Absolutism and Class at the End of the Old Regime: The Case of Languedoc

Historians of eighteenth-century France, whether of the classic Marxist tradition or the present-day trend focusing on political culture, have not analyzed the social content of the absolutist state. Peasants and artisans controlled resources of Languedoc through the ownership of land, sharecropping, mid cottage industry. The upper classes therefore depended on political relation to appropriate wealth. The judiciary allowed lords to enforce claims on peasants. Office holders in the fiscal system and the judiciary obtained a share of royal taxes. Loans taken out by the province for the crown were lucrative investments for local-nobles and-bourgeois, and steady flows of funds to the royal treasury. Yet to service mounting provincial debt, the crown had to curtail the right of office holders and lords to levy resources on peasants, for these resources were lost to the financial system. Nobles saw infringements on their privileged relationship with the state as despotic. They orchestrated a broad movement in 1788 and 1789 aimed at rendering the Estates of Languedoc representative of the three estates of the province. Thus, a class analysis of the absolutist state helps explain political developments at the end of the Old regime.