read it
Was very immersive hearing about these historians of the era. I feel I'm going to enjoy this AAR! 
Nice introduction, I look forward to following this one from the start this time!
Heck yeah! I'm really pumped about my readership I have to say like I respect all of you guys so freaking much
Yeah for a while I had an idea of a Francophone world being far better than ours and then I realized that'd be boring as heck, so we have a Bonapartist/caudillo-esque Quebec.
Was very immersive hearing about these historians of the era. I feel I'm going to enjoy this AAR!
Thank you!!! The next section is actually going to have screenshots I swear
I must first say that I am very much looking forward to these promised screenshots. Having a reference point to the game is always a bonus.
In any case, these scene-setting essays and such are similarly appreciated. De la Houssaye seems quite the character of interest, so I shall enjoy seeing how his various writings impact French society in the coming years.
In any case, these scene-setting essays and such are similarly appreciated. De la Houssaye seems quite the character of interest, so I shall enjoy seeing how his various writings impact French society in the coming years.
Yes, count me in, great to see you make the leap forward to EUIV Merrick!
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I must first say that I am very much looking forward to these promised screenshots. Having a reference point to the game is always a bonus.
In any case, these scene-setting essays and such are similarly appreciated. De la Houssaye seems quite the character of interest, so I shall enjoy seeing how his various writings impact French society in the coming years.
Thank you and yeah I'll make sure to contextualize a lot more than I did in LoF1.
And I hope that de la Houssaye ends up coming up a lot more often, as opposed to the section I wrote on Montaigne that only got brought up now.
Hell yeah!
Colbert’s Regency, 1687-1694
From The Great Administrators of France, 1782, Henri de Saint-Simon
Colbert was one of the great giants of French history. Increasingly dominating the Council over the reign of Louis the Thirteenth, by his rise to regent he was the minister of no less than seven ministries (the navy, forestry, mining, manufactures, fortresses, logistics, and the treasury) and had his fingers in almost every other ministry in the Council. In a kingdom where administration became dominated by the army and the aristocracy, the fact that Colbert, a mere bureaucrat commoner, was able to rise to the top of the government, just underscores the capability and undying industriousness of that great man.
Colbert’s skill was put to the ultimate test late into his life: at the age of 68, he became the regent of Henri III and became sole ruler of France. The seven years of the Colbert regency saw a complete shift in French politics, the deconstruction of Louis XIII’s army-led government, and the creation of a doctrine which France has followed for the whole of this century.
Colbert’s reputation as a fiscal genius remains into modernity; among all of France’s rulers his reputation alone has not changed over the years
But what we should keep in mind is the conditions from which Colbertism made sense. Colbert came to power in a France suffering from plague, in a deep panic where as many as a fifth of the French subjects were destitute, and where the French state itself was deeply in debt. This was a far worse problem than we see it as: now, a century later and in retrospection, we know that the next century would be a golden age, filled with prosperity, advances in technology, and a period of French cultural dominance unrivaled by any period since Rome. But at the time this was a serious matter: if France was not to break from its period of mass listlessness and destitution, the loss of nearly a quarter of her population would like have remained, and the ‘victory’ France achieved against the Netherlands would have entrenched itself, and the “Golden Age” would never have occurred. It was Colbert’s deft steering of this crisis which brought about the Golden Age, rather than some inevitable series of events, and it was his actions later which have created the economic ideology which France has retained since. I shall list my discussion of Colbert’s actions by separating them into three categories: the development of debt and colonial shares as a means of financing projects, the focus on internal trade, and the development of local industrial techniques for the national benefit.
A)Colonial and National Debt
The first issue at hand was France’s debt. Without access to funds France would not be able to recover from her crisis, and further taxes would just worsen an already bad situation. But Colbert's manipulations of the French debt had made creditors unwilling to provide the French state with further funding, and Colbert had already sold nearly half of royal lands as well as a massive assortment of positions and privileges. This assortment of auctions for positions and privileges came from the brutal economic fact of the old regime: that there were little to no taxes assigned to the rich, who owned the majority of land and held the majority of wealth. And even though the French state had not even scratched the surface of the billions of livres stocked within the treasuries of the grand nobility, there were few things which he would be able to sell which would give him access to this vast store of wealth. But by Colbert’s luck he had found the one thing which would access that wealth: stock in the French colonial companies.
Colbert began selling stock in each of the French colonial companies, starting with the South China company.
