Campbell P. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745
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within a long historiographical tradition going back to Tocqueville, and perhaps
even to Turgot. But it is as well to remember that Turgot the administrative
reformer fell from office as a result of his failure to appreciate the nuances and
complexities of other areas of politics.
It is not only an older tradition that simplifies the issues. A more recent
historiographical view suggests that competing discourses of justice, reason and will
undermined the regime.
4
I hope to have shown that, for all their interest, those
discourses currently studied do not necessarily reflect the prevailing practices of
courtly or judicial politics, and that they did not necessarily shape the actors in the
drama even when they used them—a point to which I shall return. Neither the
bureaucratic nor the discourse-based approach quite succeeds in doing justice to the
nature and operation of power in the regime or to its inherent problems. Each tends
to misrepresent the actual causes of conflict and crisis, the first by imposing its own
modernising bureaucratic agenda on the past, and the second by making inherent
contradictions or competing discourses into the motor of history, in a neo-Hegelian
alternative to Marx. On the other hand, the older tradition of narrative history fails
to do justice to the advances made by those trying to provide conceptual
frameworks. The great merit of both the other views is their attempt to arrive at an
explanation that takes account of deeper structures. A purely narrative or empirical
model usually ignores the structural problems within the system and the
construction of meaning by cultural codes, and does not consider the language of
politics to be in itself a problem.
The socio-political figuration as described in the present work can be called
upon to evaluate the notion of political culture that is currently widely employed
to conceptualise the problems of the end of the ancien régime. In the introduction to
a series of distinguished studies on the political culture of the old regime, Baker
gives a definition of politics: ‘Politics, broadly construed, is the activity through
which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement and
enforce the competing claims they make upon one another’.
5
Politics would thus
cover a very wide range of activities: essentially, it would be the strategies by
which people get what they want. This is a fair definition to employ so long as
there is no unconscious slippage into the assumption that it relates only to state
policies. Of course, if what contemporaries wanted was largely social
advancement and more corporate status at the expense of many of those activities
presupposed by a modern definition of politics as ‘affairs of state’, then a charge of
anachronism might be levelled at any work that ignores social aims so completely
in favour of conclusions drawn solely from the study of ‘political’ and theoretical
discourse.
6
The attempt to explore the intellectual roots of the Revolution, or the
invention of the Revolution, during the last decades of the old regime, in terms of
the discourses, is, of course, an important task. The problem is with the transition
from identifying the discourses in general within specific texts, to explaining the
use of such discourses within the political situations of the time. There is a great
danger that without the painstaking reconstruction of the situation in detail, the
discourse may be attributed as a motive for action. ‘Political’ activity in the ancien
CONCLUSION
299
régime was most often engaged in for social or jurisdictional motives. It therefore
follows that the utterance of a particular discourse should not necessarily be taken
for an expression of motive.
Unfortunately, this slippage is all too frequent in studies of the ancien régime where
definitions are implicitly much more closely related to ‘state’ activity according to
that bureaucratic tradition we have already questioned. Courtiers, with all their
considerations of prestige and family ambitions, fit into the first definition rather
well, but hardly at all into a narrower one as the state is currently defined.
7
(It would
of course be desirable to define the state as so interrelated with society as to be at
many points thoroughly imbricated with its structures and attitudes—this is largely
my point.) The narrow, statist, definition has disadvantages, especially for the study
of provincial France where perceptions of the state were vague, and where
ambitions, careers, and to a large extent life in general, were conducted in a world
far removed from concerns about the monarchy and its policies. Even provincial
institutions were in some areas only a somewhat remodelled adoption by the crown
of pre-existing provincial courts, which were therefore identified by the local
population far more with local autonomy than royal authority. We should, for
example, surely find that urban ‘politics’ was as much a matter of advancement for
individuals and families, the accumulation of money, honour and dignity, as it was
about the undeniable contradictions of royal fiscal policy.
8
Even at the provincial
level royal concerns were not matched by those of leading officers and dignitaries in
the locality, including royal intendants.
9
Just as for urban elites, royal politics—even
in the meetings of the provincial estates—was often more a question of exploiting the
monarchical interest for the sake of personal and familial considerations than a
matter of shared assumptions and language.
