The Oscar Iden Series
Prof. Carroll Quigley's Last Public Lectures
Public Authority and the State In the Western Tradition: A Thousand
Years of Growth
976-1976
Lecture 1: The State of Communities:
976-1576
For a decade after 1931, my chief intellectual concern was the
growth of the European State in the old regime, before 1789. I
dreamed that at some date in the future, perhaps thirty years in
the future, I would write the definitive history of the growth of
public authority and the development of the European State. But
after 1941 I had to abandon the project because I was to busy with
my teaching -- which I enjoyed thoroughly -- and no longer had
access to an adequate library.
After all, I discovered that other historians were becoming so
narrowly specialized, and their historical concepts so inadequate,
that it was almost impossible to explain to them what had happened
in the growth of the state. They lacked the conceptual paradigms,
the knowledge of comparative developments, and even the
understanding of their own specialities to grasp a subject as broad
as and of such long duration as the growth of public authority over
the last thousand years.
Anyone who does not understand the long term development of this
subject cannot understand the more limited aspects of it in more
recent periods. But modern historians are increasingly specialized
in narrow ranges of chronology, geographic area, and aspects of
changing events.
Let me give you a few examples of how the lack of adequate
paradigms blocks our understanding of the history of our
subject.
The area of political action in our society is a circle on which
at least four actors may intervene: the government, individuals,
communities, and voluntary associations, especially
corporations.
Yet, for the last century, discussion of political actions, and
especially the controversies arising out of such actions, have been
carried on in terms of only two actors, the government and the
individual.
Nineteenth century books often assume a polarization of the
individual versus the state, while many twentieth century books
seek to portray the state as the solution to most individuals'
problems. Conservatives, from von Hayek to Ayn Rand, now try to
curtail government on the excuse that this will give more freedom
to individuals, while liberals try to destroy communities with the
aim of making all individuals identical, including boys and
girls.
And since what we get in history is never what any one
individual or group is struggling for, but is the resultant of
diverse groups struggling, the area of political action will be
increasingly reduced to an arena where the individual, detached
from any sustaining community, is faced by gigantic and
irresponsible corporations.
A second example is derived directly from the field of history.
More than fifteen
years ago, an old friend of mine, Professor Robert R. Palmer -- we
were colleagues at Princeton in the History Department in 1936 and
1937 -- won fame and fortune from the publication of a large book
on the eighteenth century revolutions in Europe and America.
The book was loaded with facts, but lacked any real
understanding of the subject. Even the title, The Age of the
Democratic Revolution, was misleading because neither the French
Revolution nor the American Revolution was "democratic."
Bob Palmer is a very industrious person with an agile mind, and
a ready verbalizer, but he does not know what he means by
"revolution" or by "democratic," and he is totally wrong if he
believes the eighteen century revolution, in the United States or
the English-speaking world in general, was the same as the
eighteenth century revolution in France: in fact, they were the
opposite.
The French Revolution was a struggle to obtain sovereignty by a
government which did not have it. The English-speaking Revolution
was an effort by states which had sovereignty to curtail it, divide
it up, hamper it, by means of such things as federalism, separation
of powers, electoral colleges, and so forth.
My third example of the injuries inflicted on the historiography
of the growth of the state is more personal. My doctoral
dissertation on the Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom
of Italy (Harvard, 1938) was never published because
overspecialized "experts" who read the version revised for
publication persisted in rejecting aspects of the book in which
they were not specialists.
The only man who read it and had the slightest idea what it was
all about was Salvemini, the great historian from the University of
Florence, who was a refugee in this country at the time. The book's
message could be understood only by an historian who knew the
history of Italy, France, and Austria, and was equally familiar
with events before the French Revolution and afterwards.
But these national and chronological boundaries are exactly the
ones recent historians hesitate to cross for the French were
reluctant to admit that the late revolutionary and Napoleonic
reforms in French government had been anticipated in Italy, while
many Italian historians knew nothing about French government before
1789 and wanted to concentrate only on the Risorgimento after
1814.