While the English and Dutch had funded their colonial ventures via joint-stock companies from the beginning, French expansion outside of Quebec had always come through conquest and had been strictly under the purview of the government. However, these companies had brought in a massive amount of profit: the East Indies company alone had given France a third of her income. This had led to a series of requests for the opening up of these companies to some form of stock market, requests which Louis XIII had denied, under the idea that the administration of the colonies was a military matter. Colbert had no such scruples, and began opening up the French colonies to stock trading one at a time, starting with the South China Company, then moving on to the East India Company, the Suez Shipping Company*, the West Africa Company and the Antilles Company. The French state took five percent of all purchases, and beyond that started selling Company debt while taking ten percent of those purchases. Within a three year span, money from Company bonds and stocks gave France forty million livres, which allowed Colbert to pay off the highest interest loans and begin his other projects. Since Colbert succeeded in leveraging colonial debt to the benefit of the metropole, France saw the normalization of the royal debt, and kings afterwards saw debt bills, whether they came from the crown or the colonies, as one of the primary means to fund the treasury.
B)Internal Trade
Henri II had begun the development of French infrastructure with the creation of a series of canals which connected Paris and Caux to the Lowlands, based off of technology recently discovered from the Chinese. These canals were mostly oriented towards external trade: the Lowlands had always been more connected to the outside of France than the inside, and the canals gave the Seine basin the same advantage; Parisian goods were now shipped via the Bruges port to Sweden, England, Hannover, England, Italy. Now Henri and all the administrators after him knew that this was not the best means of transporting goods within France, that a system of kingdom wide roads would allow for not only external but internal trade. But this road system seemed impossible to fund and unnecessary so long as the canals connected France’s major cities.
The roads were considered unfundable, both in terms of construction and maintenance. But as Colbert and Vauban worked together in Bresse, they discovered an innovative means to fund a series of roads built to supply France’s new fortresses on the Franco-Italian border. Colbert knew that setting up a series of toll roads would allow the roads system to maintain itself, but was only able to begin construction after 1688, when the funds from the sale of East Indies Company stock allowed him to do.
The New Toll Roads set up by Colbert, which began with ‘Vauban’s Roads’ which supplied the fortresses on the French border and ended with the “Breton Road” in 1712. The colors indicate toll areas
The Royal Roads, which connected France’s major cities and major areas of agricultural and manufactorial production, began to weaken France’s dependence on finishing imports. While France continued to rely on the transformation of colonial and foreign goods into luxuries for her manufacturing industry (with particularities of dependence in the textile industry, which had 60% of its goods coming from the transformation of silk, a trend even more highly defined in Lyon, Canadian wood in the furniture industry which accounted for 50% of inputs, not to mention porcelain, coffee, tobacco), the development of the road system led to the development of some lower-prince industries, like woolen textiles, pine furniture, and metalworking. It also brought employment to portions of France ravaged by the plague.
The creation of a national market for French goods went a small ways towards undoing the problems of French manufacturing. However it has now reinforced the problems it was created to solve. The tolls which funded the road have not changed in the six centuries since they were built, a time when ocean travel became far cheaper. We have returned to a time where it is cheaper to import and finish goods rather than relying simply on the national market.
C-The forgotten link; New Industries Part 1: Orleans
The last element of Colbert’s actions which have been mostly forgotten by later administrators and by history itself. While mining has become an increasingly important industry in France, we have forgotten how it began, and while Orleans whiskey has become popular amongst the masses, few have considered its origins. Both the whiskey industry and the beginnings of mining in the Central date to Colbert’s actions during his regency, and his promotion of new and innovative local industries.
In 1690, with the highest interest debt paid down and with the first Royal Roads under construction, Colbert opened the Council to traders and merchants who wanted to ask for support in the creation of new industries in areas facing high vagrancy. While many of the requests were ridiculous, one request by Francis Detrac, merchant of Orleans, caught his eye. Orleans was one of the most heavily recruited regions in France during the war and had left much of her wheat crop fallow. Beyond that the city had lost nearly a half of its population during the war and was in desperate straights. Detrac suggested that the development of a whiskey distillery (a new technology in the 17th century which had barely broken out of Ireland) would increase the national product while creating a center of employment for the bourgeoisie of Orleans. Colbert agreed.
The beginnings of the Detrac Whiskey Company in Orleans ([color]yes I know, but French beer?????????????? No. No, I deny this.[/color])
Orleans had been an army town since its integration into France, with little in the city besides the Army Academy and the University. This meant that most of the town’s residents would leave upon graduation and made Orleans very much a ‘satellite town’ of Paris. This was true of a number of nearby cities which had little economic power of their own. In chartering the distillery Colbert began a shift away from a French economic system based on several equally sized but small cities (Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux) oriented around the economic engine of the French Lowlands, to a system of several far larger cities powered by mono-industry small towns and based primarily around Paris.
The creation (and, later, expansion) of the Detrac distillery had another effect: it was the first major government project since Louis XII which excluded the guilds. Henri II, who had focused heavily on guild-controlled Flandres, leaned hard on the guilds in his projects, leading to the dominance of the journeymen for any construction work, and the focus on luxury materials. The Derac Distillery, which soon became the largest employer in Orleans, had no guild associated with it, allowing for cheaper labor and cheaper products.
