fbpx
Wikipedia

France in the early modern period

August 20, 2023

The Kingdom of France in the early modern period, from the Renaissance (c. 1500–1550) to the Revolution (1789–1804), was a monarchy ruled by the House of Bourbon (a Capetian cadet branch). This corresponds to the so-called Ancien Régime ("old rule"). The territory of France during this period increased until it included essentially the extent of the modern country, and it also included the territories of the first French colonial empire overseas.

Kingdom of France
Royaume de France
  • c. 15th century–1792
(Ancien Régime)
Motto: Montjoie Saint Denis!
Anthem: Marche Henri IV (1590–1792)
"March of Henry IV"
The Kingdom of France in 1789.
Capital
Common languages
Religion
Roman Catholicism (987–1791)[2]
Constitutional (1791–1792)[3]
Demonym(s)French
Government
King of France 
Legislature
Historical eraMedieval/Early modern
CurrencyLivre, Franc, Écu, Louis d'or

The period is dominated by the figure of the "Sun King", Louis XIV (his reign of 1643–1715 being one of the longest in history), who managed to eliminate the remnants of medieval feudalism and established a centralized state under an absolute monarch, a system that would endure until the French Revolution and beyond.

Geography

Main article: Territorial evolution of France
 
France on the eve of the modern era (1477). The red line denotes the boundary of the French kingdom, while the light blue the royal domain.

In the mid 15th century, France was significantly smaller than it is today,[4] and numerous border provinces (such as Roussillon, Cerdagne, Calais, Béarn, Navarre, County of Foix, Flanders, Artois, Lorraine, Alsace, Trois-Évêchés, Franche-Comté, Savoy, Bresse, Bugey, Gex, Nice, Provence, Corsica and Brittany) were autonomous or foreign-held (as by the Kingdom of England); there were also foreign enclaves, like the Comtat Venaissin. In addition, certain provinces within France were ostensibly personal fiefdoms of noble families (like the Bourbonnais, Marche, Forez and Auvergne provinces held by the House of Bourbon until the provinces were forcibly integrated into the royal domaine in 1527 after the fall of Charles III, Duke of Bourbon).

The late 15th, 16th and 17th centuries would see France undergo a massive territorial expansion and an attempt to better integrate its provinces into an administrative whole. During this period, France expanded to nearly its modern territorial extent through the acquisition of Picardy, Burgundy, Anjou, Maine, Provence, Brittany, Franche-Comté, French Flanders, Navarre, Roussillon, the Duchy of Lorraine, Alsace and Corsica.

 
French territorial expansion, 1552–1798

French acquisitions from 1461–1789:

Only the Duchy of Savoy, the city of Nice and some other small papal (e.g., Avignon) and foreign possessions would be acquired later. (For a map of historic French provinces, see Provinces of France). France also embarked on exploration, colonisation, and mercantile exchanges with the Americas (New France, Louisiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, French Guiana), India (Pondicherry), the Indian Ocean (Réunion), the Far East, and a few African trading posts.

Although Paris was the capital of France, the later Valois kings largely abandoned the city as their primary residence, preferring instead various châteaux of the Loire Valley and Parisian countryside. Henry IV made Paris his primary residence (promoting a major building boom in private mansions), but Louis XIV once again withdrew from the city in the last decades of his reign and Versailles became the primary seat of the French monarchy for much of the following century.

The administrative and legal system in France in this period is generally called the Ancien Régime.

Demography

Main article: Demographics of France

The Black Death had killed an estimated one-third of the population of France from its appearance in 1348. The concurrent Hundred Years' War slowed recovery. It would be the early 16th century before the population recovered to mid-14th-century levels.

With an estimated population of 11 million in 1400, 20 million in the 17th century, and 28 million in 1789, until 1795 France was the most populated country in Europe (even ahead of Tsardom of Russia and twice the size of Britain or the Dutch Republic) and the third most populous country in the world, behind only China and India.[5]

These demographic changes also led to a massive increase in urban populations, although on the whole France remained a profoundly rural country. Paris was one of the most populated cities in Europe (estimated at 400,000 inhabitants in 1550; 650,000 at the end of the 18th century). Other major French cities include Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille.

These centuries saw several periods of epidemics and crop failures due to wars and climatic change. (Historians speak of the period 1550–1850 as the "Little Ice Age".) Between 1693 and 1694, France lost 6% of its population. In the extremely harsh winter of 1709, France lost 3.5% of its population. In the past 300 years, no period has been so proportionally deadly for the French, both World Wars included.[6]

Language

Main article: History of French

Linguistically, the differences in France were extreme. Before the Renaissance, the language spoken in the north of France was a collection of different dialects called Oïl languages whereas the written and administrative language remained Latin. By the 16th century, there had developed a standardised form of French (called Middle French) which would be the basis of the standardised "modern" French of the 17th and 18th century which in turn became the lingua franca of the European continent. (In 1539, with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, Francis I of France made French alone the language for legal and juridical acts.) Nevertheless, in 1790, only half of the population spoke or understood standard French.

The southern half of the country continued to speak Occitan languages (such as Provençal), and other inhabitants spoke Breton, Catalan, Basque, Dutch (West Flemish), and Franco-Provençal. In the north of France, regional dialects of the various langues d'oïl continued to be spoken in rural communities. During the French revolution, the teaching of French was promoted in all the schools. The French used would be that of the legal system, which differed from the French spoken in the courts of France before the revolution. Like the orators during the French revolution, the pronunciation of every syllable would become the new language.

France would not become a linguistically unified country until the end of the 19th century.

Administrative structures

Main article: Ancien Régime

The Ancien Régime, the French term rendered in English as "Old Rule", "Old Kingdom", or simply "Old Regime", refers primarily to the aristocratic, social and political system established in France from (roughly) the 15th century to the 18th century under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties. The administrative and social structures of the Ancien Régime were the result of years of state-building, legislative acts (like the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts), internal conflicts and civil wars, but they remained a confusing patchwork of local privilege and historic differences until the French Revolution took place in a radical time suppression of administrative incoherence.

Economy

Main article: Economic history of France

Culture

Main article: French Renaissance

Political history

Background

The Peace of Etaples (1492) marks, for some, the beginning of the early modern period in France.

After the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453), support on the Lancastrian side in The Wars of the Roses and the Treaty of Picquigny (1475)—its official end date—in 1492 and 1493, after support in the Battle of Bosworth Field, Charles VIII of France signed three additional treaties with Henry VII of England, Maximilian I of Habsburg, and Ferdinand II of Aragon respectively at Étaples (1492), Senlis (1493) and in Barcelona (1493). As the 15th century drew to a close, French kings could take confidence in the fact that England had been mostly driven from their territory and so they could now embark on an expansionist foreign policy. The invasion of Italy by Charles VIII in 1494 began 62 years of war with the Habsburgs (the Italian Wars).

Foreign relations

Main article: History of French foreign relations

Wars

Despite the beginnings of rapid demographic and economic recovery after the Black Death of the 14th century, the gains of the previous half-century were to be jeopardised by a further protracted series of conflicts, the Italian Wars (1494–1559), where French efforts to gain dominance ended in the increased power of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors of Germany.[7]

In 1445, the first steps were made towards fashioning a regular army out of the poorly disciplined mercenary bands that French kings traditionally relied on. The medieval division of society into "those who fought (nobility), those who prayed (clergy), and those who worked (everyone else)" still held strong and warfare was considered a domain of the nobles. Charles VIII marched into Italy with a core force consisting of noble horsemen and non-noble foot soldiers, but in time the role of the latter grew stronger so that by the middle of the 16th century, France had a standing army of 5000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry. The military was reorganized from a system of legions recruited by province (Norman legion, Gascon legion, etc.) to regiments, an arrangement which persisted into the next century. However, the nobility and troops were often disloyal to the king, if not outright rebellious, and it took another army reform by Louis XIV to finally transform the French army into an obedient force.[8]

Main article: Italian Wars
 
The Battle of Pavia in 1525

Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, seeking an ally against the Republic of Venice, encouraged Charles VIII of France to invade Italy, using the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, then under Aragonese control, as a pretext. When Ferdinand I of Naples died in 1494, Charles invaded the peninsula. For several months, French forces moved through Italy virtually unopposed, since the condottieri armies of the Italian city-states were unable to resist them. Their sack of Naples finally provoked a reaction, however, and the League of Venice was formed against them. Italian troops defeated the French at the Battle of Fornovo, forcing Charles to withdraw to France. Ludovico, having betrayed the French at Fornovo, retained his throne until 1499, when Charles's successor, Louis XII of France, invaded Lombardy and seized Milan.[9]

In 1500, Louis XII, having reached an agreement with Ferdinand II of Aragon to divide Naples, marched south from Milan. By 1502, combined French and Aragonese forces had seized control of the Kingdom; disagreements about the terms of the partition led to a war between Louis and Ferdinand. By 1503, Louis, having been defeated at the Battle of Cerignola and Battle of Garigliano, was forced to withdraw from Naples, which was left under the control of the Spanish viceroy, Ramón de Cardona. French forces under Gaston de Foix inflicted an overwhelming defeat on a Spanish army at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512, but Foix was killed during the battle, and the French were forced to withdraw from Italy by an invasion of Milan by the Swiss, who reinstated Maximilian Sforza to the ducal throne. The Holy League, left victorious, fell apart over the subject of dividing the spoils, and in 1513 Venice allied with France, agreeing to partition Lombardy between them.[10]

 
Francis, Duke of Guise at the Siege of Calais

Louis mounted another invasion of Milan, but was defeated at the Battle of Novara, which was quickly followed by a series of Holy League victories at La Motta, Guinegate, and Flodden, in which the French, Venetian, and Scottish forces were decisively defeated. However, the death of Pope Julius left the League without effective leadership, and when Louis' successor, Francis I, defeated the Swiss at Marignano in 1515, the League collapsed, and by the treaties of Noyon and Brussels, surrendered to France and Venice the entirety of northern Italy.

