What arguments does Goubert make concerning the policies of Louis XIV and the situation of France upon his death in 1715? [You may be asked this on an upcoming assessment.]

It is blindingly clear to us today that from the summer of 1693 to that of 1694 the great majority of people in France — and a good many other countries — were threatened with, suffered or actully died from starvation. In a great many places, the annual death toll rose to two, three, or four times its normal level, and sometimes more. Many families were broken up. Less than half the usual number of children were born and of those that were brought into the world, at least half perished in infancy. The marriage bells were all but silent. There were fears of a return of the plague: in the rich land of Burgundy where people had only ‘braken bread’ to eat, the old folk were wont to say that ‘the plague always began with eating braken’. The priest of Saint-Just-en-Chevalet recorded that in Vivarais people were found lying dead ‘in the fields with their mouths filled with grass’. Even a cursory glance at the parish registers reveals, all too clearly, the magnitude of the disaster: France buried at least a tenth of her population in the space of a few months…  The seasons were not merely out of joint, they were for several years on end. The harvest of 1691 was poor, the harvest of 1692 worse and that of 1693 disastrous. As usual, a succession of bad harvest set prices rocketing: between the summer of 1688 and spring 1694 they rose five or six times their original level, or even more…

Unfortunately the trouble spread to the State. From 1693 onwards, the receipts from all forms of taxation fell off sharply. No taxpayer on earth could get money out of the dead and dying. Tailles and farmed taxes had to be brought down, the latest currency manipulations speeded up, capitulation tax swiftly introduced and even, a most remarkable step, expenditure on the war cut down in the very midst of hostilities while at the same time serious negotiations got underway…

[after Louis’ death in 1715] plots were hatched and weapons got ready to bring down the men who had ruled under the dying despot. Memoirs, intrigues and pamphlets show that a real, if secret, opposition was already in existence as early as 1695. Between 1705 and 1710, there was a genuine political conspiracy aimed at setting up an aristocratic and pacifist monarchy in which the old nobility should occupy or reoccupy pride of place and all the ‘vile bourgeoisie’ and the common nobodies from whom Louis XIV had drawn his ministers, secretaries and intendants would be sent back to their scribbling or their farming…. When the king entered his last illness the dukes and parlementaires depending on Orléans  [Philippe II, regent for the young king Louis XV ; his father was Louis XIV’s younger brother] at last knew where they stood and made ready to turn the State of Louis XIV upside down…

Louis’ body was still lying in state when the anticipated revolution took place. It placed all power in the hands of the dukes, under the complaisant eye of Philippe d’Orléans. Down with the bastards, the vile bourgeois and nearly all the administrative structure built up so painfully since Richelieu… To any well-informed person, the violent reaction of the regency must appear inevitable. For no less than a quarter of a century, the real direction of French thought had eluded the royal patronage. Intellectual life had deserted Versailles for Paris, the court for the salons. The principles of law, contract and constitution, new or refurbished, had spread in enlightened circles. The example of England was quoted openly and if the memory of Charles I’s end on the scaffold was temporarily forgotten, people recalled the theories and the facts which had led to the expulsion of James II…  The fashion was for anti-despotism, irreverence, irreligion, and laboratories.

In the midst of this whirl of wit and ideas, gaiety and folly, old Colbert’s system, old Bossuet’s obstinacy, old Maintenon with her bonnets and her Jesuits and the old monarch himself, shrivelled and motionless, all seemed very out-of-date and ridiculous, like something left over from another age. There must have been many who thought with a comfortable sigh, on that morning of 1 September 1715, that at last the reign of the old was ended…

The Ancien Regime under Louis XIV was an accumulation of old forms, old habits and old ideas, the more deeply rspected the older they were, which proved incapable of reshaping or even of reforming its financial system. To do so would have meant denying its very nature, tearing down the antiquated edifice which had been shored up a score of times although it still presented a glittering facade to the world, and daring to face up to the march of time and the nature of things. The old house stood for another seventy-five years. No one in 1715 could have foreseen how comparatively imminent was its collapse.

For all this, successes, good intentions, failures, inadequacies and refusals, Louis XIV remains, through his ministers, ultimately responsible.

