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FRANCE

FRANCE. France was both the largest state in early modern Europe and the most centrally situated. Its population of roughly 20 million dwarfed all rivals: in 1620 the country had ten times the population of the Dutch Republic, four times that of England, twice that of Spain, and a third more than that of all the German states combined. On both north and south it bordered territories of the Habsburg kings of Spain, and it adjoined other Habsburg territories to the east; to the west there was Britain, which until 1544 maintained small outposts on the mainland, and even after could easily invade. The combination of size and centrality shaped much of French history during the early modern period. Given its proximity to other great powers, France could never avoid entanglements and potential conflicts with its neighbors—but possessing resources so much greater than they, it rarely sought to avoid conflict. On the contrary, its kings repeatedly attempted to establish France as Europe's leading power, annexing territories of less powerful neighbors and bullying even loyal allies. As a result, France participated in most major international conflicts of the period and in the seventeenth century assembled the largest armies that Europe had ever seen. Organizing, justifying, and paying for military power on this scale encouraged the development of state organization, and for most of the period France was Europe's most intensively governed state, as well as its biggest. Its overdeveloped monarchy brought France important benefits but also placed heavy burdens on the nation's economy. By the eighteenth century, this form of government could survive only at the cost of radical reforms, efforts that in the end led to revolutionary upheaval.

THE GEOGRAPHY AND POLITICS OF DIVERSITY

Extending from the English Channel to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Rhine, early modern France included a diverse, imperfectly integrated set of territories. Geography accounted for some of this diversity; different regions had different climates and qualities of soil, and thus different systems of agriculture. The plains of northern France were among the richest grain-producing regions in Europe, whereas the center of the country was mountainous and heavily wooded. Southern France had a Mediterranean climate, which limited grain harvests but allowed farmers to grow olives and a variety of fruits, while the north was damp and cold. But cultural differences also contributed to the country's diversity. As late as 1863, it has been estimated, 12 percent of French children spoke no French, and a much larger share of the population mainly used some form of dialect. Until 1789, laws varied from one province of the country to another, creating differences in family organization, inheritance, and landholding patterns.

Such differences reflected the fact that this territory was an artificial creation, assembled mainly by military force over a period of centuries; the process would end only in the mid-nineteenth century. The plains around Paris, known as the Île de France, constituted the original home of the French monarchs, and from it during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had extended their power as far south as the Mediterranean, making medieval France already an immense territory for its time. Even then the English retained control over a small territory in the north and a much larger area in the southwest, around the city of Bordeaux. The English kings dramatically increased their holdings during the political chaos of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enlarging their long-held territories in the southwest and conquering the rich province of Normandy. At the same time the duchy of Brittany reasserted its independence, acknowledging only nominal French overlordship; and younger branches of the royal house established semi-independent principalities for themselves, notably in Burgundy, whose dukes pursued an independent foreign policy aimed at establishing their full autonomy.

But this late-medieval tendency to dissolution reversed itself in the mid-fifteenth century, and thereafter French history was marked by new territorial acquisitions and tightening control over outlying regions. Charles VII (ruled 1422–1461), goaded into action by Joan of Arc, supervised the expulsion of the English, who were finally driven out in 1453, retaining only Calais (even that was lost in 1544). His successor, Louis XI (ruled 1461–1483), ended the threat of an independent duchy of Burgundy: when its last duke was killed in battle, in 1477, Louis immediately seized much of Burgundy's territory and set up a series of French institutions in the duke's former capital, designed to ensure that French influence functioned vigorously there. In the following generations, successive kings married heiresses to the duchy of Brittany, ensuring that it too would be integrated into the French state. In these and other peripheral regions of the kingdom, kings sought to ensure provincial loyalty by establishing institutions modeled on those in Paris, staffing them with a mix of locals and men drawn from the royal entourage. Sensitive to regional traditions and eager to secure loyalty, kings also permitted these new provinces to retain significant tax advantages and some forms of local autonomy.

After 1515, the pace of territorial expansion slowed. In the mid-sixteenth century, King Henry II (ruled 1547–1559) established a French presence in the eastern region of Lorraine; in 1589 the small kingdom of Navarre, in the southwest, along the border with Spain, became part of France when its king became Henry IV (ruled 1589–1610) of France. In the course of his wars, Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) added the Franche-Comté and Alsace to the east, Roussillon to the south, and part of Flanders and Artois to the north. Finally, after a long period of intermittent control, Louis XV (ruled 1715–1774) took over the previously independent duchy of Lorraine in 1740 and the island of Corsica in 1768. By this point France had nearly reached its modern limits; thereafter it added only Avignon (taken from the pope in 1791) and Savoy and Nice, acquired in 1860 from Italy.

