Introduction: The Change of the Guard
The main fact of European politics is that over the course of the 7 centuries between the Black Death and the conclusion of the World Wars, the political class of the old Feudal Order had been utterly destroyed as a class and replaced by a new class which assimilated what was left of it.
Consequently, even in the few remaining institutions which are dedicated to that old class, the actual form of government and political ideal that is embodied and active is a completely different one.
Therefore, we must not understand the European Conservative movement as one aimed at preserving the modernized version of the Feudal Order, but that of the new order that have succeeded it over the centuries.
We must especially be cautious since for a long time, the new order had had recruited its chief members from those members of the Feudal aristocracy which could not attain significant power within the Feudal Order. Indeed, they have raised this new order deliberately for this reason. Consequently, for a long time it have used certain arguments, symbols and devices taken from the vocabulary - or rather, the heraldry - of the old order to fortify the new one. It was only due to the opposition and growing influence of a third party, of which we shall learn later.
I: The Feudal Order - Short Summary
The Feudal Order was created as a response to the collapse of the Roman Empire- this is, the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors, not that which had lost power over its western administrative section in the 5th century.
In the Empire of Charlemagne we can still speak of a Body Politic and Public Offices being filled and performed at the charge of a Head of State. "National" laws and policies were discussed in royal councils and regional assemblies (Placita), decided upon, conveyed to the King's trusted "Companions" (Comites) administering the various regions of the realm and to the leaders (Duces) of the armies in the field, whose duty was to properly execute them.
However, the repeated breaking up of the Empire to various pieces to satisfy the need to leave each of the King-Emperor's sons a share in the inheritance, the inability of the various members of the ruling dynasty to behave as the the leaders of various regions of a single State, added to the incorporation into the Empire of vast territories in the East where Counts and Dukes saw themselves as princes of distinct peoples in their own right rather than appointees of a monarch representing a public interest, had led to the end of this order.
Therefore, as the new, "Ottonian" Holy Roman Empire was reformed by the dukes of the Saxons and the Kingdom of France by the sons of Robert the Strong, made into the principle of their new realms a device previously used to shore up the now-defunct State :Vassalage.
It is almost accurate to say that "France", for instance, has ceased to exist. Instead One must talk about various direct and indirect vassals of the "King of France" who had to struggle mightily against the strongest of them to retain some direct authority beyond his private demesne. The King held not the chief public office of a nation in his hands, but a bundle of strings reaching to the heart of each one of his subjects, high and low, directly or indirectly, each knotted and twisted in various intergenerational agreements, alliances, grievances and favors and each made out of divers materials which, when pulled, proved either tremendously strong or incredibly weak.
England, which have retained a pseudo -Carolingian system until 1066 was unique, and as a result, even after the Norman invasion, which has supplanted the native State of the English with the imported Continental Feudal system, the King remained relatively strong - in the sense that his agreements with his vassals - which were ennobled and enfeoffed originally by the Conqueror, least we forget - were more restrictive and binding. As a result, the English king enjoyed greater revenues, military power and organizational competence - which he was wise enough to entrust to hired officials rather than a new set of vassals to execute by his direct authority.
The result of this was that while England was not suffering from domestic war - which was occasioned most frequently by a royal succession dispute rather by a conflict between vassals or a challenge to royal authority per se - it has been the most coherent and well-ordered country in Europe.
Even the direct challenges to Royal Power- famously, the Baronial Revolts against King John and the deposing of Richard II by Henry Bolingbroke (later, Henry IV), ended up merely strengthening the central institutions of the English State.
Regulating the operation of royal power and making it more tolerable to the great vassals of the realm, Magna Carta forced the King to convene an assembly representing the nobility around him to discuss (Parliez) and thus legitimize his decisions. The trial of Richard II had strengthened the hand of this Parliament, even of that of the House of Commons, formerly a mere advisory board to the Lords. In other terms, not only was the State reemerging as a body with interests independent and at times divergent from that of the the King, a skeletal form of what an American philosopher would later term "a Regal Republic" had started to form.
II: The Decline of the Feudal Order in England and France:
This evolution of the neo-English State had signaled, enabled and brought about the two greatest succession conflicts in Western Europe - the second stage of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.
Both these wars were fought with the unique and rare combination of the organizational and consensus shaping powers of the English State and the still considerable might, ambition and wealth of the English Feudal order.
On the English side of the Channel, it can be said that it ended the independent power of the great landlords and that of the King as a Feudal suzerain, but immensely strengthened the Crown, that is to say, the State.
This turn of events had afforded great opportunities to those English kings who, like the Tudors, and 4 out of 6 of the Stuart monarchs, understood how to become its masters. Those who misunderstood their position, the nature of the English State and its emerging machinery had lost their crown and on one occasion, even their lives.
In France, the second stage of the Hundred Years War had brought about the beginning of the process which in England had started in 1066.
But while in England the State had started to form around a deliberative assembly discussing the manning and functions of the King's royal household, in France the process went the other way: The King had used the new institutions - his new found revenue from the Taille imposed on all commoners and the strength of the royal army assembled to fight off the English - to draw to himself usefully minor noblemen who couldn't, otherwise, expect much advancement in service of their lords or out of their meager estates. He recruited Burghers, and eventually started granting them a modicum of nobility to administer his armies, revenues and the realm (now more firmly in his direct control).
The fact of the matter was that the French and English monarchies had established at this time the Administrative State, the one body capable of managing and distributing the large revenues collected from taxation and spending them on the increase of impersonal royal power- that is, the power of the State and its administrators. In England these new institutions were somewhat checked by the Parliament, in France by the still extant Grande Seigneurs and, in both, it shall come to clash with them by the end of our period.