The elevation of Charles of Spain to Holy Roman Emperor, a position that Francis had desired, led to a collapse of relations between France and the Habsburgs. In 1519, a Spanish invasion of Navarre, nominally a French fief, provided Francis with a pretext for starting a general war; French forces flooded into Italy and began a campaign to drive Charles from Naples. The French were outmatched, however, by the fully developed Spanish tercio tactics, and suffered a series of crippling defeats at Bicocca and Sesia against Spanish troops under Fernando d'Avalos. With Milan itself threatened, Francis personally led a French army into Lombardy in 1525, only to be defeated and captured at the Battle of Pavia; imprisoned in Madrid, Francis was forced to agree to extensive concessions over his Italian territories in the "Treaty of Madrid" (1526).

 
Francis I (r. 1515–1547, painted by Jean Clouet)

The inconclusive third war between Charles and Francis began with the death of Francesco II Sforza, the duke of Milan. When Charles' son Philip inherited the duchy, Francis invaded Italy, capturing Turin, but failed to take Milan. In response, Charles invaded Provence, advancing to Aix-en-Provence, but withdrew to Spain rather than attacking the heavily fortified Avignon. The Truce of Nice ended the war, leaving Turin in French hands but effecting no significant change in the map of Italy. Francis, allying himself with Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire, launched a final invasion of Italy. A Franco-Ottoman fleet captured the city of Nice in August 1543, and laid siege to the citadel. The defenders were relieved within a month. The French, under François, Count d'Enghien, defeated an Imperial army at the Battle of Ceresole in 1544, but the French failed to penetrate further into Lombardy. Charles and Henry VIII of England then proceeded to invade northern France, seizing Boulogne and Soissons. A lack of cooperation between the Spanish and English armies, coupled with increasingly aggressive Ottoman attacks, led Charles to abandon these conquests, restoring the status quo once again.

In 1547, Henry II of France, who had succeeded Francis to the throne, declared war against Charles with the intent of recapturing Italy and ensuring French, rather than Habsburg, domination of European affairs. An early offensive against Lorraine was successful, but the attempted French invasion of Tuscany in 1553 was defeated at the Battle of Marciano. Charles's abdication in 1556 split the Habsburg empire between Philip II of Spain and Ferdinand I, and shifted the focus of the war to Flanders, where Philip, in conjunction with Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, defeated the French at St. Quentin. England's entry into the war later that year led to the French capture of Calais, England's last possession on the French mainland, and French armies plundered Spanish possessions in the Low Countries; but Henry was nonetheless forced to accept the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, in which he renounced any further claims to Italy.

The Wars of Religion

Main article: French Wars of Religion
 
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants in 1572

Barely were the Italian Wars over, when France was plunged into a domestic crisis with far-reaching consequences. Despite the conclusion of a Concordat between France and the Papacy (1516), granting the crown unrivalled power in senior ecclesiastical appointments, France was deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation's attempt to break the unity of Roman Catholic Europe. A growing urban-based Protestant minority (later dubbed Huguenots) faced ever harsher repression under the rule of Francis I's son King Henry II. After Henry II's unfortunate death in a joust, the country was ruled by his widow Catherine de' Medici and her sons Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. Renewed Catholic reaction headed by the powerful dukes of Guise culminated in a massacre of Huguenots (1562), starting the first of the French Wars of Religion, during which English, German, and Spanish forces intervened on the side of rival Protestant and Catholic forces. Opposed to absolute monarchy, the Huguenots Monarchomachs theorized during this time the right of rebellion and the legitimacy of tyrannicide.[11]

The Wars of Religion culminated in the War of the Three Henrys in which Henry III assassinated Henry de Guise, leader of the Spanish-backed Catholic league, and the king was murdered in return. After the assassination of both Henry of Guise (1588) and Henry III (1589), the conflict was ended by the accession of the Protestant king of Navarre as Henry IV (first king of the Bourbon dynasty) and his subsequent abandonment of Protestantism (Expedient of 1592) effective in 1593, his acceptance by most of the Catholic establishment (1594) and by the Pope (1595), and his issue of the toleration decree known as the Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed freedom of private worship and civil equality.

France in the 17th and 18th centuries

 
Henry IV (painted by Frans Pourbus the younger)

France's pacification under Henry IV laid much of the ground for the beginnings of France's rise to European hegemony. One of the most admired French kings, Henry was fatally stabbed by a Catholic fanatic in 1610 as war with Spain threatened. Troubles gradually developed during the regency headed by his queen Marie de Medici. France was expansive during all but the end of the 17th century: the French began trading in India and Madagascar, founded Quebec and penetrated the North American Great Lakes and Mississippi, established plantation economies in the West Indies and extended their trade contacts in the Levant and enlarged their merchant marine.[12]

Henry IV's son Louis XIII and his minister (1624–1642) Cardinal Richelieu, elaborated a policy against Spain and the German emperor during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) which had broken out among the lands of Germany's Holy Roman Empire. An English-backed Huguenot rebellion (1625–1628) defeated, France intervened directly (1635) in the wider European conflict following her ally (Protestant) Sweden's failure to build upon initial success.

After the death of both king and cardinal, the Peace of Westphalia (1648) secured universal acceptance of Germany's political and religious fragmentation, but the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin experienced a civil uprising known as the Fronde (1648–1653) which expanded into a Franco-Spanish War (1653–1659). The Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) formalised France's seizure (1642) of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemeral Catalan Republic and ushered a short period of peace.

For most of the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), France was the dominant power in Europe, aided by the diplomacy of Richelieu's successor (1642–1661) Cardinal Mazarin and the economic policies (1661–1683) of Colbert. Colbert's attempts to promote economic growth and the creation of new industries were not a great success, and France did not undergo any sort of industrial revolution during Louis XIV's reign. Indeed, much of the French countryside during this period remained poor and overpopulated. The resistance of peasants to adopt the potato, according to some monarchist apologists, and other new agricultural innovations while continuing to rely on cereal crops led to repeated catastrophic famines long after they had ceased in the rest of Western Europe. Prior to Louis XIV's reign, French soldiers frequently went into battle barefoot and with no weapons. On the other hand, France's high birthrate until the 18th century proved beneficial to its rulers since it meant the country could field larger armies than its neighbors. In fact, the king's foreign policy, as well as his lavish court and construction projects, left the country in enormous debt. The Palace of Versailles was criticized as overly extravagant even while it was still under construction, but dozens of imitations were built across Europe. Renewed war (the War of Devolution 1667–1668 and the Franco-Dutch War 1672–1678) brought further territorial gains (Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy, left to the Empire in 1482), but at the cost of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival powers.[13]

 
Louis XIV King of France and of Navarre (painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701)

French culture was part of French hegemony. In the early part of the century French painters had to go to Rome to shed their provinciality (Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain), but Simon Vouet brought home the taste for a classicized baroque that would characterise the French Baroque, epitomised in the Académie de peinture et de sculpture, in the painting of Charles Le Brun and the sculpture of François Girardon. With the Palais du Luxembourg, the Château de Maisons and Vaux-le-Vicomte, French classical architecture was admired abroad even before the creation of Versailles or Perrault's Louvre colonnade. Parisian salon culture set standards of discriminating taste from the 1630s, and with Pascal, Descartes, Bayle, Corneille, Racine and Molière, France became the cultural center of Europe. In an effort to prevent the nobility from revolting and challenging his authority, Louis implemented an extremely elaborate system of court etiquette with the idea that learning it would occupy most of the nobles' time and they could not plan rebellion. By the start of the 18th century, the nobility in France had been effectively neutered and would never again have more power than the crown. Also, Louis willingly granted titles of nobility to those who had performed distinguished service to the state so that it did not become a closed caste and it was possible for commoners to rise through the social ranks. The king sought to impose total religious uniformity on the country, repealing the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The infamous practice of dragonnades was adopted, whereby rough soldiers were quartered in the homes of Protestant families and allowed to have their way with them. Scores of Protestants fled France, costing the country a great many intellectuals, artisans, and other valuable people. Persecution extended to unorthodox Catholics like the Jansenists, a group that denied free will and had already been condemned by the popes. Louis was no theologian and understood little of the complex doctrines of Jansenism, satisfying himself with the fact that they threatened the unity of the state. In this, he garnered the friendship of the papacy, which had previously been hostile to France because of its policy of putting all church property in the country under the jurisdiction of the state rather than of Rome.

Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French navy that rivaled England's, expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200. The size of the army was also considerably increased.

Starting in the 1670s, Louis XIV established the so-called Chambers of Reunion, courts in which judges would determine whether certain Habsburg territories belonged rightfully to France. The king was relying on the somewhat vague wording in the Treaty of Westphalia, while also dredging up older French claims, some dating back to medieval times. Through this, he concluded that the strategically important imperial city of Strassburg should have gone to France in 1648. In September 1681, French troops occupied the city, which was at once strongly fortified. As the imperial armies were then busy fighting the Ottoman Empire, they could not do anything about this for a number of years. The basic aim of Louis' foreign policy was to give France more easily defensible borders, and to eliminate weak spots (Strassburg had often been used by the Habsburgs as a gateway into France).

