Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective Read Online Free PDF Page B

But that is a matter for later chapters to address. For the
    time being, we shall concern ourselves with the prerevolutionary phase of
    the story. The following pages first recapitulate the historic drive of the old
    France toward security and greatness in (and beyond) Europe. The focus
    1 Cited in Jonathan R. Dull, The French Navy and American Independence: A Study of Arms and Diplomacy, 1774–1787 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 304, 316–17.
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    The ancien régime
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    then will shift to the ways in which the old regime state, in pursuing its goals
    abroad, became the primary catalyst for domestic changes that contravened
    its own legitimating sociopolitical principles. Finally, we shall reassess the
    “prerevolution” of 1787–88, seeing in it a convergence of deeply rooted
    diplomatic, constitutional, and social crises that would soon topple the old
    regime.
    t h e p r o b l e m a t i c d r i v e t o w a r d g r e a t n e s s
    i n t h e o l d r e g i m e
    The European state system in which absolutist France had to compete –
    and which it ever wished to dominate – was manifestly not designed for the
    weak. As Prussia’s Frederick the Great put it, harshly but realistically:
    “the kingdom of heaven . . . is won by gentleness; those of this world belong
    to force.”2 Perhaps more revealing from a French point of view were the
    remarks of René-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’Argenson. Although repu-
    tedly a “philosopher” in public office, d’Argenson could comment in 1739:
    “A state should always be at the ready, like a gentleman living among
    swashbucklers and quarrellers. Such are the nations of Europe, today more
    than ever; negotiations are only a continual struggle between men without
    principles, impudently aggressive and ever greedy.”3
    The French themselves had long been prominent contributors to this
    state of affairs. Preoccupied before 1648 with beating off the armies of the
    Austro-Spanish Habsburgs, they had subsequently assumed an increas-
    ingly aggressive European and extra-European role under the long-lived
    Louis XIV. The Sun King had developed over many years a national tra-
    dition meshing ambitions of a continental and mercantile/colonial nature.
    Moreover, he had stamped this national tradition with the imprimatur of
    his charismatic reign. If princelings all over Europe scrambled to emulate
    the Grand Roi by raising châteaux and gathering entourages and leading
    lives styled after his, is it any wonder that French statesmen found it natural
    in later years to assess their country’s needs in terms at least as grandiose
    as those bequeathed to them by Louis XIV?
    France’s involvement in the two great mid-eighteenth-century wars
    witnessed starkly to these realities. The Sun King’s ghost – the specter of
    his long adherence to a foreign policy implying warfare on both land and
    sea – continued to haunt Versailles.
    The first of those conflicts, the War of theAustrian Succession (1740–48),
    was triggered by the death in 1740 of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI
    2 Cited in Rohan Butler, Choiseul: Father and Son, Vol. 1: 1719–1754 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 310.
    3 Quoted in Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers 1648–1815
    (London: Longman, 1983), p. 214.
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    Reinterpreting the French Revolution
    and the lightning occupation toward the end of that year of Austrian Silesia
    by Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Yet even before events boiled over on the
    Continent, Great Britain and Spain had drifted into war over tensions in
    the West Indies – and this was a war in which France was tempted early on
    to intervene. Louis XV’s chief minister, Cardinal André Hercule de Fleury,
    would have preferred to keep France out of the continental struggle en-
    tirely and to bring all French strength to bear against the rival across the
    Channel.4 Yet, tellingly, Fleury himself had helped to unleash the dogs of
    war on land, not only