No one was much interested in my discovery that the French state
as it was developed under Napoleon was based largely on Italian
precedents. For example, while the French state before 1789 had no
budget or accounts, Napoleon's budgets in both France and Italy
were strikinglysimilar to the budgets of the Duchy of Milan in the
sixteenth century.
Similarly, the codified educational system established by
Napoleon in France in 1808 was anticipated in the Kingdom of
Piedmont in the 1720's. Such discoveries form part of the history
of the growth of the European state, but are not of much interest
to the narrow and over-specialized controversies of the last half
century.
So instead of writing the history of public authority, I got
into what was, I suppose, my much stronger activity: the creation
of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, and frameworks
for understanding historical processes.
The basic entity we must understand is the civilization as a
whole. Although I tell you I'm going to talk about the last
thousand years, 976-1976, Western Civilization, of which we are a
part, has been around for a considerably longer time than that.
We might say Western Civilization began around 550, but there
was no significant structure of public authority until almost 1050,
with no state at all over the preceding two centuries, 850-1050.
Yet 950 is significant as the point at which our Western
Civilization began the first of its three great ages of expansion.
970- 1279. (The other two were 1440-1590 and 1770-1890).
The first age of expansion applies to the core of Western
Civilization, the area between the Rhine River and the Loire, the
area formed the core of the Carolingian Empire (687-887).
This Empire was the earliest political structure of the new
Western Civilization, one of four new civilizations which sprouted
from the ruins of Classical Civilization after A.D. 550. These four
were Byzantine (330-1453), Islamic (630-1922), Russian 800--?) and
Western (550--?). Each of them modified the traditions it accepted
from the ruins of Classical Civilization and created its own
distinct culture.
Another paradigm I want to establish is a difference between two
kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds
of governments in them. Asiatic Civilizations, which I call Class B
Civilizations, generally do not attempt to deal with individuals or
with the problems of individuals; they leave interpersonal
relationships to the local or kinship community.
Class A Civilizations including Classical Civilization, our own
Western Civilization, or the first Chinese or Sinic Civilization,
whose dates are 1800 B.C. to 400 A.D. In class A Civilizations,
although the civilization begins as an area of common culture made
up of communities, there is a long term trend to destroy and break
down those communities.
The way I would like to express this would be -- and I used to
draw it on the blackboard -- by saying that all civilizations start
out as aggregations of communities. Those communities are generally
of two types, either local, such as parishes, neighborhoods,
villages, or manors; or kinships, families, clans, and so
forth.
When a civilization begins with such communities, as ours did in
550, there is no state, and there are no atomized individuals. I
will not go into the details of this, but in such communities,
there are no written laws; all law is customary.
Most controls on behavior are what I call internalized, that is,
they are built into your hormones and your neurological responses.
You do what is necessary to remain a member of the community,
because if you were not a member of a community, you would be
nothing. You would not be a man. As you may know if you ever
studied linguistics, the names which many primitive and
not-so-primitive peoples have for themselves is the word for
man.
The communities from which Classical Civilization came were
clans, kinship groups; the communities from which Western
Civilization came were local villages and manors. Lucky
civilizations, such as Chinese Civilizations over the past 1500
years, generally have communities which are both kinship and
local.
What happens in the course of a class A civilization, over a
thousand or more years, is that the fundamental communities are
broken up and gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller
groups, and may end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a
father and a mother, who eventually lose all discipline and control
of their children. The result of this process is a state which is
not only sovereign but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated
individuals.
Of the four civilizations which came out of Classical
Antiquity's wreckage, two, Islamic and Byzantine, clearly are Class
B Civilizations, that is, they continued to work for communities.
Their governments were governments of limited powers, of which the
most important were raising money and recruiting soldiers.
The finest example of such an Asiatic Despotism was the
Mongolian Empire of GenghisKhan about A.D. 1250, but its origins go
back to the Persian Empires of the Achaemenids and the
Sassanids.
Good examples of such a structure are the Chinese Civilizations
of 220-1949, the Byzantine Empire after 640, and the Islamic
sultanates which eventually culminated in the Ottoman Empire. The
efforts of the Carolingian Franks to establish a similar empire in
Western Civilization collapsed and led to the dark age of
860-970.
