Roland Mousnier, His book on the Sale of Offices in France, and the Soviet Response (A Review by Boris Porshnev and a Monograph by Alexandra Lyublinskaya)

Abstract

Roland Mousnier’s work on the sale of offices in 17th-century France, under Henry IV and Louis XIII, was first published in 1945 and remains one of the basic and essential studies of both political and social history of France in the 16th and 17th centuries. This article provides a general description of this work with an emphasize on the novelty of the author’s approach to the problem. Mousnier combined two styles of research, socio-political/institutional and legal-historical. He had succeeded in describing specific cases of the sale and résignation (transfer from one private person to another, frequently between relatives) of offices in their administrative and political context. It was important for Mousnier to show that the monarchy, in addition to purely fiscal goals and the consolidation of the state apparatus, was solving a very important task: it managed to significantly weaken the influence of aristocratic clienteles on the management of the kingdom. In Soviet historiography, Mousnier’s book was appreciated, although critically received. Boris Porshnev rebuked Mosunier for underestimating the class struggle in France and for incorrectly assessing the venality: this policy did not facilitate the growth of the influence of the bourgeoisie, that helped to restrict the autocracy (as Mousnier thought), — on the contrary, the venality, according to Porshnev, had feudalized the bourgeoisie: the representatives of this social group, while purchasing offices and striving to ennoble themselves and to acquire fiefs, were ‘distracted from the revolutionary struggle against the feudal monarchy’. More attentive to the historical terminology, Alexandra Lublinskaya had outlined the range of subjects, whose treatment by Mousnier displeased the Soviet Marxist historians (the insufficient attention paid to the class struggle, the exaggeration of the thesis of the limitation of the royal power by the officials, the underestimation of the role of other estates of the realm), still she had widely used the French historian’s materials and conclusions in her own monographs.