 
French invasion of the Netherlands, which Louis XIV initiated in 1672, starting the Franco-Dutch War

Following the Whig establishment on the English and Scottish thrones by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1688, the anti-French "Grand Alliance" of 1689 was established. With the Turks now in retreat, the emperor Leopold could turn his attention to France. The ensuing War of the Grand Alliance lasted from 1688–1697. France's resources were stretched to the breaking point by the cost of fielding an army of over 300,000 men and two naval squadrons. Famine in 1692–1693 killed up to two million people. The exhaustion of the powers brought the fighting to an end in 1697, by which time the French were in control of the Spanish Netherlands and Catalonia. However, Louis gave back his conquests and gained only Haiti. The French people, feeling that their sacrifices in the war had been for nothing, never forgave him.

The Battle of La Hougue (1692) was the decisive naval battle in the war and confirmed the durable dominance of the Royal Navy of England.

In November 1700, the severely ill Spanish king Charles II died, ending the Habsburg line in that country. Louis had long waited for this moment, and now planned to put a Bourbon relative, Philip, Duke of Anjou, on the throne. Essentially, Spain was to become an obedient satellite of France, ruled by a king who would carry out orders from Versailles. Realizing how this would upset the balance of power, the other European rulers were outraged. However, most of the alternatives were equally undesirable. For example, putting another Habsburg on the throne would end up recreating the empire of Charles V, which would also grossly upset the power balance. After nine years of exhausting war, the last thing Louis wanted was another conflict. However, the rest of Europe would not stand for his ambitions in Spain, and so the War of the Spanish Succession began, a mere three years after the War of the Grand Alliance.[14]

The disasters of the war (accompanied by another famine) were so great that France was on the verge of collapse by 1709. In desperation, the king appealed to the French people to save their country, and in doing so gained thousands of new army recruits. Afterwards, his general Marshal Villars managed to drive back the allied forces. In 1714, the war ended with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt. France did not lose any territory, and there was no discussion of returning Flanders or Alsace to the Habsburgs. While the Duke of Anjou was accepted as King Philip V of Spain, this was done under the condition that the French and Spanish thrones never be united. Finally, France agreed to stop supporting Jacobite pretenders to the English throne. Just after the war ended, Louis died, having ruled France for 72 years.

While often considered a tyrant and a warmonger (especially in England), Louis XIV was not in any way a despot in the 20th-century sense. The traditional customs and institutions of France limited his power and in any case, communications were poor and no national police force existed.

Overall, the discontent and revolts of 16th- and 17th-century France did not approach the conditions that led to 1789. Events such as the Frondes were a naïve, unrevolutionary discontent and the people did not challenge the right of the king to govern nor did they question the Church.

The reign (1715–1774) of Louis XV saw an initial return to peace and prosperity under the regency (1715–1723) of Philip II, Duke of Orléans, whose policies were largely continued (1726–1743) by Cardinal Fleury, prime minister in all but name. The exhaustion of Europe after two major wars resulted in a long period of peace, only interrupted by minor conflicts like the War of the Polish Succession from 1733–1735. Large-scale warfare resumed with the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). But alliance with the traditional Habsburg enemy (the "Diplomatic Revolution" of 1756) against the rising power of Britain and Prussia led to costly failure in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and the loss of France's North American colonies.[15]

 
Louis XVI
Last King of Early France. By Joseph Duplessis (1775).

On the whole, the 18th century saw growing discontent with the monarchy and the established order. Louis XV was a highly unpopular king for his sexual excesses, overall weakness, and for losing Canada to the British. A strong ruler like Louis XIV could enhance the position of the monarchy, while Louis XV weakened it. The writings of the philosophers such as Voltaire were a clear sign of discontent, but the king chose to ignore them. He died of smallpox in 1774, and the French people shed few tears at his passing. While France had not yet experienced the industrial revolution that was beginning in England, the rising middle class of the cities felt increasingly frustrated with a system and rulers that seemed silly, frivolous, aloof, and antiquated, even if true feudalism no longer existed in France.

Anti-establishment ideas fermented in 18th-century France in part due to the country's relative egalitarianism. While less liberal than England during the same period, the French monarchy never approached the absolutism of the eastern rulers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople in part because the country's traditional development as a decentralized, feudal society acted as a restraint on the power of the king. Different social classes in France each had their own unique set of privileges so that no one class could completely dominate the others.

Upon Louis XV's death, his grandson Louis XVI became king. Initially popular, he too came to be widely detested by the 1780s. Again a weak ruler, he was married to an Austrian archduchess, Marie Antoinette, whose naïvety and cloistered/alienated Versailles life permitted ignorance of the true extravagance and wasteful use of borrowed money (Marie Antoinette was significantly more frugal than her predecessors). French intervention in the US War of Independence was also very expensive.

With the country deeply in debt, Louis XVI permitted the radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes, but noble disaffection led to Turgot's dismissal and Malesherbes' resignation in 1776. They were replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne, before being restored in 1788. A harsh winter that year led to widespread food shortages, and by then France was a powder keg ready to explode.

On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, France was in a profound institutional and financial crisis, but the ideas of the Enlightenment had begun to permeate the educated classes of society.

On 1792 September 21 the French monarchy was effectively abolished by the proclamation of the French First Republic.

Monarchs

 
Royal banner in presence of the Royal family of the Kingdom of France

Valois (1328–1498)

After Charles VIII the Affable, the last king in the direct Valois line, three other branches of the House of Capet reigned in France until the fall of the Ancien Régime in 1792:

Valois-Orléans (1498–1515)

Valois-Angoulême (1515–1589)

House of Bourbon (1589–1792)

Social history

France in the Ancien Régime covered a territory of around 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2), and supported 22 million people in 1700. At least 96% of the population were peasants. France had the largest population in Europe, with European Russia second at 20 million. Britain had nearly six million, Spain had eight million, and the Austrian Habsburgs had around eight million. France's lead slowly faded after 1700, as other countries grew faster.[16][17]

Rural society

In the 17th century rich peasants who had ties to the market economy provided much of the capital investment necessary for agricultural growth, and frequently moved from village to village (or town). Geographic mobility, directly tied to the market and the need for investment capital, was the main path to social mobility. The "stable" core of French society, town guilds people and village laboureurs, included cases of staggering social and geographic continuity, but even this core required regular renewal. Accepting the existence of these two societies, the constant tension between them, and extensive geographic and social mobility tied to a market economy holds the key to a clearer understanding of the evolution of the social structure, economy, and even political system of early modern France. Collins (1991) argues that the Annales School paradigm underestimated the role of the market economy; failed to explain the nature of capital investment in the rural economy; and grossly exaggerated social stability.[18]

Women and families

Very few women held any power—some queens did, as did the heads of Catholic convents. In the Enlightenment, the writings of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave a political program for reform of the Ancien Régime, founded on a reform of domestic mores. Rousseau's conception of the relations between private and public spheres is more unified than that found in modern sociology. Rousseau argued that the domestic role of women is a structural precondition for a "modern" society.[19] Within early modern society, women of urban artisanal classes participated in a range of public activities and also shared work settings with men (even though they were generally disadvantaged in terms of tasks, wages and access to property.)[20] Salic law prohibited women from rule; however, the laws for the case of a regency, when the king was too young to govern by himself, brought the queen into the center of power. The queen could assure the passage of power from one king to another—from her late husband to her young son—while simultaneously assuring the continuity of the dynasty.

Education for girls

Educational aspirations were on the rise and were becoming increasingly institutionalized in order to supply the church and state with the functionaries to serve as their future administrators. Girls were schooled too, but not to assume political responsibility. Girls were ineligible for leadership positions and were generally considered to have an inferior intellect to their brothers. France had many small local schools where working-class children—both boys and girls—learned to read, the better "to know, love and serve God". The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites, however, were given quite distinct educations: boys were sent to upper school, perhaps a university, while their sisters (if they were lucky enough to leave the house) were sent for finishing at a convent. The Enlightenment challenged this model, but no real alternative presented itself for female education. Only through education at home were knowledgeable women formed, usually to the sole end of dazzling their salons.[21]

Stepfamilies

A large proportion of children lived in broken homes or in blended families and had to cope with the presence of half-siblings and stepsiblings in the same residence. Brothers and sisters were often separated during the guardianship period and some of them were raised in different places for most of their childhood. Half-siblings and stepsiblings lived together for rather short periods of time because of their difference in age, their birth rank, or their gender. The lives of the children were closely linked to the administration of their heritage: when both their mothers and fathers were dead, another relative took charge of the guardianship and often removed the children from a stepparent's home, thus separating half-siblings.[22]

The experience of step-motherhood was surrounded by negative stereotypes; the Cinderella story and many other jokes and stories made the second wife an object of ridicule. Language, theater, popular sayings, the position of the Church, and the writings of jurists all made stepmother a difficult identity to take up. However, the importance of male remarriage suggests that reconstitution of family units was a necessity and that individuals resisted negative perceptions circulating through their communities. Widowers did not hesitate to take a second wife, and they usually found quite soon a partner willing to become a stepmother. For these women, being a stepmother was not necessarily the experience of a lifetime or what defined their identity. Their experience depended greatly on factors such as the length of the union, changing family configuration, and financial dispositions taken by their husbands.[23]

By a policy adopted at the beginning of the 16th century, adulterous women during the ancien régime were sentenced to a lifetime in a convent unless pardoned by their husbands and were rarely allowed to remarry even if widowed.

