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The Virtues of Abandon
An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment
By Charly Coleman STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9121-2
CHAPTER 1
Specters of Venality
France was at war in early 1696, as it had been for most of the preceding decade. Moreover, Europe was in the grips of a protracted financial crisis: money had grown scarce even for relatively rich states, which made it all the more difficult for the French to compensate for a succession of poor harvests by importing grain. The consequence was widespread dearth, and as many as a million and a half of Louis XIV's subjects would succumb to famine. There also remained the daunting task of concluding the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–1697), which pitted France against much of the rest of Europe. To keep his armies in the field, much of the king's gold and silver plate had been melted down, but still more money was needed.
Desperate for funds, Louis followed a tried-and-true Bourbon precedent: he created a host of new nobles. He did so not to honor the martial valor of exceptional soldiers, nor to buttress the aristocratic character of the officer corps. Rather, the measure was aimed specifically at recognizing five hundred merchants whose fortunes would contribute to financing the war. Typically, men of commerce attained ennoblement through the purchase of a specific office, and in most cases, their new status would not be inheritable without the payment of yearly fees, or until the fulfillment of two generations of service. In this instance, however, the nobility conferred by the king was to be immediate and perpetual. The edict echoed absolutist orthodoxy in such matters. The monarch, as the fount of honor, could bestow nobility on his subjects at will, in recognition of services rendered. This act, moreover, entailed an elevation in character. The nobles created would become "as if born of noble and ancient lineage" and were entitled to "use and enjoy the possession [jouir] of all the honors, prerogatives, privileges, [...] liberties, exemptions, and immunities of the other nobles of our realm, without distinction."
Such benefits came at a price, of course. First, according to a clarifying arrêt issued in August 1696, the aspiring nobles were required to pay the sum of six thousand livres, along with additional fees to have the letters patent registered. Significantly, this addendum noted that those who had been stripped of their titles during Louis's sweeping campaign against false claims of nobility, which he had waged in the reformist (and relatively peaceful) atmosphere of the 1660s, were now invited to buy back their positions. Many who chose to do so, however, ran into difficulties. A subsequent declaration, dated March 12, 1697, addressed the issue of court officials holding registrations for ransom by charging fees according to the personal wealth of the petitioner, rather than assessing a flat fee, which in this case had been set at twenty livres. In response, the king commanded that all the letters be registered, with no inquiries made into financial matters. Simultaneously, and without explanation, the registration fee was raised to fifty livres, and the applicant also had to pay for the requisite paper and stamps. These measures had proven necessary, according to the king, so that subjects granted letters might "fully enjoy the possession of the privileges attached to them." Clerks guilty of misconduct would henceforth be fined a hundred livres.
The king's actions on this occasion were by no means extraordinary. Venality—the sale of offices and titles that empowered the buyer to fulfill a public function or to occupy a position of dignity—served as a major prop for French absolutism and sustained the Old Regime. While the practice helped to ensure the monarchy's survival during periods of extreme financial stress, it also produced political, economic, and ideological contradictions that eroded its viability from within. The funds raised from venal offices and titles allowed the French monarchy to mount wars of expansion even as it spent massive sums to affirm and extend its prerogatives as the sole source of power in the kingdom. The authority to distribute honors also made it possible to make and remake the privileged orders of society in its own image and as it saw fit. The confusion that ensued struck at the fundamental logic of the system of orders. In place of a divinely ordained hierarchy in which persons of each rank exhibited certain fixed attributes and knew their places, there emerged the possibility of uncoupling moral qualities from social standing.
This state of affairs, although overseen by the crown, also problematized the monarch's standing. If the king was set upon his throne by God to represent the essential harmony between the various members of the body politic through the exercise of his will, what did it mean when the sovereign himself desired their reorganization? On what grounds could he justify doing violence to an order that was believed to be of divine provenance? What effects did the practice of venal officeholding have on the ways in which French subjects understood their social and personal identities? If human persons could no longer be considered first and foremost as part of an organic social whole, what function did they serve? How were individuals to regard one another? What legal framework governed their interactions? How were they to relate, not only to God, but to their prince and fellow subjects?
