Des États dans l’État

Readers of Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution will recall the appendix which he devotes to the Pays d’États and particularly Languedoc. His aim was to highlight the road not taken by the old monarchy in organising the administration of most of the kingdom. Although Tocqueville pointed out that, as well as Languedoc, Brittany and a number of lesser provinces (a good quarter of the kingdom, in fact) also continued before 1789 to be administered through estates, until recently historians have tended to concentrate their attention on the centralised, absolutist road taken by the monarchy in most provinces from the time of Louis XIV down to the Revolution. Occasional substantial works by érudits locaux, such as Armand Rébillon’s study of the Breton estates (1932), did appear, but were scarcely integrated into more general surveys. It was only with the work of Maurice Bordes in the mid-twentieth century that the vigour and variety of the survivals of representative government began to be widely recognised again. Since then, the operations and role of estates scarcely noticed even by Tocqueville have begun to be studied in illuminating detail, whether by Marie-Laure Legay on the various Flemish territories (2001) or Julian Swann on Burgundy (2003), but only now does his preferred example receive the exhaustive treatment it deserves. This handsome, collectively written volume (by Stéphane Durand, Arlette Jouanna and Elie Pélaquier) covers every conceivable aspect of the Languedoc estates’ organisation and activity during their last century and a half of existence. Previous scholarship has tended to locate their golden age in the sixteenth century, but a convincing case is made here for preferring a time when absolute monarchy was once thought to have cowed them into servile impotence. So far from that, argue the authors, the resurgent monarchy of Louis XIV and his successors found the estates an active and invaluable pillar of royal authority in this large but distant province. Unelected, they were nevertheless representative in the sense that their members were all from the province, yet neither royal nominees, nor holders of royal offices. They sat by independent right and convened annually. Every year they presented the king with a cahier de doléances. And although, as in the Estates-General, they comprised the three traditional orders, the Third Estate had double the numbers of the clergy and nobility, and members voted by head and not by order. In all this, they offered obvious models for the patriotic programme at national level in 1788–9. The Crown valued the estates as a useful buffer veiling its rapacity from the taxpayer, as well as an important counterweight to the pretensions of the sovereign courts—the parlement in Toulouse or the court of accounts in Montpellier. Dominated and largely managed by bishops, under Louis XIV and after, the estates also gave unquestioning support to the persecution of the Huguenots in a province where Protestantism was more widespread than anywhere else in the kingdom. The proudest claim of the estates was that they gave the province’s free consent to the taxes raised in Languedoc for the king. The basic tax they voted every year was called the Free Gift. It is true that they seldom, and decreasingly, queried what the king asked for, although there was serious resistance for a time in 1750–2 when Machault introduced the vingtième. But they also, unlike the Pays d’Election, raised substantial sums on their own behalf to fund local projects, such as roads, bridges, canals and monuments. Arthur Young bore witness in his pre-revolutionary travels to the impressive results. The effectiveness of the estates’ tax-raising in turn boosted their credit, and notoriously they were able to raise loans more cheaply than the king. The sums they borrowed over this period are all carefully recorded in exemplary lists and graphs. Most of the money raised still ended up in the king’s coffers, but cheaper credit was the solidest guarantee of the estates’ continued existence. After the tensions of the 1750s, despite periodic gestures of independence, they continued to serve the Crown’s fiscal purposes as effectively as ever, constantly outbidding the escalating claims of the parlement of Toulouse to be the voice of the province, and increasingly in uneasy alliance with the intendant. Additionally, as with the estates of other provinces, they had their own permanent agents in Paris with a direct line to ministers, and the authors offer interesting evidence of co-operation between the metropolitan representatives of all the pays d’états to present a common front against centralising tendencies. As later eighteenth-century theorists began to dream of more representative government, the future looked bright for provincial estates, and Languedoc became a beacon for how they might be generalised. In 1788–9 many saw this as the future. But, in the debate over the composition of the Estates-General, all the flaws and limitations of traditional representative institutions were rapidly brought to light, and the movement to generalise provincial estates shrivelled. So did the hopes of survival for those which had never disappeared. If despotism had found them no real obstacle to its demands, revolutionaries now thought, what sort of liberty could they have guaranteed? Occasional factual errors (as in the garbled account on p. 359 of the introduction of provincial assemblies under Necker) are all the more surprising in a monument of scholarship which will prove indispensable to anyone seeking to understand how the Ancien Régime worked

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