DISTANCE AND THE PROCESS OF UNIFICATION

Even travelers in a hurry might require three weeks to make their way across the territories thus assembled, and institutional barriers also helped ensure that the country's practical unity never matched its rulers' claims. Units of measure varied by region, and regional governments typically restricted trade across their borders in an effort to ensure local food supplies. But over the early modern period there was significant progress toward effective unification of this vast territory, especially after the end of the civil wars that had marked the sixteenth century. The French state pushed throughout the period to improve communications across the kingdom, and they sought in other ways to reduce its variety of institutions and customs. Already in 1464 Louis XI had established a postal service that crossed France, allowing travelers to exchange horses at fixed points. In the early seventeenth century, as France rebuilt from the Wars of Religion (1562–1598), Henry IV's chief minister, the duke of Sully, assumed control of French road building, setting standards for new construction and encouraging new projects. The state's interest in such projects continued to grow through the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, producing dramatic improvements in all forms of transportation. A specialized engineering service was established in the early eighteenth century to supervise construction, and in 1747 a state-run school was established to train its engineers. As a result of such efforts, between 1660 and 1789 travel times between Paris and the other major cities fell by about half, in some cases more: mid-seventeenth-century travelers had needed fifteen days to get from Paris to Bordeaux, but by 1789 this had fallen to only five days. Regularly scheduled coaches now served these roads, and the combination of better roads and improved coaches allowed travelers to make the trip in relative comfort. The government also supported efforts at canal building, linking the country's natural waterways into an effective national system, especially well suited for the distribution of heavy agricultural goods. The Canal du Midi, which permitted navigation from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was a wonder of the era when it opened in 1681.

Governments sought also to diminish the country's cultural and institutional diversity. Each province retained its distinctive law code, but successive revisions—with royal commissioners sent to investigate local practices and compile new collections—brought these more into line with one another. Other magistrates were sent into distant hinterlands to deal with reports of lawlessness and ensure compliance with the king's own laws. The later eighteenth century brought an attack on the political and economic barriers that divided the French territory. In the 1760s and 1770s, the governments of the Abbé Terray and of Turgot sought to end restrictions on free trade within the country, creating a single national market in place of the twenty or so distinct provinces. These efforts failed, partly because they provoked popular disturbances over higher food prices, but the direction of change was clearly toward national unity.

PHASES OF ROYAL POWER, 1453–1589

Even in their darkest moments, French kings enjoyed important advantages in comparison with their rivals elsewhere in Europe. The Salic law, supposed to be of ancient origins but in fact instituted in the early fourteenth century, proclaimed that women could not inherit the throne, ensuring that it would never go via marriage to a foreign prince. In the coronation ceremony, French kings were anointed with holy oil, and they enjoyed other markings of sanctity. The popes had conferred on them the title "Most Christian King," associating them with the work of the church, and long tradition accorded them the power to cure some diseases by touching the afflicted. In 1440, they had acquired the more practical advantage of levying taxes in most of the country without seeking the consent of any representative institution. These traditions of respect for royal power proved especially important in the years after 1453 as France rebuilt from the disasters of the Hundred Years' War with England. The war had devastated much of the country, and it was only around 1500 that population returned to what it had been in 1337, when the fighting began. Under Charles VII and Louis XI, the work of reconstruction advanced quickly. Rebellions by great aristocrats were put down, and the core of an effective civil service was established. In the next generation, this concern with reestablishing internal peace and order yielded to an urge for external adventures. In 1494 the sickly Charles VIII (ruled 1483–1498), Louis's son, raised a large army and led it across Italy to conquer the kingdom of Naples; the venture expressed both dynastic ambition—the royal family's claim to Naples dated to a thirteenth-century ancestor—and crusading ideals, for Charles hoped to use Naples as a jumping-off point for a crusade to liberate Jerusalem. Neither he nor the aristocratic armies he led had relinquished medieval visions of politics; they fought not for national interest, but in the service of family and faith.