These questions captivated a generation of jurists, theologians, and philosophers in the final years of the reign of Louis XIV. His constant meddling in the society of orders opened a chasm of massive proportions that proved incredibly difficult to close. Although the sale of venal offices and titles would continue until the Revolution of 1789, its very persistence signaled a challenge to traditional means of fixing social and political identities. Two rival positions arose in response. As legal theorists attempted to find ways of maintaining the status quo, clerics and moralists inspired by the movement for Catholic reform affirmed that the soul was an individual agent. All humans, regardless of social origin, were equally compelled to seek spiritual goods out of a desire for salvation. The proponents of emerging philosophical currents—above all, those led by René Descartes and John Locke—sought to liberate the human person from a preordained order and enshrine it as an acquisitive, possessive subject. Their interventions laid the groundwork for a far-reaching culture of self-ownership that would serve as an organizing principle for thought and action throughout the eighteenth century.
At the same time, the mystical theologians who rose to prominence during the period denounced this solution as morally dangerous and logically unsound. It represented for them nothing less than the expansion of venality into the very hearts and minds of the French people. From the pulpit, on the printed page, and even in the political arena, they called upon the faithful to surrender their egoistic designs, not in order to return to the status quo ante, but to dispel the fiction of the self's personal, particular identity. Their pronouncements—gradually at first, then with increasing urgency—cohered into a culture of dispossession that exerted a strong influence on French religious affairs for the next several decades. Self-professed defenders of Catholic orthodoxy condemned such views as heresies that aimed to strip the soul of its mental and physical faculties and undermine the promise of heavenly redemption. The impasse between the partisans of self-ownership and dispossession would not be settled during the reign of Louis XIV or those of his successors. It was fated, rather, to establish the terms of debate for ongoing trials, scandals, and controversies that periodically erupted down to the collapse of the Old Regime.
Property, Office, and Identity under the Old Regime
Nearly every significant attempt to settle what it meant to be a self during the Old Regime responded in some way to vexing questions concerning the nature and limits of property. The leading eighteenth-century legal scholar Robert-Joseph Pothier defined property, in a seemingly direct manner, as "the right to dispose of a thing according to one's pleasure." Yet the application of this principle proved complicated, not least because the exercise of property rights, and especially the rights of inheritance, could vary considerably depending on the prevailing legal code of the region (generally, customary law, but Roman law in the south). Beyond this general division, there was the matter of the extent to which a property right could be exercised. Even property in land, commonly regarded as absolute, could be placed under significant restrictions. For instance, although eighteenth-century jurists tended to recognize the current owner of a plot associated with a larger seigneurial domain as its real proprietor—that is, as the seigneur utile —they also acknowledged that the traditional feudal lord retained the right, depending on locale and circumstances, to various goods, payments, services, and obligations. Property owners thus continued to pay homage to the feudal principle of nulle terre sans seigneur ("no land without a lord").
Corporate structures like the seigneurie not only altered otherwise absolute legal claims to property, but also constituted their own modes of ownership. In the most general sense, men and women identified themselves by their rank in the society of orders and their place within family life, rather than as particular individuals or members of an economic class. As Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord remarks in his memoirs, "It was the family that one loved, much more so than individuals." The nobility, as well as those who aspired to join its ranks, pursued the honor to be derived from possessions more readily than the profit to be gleaned from them. This honor, in turn, manifested itself in benefits that accrued by virtue of membership in an estate, ownership of a seigneurie, or the possession of privileges or other properties in right, which carried both fiscal and social advantages. For instance, noble lords were exempted from the taille (the basic land tax), and endowed with an array of additional prerogatives in other matters. The seigneur supervised the execution of justice, collected the cens (feudal rent, paid annually) and other dues, exercised monopolies over the mills that ground grain, enjoyed exclusive rights to hunt, imposed the corvée (a period of mandatory labor), and assessed fees on the sale of land in his domain. Holders of these privileges regarded them as legal extensions of their original ownership of the domain—or, as Charles Loyseau put it more specifically, as a part of their "power in property."
