France in the early modern period
Kingdom of France Royaume de France ( Ancien Régime ) | |||||||||||||
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Religion | Constitutional (1791–1792)[3] | ||||||||||||
Demonym(s) | French | ||||||||||||
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The
The period is dominated by the figure of the "Sun King",
Geography
In the mid 15th century, France was significantly smaller than it is today,
The late 15th, 16th and 17th centuries would see France undergo a massive territorial expansion and an attempt to better integrate its provinces into an administrative whole. During this period, France expanded to nearly its modern territorial extent through the acquisition of
French acquisitions from 1461–1789:
- Under (1461, under French control since 1349)
- Under Henry II – Calais, Trois-Évêchés (1552)
- Under Henry IV – County of Foix (1607)
- Under Navarre (1620, under French control since 1589 as part of Henry IV's possessions)
- Under Louis XIV
- Treaty of Westphalia (1648) – Alsace
- Cerdagne)
- Flanders
- Under Lorraine (1766), Corsica(1768)
Only the Duchy of
Although
The administrative and legal system in France in this period is generally called the
Demography
The Black Death had killed an estimated one-third of the population of France from its appearance in 1348. The concurrent Hundred Years' War slowed recovery. It would be the early 16th century before the population recovered to mid-14th-century levels.
With an estimated population of 11 million in 1400, 20 million in the 17th century, and 28 million in 1789, until 1795 France was the most populated country in Europe (even twice the size of Britain or the Dutch Republic) and the third most populous country in the world, behind only China and India.[5]
These demographic changes also led to a massive increase in
These centuries saw several periods of epidemics and crop failures due to wars and climatic change. (Historians speak of the period 1550–1850 as the "Little Ice Age".) Between 1693 and 1694, France lost 6% of its population. In the extremely harsh winter of 1709, France lost 3.5% of its population. In the past 300 years, no period has been so proportionally deadly for the French, both World Wars included.[6]
Language
Linguistically, the differences in France were extreme. Before the Renaissance, the language spoken in the north of France was a collection of different dialects called
The southern half of the country continued to speak
France would not become a linguistically unified country until the end of the 19th century.
Administrative structures
The Ancien Régime, the
Economy
Culture
Political history
Background
The
After the
Foreign relations
Wars
Despite the beginnings of rapid demographic and economic recovery after the
In 1445, the first steps were made towards fashioning a regular army out of the poorly disciplined mercenary bands that French kings traditionally relied on. The medieval division of society into "those who fought (nobility), those who prayed (clergy), and those who worked (everyone else)" still held strong and warfare was considered a domain of the nobles. Charles VIII marched into Italy with a core force consisting of noble horsemen and non-noble foot soldiers, but in time the role of the latter grew stronger so that by the middle of the 16th century, France had a standing army of 5000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. The military was reorganized from a system of legions recruited by province (Norman legion, Gascon legion, etc.) to regiments, an arrangement which persisted into the next century. However, the nobility and troops were often disloyal to the king, if not outright rebellious, and it took another army reform by Louis XIV to finally transform the French army into an obedient force.[8]
In 1500, Louis XII, having reached an agreement with Ferdinand II of Aragon to divide Naples, marched south from Milan. By 1502, combined French and Aragonese forces had seized control of the Kingdom; disagreements about the terms of the partition led to a war between Louis and Ferdinand. By 1503, Louis, having been defeated at the Battle of Cerignola and Battle of Garigliano, was forced to withdraw from Naples, which was left under the control of the Spanish viceroy, Ramón de Cardona. French forces under Gaston de Foix inflicted an overwhelming defeat on a Spanish army at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512, but Foix was killed during the battle, and the French were forced to withdraw from Italy by an invasion of Milan by the Swiss, who reinstated Maximilian Sforza to the ducal throne. The Holy League, left victorious, fell apart over the subject of dividing the spoils, and in 1513 Venice allied with France, agreeing to partition Lombardy between them.[10]
Louis mounted another invasion of Milan, but was defeated at the Battle of Novara, which was quickly followed by a series of Holy League victories at La Motta, Guinegate, and Flodden, in which the French, Venetian, and Scottish forces were decisively defeated. However, the death of Pope Julius left the League without effective leadership, and when Louis' successor, Francis I, defeated the Swiss at Marignano in 1515, the League collapsed, and by the treaties of Noyon and Brussels, surrendered to France and Venice the entirety of northern Italy.
