WI: Ten more years of revenue - can the French sort out their finances?

What if the French finances are better, (say by no involvement in the American Revolution) and their descent into debt is slowed by ten years relative to our timeline?

Would complacency mean they wouldn't start looking at the issues until later, or would the same (failed) attempts at reform under Turgot, Calonne and Necker happen? Would the French monarchy have time for more attempts at reform without having to call the Estates General? Would they be able to better feed the peasants during the bread riots, and prevent the revolution?
 
It is highly probable that if they have no debt trouble, then they have no strong incentive to make reforms.

War expenses were the main reason for the public debt reaching high levels.

Unstainable debt levels were a decisive factor in ceasing hostilities. France as Britain had already been forced to make peace because of debt problems. And they knew, one way or another way, how to bring back debt level to more sustainable levels.

At the end of the war of the spanish succession or of the seven years war, the french public debt had reached levels similar to the level of 1789. The main point was not that much the debt level. It was the personality of Louis XVI who, though a kind person, was such a hopeless king, unable to make decisions and stick to those decisions that was the most decisive factor in the french revolution.

But as far as public debt is concerned, I think that if there is no debt problem in the 1780's, then Louis XVI carries no reform. So, when the next big war comes (because there will be a big war in Europe one way or one other), then France is going to face a debt problem similar to the one of our TL.
And with such a poor king, you will have some kind of revolution.
 
I'm not imagining no debt trouble. Just that the decline into debt is delayed by a decade.

I'm also not convinced that Revolution is inevitable. Other countries like Austria and Russia had no revolutions despite useless monarchs in the 18th and 19th Century.
 
I'm not imagining no debt trouble. Just that the decline into debt is delayed by a decade.

I'm also not convinced that Revolution is inevitable. Other countries like Austria and Russia had no revolutions despite useless monarchs in the 18th and 19th Century.

Well, Austria and Russia didn't blow a lot of money on annoying Britain by way of wayward colonists.
 
I'm not imagining no debt trouble. Just that the decline into debt is delayed by a decade.

The problem is the way the tax were made in France, as despite popular belief, France wasn't really an absolute monarchy during Louis XVI rules. The french political system was setup in sucha way that if the nobles weren't pissed of, the king could rule as an absolute one, but if they were (as they were before the revolution) they could block any new taxes levied on themselves. This was an important factor to explain the general estates convocation.

There are many problems to be resolved before resolving the french debt problem. Your money could come from two sources : the nobility or the third estate. The clergy was almost untouchable due to the always lingering menace of angering the pope. The nobility already saw their sources of revenue continually dry up during the 18th century. In 1789 they were trying to reactivate old privileges and wanted to levy more taxes from the third estate for them, not for the crown. This leave the third estate which couldn't fight anything legaly as the nobility or the clergy could do, but it is already supporting most of the taxes, levying more probably result in even more political agitation. Then you have the problem of the gradual removal of the third estate from the higher spheres. Under earlier kings, the kings would often play the third estate against the nobility, using non-noble ministers. This ended under Louis XVI (with the notable exception of Necker, all the ministers were nobles) as the nobility increased in power. And except for a few exceptions, french nobles were really incompetent, not knowing much about what they were doing.

This leave little room for a happy ending.
 
The Ancién Régime was set in a certain way, as stated, that levying new taxes was quite difficult. The French sitting out of the ARW doesn't make the deficit better, as the debt was already there and the war just made it worse. The biggest problem during the ARW was that the French finance minister of the time, Necker, chose to finance the war through high interest loans that were floated. It also didn't help that he published the government expenditure to the public, but fixed it such a way that painted France as doing well economically and ignoring the high interest loans (almost £520 million in loans were taken out) that were taken out to fund America.

The biggest idea was that new taxes were hard to create, but reviving old ones were easier. Impoverished nobility for instance, throughout the 18th centuries began to revive old laws that governed the peasants, such as the right to use the lord's oven to bake bread, and other such petty things. It really shows the nobility as a social force when in 1789 the right to hunt was granted to everyone, a privilege that had previously been held only by the nobility.

By Louis XVI's time, the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV was gone. The institutions still existed, but the strong force and charisma to make it work no longer existed. Versailles was a gilded court for the nobility, but by the end of the 18th century that were engaged in petty palace petty intrigue.
 