Part 2: The Massif Central
Colbert oversaw another major development in the French economy: the exploitation of the Central mountain range’s metals. The Massif Central covers nearly a fifth of our country, and its broken and arid hills have impoverished the South since the ebbing of the Mediterranean’s influence. In 1692, after the resolution of the debt crisis and after the completion of the first of the royal roads around Paris and the Detrac distillery, Colbert was looking for a project in the south of France, which was found in a petition from the cities of Limoges and Saint Etienne.
The Massif Central range encompassed the majority of Auvergne, but its major cities (which finished and refined the ore mined in the range) were Limoges and Saint-Etienne
The two cities were on each side of the Massif, and both had developed methods to refine the metal which came from those hills; Limoges refined copper into bronze and Saint Etienne was in the process of trying to replicate Alsatian steel. Both of these industries were desperately important to the French interest: despite having the largest army in all of Europe, France had few weapons manufactories and mostly relied on imported Swiss muskets and cannon.
Colbert responded to these requests by pouring money into the Massif Central, expanding mining operations and chartering France’s first weapons manufactory in Saint-Etienne. As the 17th century turned to the 18th, iron became the center of early French industry, undergirding the growth in construction, the beginnings of the tool industry, clockmaking and of course cannons and muskets.
The expansion of mining in Auvergne was the beginning of a total shift in the French economy from the household upward
The Massif Central area is now, if not the richest province, the most economically advanced. Through the rest of France and through the whole of French history, France had two advantages over her rivals: the strength of her luxury industries, which came through her guilds and provided the courts of the world with beauties not yet seen since the time of the Greeks, and the flexibility of the French domestic economy. These have become weaknesses we must overcome if France is to become a modern economic power.
The strength of luxury goods such as silk have created a space where laggardly means of hand-production have survived, and perversely many feel that this is the best way to make products and still partake in the consumption of these foolish trinkets. Put simply, the strength of our luxuries has retarded the development of our industries and created a force which have denied us that development: the guilds.
The French peasant lives a simple life which is economically complicated; he goes and tills his fields until nightfall, then returns home and helps the rest of his family to create some basic good, usually textiles. Previously, this allowed France to have a deeply flexible industry where a multitude of goods were created and finished in the provinces. Now, it keeps us from achieving what we could. The insular nature of the French domestic economy means that there is no need for consumption, no exchange of currency, no concentrated centers of industrial innovation. The time that the peasant spends creating products at his home is manhours wasted, the same for the time of his children and wife, who should also be working. Work should be specialized, with each province doing only what is best for that province. Only in Auvergne do we see this tendency, with the Gironde estuary producing only grain and livestock for the surrounding mines, where the mines employ three quarters of the population for refining in Saint Etienne, Moulins, and Limoges. This is the ideal province, the best hope for our country.
*Editors note: French relations with the Ottoman Empire allowed a caravan to pass with goods from the East Indies. Although a majority of goods shipped across the Cape due to how dangerous the route was, the Suez passageway allowed France to maintain trading relations with her eastern colonies during the wars and had become deeply profitable. It also led to a co-dependency between French traders and North African corsairs which led to the beginnings of the Mediterranean War
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Why were you so opposed to French beer? They, and their Belgian cousins, produce and drink their fair share .
Colbert seems something of a master economist, nice to see the French economy steaming ahead. Industry here we come!
.Colbert seems something of a master economist, nice to see the French economy steaming ahead. Industry here we come!
French whisky but not French beer? Fair enough.
Colbert seems on the ball but how are all the military sorts used to King Louis taking to his *capitalism in the colonies?
Colbert seems on the ball but how are all the military sorts used to King Louis taking to his *capitalism in the colonies?
Why were you so opposed to French beer? They, and their Belgian cousins, produce and drink their fair share
Colbert seems something of a master economist, nice to see the French economy steaming ahead. Industry here we come!
Listen the French can't get all uppity about how the Belgians oh they drink beer what weirdos and then have me write about the creation of the first beer distillery that doesn't make sense.
And Colbert was a pretty skilled administrator, I was just thinking of what would happen if he weren't hamstrung by having to pick up every single single one of Louis XIV's messes.
The colonies aren't going to like it, the idea of colonial debt is really going to screw them over over time but at the moment there's just mumbling.
Thank you very much Tommy this is a huge honor!
Also, to be perfectly honest when I saw that a reader had the award I worked as hard as I could to pull a double, but I came just short.
The Palace Coup of Du Berry
Henri III’s reign is known as the heyday of Enlightened Absolutism, a period where governance was entirely transcendent over the people. Now, arguments have been made in recent years over whether France was truly the ‘start’ of absolutism or whether it began in Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands. This jockeying for position is misguided (or, rather, guided. by a political culture that seems to have taken an odd liking to absolutism), because absolutism grew slowly over time, and there is little, intellectually, to be gained from fiddling over origins. Rather, we should look to the tendencies of absolutism to understand, not who can gain bragging rights, but rather what defines absolutism and what it means to live under it.
