The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: From the Old Regime to the Revolution Edited by Julian Swann and Joel Félix (review)

Festschrifts come in many shapes and sizes and are of notoriously variable quality. What a pleasure, then, to record that The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy is about as good an example of the genre as one could hope to encounter. A superb team of specialist contributors drawn from Britain, France, and North America have been tidily marshalled by the editors, who supply an excellent Introduction; and the whole volume is an in-depth exploration of the theme that has run like a red thread throughout the œuvre of William Doyle, the volume’s dedicatee. The editors may be excused for slightly overegging the pudding when they claim that the volume provides ‘a new interpretation of the origins of the [French] Revolution’ (p. 1). After all, it is hardly news that the financial and institutional problems of the monarchy were a vital element in its collapse. And one would expect a comprehensive analysis of the causes of the Revolution to include elements that are glimpsed only passingly here. What the volume does provide, however, is a far more extensive, deeply researched, and wide-ranging account of the problems of the monarchy than is currently available elsewhere. The Festschrift’s curse is that the reviewer can never do justice to all the contributions. It would be churlish, though, not to highlight Jean-Pierre Poussou’s cavalier assault on the Labroussian model of economic causation of the Revolution (not novel, but deliciously done); the insights into Louis XVI’s ministers provided by Julian Swann, by Munro Price (Castries), and by Joël Félix (Necker); Nigel Aston’s helpful comparative piece on Anglo-French aristocratic constitutionalism; the global dimension opened up by Mike Rapport; the military-diplomatic perspectives supplied by David Bell, Thomas E. Kaiser, Hamish Scott, and Olivier Chaline; and the spirited (if occasionally overheated) discussion of the Maison militaire by Guy Rowlands. Tim Blanning provides the biographical angle on Doyle that the Festschrift genre requires. There are two individuals whose presence and views are perhaps less pronounced than one would have wished. One is Louis XVI: the king’s glaring limitations are evident in almost every chapter and in some places on almost every page. One notes, however, that much of the evidence is provided by ex-post facto accounts of embittered, nostalgic, or regretful nobles, whose hindsight vision may be more of an impediment to understanding than most contributors allow. A full and evenhanded assessment of the monarch would have been a great help. The other ‘missing’ presence is William Doyle himself. One would simply love to have had Doyle’s own views on how far the vision provided in this volume corresponds to his own—bearing in mind that his own has changed over time. His early, ringing assault on the very notion of a feudal reaction (‘Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France?’, Past and Present, 57 (1972), 97–122) sits curiously obliquely alongside the vitality of the noble elite emphasized in his 2009 monograph Aristocracy and its Enemies (OUP). No matter: this volume has given not just its deserved recipient but all readers something to chew on.