These eastern political traditions might be called Providential
Empire or Providential Monarchy, and they are associated with the
idea of a Providential Deity. To us today, who shove religion off
into a corner and insist that it must have nothing to do with
politics or business or many other things, it may be hard to grasp
that one of the most important things in establishing the structure
of the state in any civilization has always been men's ideas of the
nature of deity.
I will not take time to give you my paradigm for that; I'll
simply point out to you something which should be obvious. The
deity -- God -- has many different attributes. He is creator; he is
masculine; he is transcendental, that is, he is outside of the
world of space and time -- that was established by 500 B.C.
Eventually, he is one; that is what Muhammad insisted on. And then
he is omnipotent, all-powerful.
I stop at this point; Providential Empires never got further
than this. The next development in our ideas of deity in Western
Civilization was that God is good. That was established by the
prophets of the desert by the fifth century B.C.
Then came the Christian message, God is love, and by the year
1250 A.D., the scholastic inference that God is pure reason. If God
is good, he cannot do everything, he can only do things that are
good. And if he can do only good, and cannot do evil, then there is
something higher than God: the rules of ethics.
Thus the great contribution, even before Christ, to the Western
idea of deity, was the idea of Transcendental Ethical
Monotheism.
On the other hand, if God is one, omnipotent and providential,
which means he interferes in the world, then whatever happens in
the world does so because he permitted it.
And whatever he permitted, who is any ordinary human being to
question it? (If you read the book of Job, you will see that this
contradiction comes into the conversation where Job says, "God,
You're running the world all wrong. You're letting bad people be
elected President …." And so forth.) In Providential Monarchy,
deity is heaven.
The Chinese word is tien, which means heaven; the word in the
original Indo-European language was something like dyess.From this
came dues and eventually Zeus. It meant bright, brilliant sky. This
deity is a being of arbitrary and wilful omnipotence; the ruler on
earth is picked by the deity and is the vicar of Omnipotent will on
earth. This means you must accept whatever happens; it leads, of
course, to fatalism, although the people in these societies
frequently don't accept that in their actions.
This idea of Providential Deity has a number of results. There is
no rule of law; there is only the rule of God's will. This is part
of the heresy of the West. When the Crusaders went to capture
Jerusalem, and their war cry was, "God wills it!" they should have
been rejected. This is not written, because the Western idea is
that God gave man free will, and if men do evil things, they are
responsible. In the West, accordingly, you get the rule of law. In
Providential Monarchy you get the rule of will.
Their slogan became, "One God in heaven; one ruler on earth,"
which meant that Providential Monarchs frequently tried to conquer
the world. I have already said that Jenghiz Khan was the greatest
of them. His government, his army, his whole attitude are very much
worth studying; his organization was a magnificent machine for
world conquest and world rule as the vicar of heaven on earth.
There are no constitutional rules of political succession in a
Providential Monarchy. There are no constitutional rules of
succession in Islamic Civilization, in Byzantine Civilization or in
Russian Civilization -- ever.
To talk about constitutional law in Russia is to talk nonsense.
Alexander the First left a note in his desk saying that he wanted
his second son, I believe, to succeed him, and that set it. That
was not an act of constitutional law; it was an act of will. This
is still true in Russia today. It is also true in China; China was
always a Providential Monarchy. But in the West, where we have the
rule of law, where even God is under the rules of ethics, we have a
very different situation, and we expect to have constitutional
rules of political action, including the rules of political
succession.
The Carolingian Empire, whose dates are, let us say,
approximately 687-887, was an attempt to impose in the West a
Providential Monarchy, which was a heresy, not in terms of the
Western beliefs of the time, but in terms of the belief intrinsic
in the nature of Western thought, including our belief in Christ
and in both of the Testaments. While all the books I read are full
of praise of Charlemagne, Charlemagne was a wilful man, trying to
do the impossible by conquering practically the whole world.
Fortunately, he failed, and the idea of Providential Deity weakened
in the West until after 1400.