Although a form of absolutism had been developing for over a century in France, it was still in a period of emergence where it conflicted with other governments, other political philosophies. If we define Absolutism as a governmental structure which references only itself, and leaving aside the question of whether absolutism ever occurred*, there is one point in French history that we can definitively say that Absolutism had taken hold: the attempted palace coup of 1692.
The Viscomte du Berry, the perpetrator of an attempted palace coup against the Colbert-Vauban regency
This may seem odd; Du Berry’s attempted coup was traditionally seen as the reason for Henri III’s desire for isolation, a parallel to the childhood of Henri II producing a similar man in radically different times. It was the reason he built Versailles, the reason for the institution of a separate Royal Guard, the psychological reason for Henri’s desire for absolutism. But in reality, the Coup was a product of the very discourse it sought to destroy, and the radical break that this coup had from all earlier attempts to wrest power from the government means that, despite being nominally against Absolutism as it manifested in the form of Colbert, du Berry was actually playing into the kind of politics which would continue far after his death.
First, let us consider the historic rebellions which attempted to take control over the Louvre. From the beginning of the Renaissance onwards, there is the War of the Commonwealth against Henri I de Hapsbourg, the War of Religion against Louis XII, and the Fronde which was fought over who would be King after the Duc de Bourgogne murdered Henri II**. That is, each King since the death of Louis XI had been subject to a major rebellion, each with the intent of removing the King and replacing him with another, more amenable monarch. With the obvious exception of the War of Religion, each has also had a relatively similar ideology, or rather imaginary: each focused on the image of a tyrannical monarch effeminizing the nobility, each portrayed themselves in lieu of a chivalric ancestor to the current weakened nobility, and each waged regular warfare in search of its goals. Furthermore, each was in general a product discontent by the provinces against the centre, with the rebels being primarily comprised of independent officers from the East and South who had their own private military forces. Put shortly, each rebellion was an attack by the exterior against the interior, during a period of time when external aristocrats still possessed a larger military force than the government could possibly wish for.
Provinces in Rebellion during the War of the Coalition, the Religious Wars, the Fronde and the du Berry conspiracy. Blue signifies government forces, red forces attempting to simply usurp power, green provincial and autonomist revolts, purple Protestant forces, and yellow Ultra-Orthodox Catholics.
This had changed substantially over the course of Louis XIII’s reign. This partly came from the simple weight of history: the destruction of each rebellion had weakened the strength of the older families, who were either exiled, executed, or had their land appropriated by the crown. Of the 93 ancient families who had been registered when Louis XI instituted the beginnings of the French bureaucracy, only three remained. The average aristocrat during the time of Louis XIII could only record their noble roots back two centuries, and the majority of these families were ‘noblesse de robe’, that is they had been promoted to the bureaucracy rather than through martial prowess. Beyond this, Louis XIII’s power base primarily came from the South, and he had spent much of his life recruiting and integrating the previously rebellious Gascony. Quite simply, by the time of the Colbert regency there was little room for an organized force in the provinces.
Now that we have discussed the historical dimension, let us look to the events of the conspiracy. Louis XIII had countered the Frondeur’s image of a nation of men emasculated by the King by presenting a counter image, of a nation ruled by its military and dedicated to martial glory. Under this lens, we can understand why figures like de Houssaye--who repurposed the Frondeur imaginary away from being for a different kind of absolutism to being republican--were so punished. But this meant that Colbert’s reorientation towards commerce and trade struck the military as a return to the weakness of Henri II. There were plenty of hints of this: the young Henri showed a larger interest in the colonies than in the military, he was being taught as an academic who would mostly act within the court, he was even considering taking the same name as his great uncle. These gave pause to the military, and they feared what could happen if the King were allowed to become a weakling.
A conspirator spreading anti-Colbert invective to anger a Parisian mob
And so a group of forty eight officers came together with the goal of killing Colbert, kidnapping the King, and making du Berry (the Marshal) regent. The plot included the majority of the Council who were infuriated at Colbert’s micromanagement and over-activity, and half of the Military Council, including such great names as de Notteau, the hero of Kolbenz, d’Intaci, the spiritual head of the Italian exiles in the French army, and de Villenueve, whose ancestor was the first Marshal, As Du Berry’s conspiracy spread, he went so far as to attempt to recruit Eugene de Savoie, the close friend of Henri III. But Eugene was a loyal man, who recoiled at even the suggestion of a coup agaisnt Colbert. Eugene’s refusal forced the conspirators’ hands, and their plot was pushed weeks ahead.
Du Berry started his plot by spreading anti-Colbert propaganda through Paris, informing the people of the “Oriental forms of perversion” that Henri was being taught by his tutors. These enraged mobs prevented Colbert from leaving the Louvre, and made it easier to make a move on Henri. On the 13th of April 1691, a group of five horsemen were sent to peacefully capture Henri and Eugene, who were practicing horsemanship to the northeast of Paris.
