The French Wars of Religion II

Part II: How elite overproduction results in the state collapse

In Part I we saw how massive population growth between 1450 and 1560 resulted in overpopulation, declining land per peasant, inflation of prices (especially for food), falling wages, and growing rents. These developments negatively affected the commoners, but were very lucrative for the elites (at least, initially). In other words (as I explain at length in End Times) this Malthusian mechanism turned on the “wealth pump” that took from the commoners and gave to the elites. When the wealth pump is allowed to run on for several decades, the result is population immiseration, followed (after a time lag) by elite overproduction, and then the decline of state fiscal health.

Écu au soleil of Louis XII

Let’s put some numbers to these trends (for the sources of data, see Chapter 5 of Secular Cycles). We don’t have good data to quantify elite overproduction for the whole of early-modern France, but there are several excellent studies focusing on particular provinces. In Secular Cycles we used studies conducted by such historians as Guy Bois, James Wood, and Jonathan Dewald, to trace the nobility dynamics in Normandy. There we saw that between 1460 and 1540 noble numbers increased, but more slowly than commoners, so that noble/commoner ratio decreased to 1.5 percent. But between 1540 and 1600 commoner population stagnated while noble numbers increased (as a result of upward social mobility and estate subdivision, as we discussed in Part I). The noble/commoner ratio, thus, increased to 3 percent. Unfortunately, there are no data for years during the FWR (French Wars of Religion), but given the major bloodletting it inflicted on the nobility, the elite/commoner ratio in early phases must have been even higher. Data from other provinces, although not quite as detailed as those for Normandy, suggest that similar degree of elite overproduction affected the whole of France.

The basic problem facing the French nobility in the second half of the sixteenth century was the irreconcilable contradiction between two processes: total production stagnated and even declined after 1540, while the numbers of the elites and their appetites grew inexorably. One result of this dynamic was increasing exploitation of peasants, but there were biological limits on how low the living standards of the productive class could be driven. The second consequence, therefore, was the falling real income per elite capita. This does not mean, however, that all elite families suffered equally.

Remember that during pre-crisis periods growing economic inequality is not simply an increasing gap between the commoners and the elites. Inequality also grows within these population strata. A small proportion of commoners profit from declining wages to bootstrap themselves into the elites (thus contributing to elite overproduction, as we saw in Part I). At the same time growing inequality within the elites eventually results in a decline of real incomes of the lesser gentry and increasing competition within the high nobility. Because further extraction of wealth from peasants was physically impossible, the competition focused on extracting resources from the state.

Anne de Montmorency (left) and François de Lorraine, Duc de Guise (right)

By 1560 two noble factions fought for the state patronage: one led by Constable Montmorency and another led by Duc de Guise. When one faction gained ascendance, it monopolized the state largess, completely excluding the other. This created a curious dynamic in which factions took turns being either the established elites or the counter-elites.

At the same time that the expanding elite numbers were putting increasing pressure on the state finances, the state’s ability to collect revenue (in real terms) was declining due to rampant inflation and general impoverishment of the taxpayers.

If you ask a historian, why did the French Kingdom go bankrupt in 1560, they would likely tell you that it was the unbearable cost of the Italian Wars (1494–1559). On one level this is correct, but it’s a surface reason. France enjoyed some early successes in these wars when it fought against a coterie of disunited Italian states. But once Spain entered the field, the situation became much more difficult. The main problem was the logistics—it was inefficient and expensive to get the troops and supplies across the Alps. By the reign of Henri II (1547-1559) it was abundantly clear that this war was a costly albatross. But the king couldn’t stop because, by that point, he was under enormous pressure to continue the war from the immiserating sections of the nobility who counted on military wages to sustain their status. (There also was a prospect of loot, or even lands in case of victory; while other members of the elites enriched themselves supplying the army. Pentagon contractors with their $600 hammers were traveling a well-worn path.)

As the crown ran out of resources to continue the war against the Spanish Habsburgs, in 1559 Henri II signed the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. The cessation of the Italian Wars made “hundreds of noble sons” unemployed, so that they “were thrown back on the home estates, where the family resources were often insufficient to support them” (quoted from Bitton, D. 1969. The French nobility in crisis: 1560-1640). Moreover, the financial situation of the crown made it impossible to continue the patronage system on the old footing. The Cardinal of Lorraine (one of the two leaders of the Guise faction), beset by would-be clients, was reduced to threatening to hang the next man who asked for a pension.

As the financial crisis deepened, the wages of troops fell into arrears, and eventually the state lost control of the army. Contemporary letters provide a striking illustration of this demographic-structural mechanism of state collapse. One officer reported in 1561 that his unpaid troops in Brittany “have left to pillage … In the end I expect to be all alone. There is so much due to the men of my company … that I am neither feared nor obeyed.” A year later another officer described how his troops, who had not been paid in a year, “ate the horses in the garrison and then retired to their houses without a sou.” The same year a third captain lacking money to pay them disbanded his Provençal levies who dispersed in gangs that attacked Calvinists “all over the province,” holding some for ransom and killing others. Other out-of-work soldiers, on the other hand, were hired by wealthy Huguenots as private armies.

With the onset of civil war in 1562 the royal finances completely collapsed. In 1560 the crown debt was 43 million l.t. (livres tournois, the unit of account in early-modern France). To give you an idea of the scale, this amount was four times greater than the total state revenue. By comparison, the ratio of debt to revenue in the USA is now 7.4 (in 2024, in $ trillion, 35.5/4.9 = 7.2). But the French Renaissance state had much less latitude to run up debt, compared to America today. Sure, they debased the currency, but they couldn’t even print paper money (not that it helped two hundred years later, on the eve of the French Revolution). So, the Crown pawned royal jewels and sold church property, but such desperate measures were insufficient to keep up with military expenditures. The result was a spiraling state debt, which towards the end of the Wars of Religion, in 1595, reached 296 million livres.

The morning after the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre Source

And that’s how massive population growth, which turned on the wealth pump, created immiseration, elite overproduction, and—ultimately—state collapse.