Charles's invasion inaugurated a half century of war over Italy, war that eventually ended in complete French defeat. Charles's army had easily conquered Naples, but Ferdinand, the king of Spain, quickly and effectively disputed his dominance, routing French armies and establishing Spain's dominance of the region. Charles died in 1498, but his successor (an elderly cousin who ruled as Louis XII) only widened these conflicts; he had his own claims to the duchy of Milan, in northern Italy, and thus French armies returned to Italy seeking to establish claims to both north and south. Francis I (1515–1547) and his son Henry II (1547–1559) continued these efforts despite repeated military disasters. Francis himself was captured in battle at Pavia in 1525, and his two sons were held hostage in Madrid for an enormous ransom. By the 1530s the Spanish had solidified their hold on Italy, and a last French defeat in 1557 (at St. Quentin, near the Netherlands border) finally ended French hopes. The drive for hegemony in Italy had produced only Spanish lordship over Milan and Naples and overwhelming Spanish influence elsewhere in the peninsula.

The peace settlement of 1559 brought its own problems. Without the distractions of foreign war, aristocratic clans competed with increased avidity for influence at court—the more intently because three of Henry II's weakling sons came in turn to the throne after his death in 1559. Neither they nor their mother, Catherine de Médicis, who exercised a large influence on royal policy over the next thirty years, had the personal authority to discipline these factions; despite the sacred trappings surrounding the French monarchy, kings' personal qualities still mattered to the success of their governments. But in the mid-sixteenth century the demands placed on kings had also become more difficult because of the arrival of Protestantism in France. Both John Calvin and his principal lieutenant Théodore de Bèze were French by birth, and they took considerable interest in bringing the Reformed religion to their native land. Calvinist missionaries sought to reach all levels of French society, but their greatest successes came among elites. By 1562 significant minorities of the bourgeoisie and nobility had turned to Calvinism, and in that year they launched a coordinated uprising. The royal army and the Catholic factions among the nobility defeated these movements, but 1562 proved to be the opening phase of a long civil war, the Wars of Religion, that merely paused in 1598 and came to a definitive conclusion only in 1629. Over these years, efforts to achieve religious toleration, embodied in short-lived peace treaties, alternated with moments of extreme religious violence. In 1572 King Charles IX's plan to have the Protestant leader Gaspard de Coligny assassinated turned into the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants, first in Paris, then in other cities throughout the country. Contemporaries believed that they were witnessing both the breakdown of order inside the country and the decay of French standing within Europe, for the Spanish king Philip II contributed both funds and troops to the Catholic side.

PHASES OF ROYAL POWER, 1589–1789

The crises of these years created broad support for stronger monarchy, and this became the dominant pattern of the seventeenth century. In 1589 the crown passed to Henry IV, a distant cousin of the previous kings and leader of the Protestant movement during the later Wars of Religion; his promise to convert to Catholicism secured the obedience of most of the country, and in 1598 the Edict of Nantes established a degree of religious peace. Rebellion, conspiracy, and civil war remained real threats, but they were brief interruptions of a trend toward stronger government—and of the revival of French efforts to dominate European power politics. As in the sixteenth century, Spain again provided the natural target of French ambitions as the dominant European power and as having several borders with France. Henry IV's sudden death in 1610, amidst plans to march against Spanish interests in the Rhineland, only postponed the fighting. His son Louis XIII (ruled 1610–1643) led French armies across the Alps in 1628 to establish a French duke in the small northern Italian principality of Mantua and then in 1635 launched France into full involvement in the Thirty Years' War against both Spain and its Habsburg ally, the Holy Roman emperor. The ensuing decades of war placed enormous burdens, both political and financial, on French resources. Rising taxes provoked popular rebellions in several provinces, and aristocratic plotting resumed, motivated by the eagerness of those around the king to attain more influence. The worst moments came in 1648, with the young Louis XIV on the throne and real power in the hands of his Spanish mother, Anne of Austria, and her Italian advisor, Cardinal Mazarin; during the four years of the Fronde, as the rebellions were called, a shifting coalition of urban crowds, royal judges, and great aristocrats twice drove Mazarin into exile and threatened to take over control of the government. But throughout this time France managed to sustain its armies against the still more severely strained Habsburg powers. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia (with the empire) and the 1659 Peace of the Pyrenees (with Spain) provided territorial gains and more broadly established France as the new dominant power in Europe.

