8 - Venality of office and popular sedition in seventeenth-century France

Summary

It is well known that the limitations of their own environment may often conceal from generations of historians certain important features of a particular age. Yet it is difficult to believe that until quite recently two fundamental aspects of the France of Richelieu and Mazarin were generally ignored and never related to each other. In venality of office and the endemic nature of popular revolt the motive forces of seventeenth-century France have been suddenly and dramatically revealed. The connection between them has been thought to provide an interpretative key to the last centuries of the ancien régime, but, unfortunately, the historian of venality of office, Roland Mousnier, and the author of the first general study of the mass risings under Richelieu, Boris Porshnev, have reached antithetical conclusions as to what this connection may be.

M. Georges Pagès was the first to sense the significance of the two phenomena, but he commented on them separately. In 1932 he published an article sketching possible lines of inquiry into the evolutions of the system whereby the crown had alienated direct control of bureaucratic processes to a class who held their charges as venal and hereditary property. Pagès did not regard this system as some kind of administrative excrescence, nor even as a short-sighted financial expedient, but rather as the monarchy's unconscious acquisition of a firm base in the nation. When Richelieu and Mazarin attempted to recover the crown's authority by superimposing the intendants, the venal bureaucracy was provoked into open resistance in the Fronde.Both systems survived and expanded after the crisis, but the intendants became the executors of power.