The fundamental reason for this Carolingian political failure
was the constantly deepening economic depression, which had begun
about A.D. 270 and continued for seven centuries. As a result of
this depression, it became less and less possible for Charlemagne
even to conquer the provinces of his own empire, and totally
impossible to rule those provinces.
As the depression became worse and worse, transportation broke
down, all bridges collapsed. (I have read a magnificent account of
someone trying to go from Chartres to Paris in this period. To
drive this would take about half an hour, I guess depending on
traffic. It took his something like seven days; when he got there,
his horse died of exhaustion.
And he had to do such things as try to patch holes in bridges by
using his shield, so the horse wouldn't fall through, and so
forth.) All commerce disappeared; everyone was reduced to living
from the piece of land he was on.
Another reason Charlemagne could not conquer great distances was
that it became economically impossible to capture any fortified
building, because the besiegers could not stay long enough -- they
could not take enough men or enough food -- to starve out the
defenders.
And if they carried a very small amount of food, they had to
take a smaller number of men, in which case the defenders would
come out and chase them away. Elaborate weapons disappeared,
including most siege equipment and besieging knowledge; all the
significant missile weapons, such as composite bows and crossbows,
ceased to be made; and the weaponry of Western Europe was reduced
to the mounted spearman and his fortified residence.
This military system lacked mobility and could neither protect
not control commerce; it could not impose tolls and was forced back
almost entirely to seeking its economic support from rents squeezed
from peasant villages.
So by the year 900 we had a two class society in Western Europe
peasants who produced food, and a small percentage of fighters who
fought on horseback with shock weapons.
The last Carolingian was removed in 887 for not fighting the
Vikings vigorously enough, and for one hundred years there was no
ruler. As a result, the area that had been Carolingian Neustria,
between the Loire and the Rhine, was reduced to a large number of
self-sufficient villages, subject to the private power of mounted
spearmen, without any state, monarchy or public authority. This
period, and these social conditions, we call a Dark Age.
There is nothing wrong with Dark Ages; they are frequently the
most productive periods in the history of any civilization. Any of
you who have read Lynn White's book on the technological advances
of the Dark Ages. Such as the plow and harnessing, know that
Western Civilization got a great deal from its Dark Age.
But, most significantly, out of the Dark Age that followed the
collapse of the Carolingian Empire, came the most magnificent thing
we have in our society: the recognition that people can have a
society without having a state. In other words, this experience
wiped away the assumption that is found throughout Classical
Antiquity, except among unorthodox and heretical thinkers.
That the state and the society are identical, and therefore you
can desire nothing more than to be a citizen. In the fourth century
B.C., Aristotle told us that the polis is a koinonia or community,
that is, an organic structure of dissimilar parts cooperating
together for mutual satisfaction of their needs. He said a man cut
off from his polis is not a man, he just looks like a man. He's
like athumb cut off from a hand. It looks like a thumb, but it's
just a piece of meat.
When through war and conquest, the political organization of
Classical Civilization expanded from polis to imperium, it was
still assumed that the empire was a community, although even in
Aristotle's day the community was breaking into competitive groups,
parties and cliques.
The attempt to persuade everyone that the political unit was a
community became more and more unconvincing, although rulers and
conservative philosophers continued to insist upon it because it
seemed the only way to prevent the political organization from
disintegrating into an assemblage of atomized and antagonistic
individuals. No other communities were approved of, and in many
cases no other communities were permitted.
Every society has what we might call the orthodox theory of the
state for that society, and every society has a suppressed heresy
of the state in thatsociety. In Classical Antiquity the orthodoxy
was that the state is the community and no one should desire
anything else.
Everyone's life should be public, everyone should be prepared to
give up anything, including his life, for the state, because the
state is his community. And if he says he's going to off and found
his own commune, by that statement, he becomes a traitor.
One of the first ones to do that was Epicurus, in the fourth
century B.C.; Epicurus said all he wanted to do was sit down in a
quiet garden with his friends and talk -- and ignore politics. (We
are rapidly approaching that in our society today, but we have not
yet reached the point where it is regarded as heretical.