The Ancién Régime was set in a certain way, as stated, that levying new taxes was quite difficult. The French sitting out of the ARW doesn't make the deficit better, as the debt was already there and the war just made it worse. The biggest problem during the ARW was that the French finance minister of the time, Necker, chose to finance the war through high interest loans that were floated. It also didn't help that he published the government expenditure to the public, but fixed it such a way that painted France as doing well economically and ignoring the high interest loans (almost £520 million in loans were taken out) that were taken out to fund America.

The biggest idea was that new taxes were hard to create, but reviving old ones were easier. Impoverished nobility for instance, throughout the 18th centuries began to revive old laws that governed the peasants, such as the right to use the lord's oven to bake bread, and other such petty things. It really shows the nobility as a social force when in 1789 the right to hunt was granted to everyone, a privilege that had previously been held only by the nobility.

By Louis XVI's time, the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV was gone. The institutions still existed, but the strong force and charisma to make it work no longer existed. Versailles was a gilded court for the nobility, but by the end of the 18th century that were engaged in petty palace petty intrigue.

I agree with much of your thinking. So the question is, do the Estates General get called at the same time, even if the debt is in a better situation? Or will there be more attempts to go through the parlements?

Another thing I don't quite get is that many of the Cahiers du Doleances from the Second Estate seem to suggest they would accept new taxes. Yet at the Assembly du Notables and in the Parlements, they were intransigent. I'm wondering what caused them to change their tune, even if it was only slight.
 
France really was in a pretty awful place, financially. Necker implemented reforms, which eased the situation briefly, then the king would have to dump him, and finances got worse, so he brought him back....

Basically, without a major political revolution of some sort, and the calling of the Estates was an attempt at a controlled version of that, France was economically unsustainable.

Could they have lasted another decade without the ARW? Maybe, but they might also have squandered that money in the Bavarian Succession, say. Was the result guaranteed to be the bloody revolution as otl? No, but there WASgoing to be some sort of revolution.
 
I agree with much of your thinking. So the question is, do the Estates General get called at the same time, even if the debt is in a better situation? Or will there be more attempts to go through the parlements?

Another thing I don't quite get is that many of the Cahiers du Doleances from the Second Estate seem to suggest they would accept new taxes. Yet at the Assembly du Notables and in the Parlements, they were intransigent. I'm wondering what caused them to change their tune, even if it was only slight.

Well, as said below, the money could end up squandered in the Bavarian War of succession, but then again we have to remember years before that Louis XV refused to intervene in the Polish partitions, most likely because of the state of the army at that time, but also because of the debt from ythe Seven Years War. If Louis XVI doesn't get involved in the ARW, he's likely to sit out the Bavarian War of Succession too. Despite the alliance with Austria, the new queen really had no pull over policy and at times Louis XVI could be quite Austrophobic, so would be more likely to sit out than do anything to aid their ally.

The big reason the Parlements became instrasigent was over the so called Lettres de cachet. These were basically bills signed by the King and a minister and stamped with the royal seal which essentially forced a Parlement to accept and register a law that it had refused to do so on his own accord. By the late 18th century there were already demands of for it's suppression, as the lettres were not typically used to pass legislation, but more popular as use to arbitrarily imprison those who protested against the crown.

The biggest issue with the Parlement of Paris, and indeed most provincial Parlements was the privileges they were seeking to preserve for the noble and even bourgeois classes. Indeed, it was through the Parlements that the bourgeois could even rise up into the nobility. The beginning of the issues began in 1776, as the nobles protested any attempt to remove their exemption from taxation. This issue had ran back into the reign of Louis XV, where the Machault d'Arnouville in 1749 attempted to reform the levying of direct taxes.

The biggest problem with expanding France's main tax, the Taille, is that those subjected to the Taille were also technically subject to the corvée. which was essentially forced labor for a set amount of time (typically three days) which could be used by the aristocracy for peasantry upon their estate, typically once a year, or by the state.
 
The debt wasn't the only problem in pre-Rev France. Was it the biggest? Quite possibly. It was certainly the most immediate, and the most obvious to the crown.

Even if you lower the debt, however, the French finances were still completely, inherently unsustainable. With the French revenue and taxation system set up the way it was; haphazard, exceedingly vulnerable to corruption, and completely inadequate at raising the necessary funds, some kind of crisis is inevitable.