Foucault and his disciples have rendered historians an important service in
showing the importance of language and its construction of meaning, and in
relating this to the construction of the historical persona. As individuals and
members of collectivities we are constructed by discourses of whose significance we
are often unaware. But it is dangerous to assume that the ‘actors’ in the past were
entirely unconscious of these processes, and that therefore intention is not a
problem for historians. In this there is a risk of what E.P.Thompson so eloquently
characterised as ‘the enormous condescension of the present towards the past’. The
multi-faceted nature of personality and motivation in the past is often underrated by
historians of institutions and by those interested in discourses.
Such an idea rather undermines the notion that a man as psychologically
individual as Robespierre could ever be no more than ‘the mouthpiece of [the
Revolution’s] purest and most tragic discourse’.
10
During the struggles and conflicts
of the latter days of the old regime, there is plenty of evidence of the manipulation of
discourses, of the selection of those most favourable to a particular strategy.
11
What,
then, are we to make of the idea of ‘parlementary constitutionalism’ that is
employed in numerous works as an explanation for the magistrates’ conflicts with
the ministry?
12
Does it do justice as a notion to the varieties of motive in a
parlementaire crisis, or does it beg the question most in need of an answer—was it a
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300
rhetorical position or a genuine motive for intervention in the affairs of state? ‘Isms’
are often too simple a label for human motivation. Do we want to perpetuate that
administrative historian’s error of reifying institutions by regarding them as
presumably homogeneous loci for discourses? Far from it. The existence of
different groups in the parlement, and the narrow majorities for many crucial and
controversial motions, both reveal a lack of unanimous sentiment on the issues at
stake. The appearance of unanimity that is created by corporatism in the ancien
régime can be very misleading: it was just that a majority vote led to corporate
solidarity triumphing over individual preferences. (On several occasions private
letters from magistrates bear witness to deep misgivings about the steps taken by
their corps.) Individualism was less pronounced than today, and to stand aside from
one’s corps was not only a highly individualist stance, it was also dangerous.
Lawyers would be disbarred, and magistrates excluded from their functions as after
1774–not by the ministry, but by their colleagues.
13
Wider explanatory structures are therefore required if we are to escape the
notion that people act ideologically or discursively in a simple monocausal way.
Jansenists, though concerned for their religion, also thought and acted as
magistrates, or barristers, or merchants. They were clients, in need of protection,
and were not free-standing individuals able to act independently. Some judges were
ambitious, like the youthful Chauvelin, others selfless like the abbé Pucelle. If they
hoped to advance their career or family status, they had to use well-tried strategies,
and these forced choices on them. It is these sorts of traditional behaviour, rather
than the more explicit pronouncements, that best explain the actions of individuals.
Many discourses went to make up the repertoire that individuals could draw upon:
civility, courtliness, that of the perfect magistrate or the perfect cleric, for example,
and many more explicit theoretical discourses like Jansenism or parlementary
traditions were articulated. Indeed, one important aim of this study has been to
show their interplay both in politics in a wide sense and in individual strategies.
There is evidence of contemporary awareness of this, in the way men changed roles
at times, exploited codes of conduct, using them tactically and strategically. As
rhetoricians, steeped in both monarchical theory and classical republican imagery,
educated people were most adept at manipulating the repertoire of languages
available to them. Historians should always over-estimate the ability of those in the
eighteenth century to understand what they were doing, and underestimate our
ability to understand them!
Thus ambiguity is an important but sometimes neglected aspect of history. It
was facilitated by role-playing, another important facet of behaviour. Ambitious
Jansenists played down their Jansenism for office; men in opposition would entirely
change their tune when in power, showing that they knew and understood the
different codes operating in different offices. It is not so much a question of
hypocrisy as of their having different priorities; obviously they had to defend their
patrimony, to advance their family and they had patrons to serve. These wider
codes of behaviour were of great importance to them; individuals observed a
different balance according to temperament, age, rank and legitimate hopes. When
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301
in 1730 at the lit de justice counsellor Robert taunted chancellor Daguesseau for
having apparently changed his position on Jansenism (Quantum mutatis ab illo, he
repeated twice to much applause), everyone would have understood that the
Chancellor was required to act in the persona of his office, and that an accusation of
hypocrisy was beside the point. What is revealing in Robert’s comment is how the
injection of ideology into the political culture of the ancien régime opened the door to
such accusations because morality was judged from different viewpoints. This was
true not only of Jansenism with its virtuous austerity but also of patriotism with its
classical republican virtue.