Responsible, that is, if it can be truly said that any man, even a king and a great king, has the power to act effectively against the great political, demographic, economic and intellectual forces which may, after all, finally command the overall development of a kingdom which is not alone int he world. Among these forces were some which, whether the king knew it or not, were acting directly against him. Others, working more slowly and obscurly and almost invariably unknown to the king, had nonetheless a powerful long-term effect which some historians have regarded as crucial.

THE FORGOTTEN FORCES

The inherent inertia of that great, tradition-ridden body which was the monarchy of the Ancien Regime, the growing antagonism of the major European states, the forces, vague or precise, foreseen or unforeseen, of which Louis XIV was more or less consciously aware, were all ultimately and undeniably in strong opposition to his designs. But were there no other forces at work, more mysterious and perhaps more powerful but ore which no allowance was made in state affairs and which may not even have occurred to the minds of those who ruled it? These, surely, were the forces which ultimately controlled the very life of the kingdom, reducing the activities of one small king of one small country to nothing more than the meaningless gesticulations of insects in relation to the universe.

For some years now, younger historians of a certain school have tended to ignore the bustle of individuals and events in favor of what they might call revealing, measuring, defining and illustrating the great, dominant rhythms which move world history as a whole. These rhythms emerge as largely economic. The method may have a certain rashness and temerity but it bears fruit…

What was the real overall bearing of the great movements of the economic conjecture, movements rarely perceived at the time unless in some vague way by one or two exceptional minds? Do they reveal the ‘deep breathing’ of History? …  It is possible that France under Louis XIV may have been unconsciously subject to powerful economic forces which are still much disputed and not fully understood. Social, demographic, mental and other factors, wholly or partly incomprehensible to the rulers, may have played their part also. How and within what limits would they have affected the nation’s course? …

Apart from one small, passing effort of Colbert’s, the State of Louis XIV seems to have taken littl thought for any kind of demographic policy….  Apart from Vauban and a few others now forgotten, no one too much interest in ‘the people’ except in terms of taxation. The chief demographic victory of the regime, the control of the plague, is largely to the credit of local authorities. But this did not stop the unknown masses from suffering, all through the reign, from the individual and collective miseries of shortages and epidemics….

The court, the kingdom and the collection of princes which, for Louis, constituted the chief of the old Continent, these were the accustomed limits pf his royal horizon. Far, far beyond them, Muscovy, Asia, the Americas and the whole world continued to exist for all that, and to develop. A new Caesar arose in Russia but his peculiarities were of interest only tot he court and to the city. Only a few missionaries and traders concerned themselves with China, at the other end of the world, or had any inkling of her incomparable civilization. Only the Dutch had access to one small hostile Japanese island, and they reaped huge profits from it War was soon to break out in India but Louis took little notice of such pagan empires. Africa provided slaves and some other merchandise but two or three poorly protected trading posts were his only interest there. The English, while making thrifty investments in the Spanish Main, were moving further north and beginning to win a decisive battle which did not interest the Great King who care little for Canada or Louisiana. Brought up by Mazarin in a world of court intrigues, dynastic squabbles and problems of succession and of frontiers, Louis rarely looked beyond his own lands and almost never to the world at large. Twenty nuns at Port-Royal-des-Champs, a few buildings at Marly and two or three strongholds seemed to him worthier objects of glory….

Isolated at Versailles at an early stage by his own pride, the machinations of a woman and a few priests and courtiers, he neither knew nor cared that his age was becoming the Age of Reason, of Science and of Liberty. From first to last, he refused to recognize the power of Holland, the nature of England, or the birth of an embryo German nation. He gave Colbert little support in his courageous maritime and colonial policies and failed to pursue them seriously. He was always more excited by one fortress in Flanders or the Palatinate than by all of India, Canada and Louisiana put together.

And yet he and his colleagues left behind them a France that was territorially larger, militarily better defended, with a more effective administration and to a large extent pacified.

And although he neglected it and often fought against it, there was a time when he built up and maintained what was to be, for a long time to come, the real greatness and glory of France. The Age of Enlightenment was dominated, at least in part, by the language and culture of France.