What occurred next was wholly outside of the plans of the conspirators: the young prince, so seemingly soft, killed three of his assailants as they were taking him away, and Eugene and he took the other two hostage to the fort at Meaux, which was at the time being presided over by Vauban and his mobile engineers. As it became clear that the mission to kidnap the King and his dear friend had failed, the conspirators moved to kill Colbert, launching an assault on the Louvre which would be one of the defining events of the Regency.
Colbert’s men do battle with the forces of the conspirators.
Although the Mobile Engineers were an hour away, many of the Conspirators (and more importantly their men) were losing their morale at the knowledge of their plans’ failure. On the other side, Colbert’s men were invigorated by the knowledge of incoming reinforcements, and battles at the barricades in the Louvre proceeded at a snail’s pace. Just as du Berry’s men broke into the last room from the Council, Henri and Eugene arrived at the gates of Paris. They provided their own form of propaganda, saying that the conspirators aimed to raise higher taxes and recruit more men from Paris, to the aim of unnecessary wars. This was not enough, and while the militia and many men in the garrison immediately aligned with Henri, the mob had been riled up too far, and street to street fighting occurred for two hours before Vauban’s troops broke out and got to the Louvre. But they were too late. In a last ditch attempt du Berry murdered Colbert, and occupied the palace with the intention of forcing the King to make him regent. But his men were completely demoralized, and surrendered to the King and his new regent, Vauban. The majority of the conspirators were exiled, with their land and titles stripped and their seats replaced. Du Berry, however, had his tendons cut before he was drawn and quartered, and his family fled to the German Empire.
The conspiracy of Du Berry has long been held as the catalyst for Henri’s move towards total absolutism. Some have argued that it created a psychological trauma leading to a need for control, though such discussions place a modern idea of stability onto a world which had little of it--if this event led to such a trauma nearly every person in Europe would have similar attributes. Some others have followed a more institutional tradition going as far back as de Boheme, arguing that the failed conspiracy led to the exhausting of the last power outside the monarchy, allowing for total domination of the country by a disconnected court.
The drawing and quartering of du Berry. His son would go on to oppose Henri in all his doings, as general in the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern armies
I would go deeper than that, and say that the Conspiracy in and of itself had already accepted the logic of absolutism and disconnected politics. Why did du Berry not consider taking the throne himself, as de Bourgogne did? Or replacing the king with a pretender, as Vigny attempted to do? Why did he never try to engage in open warfare and instead clung to the shadows of Paris and the Louvre?
He never did any of these things, and his journals and records show that he never even considered them. Because by the end of the 18th century, the logics of absolutist rule were already widely accepted, and the politics of the court had lost reference to anything outside of itself. Du Berry plotted a palace coup because, as Henri rose to power, the palace had created a world inside of itself, subject to its own logic which had the force of natural law. Over the course of the 18th century, the court would find itself defeated by the one force left which could oppose it: the whole of the People.
*Which will be the subject of my next article
**While the ‘War of the Regency’ was cut short by Saint Chaumond’s adept handling of the Bread Riot of 1612 and while it seemingly had many parallels to Du Berry’s attempted coup, it showed the beginnings of the tendencies I have just discussed: the Regent was attempting to replace Henri II with a young Louis XIII and was beginning to mobilize the army officers loyal to him, which again were primarily in the south.
Also, to be perfectly honest when I saw that a reader had the award I worked as hard as I could to pull a double, but I came just short.
The Palace Coup of Du Berry
Excerpted from the Journal of the Early Enlgihtenment, by Franceau Robb written 1984
Henri III’s reign is known as the heyday of Enlightened Absolutism, a period where governance was entirely transcendent over the people. Now, arguments have been made in recent years over whether France was truly the ‘start’ of absolutism or whether it began in Germany, Italy, or the Netherlands. This jockeying for position is misguided (or, rather, guided. by a political culture that seems to have taken an odd liking to absolutism), because absolutism grew slowly over time, and there is little, intellectually, to be gained from fiddling over origins. Rather, we should look to the tendencies of absolutism to understand, not who can gain bragging rights, but rather what defines absolutism and what it means to live under it.
Although a form of absolutism had been developing for over a century in France, it was still in a period of emergence where it conflicted with other governments, other political philosophies. If we define Absolutism as a governmental structure which references only itself, and leaving aside the question of whether absolutism ever occurred*, there is one point in French history that we can definitively say that Absolutism had taken hold: the attempted palace coup of 1692.
The Viscomte du Berry, the perpetrator of an attempted palace coup against the Colbert-Vauban regency
This may seem odd; Du Berry’s attempted coup was traditionally seen as the reason for Henri III’s desire for isolation, a parallel to the childhood of Henri II producing a similar man in radically different times. It was the reason he built Versailles, the reason for the institution of a separate Royal Guard, the psychological reason for Henri’s desire for absolutism. But in reality, the Coup was a product of the very discourse it sought to destroy, and the radical break that this coup had from all earlier attempts to wrest power from the government means that, despite being nominally against Absolutism as it manifested in the form of Colbert, du Berry was actually playing into the kind of politics which would continue far after his death.
