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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From the death of a king to the death of a revolution,
By
This review is from: A History of Modern France: Volume 1: Old Regime and Revolution 1715-1799 (Penguin History) (Paperback)
In about 250 pages, A. Cobban gives us his vision of the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI and the French Revolution. His accents are sometimes very pronounced (e.g. 'the sinister shade of atheism').
His general position is that 'theory plays little part in the determining policies. The actions of the revolutionaries were prescribed by the need to find practical solutions to immediate problems.' The central theme of his book is 'bread' (famine) for the Third Estate and 'financial crisis' for the powerful in the Old Regime. The financial crises were provoked by war (e.g. the American War) and the refusal by the wealthy (aristocracy, Church) to pay taxes. Other factors were the weakness of the kings and the functioning of the Old Regime with its bureaucratic control of industry and trade. Louis XVI had to summon the States-General, which permitted the Third Estate to take power (normally it was always in a minority position of 2 against 1). But immediately, there were internecine fights between the different factions in it. The Committee of Public Safety eliminated the right (Danton) and the left, but the members of the Committe then fought among themselves: Robespierre was guillotined. In fact, 85 % of the guillotined belonged to the Third Estate. When the new revolutionary army became sufficiently professionalized, the political role of the people was finished. The well-to-do within the Third Estate, who had used the discontent of the peasants and the craftsmen, could lean on the army to take power, until one of the generals rose above everybody and became France's new autocrat. Of course, this small book cannot give detailed explanations of all events or insightful portraits of all important characters, but it is told with dash, insight and vision. It would not have been written had the Church still ruled, because the Vatican attacked vehemently the 'monstrous right to liberty of thought and writing.' A masterly told tale about 'the nursery of the modern world'.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Decline and Fall of the Ancien Regime,
By
This review is from: A History of Modern France: Volume 1: Old Regime and Revolution 1715-1799 (Penguin History) (Paperback)
It's hard to believe now, but back in the 1950s the standard academic interpretation of the French Revolution was a Marxist one. The revolt against and eventual fall of the French monarchy, went the standard version, was the inevitable product of social contradictions and class conflict arising from industrialization. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, historians such as Francois Furet and Alfred Cobban began to advance alternative explanations for the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s. Their revised views of the Revolution looked to social and political motivations rather than purely economic ones. In 1964, Cobban, a professor of French History at University College London, published a now famous lecture series outlining the new "revisionist" view, under the title _The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution_. However, he had already published in 1957 a slightly less well-known study of the late ancien regime and revolutionary period under the relatively innocuous title _A History of Modern France 1715-1799_. This earlier book lays out and argues for the central points of the revisionist thesis while providing a succinct and fluid overview of the period.Cobban's narrative commences with the death in 1715 of Louis XIV after 54 years of personal rule. Louis XIV had used those five decades to perfect a system of absolutist monarchy and exert French power and influence throughout the continent of Europe. However his unquestioned ascendancy over a traditionally proud and independent aristocracy had not come without cost. Cobban writes, "Louis had not so much suppressed the declining aristocratic elements in the state as bought them off at high price." In exchange for obedience, the wealthiest members of French society had received broad exemption from royal taxation. Even so, vestiges of noble privilege persisted, in particular the parliaments - regional law courts responsible for registering royal edicts, traditionally dominated by the aristocracy, of which the Parliament of Paris was the most influential. For now, the parliaments lay quiescent; later under less domineering monarchs they would spearhead a reassertion of noble rights and privileges. Throughout his reign Louis XIV had sought French dominance over the continent through a seemingly endless series of wars. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) had been fought among the great powers of Europe to determine who would succeed to the Spanish throne and, as importantly, what would be the parameters of the empire inherited by that successor. After more than ten years of conflict in Europe and the Americas, the Bourbon candidate favored by Louis XIV succeeded to the throne of Spain, but under condition of exclusion from the line of inheritance to the kingship of France, thus ensuring that Louis' dream of a union of the French and Spanish kingdoms would not come to pass. Moreover the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht effected a partition of the Spanish empire, with the Spanish Netherlands and territories in northern Italy awarded to France's traditional antagonist Habsburg Austria. The War of the Spanish Succession, then, had concluded with meager political gains for France. It had also concluded at great financial cost. The mountain of war debt left behind by Louis XIV would occasion the first great fiscal crisis of eighteenth century France. The future Louis XV being only five years old in 1715, the governance of France fell to a regency under his cousin Philip of Orleans. Recognizing that a period of peace was essential for national regeneration Orleans embraced the settlements of 1713-1714, concluding an alliance with Britain which would persist until 1731, and even participating with Britain, Holland and Austria in a short war against Spain (the War of the Quadruple Alliance, 1718-1720) when that monarch attempted to challenge the new status quo in Italy. For all his prudent management of foreign affairs, any fiscal dividends which might have accrued fell victim to catastrophic economic policy. Orleans entrusted the state finances to a Scottish adventurer named John Law, a man possessed of some singular theories of finance economics. Money, reasoned Law, had no value in itself but was simply the instrument through which trade is effected. Trade being not only the lifeblood of