Asserting and expanding that power became the government's primary concern over the next fifty years. After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV proclaimed himself fully in charge of French policy, and through the longest reign of European history (he died only in 1715, leaving the crown to his great-grandson) he devoted himself to asserting French supremacy, cultural and economic as well as military. Intermittent war resumed in 1666, with new military adventures coming in 1672, 1689, and 1702. The understanding of national ambition had evolved since the sixteenth century, however. By this point, expanding national territory and advancing trade had become the express motives of international policy, replacing the dynastic and crusading ideals of the sixteenth century. Spain had fallen to the second rank of European powers, and much of Louis's effort was directed to absorbing bits of Spanish territory; the last and greatest of his wars was directed to absorbing Spain itself, whose king had died childless. Parallel efforts asserted the place of French culture within Europe. Louis's new palace at Versailles was designed partly as an advertisement for French glory and elegance, and support for artists, writers, and musicians had the same goal, affirming French cultural supremacy within Europe and royal supremacy within France.

These efforts brought some additions to French territory, and they secured for one of Louis's grandsons the Spanish throne as Philip V, though only on condition that the two crowns never be joined. Versailles and its courtly rituals impressed many other rulers, and imitations sprang up in several countries. But Louis's ambitions also united the rest of Europe against him, especially after 1685, when, with the Edict of Fontainebleau, he revoked the Edict of Nantes and banished all Protestants from France. To contemporaries, he seemed a menace to the religious peace of Europe as well as to his neighbors' territories. With most other European powers allied against it, French militarism exhausted the country's resources and produced only small gains. His subjects greeted Louis's death with relief.

Taking note of war's human and financial costs, his successors were more cautious about military adventures. Louis XV entered the brief War of the Polish Succession (1733–1735), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1747), and the Seven Years' War (1756–1763); Louis XVI, only the American Revolution (1778–1783). The first and the last of these conflicts were French successes, but the Seven Years' War was a humiliating failure, which seemed to teach a lesson that Louis XIV's last wars had already suggested: despite its immense population (which had risen to 26 million by the late eighteenth century), France had lost its dominant position within Europe. It remained Europe's largest country, but others were proving better able to mobilize their resources, for both military and civic ends. It had no equivalent to the Bank of England, which raised public loans for the government, nor could it match Prussia's extremely disciplined military organization. Already in the 1660s, government officials noted the superior economic performance of the Dutch Republic; in the eighteenth century, with the opening phases of the industrial revolution, England appeared to be growing far richer.

Diminished standing within the European state system produced a rising anxiety among French ruling elites, and led to a series of government-sponsored efforts at reform and modernization. During the last twenty-five years of the old regime, governments did away with guilds and established free trade in foodstuffs; they expelled the Jesuit order from France and instituted some toleration for Protestants; they funded agricultural societies throughout the country in hopes of improving farming techniques; they sought to reorganize the judiciary, and (immediately before the Revolution) set up an ambitious system of provincial legislatures. These were serious efforts at change, directed by thoughtful, strong-minded government ministers, who had been much influenced by their reading of Enlightenment political philosophy and economic theory. But several of these reforms lasted only briefly, falling victim to power struggles at Versailles, the kings' weakness, and the vocal opposition of groups whose interests they threatened. In the decades before 1789, the monarchy seemed incapable of sustaining a consistent policy.

So cumbrous and incoherent a system could not continue indefinitely, and in 1789 the sequence of increasingly radical government-sponsored reforms edged into revolution. By this point the crown found it difficult to finance even small successes in the competition among European states. To secure approval for new taxes, it called together a series of representative assemblies, culminating in the Estates-General of 1789. Though they believed in monarchical government, most members of the Estates from the outset demanded that radical changes be made in the country's organization. Within weeks of assembling, they had unilaterally declared themselves a National Assembly charged with creating a new constitution, and they made the king a mere executive of the nation, rather than its sovereign. Three years later, the monarchy was eliminated altogether.