But we are like Classical Civilizations; we are trying to grind
down individuals into identical atoms in a mass culture in which
all communities are disapproved. And if any community wishes to
stand apart, we will go in by force and do anything necessary to
make them become the kind of redblooded Americans we should all
want to be.)
During this Dark Age, the Mediterranean Sea became a border zone
among three new civilizations, a totally different situation from
that in Classical Civilization when it had been the connecting link
among parts of the civilization, so that, for example, the city of
Rome could bring its food from Egypt when it could not bring food
from Lombardy in Italy. East of Neustria, from the Rhine to beyond
the Elbe, Europe became an area of colonization by western
Civilization. But from 976 until after 1222, the most significant
boundary of our civilization was to the north, in a great crescent
from the Atlantic across the Baltic and Scandinavia to Russia.
From this area -- much neglected in our history books, but of
vital importance -- the Vikings were poured outward. From 750 to
930 they were pouring outward as raiders, slavers, pirates, men of
violence and virility. Then there was a brief lull. From 980, for a
hundred years, to about 1080, they were coming out as monarchies,
that is, organized state structures. I call this Northern Monarchy.
Northern Monarchies had certain definite characteristics. Where
those characteristics came from I do not know; it has not been
discussed.
They may have come from Byzantium or from some memory of the
Carolingians. By A.D. 1000 the Viking bands had reached
Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland in the West, and were ravaging
western Europe and the western Mediterranean as far as Italy, while
in the east they established the foundations of the Russian state
and attacked Constantinople without success in 941 and 971. in 941
and 971.
They occupied parts of north-eastern England from Scandinavia
after 850 and held the English throne under Sven Forked Beard and
his son Canute in 1013-1035. Viking raiders occupied Normandy in
911 and became a vassal duchy of the king of France; from Normandy
they conquered England in 1066 under their Duke William.
And in 1018 in southern Italy, Normans of Viking descent,
fighting on the side of the pope, met in battle with Varangians of
Viking descent, fighting in behalf of the Byzantine Empire.
Northern Monarchy is of very great significance; it created states
with powers which to us seem precocious.
For example, it raised a military force and taxes on the basis
of assessments on plots of land, which in England are called hides,
but which are also found in Russia. They had standing armies of
mercenary soldiers. Archaeologists have recently excavated four
large camps in Denmark, built about the year 1000 by the king Sven
Forked Beard, where his standing army was ready at any moment to
embark in ships and go off to fight.
A significant element in the success of Northern Monarchy was
its development of battle tactics. This was achieved about 1050 and
included at least four elements: a three-stage in which a missile
barrage, a shock assault, and a cavalry pursuit were used in
sequence; a recognition of the significance of tactical logistics,
especially by water, before any attack; the use of a reserve force
withheld from action until it could be applied with maximum effect;
and the removal of the leader from the front line of battle to a
detached position from which he could control the critical moments
of transition between the stages of the battle.
These tactics were much more sophisticated than the feudal
tactics of Neustria, in which a battle was reduced to the second
stage of shock assault by a mass of mounted knights with little
organizational structure and with the nominal leader often leading
the charge of his undisciplined forces.
The influence of Northern Monarchy and of Norman battle tactics
was stronger in England than in France and after 1066 produced a
more powerful and better organized government than the Capetian
monarchy. It combined three elements: the remaining traditions and
institutions of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, the feudal type of
government and manoral relations as brought from Normandy in 1066;
and the fact that conquest in 1066 gave the king the authority to
establish practices which the Capetians could not adopt until after
the great disasters in the Hundred Years War in 1345-1369.
In Northern France the situation was quite different, since
feudal decentralization was not counterbalanced there by either
Northern Monarchy or conquest. One hundred years after the last
Carolingian was deposed, a microscopic lord near Paris was
permitted by the seven or eight great lords who surrounded him, and
who were more powerful than he, to adopt a royal title.
His name was Hugh Capet; the date is 987. Hugh Capet was the
first of the Capetian kings of France, and he was allowed to take
that title because he was so weak. With the title of king he was
also allowed the title of suzerain, which is a feudal lord who has
no feudal lord above him. ( I will not attempt to describe the
feudal system if you don't know it.)
