From Corps to Citizenship: The Bureaux des Finances before the French Revolution

Abstract

The French Revolution destroyed a society organized upon the principles of monarchical absolutism and corporate hierarchy and created a new regime based upon national sovereignty and the civic equality of all citizens. Such a profound constitutional upheaval poses a perplexing problem for historians of the old regime and the Revolution. Why did the old regime of privilege, in which nearly all of the elite had a stake, collapse so quickly in 1789? How did new ideas of civic equality that is, the belief that all citizens were equal before the law, had the right to direct representation in the state, and had the duty of supporting the state with their taxes arise in a society built upon independent orders, oligarchic systems of local power, and fiscal exemptions? Finally, why was sovereignty transferred from the monarch, the guarantor of privileges, to the nation with such initial ease? The most common answer to these questions assumed that the corporate regime fell because it was archaic and moribund, and that, owing to the stubborn opposition of privileged groups, reform had been impossible. Frustrated by the selfishness and inefficiency of hidebound corps, dynamic new groups such as the bourgeoisie had begun to develop ideas of civic equality and national sovereignty. The goals of those individuals who opposed the inequities of the old regime, historians believed, were articulated in the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment seemed to be a radical affair, hostile to privilege and completely corrosive of the old order. The freemasons, philosophes, and academicians who diffused lumieres through the provinces, it appeared, had written the radical script that led directly to 1789. 1