The elevation of
The inconclusive third war between Charles and Francis began with the death of
. A lack of cooperation between the Spanish and English armies, coupled with increasingly aggressive Ottoman attacks, led Charles to abandon these conquests, restoring the status quo once again.In 1547,
The Wars of Religion
Barely were the Italian Wars over, when France was plunged into a domestic crisis with far-reaching consequences. Despite the conclusion of a
The Wars of Religion culminated in the
France in the 17th and 18th centuries
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France's pacification under
Henry IV's son
After the death of both king and cardinal, the
For most of the reign of
French culture was part of French hegemony. In the early part of the century French painters had to go to Rome to shed their provinciality (
Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French navy that rivaled England's, expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200. The size of the army was also considerably increased.
Starting in the 1670s, Louis XIV established the so-called
Following the Whig establishment on the English and Scottish thrones by the Dutch prince
The Battle of La Hougue (1692) was the decisive naval battle in the war and confirmed the durable dominance of the Royal Navy of England.
In November 1700, the severely ill Spanish king Charles II died, ending the Habsburg line in that country. Louis had long waited for this moment, and now planned to put a Bourbon relative, Philip, Duke of Anjou, on the throne. Essentially, Spain was to become an obedient satellite of France, ruled by a king who would carry out orders from Versailles. Realizing how this would upset the balance of power, the other European rulers were outraged. However, most of the alternatives were equally undesirable. For example, putting another Habsburg on the throne would end up recreating the empire of Charles V, which would also grossly upset the power balance. After nine years of exhausting war, the last thing Louis wanted was another conflict. However, the rest of Europe would not stand for his ambitions in Spain, and so the War of the Spanish Succession began, a mere three years after the War of the Grand Alliance.[14]
The disasters of the war (accompanied by another famine) were so great that France was on the verge of collapse by 1709. In desperation, the king appealed to the French people to save their country, and in doing so gained thousands of new army recruits. Afterwards, his general
While often considered a tyrant and a warmonger (especially in England), Louis XIV was not in any way a despot in the 20th-century sense. The traditional customs and institutions of France limited his power and in any case, communications were poor and no national police force existed.
Overall, the discontent and revolts of 16th- and 17th-century France did not approach the conditions that led to 1789. Events such as the Frondes were a naïve, unrevolutionary discontent and the people did not challenge the right of the king to govern nor did they question the Church.
The reign (1715–1774) of
On the whole, the 18th century saw growing discontent with the monarchy and the established order. Louis XV was a highly unpopular king for his sexual excesses, overall weakness, and for losing Canada to the British. A strong ruler like Louis XIV could enhance the position of the monarchy, while Louis XV weakened it. The writings of the philosophers such as Voltaire were a clear sign of discontent, but the king chose to ignore them. He died of smallpox in 1774, and the French people shed few tears at his passing. While France had not yet experienced the industrial revolution that was beginning in England, the rising middle class of the cities felt increasingly frustrated with a system and rulers that seemed silly, frivolous, aloof, and antiquated, even if true feudalism no longer existed in France.
Anti-establishment ideas fermented in 18th-century France in part due to the country's relative egalitarianism. While less liberal than England during the same period, the French monarchy never approached the absolutism of the eastern rulers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople in part because the country's traditional development as a decentralized, feudal society acted as a restraint on the power of the king. Different social classes in France each had their own unique set of privileges so that no one class could completely dominate the others.
Upon Louis XV's death, his grandson Louis XVI became king. Initially popular, he too came to be widely detested by the 1780s. Again a weak ruler, he was married to an Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette, whose naïvety and cloistered/alienated Versailles life permitted ignorance of the true extravagance and wasteful use of borrowed money (Marie Antoinette was significantly more frugal than her predecessors). French intervention in the US War of Independence was also very expensive.
With the country deeply in debt,
On the eve of the
On 1792 September 21 the French monarchy was effectively abolished by the proclamation of the French First Republic.
Monarchs
- Louis XI
- Charles VIII
After Charles VIII the Affable, the last king in the
- Louis XII
House of Bourbon (1589–1792)
- Henry IV
- the Regency of Marie de Medici
- Louis XIII and his minister Cardinal Richelieu
- the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin
- Louis XIV
- the Philip II of Orleans
- Louis XV
- Louis XVI
Social history
France in the Ancien Régime covered a territory of around 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2), and supported 22 million people in 1700. At least 96% of the population were peasants. France had the largest population in Europe, with European Russia second at 20 million. Britain had nearly six million, Spain had eight million, and the Austrian Habsburgs had around eight million. France's lead slowly faded after 1700, as other countries grew faster.[16][17]
Rural society
In the 17th century rich peasants who had ties to the market economy provided much of the capital investment necessary for agricultural growth, and frequently moved from village to village (or town).
