Section 2: Taming the Nobles

 

One of Louis XIV’s first priorities upon taking full power as king was to take back all the powers his mother and Mazarin had given to the Parlements (see Section 1). In 1667, Parlements lost their power to approve royal decrees or even to remonstrate. Instead, they became part of an empty ceremony–the king would arrive, accompanied by a massive show of military force, and register his decrees at the Paris Parlement without even a peep of dissent. As a reward, Parlement leaders were paid massive bribes. He kept them around mostly as useful scapegoats–it was the Parlements, not the king, who would formally demand higher taxes and thus get blamed by the people. Through force and bribery, the king ruthlessly and systematically reduced the influence of the nobility and any other obstacle to his absolute power. 

Louis XIV’s efforts to centralize power in France were greatly aided by the fact that nobles were highly unpopular. Western Europe was dominated by powerful families of nobles who ruled their corners of the continent’s various kingdoms with near complete impunity. Although all European nobles owed services and loyalty to a king or queen, in reality, they had “the monopoly of violence” in the region they ruled. A historian of the period sums the situation up well:

As king, Louis was seen by his subjects as the guardian of their rights. A prince or nobleman could pose a tremendous threat to these rights as they robbed, tortured and murdered the citizenry with impunity. There was no limit to the damage they could do, both to the local economy and to the well being of the people. It was part of Louis’s duty as king to ensure that his subjects were protected. 

Many people living in the kingdom of France at the time didn’t think of themselves as French–instead regional identities and loyalties to local noble families defined who people were. Modern nation states (France, Germany, etc.) didn’t start to come into being until absolute monarchs like Louis centralized power in their capitals. One famous example of the tangled web of loyalties that characterized warfare at the time was the Battle of the Dunes near Dunkirk, a now French town on the English Channel. In 1658, the Duke of York (the designated successor to the throne of England) fought on the side of Spanish troops and was almost killed by English soldiers on the other side. He was joined by the rebellious (French) Prince of Conde, leading Spanish and French troops against other French soldiers led by Louis XIV, who won the battle. Thanks to Louis XIV, the modern nation of France became a more solid concept, and wars began to be fought more and more often between nations, not royal and noble families.

In 1665, just four years after becoming king in full, Louis struck a major blow against the nobles by asserting control over who could call themselves a noble. Most nobles belonged to one or more special orders–organizations based on prestigious family lines that were tightly regulated by their members to exclude ambitious outsiders. 

Nobles had the power of law behind their actions towards common people and were largely immune from taxation. By seizing control over the processes by which people could join these orders, Louis asserted that he wasn’t a king in the medieval sense of the word–a first among equals who could be replaced by someone from another prestigious family. Instead, he was an absolute monarch, and only those who proved their loyalty and usefulness to him were entitled to the privileges of noble status. 

Louis started with the Order of Saint Michel, cutting its membership to 100 persons and demanding that those worthy 100 prove that: 

1. They were actually the documented descendants of their claimed noble ancestors. If they failed to provide proof, they were subjected to taxation and a hefty and humiliating fine for impersonating a noble.

2. That they were Catholic, and 

3. That they had served the king in some kind of military function for at least 10 years.

Other noble orders were similarly reformed, and many families of dubious loyalty lost their titles, putting the rest on notice that they owed their position to the king.

As one historian puts it: “He sought the establishment of a useful aristocracy, one that would devote their services to the state rather than their own interests, thereby allowing Louis the assurance that there would be no renewal of the Fronde [see Section 1, above] or any similar uprising.”

A smart dictator, however, knows that he can’t rule by fear alone. At a time when other European monarchs were reducing the privileges of nobility in their lands, Louis increased tax exemptions and social privileges for those nobles who remained loyal. Public anger at the privileges Louis gave to the nobles was to play a big role in the French Revolution, 74 years after his death.