the nation but also a source of tax revenue which could plug the hole in the royal finances, it would be desirous to stimulate as much economic activity as possible through maximizing the availability of currency. Law proceeded to consolidate the operations of the French overseas colonies into a great state monopoly trading company, including the slowly developing Louisiana territories in the Americas which brought the trade of the Mississippi region down to overseas markets via the trading post at New Orleans. Combined with a new state banking institution, the Mississippi Company began to produce currency in the form of shares backed by the presumed future profits to be generated by the trade of Louisiana. The resulting speculative bubble burst in 1720: the Mississippi Company collapsed and Law fled into exile. A French distrust of central banking would persist throughout the remainder of the 18th century; France would not again have a central bank until the reign of Napoleon. Law's attempt to remedy the financial condition of the French state through financial engineering did nothing to solve the ongoing fiscal crisis. True, the wars of Louis XIV had destabilized the royal treasury, but as Cobban makes clear, the essential problem of French finances was one of taxation, not of expenditure. The resources available to France in the eighteenth century were very considerable. It was a period of rapid expansion in overseas trade and of growth in population. The number of French ships engaged in overseas commerce quadrupled between 1715 and 1789, while the value of trade handled through the port of Bordeaux, France's richest, rose from 40 million livres in 1724 to 250 million livres in 1789. France also saw strong, steady growth in population through the course of the century, from about 17 million persons in 1715 to perhaps 26 million in 1789, making France the most populous country in Europe. The expanding wealth of the highest tier of Frenchmen was on view throughout the 1700s in the construction of grand chateaux and manor houses, and the perfection of luxury items for nobles and beneficiaries of the commodity and slave trades with the rich sugar colonies of the French Antilles. The mid eighteenth century was "a period in which the cult of the lesser arts" - goldsmithing, tapestry weaving, chamber music, the culinary arts - "reached perhaps its height." Eighteenth century painting reflected the spirit of the times. The weightier themes of the seventeenth century - the enigmatic classical allegories of Poussin, the luminous seaport sunsets of Claude Lorrain, the brooding midnight portraits of La Tour - gave way to Watteau's whimsical minstrels, Pater's country fetes and the flirting shepherds of Boucher. Cobban's summation of eighteenth century French literature could as well serve for its painting: "it was an age of wit rather than wisdom, of optimism rather than a sense of tragic destiny." To be sure, the economic expansion of France did not reflect a perfectly modern economic regime. In many ways France of the eighteenth century represents a curious hybrid of medieval and modern. It was for example, the high-water mark of guild influence over craftsmen and trades, complete with a tangle of rules and regulations governing work and innovation: "they prevented, and were intended to prevent, the development of new methods of manufacture." Consequently the pace of industrialization in France lagged far behind that of England: in 1789, Cobban relates, 900 spinning jennies operated in France, while England in that year boasted twenty thousand. Internal customs fees and tariffs further retarded trade. With the pace of industrialization thus stifled, population growth could not be translated to economic growth as it was in England; in fact population increases in these circumstances may have acted as a politically destabilizing force: by 1789, "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that France must have been suffering from intense and increasing rural over-population." And in fact widespread starvation in the countryside motivated revolutionary mobs in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The tension between the middle ages and modernity in France extended to the sphere of governance. As Cobban summarizes, "the great king [Louis XIV] had endowed France with a modern system of government while retaining a semi-medieval system of financing it." The taxation system was corrupt, inefficient and increasingly regressive. The single wealthiest institution, the Catholic Church, was entirely exempt (although the clerical government would customarily vote to the crown an annual "free gift", usually two to three million livres on revenues typically in excess of 120 million per annum). The diminished crown power of taxation hobbled France as a great power; an increasingly chaotic and faction-driven policy process at Versailles under the rule of Louis XV and his son and successor Louis XVI hastened her decline. The popular impression of an extravagant court spending the state into bankruptcy on palaces and finery is a misleading caricature - the greatest pressure on state finances came during wartime. Indeed, "The expense of even a small war was greater than that of the biggest palace." Furthermore, "war inevitably brought a fiscal crisis." In tracing the history of France's involvement in costly and unproductive wars under the personal rule of Louis XV and XVI, we trace also the slow drift of the ancien regime towards collapse and Revolution. With only brief exceptions, the Orleanist regency... Read more ›
4.0 out of 5 stars
A readable political history,
By
This review is from: A History Of Modern France Volume 1 (Paperback)
This book begins with the fall of the Monarchy in 1871 and traces French political and social history through the time of the Fifth Republic. His narrative moves well, and he is an excellent summarizer of historical developments. He traces the shaky start of the First Republic which had to resist still prevailing strong Monarchist sentiment, points out its accomplishments in creating fundamental 'republican institutions'. The great collapse of the First War is related as is the effort afterwards to reconstitute French society.The debacle of defeat in the Second War follows. Then the infamous Vichy regime is described. It does not however detail what I was most interested in understanding , the relation of the French regime to its Jewish citizens thousands of whom were deported to their deaths in concentration camps. The period of post- war economic growth and recovery marred by the crisis with the overseas colonies which leads to the rise of DeGaulle is also described.
While the book reads smoothly I found it lacking to a degree in a kind of anecdotal and storytelling brilliance which makes History most come alive.
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