State and Society in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study of Political Power and Social Revolution in Languedoc (review)

Drawing on Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, Stephen Miller suggests in the introduction to this work that historians have not paid enough attention to the relationship of interdependence between the Crown and the nobility that characterized absolute monarchy. Relying on an extensive use of local archival material, the primary aim of this study was to show how the monarchy systematically channelled authority, honours and wealth through local elites, and how such a system eventually became unviable. Contrary to Tocqueville’s thesis in L’Ancien régime et la révolution, that the eighteenth century saw increased bureaucratic centralisation both before and after the Revolution, Miller demonstrates that as royal power was extended to new areas in Languedoc, the provincial Estates, which excluded the vast majority of the region’s nobility, saw their power and responsibility increase. The result was that by the end of the 1770s, the channels of upward mobility within the Languedocien nobility had broken down. In the second half of this work, Miller moves from a detailed analysis of the relations between the various social classes — he uses the term — in the region to a demonstration of how such relations allowed for the disintegration of the Old Regime polity. Resentment over the institutional arrangements that had excluded them from real power and influence in Languedoc prompted the lesser nobles of the area, the noblesse de robe in particular, to revolt after the Estates acquiesced in the Crown’s fiscal demands of 1788. This observation is linked to the second argument of Miller’s work: while an analysis of discourse and political culture — which has dominated the historiography of the last two decades — reveals a lot about the origins of the Revolution, it does not explain the motivation of local elites. Miller suggests that these nobles mobilized the clergy, professionals and well-to-do commoners in a movement for the reform of the archaic Estates of Languedoc. The evidence for such a suggestion complicates the issue, however, as Miller’s examples actually show that the responses of different classes varied from one area to another depending on specific social and economic circumstances. The fourth and fifth chapters show how questions of wealth, honour and authority gave shape to ideological outlooks and to the events of the Revolution in Languedoc. The final chapter on local administration in Languedoc’s nine départements during the Terror provides an alternative to the historiographical tradition that sees the social relations inherited from the Old Regime as irrelevant to the nature of radical Jacobinism; however, in an effort to impose a certain continuity on a period that many see as an aberration, Miller departs from an analysis based on social class. What Jacobin militants are deemed to have in common is not class interest, but ‘temperament: a desire to conquer power on the local level, cleanse the administration of old regime elements, and fill it solely with patriots’ (p. 249). Nevertheless, this inconsistency does not take away from the overall impression of a detailed and informative scholarly study.