The difference between France and England

In a short summary of English history from 1327 onwards, Charles Tilly lists a series of regicides and civil wars, concluding that ‘armed struggles over the royal power and royal succession continued for three centuries, until the Glorious Revolution in 1688 set the House of Orange on the throne’.⁵³ Despite exaggera­tion of the amount of conflict in the period and the somewhat curious mention of the House of Orange as the last in the series of English dynasties, Tilly points to a characteristic feature of English history.

The new kings were approved by Parliament and were relatively soon able to take over the government. Even the period 1455—85, commonly referred to as the Wars of the Roses, only included shorter periods of open war and no long-term division of the country between two or more rulers. In a similar way, royal minorities, which were periods of crisis in most countries, were relatively peaceful. This is further confirmed by the almost sensational fact that four changes of religion took place over a period of 30 years in the mid-sixteenth century without a civil war.

Finally, there is a parallel to the Civil War already in the mid-thirteenth century, namely, the Baronial Rebellion of 1258-67 against King Henry III. The barons, with considerable popular support, reacted against the king’s costly foreign policy and forced him to accept a committee of barons to govern the country together with him, in clear conflict with normal practice.⁵⁴ The French king Louis IX, who acted as an arbiter between the two parties, but pronounced in favour of the king, is reported to have said that he would rather break clods behind a plough than to be king in this way.⁵⁵ The rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful but did show the barons’ ability to govern the country, at least for a short time, under the leadership of Simon de Mon­tfort (1264-65), and did not lead to a weakening of the central power.

Thus, whether or not England was more peaceful than France, the country was certainly more able to handle crises, notably that of the absence of a king or a divided monarchy. This in turn questions the idea that the survival of Parliament in the seventeenth century was just the result of some favourable accidents. The basic factor was the development of a national aristocracy closely linked to the king as well as to the local gentry and commoners, whose conflicts and struggles were always over the central power in the country, not aiming at creating separate regions outside royal control.

The explanation of the difference between England and France must to some extent be sought in geography and ecology. England was a small country with sufficient agricultural land to support a large population and with easy commu­nications, which allowed considerable centralization. Situated on an island, it was also relatively protected against attacks from abroad. Even Anglo-Saxon England seems to have been remarkably centralized and William’s conquest developed this centralization further by establishing a Norman secular and clerical aristocracy to rule the country together with the king. The following internal struggles were all about the central power in the country; there was no attempt to create a separate local power independent of the king.

By contrast, post-Carolingian France was largely a collection of principalities under the nominal suzerainty of the king, which is not surprising, considering the size of the country and the difficulties of its terrain. Compared to his German counterpart, the French king’s success in converting this area into a real kingdom under his rule was remarkable and made France, despite its weaknesses, the leading country on the European Continent until the unification of Germany in 1870. Next to England, it was also the wealthiest; no other continental power had larger incomes and could muster a larger army in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­turies.

In this connection, we also have to point to the financial consequences of the fact that France was a Catholic country. Admittedly, the king of France had already achieved considerable control of the Church in the Middle Ages, which was further extended in the following period. The king controlled appoint­ments to higher ecclesiastical offices, the clergy were normally his loyal sup­porters and the Church gave substantial contributions to the government in the form of ‘gifts’, while insisting on its freedom from taxation. Nevertheless, these payments amounted to considerably less than ordinary taxes and the clergy were not state functionaries in the same way as in Protestant, particularly Lutheran, countries. On the other hand, neither were the majority of royal officials. Finally, with the largely aristocratic character of the higher clergy, the Church served to strengthen the traditional character of French society based on landownership and prestigious offices. One of the most radical reforms introduced during the Revolution was the confiscation of ecclesiastical lands and the suppression of the monasteries in return for state salaries for the clergy, measures largely introduced for financial reasons. This led to papal condemna­tion and a bitter conflict during which many priests, who had been positive in the beginning, turned against the Revolution.

A comparison between England and the Dutch Republic, on the one hand, and France, on the other, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries seems to form a perfect confirmation of the thesis about capital and coercion. Thanks to their capital, the two former were able to finance their wars while retaining their constitutional government, whereas the latter had to develop absolute monarchy to raise the necessary sums.

By contrast, the militarization of France from the sixteenth century onwards did not lead to a corresponding strengthening of the state. The king increased his power, the number of officials increased and the court at Versailles formed a visual expression of the king’s glory, but the venality of offices resulted in an inefficient administration over which the king had little control. In the end, the regime broke down, largely because of financial problems for the king and his government. It would therefore seem that the French state would have been better off with less war and a smaller army. Concerning the question of capital, France did participate in the overseas expansion, but was less successful in this, largely because of its absolutism and venal bureaucracy. In both cases, we are therefore dealing with long-term constitutional differences, which influenced the relative success in building up capital.

Would a greater amount of direct taxation granted by central assemblies parallel to the English Parliament have been a realistic alternative to the sales of offices? Would assemblies where the nobles were represented have been willing to impose taxes that they were liable to pay themselves? If so, they would certainly have demanded a say in the use of those taxes and might have refused to support some of the wars the king wanted. Given the record of noble rebellions and Louis XIV’s experience with the Fronde, it is also understandable that Louis XIV did not want such assemblies.

It would seem that the best way for the king to improve his finances would have been to wage less war. As pointed out by many scholars, France did not have the advantage of England of being an island and was consequently subject to greater threats from its neighbours. On the other hand, with the possible exception of the wars of religion, when the country was divided, and the 1630s and 1640s, when a total victory of the Emperor in Germany, combined with the close alliance between the German and Spanish Habsburgs, might pose the threat of encircle­ment, it is difficult to see that France was under any great threat from abroad. As long as it avoided internal division, France was a strong country surrounded by weaker neighbours. The wars were therefore more probably the result of the king’s search for wealth and glory by foreign conquest. Although the aim of historical research is to explain what people in the past actually did rather than what they ought to have done, we can at least question the current theory of the importance of warfare for state formation and conclude that an important explanation for the French king’s relative failure in this respect was the frequency of his wars. Thus, the example of France shows that war might not only strengthen the state but also weaken it. The widespread sales of offices would seem to have resulted in a number of officers with little to do as well as to reduce the government’s influence over its local representatives.

The examples discussed so far clearly point to the importance of capital in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colonial and inter-European trade and manufacture created great fortunes which enabled the Dutch Republic with two million inhabitants to mobilize military forces strong enough to defeat Spain and France with many times larger populations and even combining this with a higher standard of living for its inhabitants. Already before discussing the rest of Europe, we can conclude that a purely agrarian state would have had great difficulties in competing internationally during this period. It also seems likely that there was a connection between capital and constitutionalism, most probably in the sense that constitutionalism under certain circumstances would lead to capital accumulation by creating the conditions for free competition in the economic field. Whereas both seem to have been present from early on in the Netherlands, constitutional government is certainly older than capital in England.