The venal office constituted one of the most pervasive and perhaps the most contested forms of nonmaterial property under the Old Regime. Upon purchasing an office, the buyer acquired the authority to perform a public service and was entitled to the income derived from it. The transaction provided revenue for both parties, but it was far more than financial in character, since the office transformed the status of its holder. Certain offices—such as those of secrétaire du roi, or positions in the bureaux des finances, the Cours des aides, and magistracies in the Parlements—granted inheritable nobility to the buyer either after twenty years or, as was more commonly the case, after at least a generation of service. Two generations was the norm for most of the seventeenth century, but the crown eased the requirement in subsequent decades to such an extent that, by the end of the Old Regime, 70 percent of ennobling offices allowed for membership in the Second Estate after a single generation. These posts reaped the greatest financial windfalls for the state—it cost up to 120,000 livres to become a secrétaire du roi —but the crown also sold thousands upon thousands of less expensive offices that authorized royal subjects to exercise certain functions or practice particular vocations.
This practice of venality first emerged in the fifteenth century, and it quickly took root in all sectors of state and society. Nearly the entire judiciary was venal, from presiding judges down to clerks, registrars, ushers, and process servers. Municipal offices throughout the kingdom could be bought and sold, as could captaincies and other military ranks (at least until France's dismal showing in the Seven Years' War). Trade corporations generally escaped full-blown venalization; even so, it required the purchase of an office to operate as an oyster-seller, fishmonger, tin inspector, grain merchant, wigmaker, official tester of eaux de vie, or in any number of other professions. As this brief survey suggests, the French monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries engaged in the creation of posts to be bought and sold on a truly gargantuan scale. According to William Doyle's calculations, approximately 70,000 venal offices existed by 1789, and at least 300,000 French subjects owed their livelihoods and status either directly or indirectly to possessing such a position. The system, simply put, was too big to fail, and when it did, the Old Regime collapsed with it.
Especially during military conflicts and other periods of financial hardship, the monarchy exploited the venal system to raise badly needed funds, making little or no effort to conceal its intentions. To cite one characteristic case, in August 1696, the year in which Louis XIV issued five hundred new titles of nobility, he also created new hereditary offices for overseeing the duties levied on gold and silver work, ormarques d'or and d'argent. In February 1698, however, he reversed course, ordering the suppression of the offices and the reimbursement of those who had purchased them. Although the king was under no obligation to justify the decision, he defended it by claiming that the costs of war had compelled him to create offices that he now recognized as being injurious to the "good of our state and the peace of our subjects." A less magnanimous rationale clearly shone through as well. In 1696, France was still embroiled in the War of the League of Augsburg. Once peace was concluded the following year, the additional revenue that would be generated by the offices was no longer needed, and so they were abolished. In a perverse variation on the traditional service ethic of the privileged orders, exemplified by the military sacrifices of the Second Estate, the crown brazenly disposed of an entire class of subjects once it had outlived its immediate usefulness.
Venality thus gave rise to glaring contradictions for which no immediate remedy presented itself. While the abuses and absurdities inherent in the system were widely denounced, not only by those directly affected, but also by the period's most astute political thinkers, the monarchy made no serious efforts to curb it. Since the crown could not do without the cash that venality raised, it remained as a glaring, towering monument both to the king's stature, as the source of all dignity, and also to the all-too-material limits of his power. Venality also problematized the standing of property rights, in creating conflicting claims of ownership by officeholders and the monarch. Indeed, it fundamentally altered what it meant to be a French subject. According to the logic that governed the traditional society of orders, identity derived from status, which in turn derived from one's position in the hierarchical chain originating in God and extending down to lowliest of creatures. Venal officeholding monetarized status. It converted the attributes that determined one's identity into qualities that could not only be acquired but purchased in a marketplace. This innovation had decisive effects on both fiscal and social arrangements, not least of which was that the French nobility became the most open in Europe. In large part due to venality, two-thirds of French noble families at the end of the Old Regime had only been so since the seventeenth century, and a quarter had been elevated after 1700.22 As in the case of offices, the crown ruthlessly exploited the demand for titles to its advantage by issuing and then rescinding orders of ennoblement as the financial situation demanded. Given that bearers of nobility tended to regard it not only as a social marker, but as an essential aspect of their being, manipulating status in this manner could only serve to intensify the sense that identity was precarious, and that appearances need not necessarily correspond to reality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Virtues of Abandon by Charly Coleman. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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