First, let us consider the historic rebellions which attempted to take control over the Louvre. From the beginning of the Renaissance onwards, there is the War of the Commonwealth against Henri I de Hapsbourg, the War of Religion against Louis XII, and the Fronde which was fought over who would be King after the Duc de Bourgogne murdered Henri II**. That is, each King since the death of Louis XI had been subject to a major rebellion, each with the intent of removing the King and replacing him with another, more amenable monarch. With the obvious exception of the War of Religion, each has also had a relatively similar ideology, or rather imaginary: each focused on the image of a tyrannical monarch effeminizing the nobility, each portrayed themselves in lieu of a chivalric ancestor to the current weakened nobility, and each waged regular warfare in search of its goals. Furthermore, each was in general a product discontent by the provinces against the centre, with the rebels being primarily comprised of independent officers from the East and South who had their own private military forces. Put shortly, each rebellion was an attack by the exterior against the interior, during a period of time when external aristocrats still possessed a larger military force than the government could possibly wish for.
Provinces in Rebellion during the War of the Coalition, the Religious Wars, the Fronde and the du Berry conspiracy. Blue signifies government forces, red forces attempting to simply usurp power, green provincial and autonomist revolts, purple Protestant forces, and yellow Ultra-Orthodox Catholics.
This had changed substantially over the course of Louis XIII’s reign. This partly came from the simple weight of history: the destruction of each rebellion had weakened the strength of the older families, who were either exiled, executed, or had their land appropriated by the crown. Of the 93 ancient families who had been registered when Louis XI instituted the beginnings of the French bureaucracy, only three remained. The average aristocrat during the time of Louis XIII could only record their noble roots back two centuries, and the majority of these families were ‘noblesse de robe’, that is they had been promoted to the bureaucracy rather than through martial prowess. Beyond this, Louis XIII’s power base primarily came from the South, and he had spent much of his life recruiting and integrating the previously rebellious Gascony. Quite simply, by the time of the Colbert regency there was little room for an organized force in the provinces.
Now that we have discussed the historical dimension, let us look to the events of the conspiracy. Louis XIII had countered the Frondeur’s image of a nation of men emasculated by the King by presenting a counter image, of a nation ruled by its military and dedicated to martial glory. Under this lens, we can understand why figures like de Houssaye--who repurposed the Frondeur imaginary away from being for a different kind of absolutism to being republican--were so punished. But this meant that Colbert’s reorientation towards commerce and trade struck the military as a return to the weakness of Henri II. There were plenty of hints of this: the young Henri showed a larger interest in the colonies than in the military, he was being taught as an academic who would mostly act within the court, he was even considering taking the same name as his great uncle. These gave pause to the military, and they feared what could happen if the King were allowed to become a weakling.
A conspirator spreading anti-Colbert invective to anger a Parisian mob
And so a group of forty eight officers came together with the goal of killing Colbert, kidnapping the King, and making du Berry (the Marshal) regent. The plot included the majority of the Council who were infuriated at Colbert’s micromanagement and over-activity, and half of the Military Council, including such great names as de Notteau, the hero of Kolbenz, d’Intaci, the spiritual head of the Italian exiles in the French army, and de Villenueve, whose ancestor was the first Marshal, As Du Berry’s conspiracy spread, he went so far as to attempt to recruit Eugene de Savoie, the close friend of Henri III. But Eugene was a loyal man, who recoiled at even the suggestion of a coup agaisnt Colbert. Eugene’s refusal forced the conspirators’ hands, and their plot was pushed weeks ahead.
Du Berry started his plot by spreading anti-Colbert propaganda through Paris, informing the people of the “Oriental forms of perversion” that Henri was being taught by his tutors. These enraged mobs prevented Colbert from leaving the Louvre, and made it easier to make a move on Henri. On the 13th of April 1691, a group of five horsemen were sent to peacefully capture Henri and Eugene, who were practicing horsemanship to the northeast of Paris.
What occurred next was wholly outside of the plans of the conspirators: the young prince, so seemingly soft, killed three of his assailants as they were taking him away, and Eugene and he took the other two hostage to the fort at Meaux, which was at the time being presided over by Vauban and his mobile engineers. As it became clear that the mission to kidnap the King and his dear friend had failed, the conspirators moved to kill Colbert, launching an assault on the Louvre which would be one of the defining events of the Regency.
Colbert’s men do battle with the forces of the conspirators.