Religion

 
The Reims Cathedral, built on the site where Clovis I was baptised by Remigius, functioned as the site for the coronation of the Kings of France.

Prior to the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the official state religion of the Kingdom of France.[24] France was traditionally considered the Church's eldest daughter (French: Fille aînée de l'Église), and the King of France always maintained close links to the Pope.[25] However, the French monarchy maintained a significant degree of autonomy, namely through its policy of "Gallicanism", whereby the king selected bishops rather than the papacy.[26]

During the Protestant Reformation of the mid 16th century, France developed a large and influential Protestant population, primarily of Reformed confession; after French theologian and pastor John Calvin introduced the Reformation in France, the number of French Protestants (Huguenots) steadily swelled to 10 percent of the population, or roughly 1.8 million people. The ensuring French Wars of Religion, and particularly the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, decimated the Huguenot community;[27][28] Protestants declined to seven to eight percent of the kingdom's population by the end of the 16th century. The Edict of Nantes brought decades of respite until its revocation in the late 17th century by Louis XIV. The resulting exodus of Huguenots from the Kingdom of France created a brain drain, as many of them had occupied important places in society.[29]

French exploration and colonies

Literature

Art

See also

References

  1. ^ The Governor General of Canada. "Royal Banner of France - Heritage Emblem". Confirmation of the blazon of a Flag. February 15, 2008 Vol. V, p. 202. The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General.
  2. ^ Wolf, John Baptiste Wolf (1962). The Emergence of European Civilization: From the Middle Ages to the Opening of the Nineteenth Century. University of Virginia Press. p. 419. ISBN 9789733203162.
  3. ^ Popkin, Jeremy D. (2010-01-01). A short history of the French Revolution. Pearson Education. ISBN 978-0205693573. OCLC 780111354.
  4. ^ Bély, 21. In 1492, roughly 450,000 km2 (173,746 sq mi) versus 550,000 km2 (212,356 sq mi) today.
  5. ^ Andrea Alice Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (2009)
  6. ^ René Pillorget and Suzanne Pillorget, France baroque, France classique: 1589–1715 (1996) pp. 1155–1157.
  7. ^ R.J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France (1996)
  8. ^ John A. Lynn, Giant of the grand siècle: the French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
  9. ^ Antonio Santosuosso, "Anatomy of Defeat in Renaissance Italy: The Battle of Fornovo in 1495," International History Review (1994) 16#2 pp. 221–50.
  10. ^ R. B. Wernham, ed. (1955). The New Cambridge Modern History, Vol. 3: Counter-Reformation and Price Revolution, 1559–1610. Cambridge UP. pp. 297–98.
  11. ^ W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (1999).
  12. ^ W. J. Eccles, France in America (1990)
  13. ^ John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (1968)
  14. ^ John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999)
  15. ^ Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99 (2002)
  16. ^ Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Regime (1973) pp. 2–9
  17. ^ Colin McEvedy and Richard M. Jones, Atlas of World Population History (1978), pp. 55–61
  18. ^ James B. Collins, "Geographic and Social Mobility in Early-Modern France." Journal of Social History 1991 24(3): 563–77. ISSN 0022-4529 Fulltext: Ebsco. For the Annales interpretation see Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986) excerpt and text search
  19. ^ Jennifer J. Popiel, "Making Mothers: The Advice Genre and the Domestic Ideal, 1760–1830", Journal of Family History 2004 29(4): 339–50
  20. ^ Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Cornell University Press, 1988.
  21. ^ Carolyn C. Lougee, "'Noblesse', Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fenelon and Saint-Cyr", History of Education Quarterly 1974 14(1): 87–113
  22. ^ Sylvie Perrier, "Coresidence of Siblings, Half-siblings, and Step-siblings in 'Ancien Regime' France." History of the Family 2000 5(3): 299–314 online at EBSCO
  23. ^ Sylvie Perrier, "La Maratre Dans La France D'ancien Regime: Integration Ou Marginalite?" ["The Stepmother in Ancien Régime France: Integration or Marginality?] Annales De Demographie Historique 2006 (2): 171–88 in French
  24. ^ Wolf, John Baptiste Wolf (1962). The Emergence of European Civilization: From the Middle Ages to the Opening of the Nineteenth Century. University of Virginia Press. p. 419. ISBN 9789733203162.
  25. ^ Parisse, Michael (2005). "Lotharingia". In Reuter, T. (ed.). The New Cambridge Medieval History: c. 900–c. 1024. Vol. III. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 313–315.
  26. ^ Wolfe, M. (2005). JOTHAM PARSONS. The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 322. The American Historical Review, 110(4), 1254–1255.
  27. ^ Hans J. Hillerbrand, Encyclopedia of Protestantism: 4-volume Set, paragraphs "France" and "Huguenots"
  28. ^ The Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority by Philip Benedict; American Philosophical Society, 1991 - 164
  29. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed, Frank Puaux, "Huguenot"

References and bibliography

  • Behrens, C.B.A. Ancien Régime (1989)
  • Cobban, Alfred. A history of modern France: vol 1 1715–1799 (1963) free to borrow
  • Doyle, William, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime (2012) 656 pp excerpt and text search; 32 topical chapters by experts
  • Doyle, William, ed. Old Regime France: 1648–1788 (2001) excerpt and text search
  • Holt, Mack P. Renaissance and Reformation France: 1500–1648 (2002) excerpt and text search
  • Jones, Colin. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, 1715–99 (2002). excerpt and text search
    • Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. The Ancien Régime: A History of France 1610–1774 (1999), political survey excerpt and text search

    Political and military

    • Baker, Keith, ed. The Political Culture of the Old Regime (1987), articles by leading scholars
    • Black, Jeremy. From Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (1999)
    • Briggs, Robin. Early modern France 1560–1715 (1977) Free to borrow
    • Collins, James B. The State in Early Modern France (2009) excerpt and text search
    • Knecht, R.J. The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France. (1996). ISBN 0-00-686167-9
    • Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667–1714 (1999) excerpt and text search
    • Major, J. Russell. From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles & Estates. (1994). ISBN 0-8018-5631-0
    • Perkins, James Breck. France under Louis XV (2 vol 1897) online vol 1; online vol 2
    • Potter, David. A History of France, 1460–1560: The Emergence of a Nation-State (1995)
    • Tocqueville, Alexis de. Ancien Régime and the French Revolution (1856; 2008 edition) excerpt and text search
    • Wolf, John B. Louis XIV (1968), the standard scholarly biography online edition

    Society and culture

    • Beik, William. A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France (2009) excerpt and text search
    • Davis, Natalie Zemon. Society and culture in early modern France (1986) free to borrow
    • Farr, James Richard. The Work of France: Labor and Culture in Early Modern Times, 1350–1800 (2008) excerpt and text search
    • Goubert, Pierre. Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1972), social history from Annales School
    • Goubert, Pierre. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century (1986) excerpt and text search
    • Hugon, Cécile (1997) [1911]. "Social Conditions in 17th-Century France (1649-1652)". In Halsall, Paul (ed.). Social France in the XVII Century. London: Methuen. pp. 171–172, 189. ISBN 9780548161944. from the original on 23 August 2016. Retrieved 7 August 2021.
    • McManners, John. Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Vol. 1: The Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramifications; Vol. 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion(1999)
    • Van Kley, Dale. The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (1996)
    • Ward, W.R. Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (1999).

    In French

    • (in French) Bély, Lucien. La France moderne: 1498–1789. Collection: Premier Cycle. Paris: PUF, 1994. ISBN 2-13-047406-3
    • (in French) Bluche, François. L'Ancien régime: Institutions et société. Collection: Livre de poche. Paris: Fallois, 1993. ISBN 2-253-06423-8
    • (in French) Jouanna, Arlette and Philippe Hamon, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. La France de la Renaissance; Histoire et dictionnaire. Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 2001. ISBN 2-221-07426-2
    • (in French) Jouanna, Arlette and Jacqueline Boucher, Dominique Biloghi, Guy Thiec. Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de religion. Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1998. ISBN 2-221-07425-4
    • (in French) Pillorget, René and Suzanne Pillorget. France Baroque, France Classique 1589–1715. Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1995. ISBN 2-221-08110-2
    • (in French) Viguerie, Jean de. Histoire et dictionnaire du temps des Lumières 1715–1789. Collection: Bouquins. Paris: Laffont, 1995. ISBN 2-221-04810-5

    External links

    • French Pamphlet collection documents significant events and periods in French history throughout the 17th-20th centuries, at the University of Maryland Libraries