If Louis XVI is on the throne when that crisis occurs, some kind of revolution breaks out. His character was just so utterly unsuited to ruling, and especially ruling during a crisis like the one that unfolded, that he was going to botch is bar the most incredible luck.

That's the long and short of it. Unless some other change gets someone else on the throne, Revolution was inevitable. It might be very different from the Revolution OTL, but some kind of drastic upheval was certain.
 
One thing that people fail to consider in these what if questions about the French Revolution is that the final straw was not debt or tax related in the end. The Revolution occured when it did because 1788 saw the third failed harvest in that decade, and by that point the French state was no longer in a position to subside urban grain deliveries. When the price of bread rose to levels where a day's wages couldn't cover your daily pain, that's when the first riots started. Without the disette of the 1780s pushing the masses to revolt, who knows how long the old system could have muddled along?
 
I'm not imagining no debt trouble. Just that the decline into debt is delayed by a decade.

I'm also not convinced that Revolution is inevitable. Other countries like Austria and Russia had no revolutions despite useless monarchs in the 18th and 19th Century.
That possibly might be because Russia had a well tested system of coups in the case of bad monarchs, therefore making revolutions unnecessary. Once the practice of a palace coup was no longer practiced, things got rather bad.
 
One thing that people fail to consider in these what if questions about the French Revolution is that the final straw was not debt or tax related in the end. The Revolution occured when it did because 1788 saw the third failed harvest in that decade, and by that point the French state was no longer in a position to subside urban grain deliveries. When the price of bread rose to levels where a day's wages couldn't cover your daily pain, that's when the first riots started. Without the disette of the 1780s pushing the masses to revolt, who knows how long the old system could have muddled along?

This is finance related. In this scenario, with ten years more funding, the government WILL be in a position to subsidise bread.

In terms of muddling along, the question is whether the Estates General will be called around 1789. I can't work out if it happened then because they'd tried reforming the finances on multiple occasions unsuccessfully and thus this would naturally be attempted at some point, or if they called it because they needed to take drastic action quick. I imagine it's the former.
 
That possibly might be because Russia had a well tested system of coups in the case of bad monarchs, therefore making revolutions unnecessary. Once the practice of a palace coup was no longer practiced, things got rather bad.

And Austria? As far as I can tell, Britain was the only country in this time period that had a sensible finance system sorted. Why didn't the other big countries fighting major wars go bankrupt?
 
The debt wasn't the only problem in pre-Rev France. Was it the biggest? Quite possibly. It was certainly the most immediate, and the most obvious to the crown.

Even if you lower the debt, however, the French finances were still completely, inherently unsustainable. With the French revenue and taxation system set up the way it was; haphazard, exceedingly vulnerable to corruption, and completely inadequate at raising the necessary funds, some kind of crisis is inevitable.

If Louis XVI is on the throne when that crisis occurs, some kind of revolution breaks out. His character was just so utterly unsuited to ruling, and especially ruling during a crisis like the one that unfolded, that he was going to botch is bar the most incredible luck.

That's the long and short of it. Unless some other change gets someone else on the throne, Revolution was inevitable. It might be very different from the Revolution OTL, but some kind of drastic upheval was certain.

I agree. I completely accept in this scenario that a crisis is still going to happen. The question is when that crisis hits.
 
Well, as said below, the money could end up squandered in the Bavarian War of succession, but then again we have to remember years before that Louis XV refused to intervene in the Polish partitions, most likely because of the state of the army at that time, but also because of the debt from ythe Seven Years War. If Louis XVI doesn't get involved in the ARW, he's likely to sit out the Bavarian War of Succession too. Despite the alliance with Austria, the new queen really had no pull over policy and at times Louis XVI could be quite Austrophobic, so would be more likely to sit out than do anything to aid their ally.

The previous King has also refused to participate in the Falklands crisis, despite the main figure in government pushing for it very heavily. So it seems like by the 1770s (perhaps the 1780s in this timeline), France isn't going to commit to any war that isn't as promising as the ARW.
 
The previous King has also refused to participate in the Falklands crisis, despite the main figure in government pushing for it very heavily. So it seems like by the 1770s (perhaps the 1780s in this timeline), France isn't going to commit to any war that isn't as promising as the ARW.

This is a good point, but it has to be remembered that the French were pretty confident a revolt of some sort was coming in America.
 
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