Although the Mobile Engineers were an hour away, many of the Conspirators (and more importantly their men) were losing their morale at the knowledge of their plans’ failure. On the other side, Colbert’s men were invigorated by the knowledge of incoming reinforcements, and battles at the barricades in the Louvre proceeded at a snail’s pace. Just as du Berry’s men broke into the last room from the Council, Henri and Eugene arrived at the gates of Paris. They provided their own form of propaganda, saying that the conspirators aimed to raise higher taxes and recruit more men from Paris, to the aim of unnecessary wars. This was not enough, and while the militia and many men in the garrison immediately aligned with Henri, the mob had been riled up too far, and street to street fighting occurred for two hours before Vauban’s troops broke out and got to the Louvre. But they were too late. In a last ditch attempt du Berry murdered Colbert, and occupied the palace with the intention of forcing the King to make him regent. But his men were completely demoralized, and surrendered to the King and his new regent, Vauban. The majority of the conspirators were exiled, with their land and titles stripped and their seats replaced. Du Berry, however, had his tendons cut before he was drawn and quartered, and his family fled to the German Empire.
The conspiracy of Du Berry has long been held as the catalyst for Henri’s move towards total absolutism. Some have argued that it created a psychological trauma leading to a need for control, though such discussions place a modern idea of stability onto a world which had little of it--if this event led to such a trauma nearly every person in Europe would have similar attributes. Some others have followed a more institutional tradition going as far back as de Boheme, arguing that the failed conspiracy led to the exhausting of the last power outside the monarchy, allowing for total domination of the country by a disconnected court.
The drawing and quartering of du Berry. His son would go on to oppose Henri in all his doings, as general in the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern armies
I would go deeper than that, and say that the Conspiracy in and of itself had already accepted the logic of absolutism and disconnected politics. Why did du Berry not consider taking the throne himself, as de Bourgogne did? Or replacing the king with a pretender, as Vigny attempted to do? Why did he never try to engage in open warfare and instead clung to the shadows of Paris and the Louvre?
He never did any of these things, and his journals and records show that he never even considered them. Because by the end of the 18th century, the logics of absolutist rule were already widely accepted, and the politics of the court had lost reference to anything outside of itself. Du Berry plotted a palace coup because, as Henri rose to power, the palace had created a world inside of itself, subject to its own logic which had the force of natural law. Over the course of the 18th century, the court would find itself defeated by the one force left which could oppose it: the whole of the People.
*Which will be the subject of my next article
**While the ‘War of the Regency’ was cut short by Saint Chaumond’s adept handling of the Bread Riot of 1612 and while it seemingly had many parallels to Du Berry’s attempted coup, it showed the beginnings of the tendencies I have just discussed: the Regent was attempting to replace Henri II with a young Louis XIII and was beginning to mobilize the army officers loyal to him, which again were primarily in the south.
Yeah... the complete disconnect of court politics and the reality of the people seems familiar today, somehow.
Yeah I've been watching House of Cards while writing this and I get a similar feeling, though current politics are more driven by organized interests (albeit ones which represent a small portion of the population). This doesn't mean that the government is disconnected, more like it's connected to certain groups. Luckily that provides an easy (to say) solution: ya gotta organize.
An idea I've had for a long time that never really gets the opportunity to come out: my favorite character in the Star Wars series is Piett. He might not be particularly competent, courageous, or noble, but he was perfectly suited to the environment in which he lived: he was capable within the metrics that let one rise in the Empire. He knew how to deflect criticism and failures, how to make his indecision seem like forethought, how to make sure his failures didn't lead to him getting force-strangled by Vader. None of these traits made for a good Admiral, but they made for a good Admiral within the twisted world of Imperial military politics
It certainly requires no large jump of the imagination to see how such a self-contained body as the ruling court could succumb (easily) to pressure from the people. One gets the profound impression that it exists merely for its own means – and therefore one would also suppose that it seldom acts in the interests of those whom it governs. As long as the nobility don't become completely effete, then I would hazard that you should be alright for a while. Widespread effeteness does strike me as being impending, though. There have been enough hints to a king emasculating his aristos, after all.
Hey, what's the problem with effeteness?!?!?
On Laissez Dire and Laissez Faire
From ‘The Oran Notebooks’, 1826, Oran, written by Antoine Saint Just, republished by Grand River Press, translated by Ernest Laclau
The greatest of changes can be produced by the minorest of beginnings. That’s what my friend Marat told me before he died, and that is the maxim that this town has lived by. My studies have shown, countless times, the truth of this assertion; that a minor mistranslation of a religious text would produce the ideology of the age, which had been the official opposition under the Ancien Regime and has now seemingly conquered the world.
This began with the tutoring of Henri III. As Louis XIII’s health faded he became increasingly concerned with his underaged heir, and although he personally taught the young Henri all he could, he was a very old man who was incapable of extended physical activity. And so, like most other things, he delegated this responsibility to Colbert, the man who was prime minister in all but name; more than that, he had personally created the French government as it was known in my childhood.
