Nobles tended to justify their grip on the armed forces by arguing that their order existed to fight; and this argument served to defend their tax-exemptions as well. It went back to the classic medieval division of society into those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed. Naturally those who prayed, the clergy, invoked similar arguments, for the same functional principle underlay the extensive privileges which they enjoyed, too. In law the clergy ranked ahead of the nobility as the first order of the realm, for they were the custodians of the community’s spiritual welfare and its moral standards. They numbered about 130,000, but over half were in regular orders (two-thirds of them women) and many of the seculars were canons without cure of souls as members of 496 cathedral or collegiate chapters. Parish priests, therefore, were in a minority, and their distribution across the country averaged one for every 400 or 500 inhabitants. But the clerical presence, like everything else in the kingdom, was unevenly distributed. In the countryside the curé was often the only ecclesiastic his parishioners ever came across; whereas townscapes were dominated by convents, seminaries, schools, and hospitals, all run by clerics, not to mention cathedrals, collegiate churches, and innumerable parish churches within sight of one another and within sound of each other’s bells. In many a small town the church was the chief source of employment. In Chartres, the cathedral chapter alone gave direct employment to 500 or 600 of the 12,000 inhabitants, and was the main source of business for many more. The money thus spent came from over 17,000 acres and 124 feudal lordships in the surrounding district. In Bayeux, a town of 10,000, it was estimated that the total annual contribution of all ecclesiastical institutions to the town’s economy was worth 400,000 livres. Over France as a whole about six or seven per cent of the land was in the hands of the Church, although much more in the north than the south; and in the form of the tithe, the parish clergy were theoretically entitled to a tenth of every person’s livelihood for their upkeep. In practice the tithe was far more patchily levied, and seldom took as much as a tenth even from those who failed to avoid it. But, with the exception of provinces added to the kingdom since 1561, and thereby ‘reputed foreign’, all these ecclesiastical revenues were exempt from ordinary taxation. Unlike the nobility, the clergy had consistently fought off every attempt by the government to breach this principle. The most recent battle had occurred between 1749 and 1751, when the vingtième had been introduced. The clergy won it because they were well organized. Unlike the second or third estates, they had a representative General Assembly which convened every five years. When it was not in session the collective affairs of the order were managed by a permanent General Agency headed by two carefully chosen Agents-General, ambitious young priests with names to make. Most of their business was financial, since exemption from taxation did not mean that the clergy contributed nothing to the royal revenues. Every ten years a ‘free gift’ was negotiated, made up by an internal levy on clerical income. Further sums were raised to pay interest on extensive loans which the clergy used its superior credit to float on the State’s behalf. Altogether the clergy paid out about 16 millions annually to or for the State, but since they had revenues of perhaps a quarter of a billion the proportion of their income was nowhere near that demanded of the laity.
Nor was the weight of clerical taxation equitably distributed within the order. The parish clergy, dependent on tithes, fees, and if they were lucky a little glebe land, paid almost half the total raised, yet had little say in its allocation within each diocese. Positions of power or influence in the hierarchy were monopolized by canons and other representatives of the great chapters and monasteries who owned most of the Church’s landed wealth. And the richest of these corporations, in turn, were invariably dominated by the nobility, who saw in them an important, comfortable, and well-paid refuge for over-numerous sons and daughters otherwise burdensome to family fortunes. Ever since the Concordat of 1516 between Francis I and Pope Leo X the king had appointed all bishops and the abbots of greater monasteries. In the eighteenth century he distributed this huge fund of patronage on the advice of a bishop entrusted with what was known as the benefice portfolio (feuille des bénéfices). None of its holders, however, proved able to resist the enormous pressure they were subjected to by courtier families anxious to place their members, friends, and dependants in lucrative clerical comfort. The rise in landed revenues over the century only increased the demand. The greater archbishops all enjoyed six-figure incomes, and very few prelates brought in less than 20,000 livres. A commendatory abbot of one of the greater monasteries might draw more than many a bishop. Accordingly most of these much sought-after benefices went to younger sons of the greater nobility. In 1789 the entire episcopate (bar one) was of noble birth, and a quarter of all sees were in the hands of just thirteen families. Many of the beneficiaries of this system were appointed very young after truncated studies, lightning ordination, and rapid progress through a hierarchy of lesser dignities. Talleyrand, condemned to a clerical rather than a military career by an accident in infancy which stunted one of his legs, was ordained a subdeacon at 21, canon of Rheims within weeks, an abbot within months, yet did not become a priest until four years later. Another year saw him one of the two Agents-General of the Clergy, and at 34, in 1788, he was bishop of Autun. Few of Louis XVI’s bishops were as cynical and cold-blooded as Talleyrand was to prove, and most were to stand by their vocation with more or less zeal when it was put to the test. But they had all climbed the ladder of preferment in the same way, for there was no other. And if such a system produced tepid pastors, it made the bishops of the Gallican Church formidable politicians and powerbrokers. When Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, became chief minister in May 1787, it was the fulfilment of an ambition openly pursued for years. The examples earlier in the century of Fleury, Bernis, and Terray showed that Louis XIV’s principle of never giving high secular office to clerics had died with him.