Women and families
Very few women held any power—some queens did, as did the heads of Catholic convents. In the Enlightenment, the writings of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave a political program for reform of the Ancien Régime, founded on a reform of domestic mores. Rousseau's conception of the relations between private and public spheres is more unified than that found in modern sociology. Rousseau argued that the domestic role of women is a structural precondition for a "modern" society.[19] Within early modern society, women of urban artisanal classes participated in a range of public activities and also shared work settings with men (even though they were generally disadvantaged in terms of tasks, wages and access to property.)[20] Salic law prohibited women from rule; however, the laws for the case of a regency, when the king was too young to govern by himself, brought the queen into the center of power. The queen could assure the passage of power from one king to another—from her late husband to her young son—while simultaneously assuring the continuity of the dynasty.
Education for girls
Educational aspirations were on the rise and were becoming increasingly institutionalized in order to supply the church and state with the functionaries to serve as their future administrators. Girls were schooled too, but not to assume political responsibility. Girls were ineligible for leadership positions and were generally considered to have an inferior intellect to their brothers. France had many small local schools where working-class children—both boys and girls—learned to read, the better "to know, love and serve God". The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites, however, were given quite distinct educations: boys were sent to upper school, perhaps a university, while their sisters (if they were lucky enough to leave the house) were sent for finishing at a convent. The Enlightenment challenged this model, but no real alternative presented itself for female education. Only through education at home were knowledgeable women formed, usually to the sole end of dazzling their salons.[21]
Stepfamilies
A large proportion of children lived in broken homes or in blended families and had to cope with the presence of half-siblings and stepsiblings in the same residence. Brothers and sisters were often separated during the guardianship period and some of them were raised in different places for most of their childhood. Half-siblings and stepsiblings lived together for rather short periods of time because of their difference in age, their birth rank, or their gender. The lives of the children were closely linked to the administration of their heritage: when both their mothers and fathers were dead, another relative took charge of the guardianship and often removed the children from a stepparent's home, thus separating half-siblings.[22]
The experience of step-motherhood was surrounded by negative stereotypes; the Cinderella story and many other jokes and stories made the second wife an object of ridicule. Language, theater, popular sayings, the position of the Church, and the writings of jurists all made stepmother a difficult identity to take up. However, the importance of male remarriage suggests that reconstitution of family units was a necessity and that individuals resisted negative perceptions circulating through their communities. Widowers did not hesitate to take a second wife, and they usually found quite soon a partner willing to become a stepmother. For these women, being a stepmother was not necessarily the experience of a lifetime or what defined their identity. Their experience depended greatly on factors such as the length of the union, changing family configuration, and financial dispositions taken by their husbands.[23]
By a policy adopted at the beginning of the 16th century, adulterous women during the ancien régime were sentenced to a lifetime in a convent unless pardoned by their husbands and were rarely allowed to remarry even if widowed.
Religion
Prior to the
During the Protestant Reformation of the mid 16th century, France developed a large and influential Protestant population, primarily of
French exploration and colonies
- Age of Discovery
- French colonization of the Americas
- French colonial empires
Literature
- French Renaissance literature
- French literature of the 17th century
- French literature of the 18th century
Art
- French Renaissance
- French Baroque and Classicism
- French Rococo and Neoclassicism
See also
- French Enlightenment
- Paris in the 17th century
- Paris in the 18th century
Notes
References
- ^ The Governor General of Canada. "Royal Banner of France - Heritage Emblem". Confirmation of the blazon of a Flag. February 15, 2008 Vol. V, p. 202. The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General.
- ISBN 978-9-7332-0316-2.
- OCLC 780111354.
- ^ Bély (1994), p. 21.
- ^ Andrea Alice Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (2009)
- ^ Pillorget & Pillorget (1995), pp. 1155–1157.
- ^ R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (1996)
- ^ John A. Lynn, Giant of the grand siècle: the French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
- ^ Antonio Santosuosso, "Anatomy of Defeat in Renaissance Italy: The Battle of Fornovo in 1495," International History Review (1994) 16#2 pp. 221–50.
- ^ Wernham, R. B., ed. (1955). The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 3: Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559–1610. Cambridge University Press. pp. 297–98.
- ^ W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (1999).
- ^ Eccles, W. J. (1990). France in America.
- ^ Wolf (1968).