But he did not even have the powers of a real suzerain, because
the feudal lords who were technically his vassals did not perform
military service, did not come to his court to settle disputes, and
had very little to do with him. Nevertheless, the power of the
religious aura of kingship allowed him gradually to accumulate more
and more power.
Now I want to say a few words about the title of king. King is a
religious title; it means a ruler who has been consecrated with
holy oils by an archbishop in an archiepiscopal cathedral, in a
ceremony very similar to the sacrament of confirmation. This title
of king allowed him to assume certain powers, such as, the king
could see that everyone gets justice: he will seek justice on earth
with God's blessing. The king should see that everyone gets
protection, the king's peace, in other words. To the vassals that
meant that the Capetians should provide ethical and moral support
for their individual rights, which was exactly what they
wanted.
The interesting thing is that in 1792, when Louis was going to
the scaffold, he still believed that the obligation that he had as
king was to support the rights of everyone, including the nobles
and the church. This was the central core of the Old Regime and it
cannot be emphasised too much: the king is the source of justice.
And as such, he was bound more than anyone else in the society to
obey the laws.
With this idea of legal restraints on the king, I want to
combine something else which may, perhaps, be difficult. The idea
of property in Classical Antiquity is summed up in the word
proprietas, which means possession of all the innumerable and
undesignated rights in an object, maybe with a few specific
restraints. In other words, you may have a car that will go 150
miles an hour, but you're not supposed to drive it 150 miles an
hour. But you can drive it or not; you can rent it; you can sell
it. That is proprietas. It is not the medieval idea of property. In
the early Middle Ages no one worried about proprietas in the
ultimate sense of possession of a title.
All anyone cared about was specific rights to do specific things
or to obtain specific benefits from an object. For example some
people might have the right to grow crops on a piece of land in
ways specified by custom at certain times of the year; while others
might have rights to graze animals on it in fixed numbers for fixed
periods; a church might have the right to a customary fraction of
the crop; and a lord might hold certain rights over it, to hunt on
it, to collect fees for having its grain ground into flour in his
mill, and so forth. Thus the idea of property was specific rights,
and the word we use for it is dominia, which is a plural.
The obligation of the Capetian king was to preserve everyone's
dominia, and this included his own property, because it was not
his, it belonged to the monarchy, to the family. Thus he could not
alienate the demesne, as we call it, the landed property of the
monarchy. From this emerged two intertwined principles which became
the central core of the Old Regime in France until 1789: first, the
king was under legal restraints, and secondly, the medieval idea of
property as dominia, that is, as bundles of customary individual
rights, was entrenched.
After 1000, as their power grew, the Capetians were able to
assume certain dimly remembered powers that had been associated
with the Carolingians: to coin money; to call out all able-bodied
men for military service in an emergency; to insure that all men
lived in peace and had justice; to protect the Church and religion,
to grant rights of self government to municipalities; and to
regulate commerce, especially exports, so that there would be no
shortage of food for the people.
Associated with these, especially with the last one, was an
aspect of kingship which came to be called la police, that is, not
"police power", but the "policy power." What we might call
administrative power, a significant element in the modern concept
of sovereignty. Its chief idea is that in an emergency or
complicated social situation the ordinary rules may not work and
there must be in society a power of discretion
to suspend or modify those rules.
In building up the powers of the monarchy, one of the greatest
assets of the Capetians was their ability to make the title King of
the French hereditary rather than elective. They were able to do
this because they produced sons for eight generations over 341
years, from 987 to 1328, and the early kings were able to have
their sons coronated while the fathers were still alive. After
1324-1328, by adoption of The Salic law in royal succession, the
dynasty continued under its Valois branch from 1328-1589, providing
six hundred years of male succession without a serious dispute. The
more powerful feudal lords who surrounded the Capetians did not
have as much luck; for one thing, they took too many risks by going
off on the Crusades and so forth.