The Education of the State
I am sure this has already been discussed, but Colbert faced a tremendously different process in the education of Henri III than any previous regent had. Before Colbert, the governments of France consisted of a handful of noblemen and officers. By the beginning of Henri III’s tutoring, the central government employed more than ten thousand bureaucrats, tax farmers, officers, and was led by a council of twenty ministries. This government had been hampered by the lack of education among many of its newest servants, leading to an infinite number of petty bickerings. In his education of Henri, Colbert sought not only to provide a worthy Prince to France, but to educate the whole of the French state and provide a ‘common language’ which would allow the state to communicate with itself.
Tacitus had long been the official historian of the Bourbon monarchy, but the Prince’s Syllabus led to a far wider reading of his works, and the adoption of de Houssaye’s republican reading of the great Roman
From the very origins of raison d’etat, there has been a separate raison publique. Key to the decisions of kings was the secrecy of the processes behind their decisions, and the censorship of any materiel that would allow the public to criticize or even analyze the state. The Revolution brought forth a great deal of archived knowledge, including forbidden analyses on Machiavelli and Tacitus and articles titled “On the Uses of Assasination”. Many of these articles are gone, back into the archives or destroyed, but this fact remained; that until the 18th century the state did its very most to prevent its subjects from understanding politics on the same scale it did, in the same ways and via the same methods. An extended policy of censorship, secrecy, and a clear separation between history and propaganda would have continued into the 18th century if the Prince’s Syllabus had not been released when it had.
The Prince’s Syllabus
The Programme Princiere was created as a means to establish a holistic canon of political philosophy for those who would direct the state. It included forty books, categorized into broad sections, the largest of which (at eighteen texts) was “Tacitisme et la Raison d’Etat”, a series of texts on princely activities which, for lack of good translations into French, included Machiavelli’s Le Duce and de la Houssaye’s Rules for a Courier. Significant was the relatively small place which Biblical studies occupied; even for a deeply pious man like Colbert, only four texts within the Syllabus directly related to theology.
Also controversial and likely attributable to Louis XIII was the inclusion of “Textes de l’Orient”. Louis, who had been an officer of the East India Company before winning the crown during the Fronde, was deeply influenced by the philosophies of the East and believed that his grandson should know the history of his Eastern subjects who were so important to the treasury and to Louis’ personal intellectual development.
Poet on a Mountain Top, one of the few adornments of Louis XIII’s personal office, and a gift from the King of Min to the man who protected them from the Qing offensive
This set of works would have remained entirely within the upper-government officials it was meant for if it were not for the state of the printing industry when Colbert released it. A decade of financial collapse, plague, warfare and Colbert’s massively increased tariffs had nearly laid low the Parisian printing industry, with a half of the printing shops going out of business during the decade. One of the government’s printers, in an effort to increase business, distributed the syllabus and soon enough all of the printers of Paris were creating collections of the Syllabus’ writings to sell to Parisian students.
The initial distributor was never discovered, and some had suggested that the man who gave the syllabus to the press was none other than the Prince himself. But what is known is that within the month of the Syllabus’ distribution to the people, a direction coming from the King’s own hand was published exonerating the “act of the virtuous printer”, although with the statement that if the printer of the government’s secrets were to ever reveal himself that he would be imprisoned; it said that the king has created a policy of free speech (laissez dire being the specific term used), while freedom to ‘act’ was still limited. This established the principle of the Ancien Regime’s ‘enlightenedness’ for the whole of Henri III’s reign: to quote Rousseau “that Speech has been made free though Men be still in shackles”.
’Laissez Dire is the fundamental legitimation of our monarchy, a right above all other rights, creating a world where the rich argue about the universal freedom of their age while outside their building the poor man begs for his very life”
The Origins of Laissez Faire
This brings us to the birth of Laissez Faire in a minor mistranslation. Louis’ inclusion of several texts from the Orient led to a massive desire for a translation of these works, translations which were made spotty by the lack of native Chinese speakers. And so it came to be that the Lao Tsu and the Shuang Tsu were translated by a Hubert Loyeau, a merchant born in the Orient. His translation of what I am told is the oriental conception of ‘just being’ was Laissez faire, ‘to let be’. This concept became inherently connected to the idea of the ‘undetermined kingdom’ in the Shuang Tsu, whose description I will quote:
Nothing at all. (Except perhaps the connotations of ineffectuality can bring.)
Another very interesting update. The development of this sort of proto-liberal philosophy is intriguing to watch – and I'm beginning into see how conditions from which a revolution could be born will come into being. As you allude to in one of the captions, one doesn't imagine that the country's rulers bickering about various freedoms without actually acting upon them would greatly please the masses.
The idea of 无为 (Wu Wei) is really quite interesting, and extremely hard to translate at the same time. In my opinion (granted, I haven't read the whole thing, just selected passages, and my classical Chinese isn't that good), "without struggle" fits best. It is not about not interfering, it is about interfering in a way that feels completely normal and natural to everyone involved and making your will reality without being noticed. In short, don't make a fuss. The English should be familiar with the concept.