    August 20, 2023
    france, early, modern, period, kingdom, from, renaissance, 1500, 1550, revolution, 1789, 1804, monarchy, ruled, house, bourbon, capetian, cadet, branch, this, corresponds, called, ancien, régime, rule, territory, france, during, this, period, increased, until,. The Kingdom of France in the early modern period from the Renaissance c 1500 1550 to the Revolution 1789 1804 was a monarchy ruled by the House of Bourbon a Capetian cadet branch This corresponds to the so called Ancien Regime old rule The territory of France during this period increased until it included essentially the extent of the modern country and it also included the territories of the first French colonial empire overseas Kingdom of FranceRoyaume de Francec 15th century 1792 Ancien Regime Top Royal Banner 1 Bottom Royal Standard 1643 design Coat of arms of France amp Navarre 1589 1792 Motto Montjoie Saint Denis Anthem Marche Henri IV 1590 1792 March of Henry IV The Kingdom of France in 1789 CapitalParis 987 1682 Versailles 1682 1789 Paris 1789 1792 Common languagesLatin French official Occitan Franco Provencal Breton German Basque Catalan Dutch CorsicanReligionRoman Catholicism 987 1791 2 Constitutional 1791 1792 3 Demonym s FrenchGovernmentFeudal monarchy 987 1648 Absolute monarchy 1648 1791 Constitutional monarchy 1791 1792 King of France LegislatureEstates General 1302 1791 Legislative Assembly 1791 1792 Historical eraMedieval Early modernCurrencyLivre Franc Ecu Louis d orPreceded by Succeeded byFrance in the Middle Ages French First RepublicKingdom of FranceThe period is dominated by the figure of the Sun King Louis XIV his reign of 1643 1715 being one of the longest in history who managed to eliminate the remnants of medieval feudalism and established a centralized state under an absolute monarch a system that would endure until the French Revolution and beyond Contents 1 Geography 2 Demography 3 Language 4 Administrative structures 5 Economy 6 Culture 7 Political history 7 1 Background 7 2 Foreign relations 7 3 Wars 7 4 The Wars of Religion 7 5 France in the 17th and 18th centuries 7 6 Monarchs 8 Social history 8 1 Rural society 8 2 Women and families 8 2 1 Education for girls 8 2 2 Stepfamilies 9 Religion 10 French exploration and colonies 11 Literature 12 Art 13 See also 14 References 15 References and bibliography 15 1 Political and military 15 2 Society and culture 15 3 In French 16 External linksGeography EditMain article Territorial evolution of France France on the eve of the modern era 1477 The red line denotes the boundary of the French kingdom while the light blue the royal domain In the mid 15th century France was significantly smaller than it is today 4 and numerous border provinces such as Roussillon Cerdagne Calais Bearn Navarre County of Foix Flanders Artois Lorraine Alsace Trois Eveches Franche Comte Savoy Bresse Bugey Gex Nice Provence Corsica and Brittany were autonomous or foreign held as by the Kingdom of England there were also foreign enclaves like the Comtat Venaissin In addition certain provinces within France were ostensibly personal fiefdoms of noble families like the Bourbonnais Marche Forez and Auvergne provinces held by the House of Bourbon until the provinces were forcibly integrated into the royal domaine in 1527 after the fall of Charles III Duke of Bourbon The late 15th 16th and 17th centuries would see France undergo a massive territorial expansion and an attempt to better integrate its provinces into an administrative whole During this period France expanded to nearly its modern territorial extent through the acquisition of Picardy Burgundy Anjou Maine Provence Brittany Franche Comte French Flanders Navarre Roussillon the Duchy of Lorraine Alsace and Corsica French territorial expansion 1552 1798French acquisitions from 1461 1789 Under Louis XI Provence 1482 Dauphine 1461 under French control since 1349 Under Henry II Calais Trois Eveches 1552 Under Henry IV County of Foix 1607 Under Louis XIII Bearn and Navarre 1620 under French control since 1589 as part of Henry IV s possessions Under Louis XIV Treaty of Westphalia 1648 Alsace Treaty of the Pyrenees 1659 Artois Northern Catalonia Roussillon Cerdagne Treaty of Nijmegen 1678 79 Franche Comte Flanders Under Louis XV Lorraine 1766 Corsica 1768 Only the Duchy of Savoy the city of Nice and some other small papal e g Avignon and foreign possessions would be acquired later For a map of historic French provinces see Provinces of France France also embarked on exploration colonisation and mercantile exchanges with the Americas New France Louisiana Martinique Guadeloupe Haiti French Guiana India Pondicherry the Indian Ocean Reunion the Far East and a few African trading posts Although Paris was the capital of France the later Valois kings largely abandoned the city as their primary residence preferring instead various chateaux of the Loire Valley and Parisian countryside Henry IV made Paris his primary residence promoting a major building boom in private mansions but Louis XIV once again withdrew from the city in the last decades of his reign and Versailles became the primary seat of the French monarchy for much of the following century The administrative and legal system in France in this period is generally called the Ancien Regime Demography EditMain article Demographics of France The Black Death had killed an estimated one third of the population of France from its appearance in 1348 The concurrent Hundred Years War slowed recovery It would be the early 16th century before the population recovered to mid 14th century levels With an estimated population of 11 million in 1400 20 million in the 17th century and 28 million in 1789 until 1795 France was the most populated country in Europe even ahead of Tsardom of Russia and twice the size of Britain or the Dutch Republic and the third most populous country in the world behind only China and India 5 These demographic changes also led to a massive increase in urban populations although on the whole France remained a profoundly rural country Paris was one of the most populated cities in Europe estimated at 400 000 inhabitants in 1550 650 000 at the end of the 18th century Other major French cities include Lyon Rouen Bordeaux Toulouse and Marseille These centuries saw several periods of epidemics and crop failures due to wars and climatic change Historians speak of the period 1550 1850 as the Little Ice Age Between 1693 and 1694 France lost 6 of its population In the extremely harsh winter of 1709 France lost 3 5 of its population In the past 300 years no period has been so proportionally deadly for the French both World Wars included 6 Language EditMain article History of French Linguistically the differences in France were extreme Before the Renaissance the language spoken in the north of France was a collection of different dialects called Oil languages whereas the written and administrative language remained Latin By the 16th century there had developed a standardised form of French called Middle French which would be the basis of the standardised modern French of the 17th and 18th century which in turn became the lingua franca of the European continent In 1539 with the Ordinance of Villers Cotterets Francis I of France made French alone the language for legal and juridical acts Nevertheless in 1790 only half of the population spoke or understood standard French The southern half of the country continued to speak Occitan languages such as Provencal and other inhabitants spoke Breton Catalan Basque Dutch West Flemish and Franco Provencal In the north of France regional dialects of the various langues d oil continued to be spoken in rural communities During the French revolution the teaching of French was promoted in all the schools The French used would be that of the legal system which differed from the French spoken in the courts of France before the revolution Like the orators during the French revolution the pronunciation of every syllable would become the new language France would not become a linguistically unified country until the end of the 19th century Administrative structures EditMain article Ancien Regime The Ancien Regime the French term rendered in English as Old Rule Old Kingdom or simply Old Regime refers primarily to the aristocratic social and political system established in France from roughly the 15th century to the 18th century under the late Valois and Bourbon dynasties The administrative and social structures of the Ancien Regime were the result of years of state building legislative acts like the Ordinance of Villers Cotterets internal conflicts and civil wars but they remained a confusing patchwork of local privilege and historic differences until the French Revolution took place in a radical time suppression of administrative incoherence Economy EditMain article Economic history of FranceCulture EditMain article French RenaissancePolitical history EditBackground Edit The Peace of Etaples 1492 marks for some the beginning of the early modern period in France After the Hundred Years War 1337 1453 support on the Lancastrian side in The Wars of the Roses and the Treaty of Picquigny 1475 its official end date in 1492 and 1493 after support in the Battle of Bosworth Field Charles VIII of France signed three additional treaties with Henry VII of England Maximilian I of Habsburg and Ferdinand II of Aragon respectively at Etaples 1492 Senlis 1493 and in Barcelona 1493 As the 15th century drew to a close French kings could take confidence in the fact that England had been mostly driven from their territory and so they could now embark on an expansionist foreign policy The invasion of Italy by Charles VIII in 1494 began 62 years of war with the Habsburgs the Italian Wars Foreign relations Edit Main article History of French foreign relations Wars Edit Despite the beginnings of rapid demographic and economic recovery after the Black Death of the 14th century the gains of the previous half century were to be jeopardised by a further protracted series of conflicts the Italian Wars 1494 1559 where French efforts to gain dominance ended in the increased power of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors of Germany 7 In 1445 the first steps were made towards fashioning a regular army out of the poorly disciplined mercenary bands that French kings traditionally relied on The medieval division of society into those who fought nobility those who prayed clergy and those who worked everyone else still held strong and warfare was considered a domain of the nobles Charles VIII marched into Italy with a core force consisting of noble horsemen and non noble foot soldiers but in time the role of the latter grew stronger so that by the middle of the 16th century France had a standing army of 5000 cavalry and 30 000 infantry The military was reorganized from a system of legions recruited by province Norman legion Gascon legion etc to regiments an arrangement which persisted into the next century However the nobility and troops were often disloyal to the king if not outright rebellious and it took another army reform by Louis XIV to finally transform the French army into an obedient force 8 Main article Italian Wars The Battle of Pavia in 1525Ludovico Sforza the Duke of Milan seeking an ally against the Republic of Venice encouraged Charles VIII of France to invade Italy using the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples then under Aragonese control as a pretext When Ferdinand I of Naples died in 1494 Charles invaded the peninsula For several months French forces moved through Italy virtually unopposed since the condottieri armies of the Italian city states were unable to resist them Their sack of Naples finally provoked a reaction however and the League of Venice was formed against them Italian troops defeated the French at the Battle of Fornovo forcing Charles