Equally difficult to get to grips with is the environment of the court. As the
evidence of Part 1 shows, the language and codes of the court were extremely
subtle and are now difficult to interpret. The study of court politics is therefore a
complicated task conditioned by the ambiguities of the evidence and by the
distance from our own categories. Yet it must be attempted and it is not an
impossible one. By sifting all the evidence carefully and evaluating the position
and potential reliability of the witnesses, their memoirs, their correspondence be it
private or public, patronage-oriented or administrative, the minute changes in
rank and position and the knowledge that hindsight confers, it has been possible
to construct a sort of ‘real’ (or meta) account of what ‘actually’ happened (I use
the terms real and actual loosely, all too aware of the problems inherent in trying
to reconstruct a chain of events). Such an analytical narrative is of great use as a
yardstick by which to measure even more problematic material. The evidence of
individual memoirs, journals, newspapers or the reports of nouvellistes may then be
measured for their accuracy as a portrayal of ‘politics’ against ‘what happened’.
Only in this way may the nature of the discourse of journalists or other creators of
public opinion be fully evaluated. One perspective carefully evaluated may throw
light on another, thus courtly representations of politics must be understood
within their own limited view of causality and their own narrative structures. But
courtiers did have better access to the codes of politics than many other observers
whose codes are closer to those we have made our own, as ‘rational’ and
‘enlightened’ historians.
14
When seeking to understand how the political culture functioned, it is
certainly misleading to give more weight to the languages used to reflect upon
politics than to the discourses employed in day-to-day politics. It is probably even
more misleading to analyse political life through the records of outsiders like
journalists and enlightened critics for theirs is a very particular and uninformed
representation of it. When all is said and done, given the nature of courtiers and
the structure of life at the court, there was little likelihood of any outsider getting
to the bottom of any affair.
15
Even when a journalist was fed information by a
minister, and there are examples of this in Lenoir’s memoirs for the 1780s, this
might well have been done with a view to influencing public opinion in favour of
a certain faction, rather than to enlighten. In the light of this, we might well
conclude that many of the sources widely used for studies of political life are best
used as evidence not of ‘what happened’ but of what was considered to be
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plausible interpretation by an informed observer.
16
Any failure to respect these
limitations in the evidence and make proper distinctions will surely impair our
understanding of those events which had a courtly dimension. It goes without
saying that the loose use of anecdotal and memoir material is counter-productive.
There is quite simply no short cut to the ‘facts’ of political life once the court is
recognised as its focal point.
Based more upon the evidence of theoretical texts and journalistic
commentaries, rather than on the daily practice of politics, the notion that there was
a new politics of contestation from the 1750s has been gaining ground among
historians. First, we might question why it is that the 1750s has been singled out.
Does not all political language express ideology and, however consensual it might
appear, does it not involve the possibility of conflict or contestation? This is surely as
true of the seventeenth century as it is of the late eighteenth, for that is its function.
To put the accent on a politics of ideological contestation from the 1750s may
therefore simply be another way of saying that the language of politics looks more
modern or ideological from that point on, and it appears to tie in with the period
identified by orthodox historians as one of heightened class conflict.
17
It is indeed
true that the classical republican language of virtue and patriotism became more
current, as did appeals to a constitution. But there was undoubtedly also a politics of
contestation—be it defined as a ‘war of words’
18
or jurisdictional disputes—from 1718
to 1733 involving the parlement, lawyers and Jansenists—but as it was partly
religious it has usually been overlooked. It has recently been shown that in the
parlementaire disputes of the 1750s and 1760s much the same processes were at
work as those we have emphasised in the 1730s.
19
However, the complexity of the
issues is well illustrated by the fact that the transformation to a more modern
language took place largely as a consequence of Jansenist preoccupations articulated
by a parti both within and without the Paris parlement. To put it in terms of the new
language of historians, different discourses were operating at the same time on
different levels to fulfil different strategies. To focus upon one discourse or strategy
to the exclusion of others would be a mistake: as Van Kley has so clearly shown in
his fine book on the Damiens affair, in the eighteenth century religious discourse
should not be divorced from its ‘political’, jurisdictional or constitutional
dimensions. It is also necessary to study not just the theories employed but also the
articulation of interests. For the latter, such factors as corporate loyalty, jurisdictional
concerns, hierarchy, honour, youth and ambition, all found to be important in the
parlementaire crisis of the 1730s, have also been found to have had a major effect on
the course of later disputes.