As the families of these vassals died out, their territories
reverted to the king as suzerain through the right of escheat, that
is, if a territory, a group of dominia, had no heir, it reverted to
the king, who could grant it out to someone else. In this way the
kings were able to create a superficial territorial unity of France
before 1500, but the fiefdoms were usually given as apanages to
junior members of the royal family, so this unity was in appearance
rather than in fact.
In most cases the royal authority was extended as suzerainty
rather than sovereignty, and local acquiescence was obtained by
leaving the laws, taxes and customs intact. The royal family was
less powerful in these apanages than the rulers they were
replacing, who had not been under the obligation to be as law
abiding as the king and as subject to the rules of what was
right.
In this way there gradually grew up a legalized confusion of
extremely limited sovereignty, because in the Middle Ages any
customary right one might have over a person or an object, which
was beneficial to the holder and had been exercised long enough to
be recognized as custom, became a legal right to be protected by
judicial action in the proper court. In English law this is called
the right of prescription: if you do something for more than
twenty-one years, you may gain the right to do it against the
private owner of private property.
You may notice that every few years Rockefeller Center in New
York City is roped off and you are not allowed to walk between the
buildings. This is to prevent you from walking there for twenty-one
years and gaining a prescriptive right to do so. But in English law
the right of prescription cannot be exercised against the state. In
France it was; in fact, it was the obligation of the king to
protect such rights.
In France, bundles of such rights, or dominia, formed tenures,
which came to be known as fiefs in the feudal system, benefices in
the ecclesiastical system, and holdings in the manoral system. Each
of these gradually developed its own law, courts and judicial
procedures. After about 1050 a fourth field of law arose to cover
commerce, towns and merchants; the Law Merchant. And finally, as
royal government and public authority appeared and grew, a fifth
field of royal justice and public law appeared. In all of these,
the rule of law and not the rule of will was assumed. (This opened
the way to something which is typical of the west: the
rule of lawyers and judges.
There have been three periods in the history of Western
Civilization during which we have been overwhelmed by lawyers and
judges, who tell us again and again that we cannot do certain
things because they are illegal, even if those things are
absolutely essential.
The first period would be from 1313 to about 1480; the second
was from about 1690 to the French Revolution; which was a revolt
against a mass of confused, legalistic rigidity preventing
necessary reforms. The third is our own day, when judges and
lawyers are running everything and we are obsessed by legalism and
litigation.)
Although the kings of France were seeking to extend the royal
domain and to extend their authority within the domain from at
least 1050, advances were on a piecemeal basis until well along in
the Hundred Years War with England (1338-1453).
The English attempt to conquer France in that war was
hopeless.
They could win battles, but they could not control territory.
Eventually all they did was go out and plunder , living off the
country, killing people, burning villages, seizing rich
people and demanding ransoms, and so forth.
The English believed that if they punished the French in this
way, the people would realize that the king of France would not
protect them, and therefore they should turn their allegiance to
the king of England.
But the English were quite mistaken in this, because the people
of western France had expected protection not from the king but
from their local lords, and the demonstrations of English brutality
made them shift their allegiance from local lords to the king of
France. This reached its peak in Joan of Arc, who in 1429 summoned
the whole religious loyalty of France and focused it on the pious,
retiring Dauphin; this enabled the French to throw out the English
in about 25 years.
That Dauphin, who became Charles VII (1422-1461), was one of the
most significant rulers in French history, although he has been
relatively neglected by historians, and a recent English biography
by M.G.A. Vale (1974) leaves out almost everything of importance.
Most books on his reign have tended to concentrate on the
superficially exciting events of the first half of it rather than
the much more significant administrative acts of the second half,
after 1436.
Charles, a deeply religious man, sought to get down in writing
the customary rules of political life in France with an effective
and just royal government at its core. He established a royal army
with a regular system of taxation to support it. But he did two
other things which are much more important.
In 1438, while the war was still going on, he codified the
customary relations of the Church of France in the Pragmatic
Sanction of Bourges; this recognized the Gallican Church as a
largely autonomous society, free from royal and papal control,
electing its own bishops, controlling its own property, and so
forth.