to withdraw to France Ludovico having betrayed the French at Fornovo retained his throne until 1499 when Charles s successor Louis XII of France invaded Lombardy and seized Milan 9 In 1500 Louis XII having reached an agreement with Ferdinand II of Aragon to divide Naples marched south from Milan By 1502 combined French and Aragonese forces had seized control of the Kingdom disagreements about the terms of the partition led to a war between Louis and Ferdinand By 1503 Louis having been defeated at the Battle of Cerignola and Battle of Garigliano was forced to withdraw from Naples which was left under the control of the Spanish viceroy Ramon de Cardona French forces under Gaston de Foix inflicted an overwhelming defeat on a Spanish army at the Battle of Ravenna in 1512 but Foix was killed during the battle and the French were forced to withdraw from Italy by an invasion of Milan by the Swiss who reinstated Maximilian Sforza to the ducal throne The Holy League left victorious fell apart over the subject of dividing the spoils and in 1513 Venice allied with France agreeing to partition Lombardy between them 10 Francis Duke of Guise at the Siege of CalaisLouis mounted another invasion of Milan but was defeated at the Battle of Novara which was quickly followed by a series of Holy League victories at La Motta Guinegate and Flodden in which the French Venetian and Scottish forces were decisively defeated However the death of Pope Julius left the League without effective leadership and when Louis successor Francis I defeated the Swiss at Marignano in 1515 the League collapsed and by the treaties of Noyon and Brussels surrendered to France and Venice the entirety of northern Italy The elevation of Charles of Spain to Holy Roman Emperor a position that Francis had desired led to a collapse of relations between France and the Habsburgs In 1519 a Spanish invasion of Navarre nominally a French fief provided Francis with a pretext for starting a general war French forces flooded into Italy and began a campaign to drive Charles from Naples The French were outmatched however by the fully developed Spanish tercio tactics and suffered a series of crippling defeats at Bicocca and Sesia against Spanish troops under Fernando d Avalos With Milan itself threatened Francis personally led a French army into Lombardy in 1525 only to be defeated and captured at the Battle of Pavia imprisoned in Madrid Francis was forced to agree to extensive concessions over his Italian territories in the Treaty of Madrid 1526 Francis I r 1515 1547 painted by Jean Clouet The inconclusive third war between Charles and Francis began with the death of Francesco II Sforza the duke of Milan When Charles son Philip inherited the duchy Francis invaded Italy capturing Turin but failed to take Milan In response Charles invaded Provence advancing to Aix en Provence but withdrew to Spain rather than attacking the heavily fortified Avignon The Truce of Nice ended the war leaving Turin in French hands but effecting no significant change in the map of Italy Francis allying himself with Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire launched a final invasion of Italy A Franco Ottoman fleet captured the city of Nice in August 1543 and laid siege to the citadel The defenders were relieved within a month The French under Francois Count d Enghien defeated an Imperial army at the Battle of Ceresole in 1544 but the French failed to penetrate further into Lombardy Charles and Henry VIII of England then proceeded to invade northern France seizing Boulogne and Soissons A lack of cooperation between the Spanish and English armies coupled with increasingly aggressive Ottoman attacks led Charles to abandon these conquests restoring the status quo once again In 1547 Henry II of France who had succeeded Francis to the throne declared war against Charles with the intent of recapturing Italy and ensuring French rather than Habsburg domination of European affairs An early offensive against Lorraine was successful but the attempted French invasion of Tuscany in 1553 was defeated at the Battle of Marciano Charles s abdication in 1556 split the Habsburg empire between Philip II of Spain and Ferdinand I and shifted the focus of the war to Flanders where Philip in conjunction with Emmanuel Philibert Duke of Savoy defeated the French at St Quentin England s entry into the war later that year led to the French capture of Calais England s last possession on the French mainland and French armies plundered Spanish possessions in the Low Countries but Henry was nonetheless forced to accept the Peace of Cateau Cambresis in which he renounced any further claims to Italy The Wars of Religion Edit Main article French Wars of Religion The St Bartholomew s Day massacre of French Protestants in 1572Barely were the Italian Wars over when France was plunged into a domestic crisis with far reaching consequences Despite the conclusion of a Concordat between France and the Papacy 1516 granting the crown unrivalled power in senior ecclesiastical appointments France was deeply affected by the Protestant Reformation s attempt to break the unity of Roman Catholic Europe A growing urban based Protestant minority later dubbed Huguenots faced ever harsher repression under the rule of Francis I s son King Henry II After Henry II s unfortunate death in a joust the country was ruled by his widow Catherine de Medici and her sons Francis II Charles IX and Henry III Renewed Catholic reaction headed by the powerful dukes of Guise culminated in a massacre of Huguenots 1562 starting the first of the French Wars of Religion during which English German and Spanish forces intervened on the side of rival Protestant and Catholic forces Opposed to absolute monarchy the Huguenots Monarchomachs theorized during this time the right of rebellion and the legitimacy of tyrannicide 11 The Wars of Religion culminated in the War of the Three Henrys in which Henry III assassinated Henry de Guise leader of the Spanish backed Catholic league and the king was murdered in return After the assassination of both Henry of Guise 1588 and Henry III 1589 the conflict was ended by the accession of the Protestant king of Navarre as Henry IV first king of the Bourbon dynasty and his subsequent abandonment of Protestantism Expedient of 1592 effective in 1593 his acceptance by most of the Catholic establishment 1594 and by the Pope 1595 and his issue of the toleration decree known as the Edict of Nantes 1598 which guaranteed freedom of private worship and civil equality France in the 17th and 18th centuries Edit Henry IV painted by Frans Pourbus the younger France s pacification under Henry IV laid much of the ground for the beginnings of France s rise to European hegemony One of the most admired French kings Henry was fatally stabbed by a Catholic fanatic in 1610 as war with Spain threatened Troubles gradually developed during the regency headed by his queen Marie de Medici France was expansive during all but the end of the 17th century the French began trading in India and Madagascar founded Quebec and penetrated the North American Great Lakes and Mississippi established plantation economies in the West Indies and extended their trade contacts in the Levant and enlarged their merchant marine 12 Henry IV s son Louis XIII and his minister 1624 1642 Cardinal Richelieu elaborated a policy against Spain and the German emperor during the Thirty Years War 1618 1648 which had broken out among the lands of Germany s Holy Roman Empire An English backed Huguenot rebellion 1625 1628 defeated France intervened directly 1635 in the wider European conflict following her ally Protestant Sweden s failure to build upon initial success After the death of both king and cardinal the Peace of Westphalia 1648 secured universal acceptance of Germany s political and religious fragmentation but the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin experienced a civil uprising known as the Fronde 1648 1653 which expanded into a Franco Spanish War 1653 1659 The Treaty of the Pyrenees 1659 formalised France s seizure 1642 of the Spanish territory of Roussillon after the crushing of the ephemeral Catalan Republic and ushered a short period of peace For most of the reign of Louis XIV 1643 1715 France was the dominant power in Europe aided by the diplomacy of Richelieu s successor 1642 1661 Cardinal Mazarin and the economic policies 1661 1683 of Colbert Colbert s attempts to promote economic growth and the creation of new industries were not a great success and France did not undergo any sort of industrial revolution during Louis XIV s reign Indeed much of the French countryside during this period remained poor and overpopulated The resistance of peasants to adopt the potato according to some monarchist apologists and other new agricultural innovations while continuing to rely on cereal crops led to repeated catastrophic famines long after they had ceased in the rest of Western Europe Prior to Louis XIV s reign French soldiers frequently went into battle barefoot and with no weapons On the other hand France s high birthrate until the 18th century proved beneficial to its rulers since it meant the country could field larger armies than its neighbors In fact the king s foreign policy as well as his lavish court and construction projects left the country in enormous debt The Palace of Versailles was criticized as overly extravagant even while it was still under construction but dozens of imitations were built across Europe Renewed war the War of Devolution 1667 1668 and the Franco Dutch War 1672 1678 brought further territorial gains Artois and western Flanders and the free county of Burgundy left to the Empire in 1482 but at the cost of the increasingly concerted opposition of rival powers 13 Louis XIV King of France and of Navarre painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud 1701 French culture was part of French hegemony In the early part of the century French painters had to go to Rome to shed their provinciality Nicolas Poussin Claude Lorrain but Simon Vouet brought home the taste for a classicized baroque that would characterise the French Baroque epitomised in the Academie de peinture et de sculpture in the painting of Charles Le Brun and the sculpture of Francois Girardon With the Palais du Luxembourg the Chateau de Maisons and Vaux le Vicomte French classical architecture was admired abroad even before the creation of Versailles or Perrault s Louvre colonnade Parisian salon culture set standards of discriminating taste from the 1630s and with Pascal Descartes Bayle Corneille Racine and Moliere France became the cultural center of Europe In an effort to prevent the nobility from revolting and challenging his authority Louis implemented an extremely elaborate system of court etiquette with the idea that learning it would occupy most of the nobles time and they could not plan rebellion By the start of the 18th century the nobility in France had been effectively neutered and would never again have more power than the crown Also Louis willingly granted titles of nobility to those who had performed distinguished service to the state so that it did not become a closed caste and it was possible for commoners to rise through the social ranks The king sought to impose total religious uniformity on the country repealing the Edict of Nantes in 1685 The infamous practice of dragonnades was adopted whereby rough soldiers were quartered in the homes of Protestant families and allowed to have their way with them Scores of Protestants fled France costing the country a great many intellectuals artisans and other valuable people Persecution extended to unorthodox Catholics like the Jansenists a group that denied free will and had already been condemned by the popes Louis was no theologian and understood little of the complex doctrines of Jansenism satisfying himself