THE CHARACTER OF GOVERNMENT

In 1515, France had few government officials, only one for every 4,700 inhabitants, according to one historian's estimate, but by 1665 the ratio had changed to one official for every 380 inhabitants, giving France one of the largest governments in early modern Europe. The state's massive expansion partly resulted from public demand. In the litigious world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both elites and ordinary people wanted more judges, and they wanted better control of public disorder; in response, Louis XIV established Europe's first professional police force. But the needs of royal ambition counted for more than popular demand for governmental services. The gigantic armies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries needed civilian officials to manage them, and they needed to be paid for, meaning that the number of tax officials grew as fast as the number of judges. In the seventeenth century, this effort to extract revenue merged with an additional governmental project, that of monitoring and stimulating economic activity. The idea that government should encourage economic development had circulated in the early seventeenth century, but it became especially prominent during the reign of Louis XIV, under the influence of his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. At Colbert's urging, government tax offices expanded to keep closer track of economic changes, and new officials were created specifically to inspect and encourage commercial activity. The French navy was strengthened to protect overseas trade, and direct subsidies were given to some industries. Such ideas continued to influence French officials through the eighteenth century, and they retained through 1789 a lofty view of themselves as guiding the nation's economic activity.

As the early modern period advanced, professional civil servants of this kind faced steadily less competition from other institutions. National representative assemblies, known as Estates-General, had been an important element of medieval French government, and they continued to meet frequently during the sixteenth century. But both the king and his leading officials viewed the Estates with suspicion, and after 1615 they ceased to meet. Provincial estates continued to play a role in governing some outlying regions, notably in Brittany and Languedoc, but in other regions these institutions too disappeared. Over most of the country, the French kings had established their right to levy taxes without consulting their subjects.

In some respects, this failure of French representative institutions added dramatically to the monarchy's power. But though French royal power was in some respects absolute, in other ways it faced significant limitations, many of them bound up with the character of its own civil service. Since the early sixteenth century, almost all offices in the French state had come to be articles of property, whose occupants could sell them or pass them on to their children. This system of venal office-holding was nearly unique in Europe. Probably it had originated from private bribery, but the government itself quickly began selling positions as a fundraising device. In 1522 Francis I established a bureau to sell new positions, and complicated rules were established giving the government a share in private sales. Both the government and potential buyers had an interest in the system's expansion, and expand it did. Numerous new offices were created, ranging from the loftiest judgeships to petty local positions, and individuals rushed to buy them, eager for the combination of status, power, and tax exemption they offered. Until the 1660s even this rising supply did not suffice to meet demand; office prices rose dramatically, and the most important offices cost enormous sums.

Venality complicated relations between royal officials and the king himself. Officeholders wanted to protect the value of their investments, and they reacted with hostility to royal plans that would diminish their importance or abolish outmoded positions; and they could oppose the king without risk of dismissal. Opposition was most vocal and most dangerous at the top of the official hierarchy, from the country's leading law courts. By 1789 these included fourteen parlements, appeals courts scattered across the country, each numbering dozens of judges, and about a dozen sister courts charged mainly with supervising tax collection. Though they spent much of their time deciding private litigation, the parlements also had important political and administrative functions. They regulated commerce and many other matters within their jurisdictions; more important still, new laws from the king required their formal endorsement and registration, a process that often involved contentious debates about royal policies, and that often included magistrates offering their own amendments.

As a result, politics in early modern France was marked by repeated conflicts between the central government and its own officials. Henry IV argued with the magistrates over religion and finally had to enforce their compliance with his policy of toleration for Protestants. In the next generation, struggles primarily concerned royal fiscal policy, culminating in outright rebellion—the Fronde of 1648—led by magistrates of the Parlement of Paris. After 1661, Louis XIV bullied the magistrates into submission, but in the eighteenth century they returned to opposing royal plans in matters of religion, taxation, and economic policy. Such disputes echoed far outside the government itself, for the magistrates proved adept at mobilizing public opinion in support of their views, making effective use of pamphlets to reach middle-class readers. However absolute they were in theory, French kings could never ignore alternative centers of political power. Even Louis XIV combined intimidation and negotiation in dealing with the magistrates, offering financial advantages and policy concessions to those who went along with government plans.