20
Another part of the discursive dialectic that is used to explain the Revolution is
the emergence of public opinion. Important contributions to the debate on
political culture have traced the development of the concept of public opinion as
‘an implicit new system of authority’. Public opinion was, in the words of Baker,
‘an abstract category, invoked by actors in a new kind of politics to secure the
legitimacy of claims that could no longer be made binding in the terms (and
within the traditional institutional circuit) of an absolutist political order.’
21
This
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imaginary tribunal served to legitimate participation in politics and more
particularly, opposition to absolute monarchy, by new groups. This was certainly
the case and many examples in pamphlet literature in the 1770s and 1780s
confirm its rhetorical role.
22
However, it was even more complicated than that. The history of public opinion
is recent and not all aspects of it have yet been considered. From the perspective of
the present work some omissions may be rectified. Public opinion obviously played
a part in political culture before the mid-century—although not by that name, and
without its later intellectual representations. Here also continuities deserve more
emphasis. The Parisians’ fascination with news is well attested in the sixteenth
century, while the Mazarinades provide extensive proof of the ready market for
political and scurrilous pamphlets at the time of the Fronde. This ‘tribunal’, as it was
later to be called, surely also existed in the eyes of ministers and courtiers long
before the mid-eighteenth century. If not, it is hard to explain the function of
provincial estates and the drawing up of cahiers for the several Estates General. In
particular, the public was appealed to, as J.Klaits has shown, during the wars of
Louis XIV.
23
In the 1720s, financial edicts appealed to a notion of ‘the public’ and it
is tempting to conclude that the realisation of the importance of public opinion for
monetary credit preceded that of it as an impartial tribunal.
24
Opinion affected the
interest rates to be paid for government loans, in so far as subscribers were drawn
from a wide spectrum within the elites. Of immense importance also was the
campaign to inform the public of religious affairs, carried on by the Nouvelles
ecclésiastiques. The inner core of the parti janséniste had an explicit understanding of
public opinion as a tribunal, which predates other examples. ‘The public is a judge
they have been unable to corrupt’, wrote the editors of the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques on
1 January 1732.
25
Interestingly, there is another aspect of public opinion still more closely related to
court politics and which is also observable as early as the 1720s, in the case of the
due de Bourbon. Royal ministers were supposed to safeguard the commonwealth
on behalf of the King; if it could be shown that they had against their policies the vox
populi, they would be endangering royal prestige and the ship of state by giving rise
to disorders: fiscal or subsistence riots might occur. Therefore, interested parties
could maintain that a minister should be dismissed before his policies jeopardised
the state. Faction seized upon this and, in the same way as it pulled strings with
clients in institutions to discredit policies, it was not above manufacturing public
opinion as a powerful weapon in the game of ‘Ote-toi de la que je m’y mette’. For
this reason, deliberately spread rumours (the ‘on-dits’), the hawking of placards,
witty lampoons and songs that went the rounds were all constituent of a ‘public
opinion’ which could be exploited. The activities of the parti janséniste in publishing
a news-sheet and appealing to a public show that they were aware of its uses in the
1720s. In that period, public opinion was certainly not an impartial tribunal, for
courtiers, factions and ministers employed pamphleteers and spies to write polemics
and spread rumours, attempting to create opinions favourable to them. So opinion
was both generated by a genuine increase in interest and manufactured in part by
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304
the state, courtiers and nouvellistes. This earlier usage by no means undermines the
argument put forward by Baker that the concept of public opinion emerged as a
tribunal that legitimised a new politics of contestation. It merely predates its use and
highlights the continued importance of factional manœuvres in exploiting the
concept.
Thus public opinion in the late ancien régime was conceived of not only as an
independent tribunal which was to become a force in politics, but also as a tool
employed by both ministers and courtly or judicial opposition; it was another and
newer element in an older political game. The public was not so well informed
about the realities of politics, in terms of the true springs of events, as it was about
the plausible interpretations that could be deduced from the very limited evidence
available. It is notable that, for the most part, ‘the public’ did not play a significant
role in the crisis of 1787–8. Before the summer of 1788, most pamphlets of
substance were written by journalists, lawyers and hacks. There is even evidence
from eyewitness accounts that the ‘popular’ disturbances in support of the
parlements after the May edicts in 1788 were instigated and led by interested
members of the basoche, the lower orders of the legal profession who depended for a
living on the courts, and were not therefore the result of the anger of an informed
public.
26
Even at this late stage, therefore, most aspects of politics were not new. In
terms of politics, opinion was embryonic, with little power and influence as yet. In
brief, we should be careful not to antedate the significance of the changes that were
embodied in the revolutionary regime.