- ^ John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999)
- ^ Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99 (2002)
- ^ Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Regime (1973) pp. 2–9
- ^ Colin McEvedy and Richard M. Jones, Atlas of World Population History (1978), pp. 55–61
- Ebsco. For the Annales interpretation see Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986) excerpt and text search
- ^ Jennifer J. Popiel, "Making Mothers: The Advice Genre and the Domestic Ideal, 1760–1830", Journal of Family History 2004 29(4): 339–50
- ^ Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Cornell University Press, 1988.
- ^ Carolyn C. Lougee, "'Noblesse', Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fenelon and Saint-Cyr", History of Education Quarterly 1974 14(1): 87–113
- EBSCO
- ^ Sylvie Perrier, "La Maratre Dans La France D'ancien Regime: Integration Ou Marginalite?" ["The Stepmother in Ancien Régime France: Integration or Marginality?] Annales De Demographie Historique 2006 (2): 171–88 in French
- ISBN 978-9-7332-0316-2.
- ^ Parisse, Michael (2005). "Lotharingia". In Reuter, T. (ed.). The New Cambridge Medieval History: c. 900–c. 1024. Vol. III. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 313–315.
- ^ Wolfe, M. (2005). JOTHAM PARSONS. The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 322. The American Historical Review, 110(4), 1254–1255.
- ^ Hans J. Hillerbrand, Encyclopedia of Protestantism: 4-volume Set, paragraphs "France" and "Huguenots"
- ^ The Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority by Philip Benedict; American Philosophical Society, 1991 - 164
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed, Frank Puaux, "Huguenot"
Works cited
- Bély, Lucien (1994). La France moderne: 1498–1789. Premier Cycle (in French). Paris: PUF. ISBN 2-1304-7406-3.
- Pillorget, René; Pillorget, Suzanne (1995). France Baroque, France Classique 1589–1715. Bouquins (in French). Paris: Laffont. OL 8865789M.
- Wolf, John Baptiste (1968). Louis XIV., academic biography
Further reading
General
- Behrens, C.B.A. Ancien Régime (1989)
- Bluche, François. L'Ancien régime: Institutions et société (in French) Collection: Livre de poche. Paris: Fallois, 1993. ISBN 2-2530-6423-8
- Cobban, Alfred (1963). A history of modern France. Vol. 1 1715–1799. OL 20767094M.
- Doyle, William, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime (2012)
- Doyle, William, ed. Old Regime France: 1648–1788 (2001)
- Holt, Mack P. Renaissance and Reformation France: 1500–1648 (2002)
- Jones, Colin (2002). The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99 (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on July 25, 2011.
- Jouanna, Arlette and Philippe Hamon, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. La France de la Renaissance; Histoire et dictionnaire (in French) Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 2001. ISBN 2-2210-7426-2
- Jouanna, Arlette and Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de religion (in French) Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1998. ISBN 2-2210-7425-4
- Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Ancien Régime: A History of France 1610–1774 (1999), political survey
- Viguerie, Jean de. Histoire et dictionnaire du temps des Lumières 1715–1789 (in French) Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1995. ISBN 2-2210-4810-5
Political and military
- Baker, Keith, ed. The Political Culture of the Old Regime (1987), articles by leading historians
- Black, Jeremy. From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (1999)
- Briggs, Robin (1977). Early modern France 1560–1715. OL 21269052M.
- Collins, James B. The State in Early Modern France (2009)
- Knecht, R.J. The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. (1996). ISBN 0-0068-6167-9
- Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999)
- Major, J. Russell (1994). From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles & Estates. ISBN 0-8018-5631-0.
- Perkins, James Breck. France under Louis XV (2 vol 1897)
- Potter, David. A History of France, 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation-State (1995)
- Tocqueville, Alexis de. Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (1856; 2008 edition)
Society and culture
- Beik, William. A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (2009)
- Davis, Natalie Zemon (1986). Society and culture in early modern France. OL 21269052M.
- Farr, James Richard. The Work of France: Labor and Culture in Early Modern Times, 1350–1800 (2008)
- Forster, Robert (1980). Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Depont Family in 18th Century France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-2406-7.
- Goubert, Pierre. Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1972), social history from Annales School
- Goubert, Pierre. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986)
- Hugon, Cécile (1997) [1911]. "Social Conditions in 17th-Century France (1649-1652)". In Halsall, Paul (ed.). Social France in the XVII Century. ISBN 978-0-5481-6194-4. Archived from the originalon 23 August 2016. Retrieved 7 August 2021.
- McManners, John. Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Vol. 1: The Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramifications; Vol. 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion(1999)
- Van Kley, Dale. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (1996)
- Ward, W.R. Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (1999).
External links
- French Pamphlet collection documents significant events and periods in French history throughout the 17th-20th centuries, at the University of Maryland Libraries