And then in 1454, one year after the war ended -- this is
amazing -- the king issued an edict, Montils-le-Tours. I do not
find this mentioned in most history books, although it was probably
the most important edict of the Old Regime.
It ordered each locality to codify its local customs as the law
of that district. The decree was reissued three times by 1595 and
was carried out by 1580, when France had 365 different local law
codes based on dominia. This meant the king had condemned France to
what we would call legal or administrative disunity, and it was one
of the chief, if not the most important, causes of the Revolution
of 1789.
Accepted by the kings and applied by the courts, this legal
structure so hampered the actions of the government that the
monarchy was never able to achieve a fully sovereign state and was
in semi-paralysis long before 1789.
France achieved territorial unity by 1500, but this meant only
one thing, that all of France had the same king. Most dominia,
including those which rose after 1500 were legally valid, often
guaranteed by royal promises. Taxes were different everywhere
because they were collected according to local custom. There were
tolls preventing commerce moving everywhere.
There was no unity of the judicial system at one time there were
fourteen supreme courts. Almost every commodity had different units
of measurement, which differed from place to place, and also
changed in size over time. Thousands of local tolls and fees became
dominia, often collected by private interests.
This made transportation costs so high that goods made in France
could not compete with foreign-made goods over much of France, and
the poor sometimes starved while there was a surplus of grain in
neighbouring provinces. It was a realm of organized legal
confusion, good business for lawyers and judges but very bad for
businessmen, with hundreds of different laws, jurisdictions,
weights, measures, monetary units, economic regulations and small
monopolistic markets.
This disunified condition led inevitable to the French
Revolution, although it took hundreds of years to reach that point.
In 1789, no state could survive which had different systems of
weights and measures for every commodity; which had different laws,
so that Rousseau could say you changed laws every time you changed
your post horse; which had conflicting jurisdictions; which had
different tax rates, so in some districts the rich paid nothing in
taxes while the poor paid a great deal, while in others the rich
paid a great deal, and so forth. It was chaos, because whatever
was, was custom, and under the prescriptive rights that custom was
dominia, and dominia was the law.
And as a result, in 1789 we find a solution to a problem which,
when I was younger than even the students who are here, struck me
right in the face: I always had the eye of a child. I asked , "If
the king of France was absolute, as all the books say he was, how
could he be bankrupt, unless the country was bankrupt?" But no one
claims France was bankrupt in 1789; France was among the wealthiest
countries in Europe. So if the king was absolute, there was no
reason why he could not use his absolute power to raise the money
he needed from a wealthy economic system like
that of France.
That is one of the reasons I studied this subject, and I found
that the king of France was not absolute -- he was not even
sovereign. Indeed, he had reached the peak of his power around 1520
and 1576, when we are ending this lecture, his power was already
collapsing into a mass of increasing rigid restraints. I'll give
you one example, and then you can leave, although you've been very
patient.
The king could not borrow, because he had no collateral. The
property of the monarchy was not his, so he could not offer any of
the royal possessions as collateral on loans. If he wanted to
borrow 100,000 livres and could put up as collateral a necklace or
something of the Queen's, which wasn't part of the royal dominia,
that would be all right.
But he had to borrow millions. For centuries, therefore, since
the kings could not alienate properties, they alienated incomes.
This means that when they wanted to borrow money, they would say,
"I'll never pay back the principal, but I will pay you the interest
on it. Here is an income that has just come free, because the
family that has been getting it for three hundred years has died
out. It yields, let us say 100,000 a year, and at ten per cent
interest you will give me a million.
And if you ever want the principal back, you can always sell an
income of 100,000 for a million." In this way, by 1789 every income
the king had was committed to some expense.
In 1561 the king had to find enormous sums of money. (To save
time, I won't explainhow he got so badly in debt.) The city of
Paris offered to guarantee the loans given to him, but they needed
insurance that the interest would be paid, so the Church of France
volunteered to pay the interest. This is called les Rentes sur
l'Hotel de Ville de Paris, and within 150 years, it made the Church
of France stronger and more of a sovereign political entity than
the monarchy itself. But we'll have to save that for next
Wednesday.
Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.
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