with the fact that they threatened the unity of the state In this he garnered the friendship of the papacy which had previously been hostile to France because of its policy of putting all church property in the country under the jurisdiction of the state rather than of Rome Cardinal Mazarin oversaw the creation of a French navy that rivaled England s expanding it from 25 ships to almost 200 The size of the army was also considerably increased Starting in the 1670s Louis XIV established the so called Chambers of Reunion courts in which judges would determine whether certain Habsburg territories belonged rightfully to France The king was relying on the somewhat vague wording in the Treaty of Westphalia while also dredging up older French claims some dating back to medieval times Through this he concluded that the strategically important imperial city of Strassburg should have gone to France in 1648 In September 1681 French troops occupied the city which was at once strongly fortified As the imperial armies were then busy fighting the Ottoman Empire they could not do anything about this for a number of years The basic aim of Louis foreign policy was to give France more easily defensible borders and to eliminate weak spots Strassburg had often been used by the Habsburgs as a gateway into France French invasion of the Netherlands which Louis XIV initiated in 1672 starting the Franco Dutch WarFollowing the Whig establishment on the English and Scottish thrones by the Dutch prince William of Orange in 1688 the anti French Grand Alliance of 1689 was established With the Turks now in retreat the emperor Leopold could turn his attention to France The ensuing War of the Grand Alliance lasted from 1688 1697 France s resources were stretched to the breaking point by the cost of fielding an army of over 300 000 men and two naval squadrons Famine in 1692 1693 killed up to two million people The exhaustion of the powers brought the fighting to an end in 1697 by which time the French were in control of the Spanish Netherlands and Catalonia However Louis gave back his conquests and gained only Haiti The French people feeling that their sacrifices in the war had been for nothing never forgave him The Battle of La Hougue 1692 was the decisive naval battle in the war and confirmed the durable dominance of the Royal Navy of England In November 1700 the severely ill Spanish king Charles II died ending the Habsburg line in that country Louis had long waited for this moment and now planned to put a Bourbon relative Philip Duke of Anjou on the throne Essentially Spain was to become an obedient satellite of France ruled by a king who would carry out orders from Versailles Realizing how this would upset the balance of power the other European rulers were outraged However most of the alternatives were equally undesirable For example putting another Habsburg on the throne would end up recreating the empire of Charles V which would also grossly upset the power balance After nine years of exhausting war the last thing Louis wanted was another conflict However the rest of Europe would not stand for his ambitions in Spain and so the War of the Spanish Succession began a mere three years after the War of the Grand Alliance 14 The disasters of the war accompanied by another famine were so great that France was on the verge of collapse by 1709 In desperation the king appealed to the French people to save their country and in doing so gained thousands of new army recruits Afterwards his general Marshal Villars managed to drive back the allied forces In 1714 the war ended with the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt France did not lose any territory and there was no discussion of returning Flanders or Alsace to the Habsburgs While the Duke of Anjou was accepted as King Philip V of Spain this was done under the condition that the French and Spanish thrones never be united Finally France agreed to stop supporting Jacobite pretenders to the English throne Just after the war ended Louis died having ruled France for 72 years While often considered a tyrant and a warmonger especially in England Louis XIV was not in any way a despot in the 20th century sense The traditional customs and institutions of France limited his power and in any case communications were poor and no national police force existed Overall the discontent and revolts of 16th and 17th century France did not approach the conditions that led to 1789 Events such as the Frondes were a naive unrevolutionary discontent and the people did not challenge the right of the king to govern nor did they question the Church The reign 1715 1774 of Louis XV saw an initial return to peace and prosperity under the regency 1715 1723 of Philip II Duke of Orleans whose policies were largely continued 1726 1743 by Cardinal Fleury prime minister in all but name The exhaustion of Europe after two major wars resulted in a long period of peace only interrupted by minor conflicts like the War of the Polish Succession from 1733 1735 Large scale warfare resumed with the War of the Austrian Succession 1740 1748 But alliance with the traditional Habsburg enemy the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 against the rising power of Britain and Prussia led to costly failure in the Seven Years War 1756 1763 and the loss of France s North American colonies 15 Louis XVILast King of Early France By Joseph Duplessis 1775 On the whole the 18th century saw growing discontent with the monarchy and the established order Louis XV was a highly unpopular king for his sexual excesses overall weakness and for losing Canada to the British A strong ruler like Louis XIV could enhance the position of the monarchy while Louis XV weakened it The writings of the philosophers such as Voltaire were a clear sign of discontent but the king chose to ignore them He died of smallpox in 1774 and the French people shed few tears at his passing While France had not yet experienced the industrial revolution that was beginning in England the rising middle class of the cities felt increasingly frustrated with a system and rulers that seemed silly frivolous aloof and antiquated even if true feudalism no longer existed in France Anti establishment ideas fermented in 18th century France in part due to the country s relative egalitarianism While less liberal than England during the same period the French monarchy never approached the absolutism of the eastern rulers in Vienna Berlin St Petersburg and Constantinople in part because the country s traditional development as a decentralized feudal society acted as a restraint on the power of the king Different social classes in France each had their own unique set of privileges so that no one class could completely dominate the others Upon Louis XV s death his grandson Louis XVI became king Initially popular he too came to be widely detested by the 1780s Again a weak ruler he was married to an Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette whose naivety and cloistered alienated Versailles life permitted ignorance of the true extravagance and wasteful use of borrowed money Marie Antoinette was significantly more frugal than her predecessors French intervention in the US War of Independence was also very expensive With the country deeply in debt Louis XVI permitted the radical reforms of Turgot and Malesherbes but noble disaffection led to Turgot s dismissal and Malesherbes resignation in 1776 They were replaced by Jacques Necker Necker had resigned in 1781 to be replaced by Calonne and Brienne before being restored in 1788 A harsh winter that year led to widespread food shortages and by then France was a powder keg ready to explode On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789 France was in a profound institutional and financial crisis but the ideas of the Enlightenment had begun to permeate the educated classes of society On 1792 September 21 the French monarchy was effectively abolished by the proclamation of the French First Republic Monarchs Edit Royal banner in presence of the Royal family of the Kingdom of FranceValois 1328 1498 Louis XI Charles VIIIAfter Charles VIII the Affable the last king in the direct Valois line three other branches of the House of Capet reigned in France until the fall of the Ancien Regime in 1792 Valois Orleans 1498 1515 Louis XIIValois Angouleme 1515 1589 Francis I Henry II and Catherine de Medici Francis II Charles IX Henry IIIHouse of Bourbon 1589 1792 Henry IV the Regency of Marie de Medici Louis XIII and his minister Cardinal Richelieu the Regency of Anne of Austria and her minister Cardinal Mazarin Louis XIV the Regence of Philip II of Orleans Louis XV Louis XVISocial history EditFrance in the Ancien Regime covered a territory of around 200 000 square miles 520 000 km2 and supported 22 million people in 1700 At least 96 of the population were peasants France had the largest population in Europe with European Russia second at 20 million Britain had nearly six million Spain had eight million and the Austrian Habsburgs had around eight million France s lead slowly faded after 1700 as other countries grew faster 16 17 Rural society Edit In the 17th century rich peasants who had ties to the market economy provided much of the capital investment necessary for agricultural growth and frequently moved from village to village or town Geographic mobility directly tied to the market and the need for investment capital was the main path to social mobility The stable core of French society town guilds people and village laboureurs included cases of staggering social and geographic continuity but even this core required regular renewal Accepting the existence of these two societies the constant tension between them and extensive geographic and social mobility tied to a market economy holds the key to a clearer understanding of the evolution of the social structure economy and even political system of early modern France Collins 1991 argues that the Annales School paradigm underestimated the role of the market economy failed to explain the nature of capital investment in the rural economy and grossly exaggerated social stability 18 Women and families Edit Very few women held any power some queens did as did the heads of Catholic convents In the Enlightenment the writings of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau gave a political program for reform of the Ancien Regime founded on a reform of domestic mores Rousseau s conception of the relations between private and public spheres is more unified than that found in modern sociology Rousseau argued that the domestic role of women is a structural precondition for a modern society 19 Within early modern society women of urban artisanal classes participated in a range of public activities and also shared work settings with men even though they were generally disadvantaged in terms of tasks wages and access to property 20 Salic law prohibited women from rule however the laws for the case of a regency when the king was too young to govern by himself brought the queen into the center of power The queen could assure the passage of power from one king to another from her late husband to her young son while simultaneously assuring the continuity of the dynasty Education for girls Edit Educational aspirations were on the rise and were becoming increasingly institutionalized in order to supply the church and state with the functionaries to serve as their future administrators Girls were schooled too but not to assume political responsibility Girls were ineligible for leadership positions and were generally considered to have an inferior intellect to their brothers France had many small local schools where working class children both boys and girls learned to read the better to know love and serve God The sons and daughters of the noble and bourgeois elites however were given quite