The notion that the political culture of the period after 1750 was new therefore
needs careful evaluation. To the present writer it is far from clear that the
aggregation of several areas of culture pointed to in support of this argument adds
up to a fundamentally new political culture. The desacralisation of the monarchy,
a politics of contestation and public opinion are all categories that fit better into
intellectual history than with studies of the operation of politics in practice. Such
developments are not clear cut, nor easily assignable to a particular period. If it is
a question of degree, of a critical point reached by an accumulation of changes,
then it can still be argued that notwithstanding some significant developments
and shifts of emphasis in the eighteenth century, the political culture of the ancien
régime remained basically cast within its older mould. The socio-political
structures of court, administration, patronage and clientage, the practices of
management, faction, the courtly creation and manipulation of popular opinions,
were all in evidence to the end. Once it is recognised that power functioned in
many non-bureaucratic ways, then it can be seen that neither ‘the state’ nor ‘the
bureaucracy’ had a monopoly on it. The very elite that was involved in public
opinion, in the culture of the enlightenment, also shared power at court and in the
provinces. It is thus hard to see a new political culture being created as a reaction
to an ‘administrative centralisation’ that reduced even the elite to an equality of
oppression, as Tocqueville would have it. In brief, the study of political practice,
an area neglected by historians who advocate a new political culture, gives cause
for doubt.
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Many problems remain with the ways in which we conceptualise the ancien régime
and its relationship to the revolution. Historians must continue to reexamine the
political life of the ancien régime, with the aid of recent methodological insights but
without becoming trapped by some of the assumptions in the approach taken by
less empirical historians. Those who focus on the new politics and its discourses
should take more seriously the view that the dissolution of the regime began at its
centre. Any search for the ‘new’ political institutions and languages must be
predicated on a fuller understanding of the pre-existing structures and practices.
Those who emphasise the importance of contradictions should recognise that more
than contradiction alone may be necessary to explain the dissolution of a long-
standing political system. Regimes can often survive their inherent contradictions
for long periods, and this had been the case with the absolute monarchy.
THE SOCIO-POLITICAL SYSTEM OF THE BAROQUE STATE
The reign of Louis XIV was long thought to have effected a transition to a more
bureaucratic and centralised form of government, in which faction was controlled
and power functioned administratively. Much of that ‘absolutist’ picture has been
questioned, indeed abandoned, by recent historians of Louis XIV. His absolute
monarchy now looks far from absolute or centralised in terms of power, and the
processes of bluff, negotiation and compromise, of ad hoc responses to wartime
emergencies, all seem to characterise his rule better than a systematic
transformation of France into a centralised modern state. With this new image, the
story of the second quarter of the eighteenth century is one of continuities.
The situation revealed in this book is one in which there were strong links
between the social system with its hierarchies and privileges, and the court which
continued to be of central importance as an instrument of government: we are
therefore dealing with a socio-political system in which the influence exerted
through social factors was as important an instrument of rule as the administrative
elements. This study of the period of Fleury, by revealing the persistence of non-
bureaucratic forms and practices of power, does not therefore confirm the existence
of a modern centralised and bureaucratic state in the first half of the eighteenth
century.
Consequently, and against a large body of earlier work, it is now possible to
argue that a ‘baroque state’ existed, as a separate form of state, closely dependent on
society, with its own coherence and characteristics, which had come into existence
by the later sixteenth century and was to continue to exist, its essential
characteristics intact, until the Revolution.
27
What the Bourbon monarchy had
succeeded in doing was devising a way of making the network of socio-political
structures and ideologies that was ‘the state’ function in times of greater stress, and
enable it to rise to the weightier demands put upon it. This situation did not
preclude the adoption of some new functions in certain areas, but these, in spite of
the intense historiographical interest in them (which has therefore overvalued their
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306
significance), should be interpreted as grafts on to an older model. They did not
result in a transformation into an all-but-modern administrative state, even if some
of these newer elements were destined to come to the forefront during the
Revolution and in the nineteenth century. The bureaucratic structures that existed
in the eighteenth century were imbued not with the modern administrative spirit
but with notions of honour, familial advancement, corporatism, patronage and
clientage. All these are familiar features of the seventeenth-century polity.