Brienne had made his name as a church reformer. In 1766 he had been made chairman of the Commission of Regulars established by the Assembly of the Clergy to investigate and if necessary close or amalgamate under-occupied monasteries or convents. This reforming gesture was undertaken in the aftermath of the greatest religious upheaval of the century, the expulsion of the Jesuits from the kingdom in 1764. Resulting in many ways from a string of improbable accidents, this removal by the secular power of one of the most vigorous and influential orders in French religious and educational life nevertheless vividly demonstrated how vulnerable a Church that refused to reform itself might be. Reading these warning signs, the Church looked around for soft targets. Contemplative orders, faltering in their recruitment and condemned by an increasingly utilitarian public opinion as useless hoarders of wealth and bolt-holes for idlers, were obviously in an exposed position. Between 1768 and 1780, accordingly, 458 smaller monasteries were dissolved. Their capital assets, estimated at 642,029 livres, were redistributed to hospitals, poor houses, and seminaries. But larger, richer houses continued unscathed, and nothing was done about the problems of the parish clergy, the Church’s undervalued, underprivileged workhorses. Few parish priests came from really poor backgrounds. The costs of acquiring the education necessary for the priesthood alone ensured that. Nor could the majority of beneficed parish priests be considered poverty-stricken by the standards of most of the population. But many resented the inequitable distribution of the Church’s wealth, their exclusion from any say in how the Church was governed, and the complete absence of promotion prospects. Improving agricultural prices brought growing prosperity to those who enjoyed tithes, but in many towns tithes were a thing of the past, and even in the country about a third of the beneficed clergy had no right to their parish’s tithes. They had been impropriated, sometimes by laymen but more often by monasteries or other ecclesiastical corporations, who only paid the incumbent a fixed share of the yield, known as the portion congrue. The inflation of the century constantly eroded the value of what was in effect a salary; and in 1768
and again in 1786 royal edicts imposed rises. On both occasions they were denounced as inadequate, yet rather than pay them many tithe-owners abandoned their rights to incumbents. Now it was their turn to incur the odium of tithe collection, and to find that the yield was often less than that of the congrue. In the 1770s the discontents of the parish clergy erupted in many dioceses in the form of mutinous assemblies which denounced the inadequacies of the congrue, the unfairness of clerical taxation, domination of diocesan administration by canons and regulars, and the ‘despotism’ of bishops, whose authority stood behind so many of these practices. The bishops’ response, in the Assembly of the Clergy of 1780, was to reiterate long-standing prohibitions on unauthorized clerical gatherings. Their stance was reinforced by a royal edict of 1782 which apparently brought an end to the so-called ‘revolt of the curés’. It did nothing to tackle its causes, however, at a time when the Church was under unprecedented attack from critical laymen.
Nothing infuriated the Church’s critics more than its political power. It held a monopoly of public worship, and all the king’s subjects were legally Catholics. Protestants enjoyed no legal toleration, except in Alsace, and no civil rights. As recently as 1762 a pastor had been executed, and the last Protestant galley-slaves were released only in 1775. The Church controlled almost the entire educational system, and the bulk of poor relief and hospital provision. It had extensive powers of censorship, and the pulpit was used constantly by the secular authorities for important public announcements and warnings. All this reinforced the unique God-given moral authority to which the Church laid claim. Its importance in keeping the king’s subjects docile and obedient was incalculable in a country where the everyday forces of law and order were very thinly stretched.
Apart from the army, law-enforcement throughout most of the kingdom was in the hands of the Maréchaussée, a mounted police force barely 3,000 strong. Additionally all towns of any size employed watchmen, but even in the largest their complement seldom ran to three figures. Only Paris was considered well policed, with almost 2,000 officers serving a variety of agencies in addition to the French and Swiss guards. France, in fact, had far more magistrates than policemen, their numbers swelled by the sale of offices in earlier centuries. At the lowest level were thousands of petty jurisdictions, many private, but all fully staffed by a complement of judges, clerks, procurators, ushers, and tipstaffs. Angers alone, a city of 26,000 inhabitants, had 53 different courts or tribunals, none of them near the top of the judicial hierarchy. Besançon, somewhat larger but with a parlement, had a legal population of around 500, which meant almost one-twelfth of the population probably depended directly on the law for their existence, and many more indirectly. The delays and costs of this judicial labyrinth were notorious. ‘Do we not see every day’, noted the procurator-general of the parlement of Paris (who ought to have known) in 1763,17 ‘people obliged to go to law over two or three years and at great cost to find out which judges they will have the misfortune to appear before?’ Yet so long as France lacked a uniform set of laws and the government felt unable to buy out venal office-holders the problem seemed insoluble. Such reforms and rationalizations as did occur, between 1771 and 1774 or again in 1788, were fragmentary, came as by-products of political conflict between the government and the parlements, and proved as transient as the circumstances that had facilitated them.