THE CHARACTER OF SOCIETY

The rising number of royal judges and officials was the most important change that French society underwent during the early modern period. By the seventeenth century, officials formed the richest group in most French cities, and they dominated urban politics and culture. At the highest levels, judges from the parlements and other important law courts shaded into the aristocracy, forming a distinctive class known as the nobility of the robe. Tensions remained with the older military nobility, the nobility of the sword, and the most distinguished families of the old nobility would not have considered placing their sons in judicial careers. But even these families often intermarried with members of the robe nobility, and farther down the social scale the merger between robe and sword nobilities was almost complete. Partly as a result, French nobles tended to leave the countryside after about 1650. Those who could afford to bought houses in Paris, Versailles, and the regional capitals, where they could enjoy an increasingly sophisticated urban life. By the later eighteenth century, observers claimed, only poor nobles resided permanently in the country; others visited their country estates only occasionally, for brief periods of rural relaxation, before returning to the pleasures of city and court. Other elements of the French bourgeoisie showed less dynamism in the period, and families often preferred the safety of official careers to the uncertainties of commerce. As a result, some of the most successful entrepreneurs in early modern France were foreigners; Italian bankers settled in sixteenth-century Lyon, making that city an important financial center, and Iberian merchants played an important role in the development of French commerce along the Atlantic seaboard. In the eighteenth century, however, French merchants became more adventurous, profiting from opportunities in the Atlantic colonial trade and investing in textile manufacturing and metallurgy. The Paris stock market was a relative latecomer, founded well after comparable institutions in Amsterdam and London, but it was a center of frenetic activity in the late eighteenth century. Even then, however, the greatest commercial fortunes tended to be associated with the state. Throughout the period, the French government desperately needed bankers who could supply loans to make up for inadequate tax receipts, and such figures increasingly took over tax collection themselves.

Because of the hesitant development of its commercial and manufacturing sectors, France remained an overwhelmingly rural society throughout the early modern period. In 1500, only thirty-two French cities had at least 10,000 inhabitants; only a dozen of these had 20,000 or more, and only three had 40,000. With a population of well over 100,000 inhabitants, Paris ranked as the largest city in northern Europe, and, as the capital of an increasingly powerful government, it expanded dramatically over the period, to about 600,000 on the eve of the Revolution. Other cities grew as well; by 1800 there were ten cities with at least 40,000 inhabitants and thirty-one with 20,000. But only a handful of commercial centers—Lyon, the Mediterranean port of Marseille, and the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux and Nantes—grew very quickly.

As a result, through 1789 at least three-fourths of French men and women lived in the countryside, in communities numbering only a few hundred residents. In settings of this kind, villagers necessarily had intimate knowledge of one another's lives, and many village institutions strengthened communal bonds. Many villages owned some communal lands, which residents could use for pasturing animals and collecting firewood, and in many regions villagers had common rights even to private land after the harvest had been collected. Religious rituals further strengthened community ties, since the village's borders followed those of the Catholic parish, and the parish church supplied the village's main public space. Bound together by so many ties, the village could form an effective political unit when its interests were threatened. The first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a wave of peasant rebellions against royal tax demands, and throughout the period villagers launched collective lawsuits against landlords and others. Despite such moments of collective action, however, the early modern village was also a deeply divided place, and divisions tended to become more serious as the period progressed. In the early sixteenth century, most French villages were dominated by a large middle class of farmers, most of whom controlled enough land to feed their families and produce a small surplus. Between 1550 and 1650, however, land came to be concentrated in very few hands as a result of multiple social pressures: population growth led families to divide parcels among their heirs; rising taxes and rents drove many middling farmers into economic difficulties; newly rich royal officials were buying up both large and small properties. By 1650, most villages were divided between a mass of impoverished agricultural laborers and a very small group of wealthy farmers.

These stark divisions within rural society were not a primary cause of the political explosions of 1789, and peasants played only marginal roles in the Revolution. But rural poverty contributed indirectly to the monarchy's collapse. At the end of the eighteenth century, France was a great power whose social problems stood in the way of its international ambitions. The men of 1789 believed that their nation required complete regeneration in order to return to greatness. The monarchy had visibly failed in the task of reconstruction; now representatives of the nation would undertake it.

See also Ancien Régime; Austrian Succession, War of the; Bordeaux; Bourbon Dynasty (France); Burgundy; Camisard Revolt; Catherine de Médicis; Charles VIII (France); Charles the Bold (Burgundy); Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Coligny Family; Condé Family; Devolution, War of; Estates-General, French; Francis I (France); Fronde; Guise Family; Habsburg-Valois Wars; Henry IV (France); Huguenots; League of Augsburg, War of the; Louis XII (France); Louis XIII (France); Louis XIV (France); Louis XV (France); Louis XVI (France); Lyon; Marie Antoinette; Marie de Médicis; Mazarin, Jules; Nantes, Edict of; Poisons, Affair of the; Polish Succession, War of the; Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Mme de; Richelieu, Armand-Jean Du Plessis, cardinal; Seven Years' War; Thirty Years' War; Valois Dynasty (France); Versailles; Wars of Religion, French.

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JONATHAN DEWALD