The continuities should therefore be underlined, as the essential structures
were the product of long-standing practices and rationales. Faction and court
politics in the period of Fleury operated in similar if not identical ways to earlier
and later practices. The factional manœuvres of this period help to give the period
its specificity, but are also typical of the political culture throughout the ancien
régime. The institutional and individual strategies we have examined in such detail
are replicated throughout the final decades of the regime. Even monarchical
theory changed remarkably little over many generations; theoretical change came
from the opposition, not the royal propagandists.
28
In the reign of Louis XV,
power was still derived from God and was held by the King, whose sovereignty
was undivided: he was still an absolute monarch. Although on many occasions
the King could impose his will arbitrarily—for example, with lettres de cachet—there
continued to be a long-standing and clear theoretical distinction between
authority exercised legitimately according to the laws of France, and despotism,
which was the abuse of power. Louis XV still had to exercise his considerable
authority in a legal and Christian fashion and in particular he had to respect all
the rights, privileges and customs of the corporations, orders and localities.
Because France was not so much a unified state as a diverse collection of
provinces and corporate bodies dominated by independently minded local elites,
general policies were always difficult to frame and even more difficult to execute.
Wise ministers realised this, and lowered their sights accordingly. In practice, as
the present study shows in many instances, royal power to effect change remained
rather limited: it was impossible to introduce sweeping reforms without being
accused of despotism or meeting serious resistance in the form of the defence of
privilege, often buttressed by appeals to a nebulous but hallowed order of things.
For this reason co-operation and persuasion rather than force were necessary for
government—hence the importance of patronage, clientage, propaganda and
ceremony as vital aspects of the political system.
The structure of politics, and the varieties of political culture that co-existed
within one state, therefore worked against the successful development of a
bureaucratic state. This is because political life was extremely complex, as is shown
by the previous chapters on political crisis and its management. The more recent
bureaucratic elements in the state were not well adapted to the wide variations
within political culture. The grumbling obedience to members of the
administration that is displayed today was lacking then, because the ordered
bureaucratic mentality hardly existed beyond the world of clerks and royal lawyers.
The elite had limited respect for administrators of lower social rank, and the
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307
independently minded seigneur or member of a corporation would expect some
honourable compromise to be possible, and would turn to his patrons for help.
Perhaps the administration was stronger than it looked and in many instances could
have won a struggle with the elites, but the contemporary perception was of living
in a precarious age in which social and political order remained fragile, liable to
collapse. This sense of a hard-won and precarious equilibrium encouraged the
continuance of traditional political compromises.
In this system, it could be argued that some aspects of the bureaucracy created
tensions rather than resolved them. The stark administrative statement, the
unexpected judicial ruling from a council, neglected the formulae that sustained
honour and rank and could quickly generate similarly uncompromising replies.
Thus the familiar process of escalating conflict would begin. To defuse the tensions
and oil the wheels of the administration, personal intervention by respected
intermediaries was always necessary. Bargaining and brokerage remained
important aspects of political culture and operated as much through the ‘unofficial’
channels of patronage as through the administrative agents. Even when these office-
holders, be they in council or in bureau, accorded requests, it was often in the guise
of favours.
The baroque state was replete with inner tensions and unresolved
contradictions that were hallowed by time. Successful politics, whether a matter of
familial advancement, corporate independence or royal statebuilding, required
this to be taken into account. Politics was an extremely messy business whose
practitioners had to deal with far more than the issues in administrative terms, for
they had to engage with corporate rivalries, family strategies, the social and
political cohesion of local elites, with very little bureaucratic support in an age
when bureaucratic procedures in themselves constituted an element of friction.
Sensitive political management within the traditions of the regime was an
extraordinarily difficult affair in which the possibilities for error were far greater
than the chances of success. There were simply too many contradictory and
competing elements to juggle with. The whole game was made all the more
difficult by the convention that the King’s business was not something that was
open to discussion or interference by those outside the royal council. Much of
what today is considered to be the legitimate sphere of politics was not officially
allowed—although, in contrast, some of what today is forbidden, under the label
of corruption, was expected or tolerated.
Faction exploited networks of influence, including the manipulation of opinion,
to achieve most often social but sometimes political goals. Because competition was
for limited ends within a closed system, in many cases the success of one faction
depended upon the defeat or discrediting of another. Factions would pull strings
with clients in the various administrative or judicial institutions such as estates or
parlements in order to make life more difficult for rivals and to sabotage their
policies. This aspect of politics has been too little investigated in the Paris parlement
and particularly in the Assembly of Notables. Talleyrand observed that the
‘intrigues, after having scandalously disrupted the Assembly of Notables, had