distinct educations boys were sent to upper school perhaps a university while their sisters if they were lucky enough to leave the house were sent for finishing at a convent The Enlightenment challenged this model but no real alternative presented itself for female education Only through education at home were knowledgeable women formed usually to the sole end of dazzling their salons 21 Stepfamilies Edit A large proportion of children lived in broken homes or in blended families and had to cope with the presence of half siblings and stepsiblings in the same residence Brothers and sisters were often separated during the guardianship period and some of them were raised in different places for most of their childhood Half siblings and stepsiblings lived together for rather short periods of time because of their difference in age their birth rank or their gender The lives of the children were closely linked to the administration of their heritage when both their mothers and fathers were dead another relative took charge of the guardianship and often removed the children from a stepparent s home thus separating half siblings 22 The experience of step motherhood was surrounded by negative stereotypes the Cinderella story and many other jokes and stories made the second wife an object of ridicule Language theater popular sayings the position of the Church and the writings of jurists all made stepmother a difficult identity to take up However the importance of male remarriage suggests that reconstitution of family units was a necessity and that individuals resisted negative perceptions circulating through their communities Widowers did not hesitate to take a second wife and they usually found quite soon a partner willing to become a stepmother For these women being a stepmother was not necessarily the experience of a lifetime or what defined their identity Their experience depended greatly on factors such as the length of the union changing family configuration and financial dispositions taken by their husbands 23 By a policy adopted at the beginning of the 16th century adulterous women during the ancien regime were sentenced to a lifetime in a convent unless pardoned by their husbands and were rarely allowed to remarry even if widowed Religion Edit The Reims Cathedral built on the site where Clovis I was baptised by Remigius functioned as the site for the coronation of the Kings of France Prior to the French Revolution the Catholic Church was the official state religion of the Kingdom of France 24 France was traditionally considered the Church s eldest daughter French Fille ainee de l Eglise and the King of France always maintained close links to the Pope 25 However the French monarchy maintained a significant degree of autonomy namely through its policy of Gallicanism whereby the king selected bishops rather than the papacy 26 During the Protestant Reformation of the mid 16th century France developed a large and influential Protestant population primarily of Reformed confession after French theologian and pastor John Calvin introduced the Reformation in France the number of French Protestants Huguenots steadily swelled to 10 percent of the population or roughly 1 8 million people The ensuring French Wars of Religion and particularly the St Bartholomew s Day massacre decimated the Huguenot community 27 28 Protestants declined to seven to eight percent of the kingdom s population by the end of the 16th century The Edict of Nantes brought decades of respite until its revocation in the late 17th century by Louis XIV The resulting exodus of Huguenots from the Kingdom of France created a brain drain as many of them had occupied important places in society 29 French exploration and colonies EditAge of Discovery French colonization of the Americas French colonial empiresLiterature EditFrench Renaissance literature French literature of the 17th century French literature of the 18th centuryArt EditFrench Renaissance French Baroque and Classicism French Rococo and NeoclassicismSee also EditFrench Enlightenment Paris in the 17th century Paris in the 18th centuryReferences Edit The Governor General of Canada Royal Banner of France Heritage Emblem Confirmation of the blazon of a Flag February 15 2008 Vol V p 202 The Office of the Secretary to the Governor General Wolf John Baptiste Wolf 1962 The Emergence of European Civilization From the Middle Ages to the Opening of the Nineteenth Century University of Virginia Press p 419 ISBN 9789733203162 Popkin Jeremy D 2010 01 01 A short history of the French Revolution Pearson Education ISBN 978 0205693573 OCLC 780111354 Bely 21 In 1492 roughly 450 000 km2 173 746 sq mi versus 550 000 km2 212 356 sq mi today Andrea Alice Rusnock Vital Accounts Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth Century England and France 2009 Rene Pillorget and Suzanne Pillorget France baroque France classique 1589 1715 1996 pp 1155 1157 R J Knecht The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France 1996 John A Lynn Giant of the grand siecle the French Army 1610 1715 Cambridge University Press 2006 Antonio Santosuosso Anatomy of Defeat in Renaissance Italy The Battle of Fornovo in 1495 International History Review 1994 16 2 pp 221 50 R B Wernham ed 1955 The New Cambridge Modern History Vol 3 Counter Reformation and Price Revolution 1559 1610 Cambridge UP pp 297 98 W R Ward Christianity under the Ancien Regime 1648 1789 1999 W J Eccles France in America 1990 John B Wolf Louis XIV 1968 John A Lynn The Wars of Louis XIV 1667 1714 1999 Colin Jones The Great Nation France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715 99 2002 Pierre Goubert The Ancien Regime 1973 pp 2 9 Colin McEvedy and Richard M Jones Atlas of World Population History 1978 pp 55 61 James B Collins Geographic and Social Mobility in Early Modern France Journal of Social History 1991 24 3 563 77 ISSN 0022 4529 Fulltext Ebsco For the Annales interpretation see Pierre Goubert The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century 1986 excerpt and text search Jennifer J Popiel Making Mothers The Advice Genre and the Domestic Ideal 1760 1830 Journal of Family History 2004 29 4 339 50 Landes Joan B Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution Cornell University Press 1988 Carolyn C Lougee Noblesse Domesticity and Social Reform The Education of Girls by Fenelon and Saint Cyr History of Education Quarterly 1974 14 1 87 113 Sylvie Perrier Coresidence of Siblings Half siblings and Step siblings in Ancien Regime France History of the Family 2000 5 3 299 314 online at EBSCO Sylvie Perrier La Maratre Dans La France D ancien Regime Integration Ou Marginalite The Stepmother in Ancien Regime France Integration or Marginality Annales De Demographie Historique 2006 2 171 88 in French Wolf John Baptiste Wolf 1962 The Emergence of European Civilization From the Middle Ages to the Opening of the Nineteenth Century University of Virginia Press p 419 ISBN 9789733203162 Parisse Michael 2005 Lotharingia In Reuter T ed The New Cambridge Medieval History c 900 c 1024 Vol III Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press pp 313 315 Wolfe M 2005 JOTHAM PARSONS The Church in the Republic Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France Washington D C Catholic University of America Press 2004 Pp ix 322 The American Historical Review 110 4 1254 1255 Hans J Hillerbrand Encyclopedia of Protestantism 4 volume Set paragraphs France and Huguenots The Huguenot Population of France 1600 1685 The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority by Philip Benedict American Philosophical Society 1991 164 Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed Frank Puaux Huguenot References and bibliography EditBehrens C B A Ancien Regime 1989 Cobban Alfred A history of modern France vol 1 1715 1799 1963 free to borrow Doyle William ed The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime 2012 656 pp excerpt and text search 32 topical chapters by experts Doyle William ed Old Regime France 1648 1788 2001 excerpt and text search Holt Mack P Renaissance and Reformation France 1500 1648 2002 excerpt and text search Jones Colin The Great Nation France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715 99 2002 excerpt and text search Scholarly bibliography by Colin Jones 2002 Le Roy Ladurie Emmanuel The Ancien Regime A History of France 1610 1774 1999 political survey excerpt and text searchPolitical and military Edit Baker Keith ed The Political Culture of the Old Regime 1987 articles by leading scholars Black Jeremy From Louis XIV to Napoleon The Fate of a Great Power 1999 Briggs Robin Early modern France 1560 1715 1977 Free to borrow Collins James B The State in Early Modern France 2009 excerpt and text search Knecht R J The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France 1996 ISBN 0 00 686167 9 Lynn John A The Wars of Louis XIV 1667 1714 1999 excerpt and text search Major J Russell From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy French Kings Nobles amp Estates 1994 ISBN 0 8018 5631 0 Perkins James Breck France under Louis XV 2 vol 1897 online vol 1 online vol 2 Potter David A History of France 1460 1560 The Emergence of a Nation State 1995 Tocqueville Alexis de Ancien Regime and the French Revolution 1856 2008 edition excerpt and text search Wolf John B Louis XIV 1968 the standard scholarly biography online editionSociety and culture Edit Beik William A Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France 2009 excerpt and text search Davis Natalie Zemon Society and culture in early modern France 1986 free to borrow Farr James Richard The Work of France Labor and Culture in Early Modern Times 1350 1800 2008 excerpt and text search Goubert Pierre Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen 1972 social history from Annales School Goubert Pierre The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century 1986 excerpt and text search Hugon Cecile 1997 1911 Social Conditions in 17th Century France 1649 1652 In Halsall Paul ed Social France in the XVII Century London Methuen pp 171 172 189 ISBN 9780548161944 Archived from the original on 23 August 2016 Retrieved 7 August 2021 McManners John Church and Society in Eighteenth Century France Vol 1 The Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramifications Vol 2 The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion 1999 Van Kley Dale The Religious Origins of the French Revolution From Calvin to the Civil Constitution 1560 1791 1996 Ward W R Christianity under the Ancien Regime 1648 1789 1999 In French Edit in French Bely Lucien La France moderne 1498 1789 Collection Premier Cycle Paris PUF 1994 ISBN 2 13 047406 3 in French Bluche Francois L Ancien regime Institutions et societe Collection Livre de poche Paris Fallois 1993 ISBN 2 253 06423 8 in French Jouanna Arlette and Philippe Hamon Dominique Biloghi Guy Thiec La France de la Renaissance Histoire et dictionnaire Collection Bouquins Paris Laffont 2001 ISBN 2 221 07426 2 in French Jouanna Arlette and Jacqueline Boucher Dominique Biloghi Guy Thiec Histoire et dictionnaire des Guerres de religion Collection Bouquins Paris Laffont 1998 ISBN 2 221 07425 4 in French Pillorget Rene and Suzanne Pillorget France Baroque France Classique 1589 1715 Collection Bouquins Paris Laffont 1995 ISBN 2 221 08110 2 in French Viguerie Jean de Histoire et dictionnaire du temps des Lumieres 1715 1789 Collection Bouquins Paris Laffont 1995 ISBN 2 221 04810 5External links EditFrench Pamphlet collection documents significant events and periods in French history throughout the 17th 20th centuries at the University of Maryland Libraries Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title France in the early modern period amp oldid 1170338238, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

    article

    , read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.