The parlements sat at the summit of the judicial hierarchy, the supreme and final courts of appeal for their own regions. They also enjoyed extensive administrative powers which brought them into regular conflict with governors and intendants. Above all they had a crucial role in the legislative process. All laws, to be valid, needed to be registered in their records, and they had the right to point out any defects in new legislation by sending the king remonstrances. By deferring registration pending the king’s reply they were able to delay and obstruct government policy, and since the death of Louis XIV they had developed this technique into a major vehicle of opposition. Strictly speaking remonstrances were confidential communications between the king and his courts, but over the same period it had become normal for parlements to marshal public opinion on their side by printing and selling them. Often they would renew remonstrances after the king’s reply, and later in the century they extended their means of resistance to judicial strikes and occasional mass resignations. Everyone knew, however, that ultimately the king had the last word. He could silence all opposition by coming in person (or in the provinces sending a personal representative) to the court and dictating registration of the contentious measures in a session known as a lit de justice. In the presence of the monarch, the fount of justice, the delegated authority of his magistrates was nullified. Parlements usually protested at such displays of sovereignty, but they seldom continued to resist after them. Honour was satisfied, and beyond lay outright rebellion, which none of them was prepared to contemplate. Nor did most contentious issues need the extreme response of a lit de justice to resolve them. The exceptions were matters of religion and finance. Even here the expulsion of the Jesuits in the 1760s, which they largely brought about, marked the end as well as the highpoint of the parlements’ interference in religious questions. Financial confrontations, however, could only get worse in an age of ever-spiralling military expenditure and constant attempts to increase taxes and borrowing to meet it. In the first half of the century the parlement of Paris, by far the most important sovereign court, with a jurisdiction covering a third of France, spoke out almost alone on such matters. But from the introduction of the vingtième in 1749 the provincial courts also began to assert themselves, both on financial matters and against what they saw as the attempts of agents of central government in the provinces to extend their own authority. The 1760s were particularly stormy, witnessing serious clashes with the parlements of Besançon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Pau, and Rennes, and periodic lesser confrontations with others, too. The suspicion grew that the sovereign courts were acting in secret concert to discredit and usurp royal power, and in 1766 Louis XV felt obliged to reassert his absolute and unlimited authority in blunt terms. In what those present remembered as a ‘scourging session’, the king came in person to the parlement of Paris and declared that:
It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides … It is from me alone that my courts derive their authority; and the plenitude of this authority, which they exercise only in my name, remains always in me … It is to me alone that legislative power belongs, without any dependence and without any division … The whole public order emanates from me, and the rights and interests of the nation … are necessarily joined with mine and rest only in my hands.
But clashes continued, as it proved impossible in peacetime to reduce the burden of taxes first justified by the demands of mid-century wars. In 1771 they reached a further climax when a new chancellor, Maupeou, provoked the parlement of Paris into refusing all co-operation. Maupeou reacted by exiling its magistrates and replacing them with more docile collaborators. He also took the opportunity to abolish venality of offices in the parlement and set up a new structure of subordinate courts throughout the parlement’s ressort. When the provincial parlements protested, they too were remodelled. Surprising numbers of existing magistrates co-operated in this operation, but those who suffered exile and dispossession raised a huge clamour at what they claimed was the overthrow of the kingdom’s constitution. The king was deluged with remonstrances before the courts were silenced by the reform, and despite a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign, the government was unable to convince the bulk of public opinion of the value of what it had done. The new system had still put down no deep roots when, three years after its introduction, Louis XV died. What to do about the parlements was therefore the first major political decision faced by Louis XVI on his accession. Within months he decided to restore them, Maupeou was dismissed, and all his innovations abandoned. The new monarch’s most influential ministers had persuaded him that public opinion would have no faith in his good intenti
ons if he did not bring back the tried and trusted defenders of public liberties. And so by the time of the coronation the old judiciary had been reintegrated, venality restored, and the parlement of Paris was once again remonstrating and obstructing the registration of new laws. But those who thought nothing had changed were wrong. The parlements had been shown that they were not invulnerable, and the public had been shown what feeble checks on a determined government they were. The parlement of Paris, having proved to its own satisfaction by its remonstrances of 1775 and 1776 that it was as formidable as ever, lapsed into a relative quiescence that lasted a decade. Several of its provincial counterparts were torn for years by unseemly internal recriminations between magistrates who had co-operated with Maupeou and those who had not. The chancellor (France’s last, since he refused to resign his lifetime appointment on dismissal, and only died in 1792) had shattered the parlements’ political credibility, and even their complete restoration was unable to rebuild it.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 6