In England, the final nail in the coffin of Feudal authority was the Peasants Rebellion of 1381.
Richard II' conduct and treatment of the rebels and their leader Wat Tyler is often cited as proof of the frailty, unreliability and stupidity, while in fact this was a masterstroke of statecraft and nation- building.
First agreeing the rebels "should receive all we can fairly grant" and for a meeting with Wat Tyler, the king is accused of letting one of his underling take excessive offence at some uncouth behavior of the peasant leader, killing him. The King then proceeded to promise the rebels to be their new leader, granting them written guarantees of their new rights and liberties and sending them on their way. This followed by him assembling his forces and those of the lords and culling what was left of the rebellion ("Serfs thou art and serfs thou shall remain").
Were Richard to side with the peasants outright, from start to finish, he would have not only have upended the entirety of settled life in England - which would have caused great disorder and suffering - he would have become merely the leader of the Peasants, a crowd which had no particular love for him and could turn against him. Were he to side with the lords, as did the Dauphine of France in the 1351 French Peasant Revolt, he would have become, just like the King of France, merely the chief Feudal lord in the realm.
Instead, by first letting the lords utterly fail to demonstrate their supposed power, than saving the City of London from the pillagers (by diverting them to the countryside for the negotiations), granting the peasants a "parchment guarantee" which he ha drevoked immediately, the King has established that all power in the Realm - that of the lords, of the incorporated cities, of the Law itself- flows from the Crown, that is, the State, which merely favors the lord over the serf out of policy and usage, but rule both with the same authority.
III: Aristocrats, Administrators and Parliaments
The Nobility of Service
After the defeat of Feudalism at the Battle of Bosworth Field in England, whatever was left of the nobility faced a choice:
They were either to turn unto a nobility of service and have completely immersed itself and invested its fortunes in the favors and offices of the crown, or resort to their country estates to live upon the land as rich subjects, not materially different in kind than any other landholder, but merely in size and wealth.
In either case they would have retained great influence: as Crown Minister or a courtier, a nobleman could exert great influence on the direct administration of the realm. As a country gentleman, he could act as local magistrate, take up his seat amongst the Lords and greatly influence (or hand pick) the election of the local member of the Commons.
The Crown, of course, had created new dukes, earls and barons from the lands it confiscated from its defeated enemies, usually from amongst those who served the King well in war and peace.
Two generations after Bosworth the two greatest noblemen in the realm, the Lord Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Lord Radclyffe, Earl of Sussex, both rose through service from minor nobility - Sussex' grandfather was invested in his title after his father died a traitor's death by Henry VII due to his loyal service to the same monarch, while Dudley was the younger son of a duke who earned his dukedom by the favor of Henry VIII, and the grandson of the untitled financial assistant t Henry VII, Edmund Dudley.
In France, the High Nobility, or The Nobility of the Sword (noblesse d'épée) had continued to be the major force in politics besides the those created by the Robe, Letters, Bell, and the Chancery and granted by the King for his favored administrators. But noblemen no longer influence national politics as vassals but as the greatest members of the National Community and the King's most powerful subjects.
Of course, the lords had exacted a terrible vengeance on Richard, but to do so they had to reach into the two main institutions of the Crown - the Royal Dynasty and Parliament - and strike a deal with two ambitious and power hungry state-bodies - The Housed of Lancaster, in the person of Bolingbroke, as well as the House of Commons. In the end, these actions merely strengthened the Crown - even against its wearer.
IV: The Holy Roman Empire and Its Revolts
One of the least appreciated aspect of European Radicalism is the heritage of the Popular Revolts.
We have written elsewhere on the English Leveler movement breaking out in the aftermath of the English Civil War, but this is only part of the story. In truth, the Levelers represent merely the latest and westernmost edge of a movement that started its way in the great revolts of the 14th Century.
The one space where such movements have been successful was the one we have neglected in our analysis so far- the lands of the Holy Roman Empire.
While in France and England the old Feudal Order and the social group that represented it have declined, in the Holy Roman Empire the opposite was true- the authority of the Emperor had weakened and the coherence of the realm with it.
The Emperor had remained the personal superior and lord of all the rulers of Germany, Italy and the Low Countries, but his vassals gradually came to be the heads of their own de-facto independent states. Even Charles V who had enjoyed an extraordinary amount of power within the Empire due to the wealth generated by the Spanish Crown and its New World holdings, could only set the law which was up to the individual princes to enforce, and could do so only in an Diet of the Imperial Estates.
This Diet of the Imperial Estates, as the name suggests was composed of the Feudal Orders of Imperial society - the territorial princes, the prelates and the free-cities of the Empire )with a certain overlap between the first two orders). The administrative machinery of the Empire- the Reichskreise or "Imperial Circles", its judiciary, the Reichskammergericht ("The Imperial Chamber Court") were staffed by either the autonomous princes or their representatives, and they have voted according to the instructions and interests of these princes.
In such circumstances, despite Imperial Law empowering princes to take any and all actions against rebellion as de-jure enforcers of the Emperor's authority, the Empire have seen more successful, extensive, prolonged and ambitious popular revolts than more centralized France and England, who already were liquidating their Feudal order into unitary states by that time.
Two great and venerable states in modern Europe are the result of exactly this type of an uprising.
The first is Switzerland, where the very ancestral seat of the Habsburgs was lost in 1415. The second, again a Habsburg Habsburgian failure, the Netherlands, which within 80 years rose from a loose confederation of the of poorly armed cities to a true great power who could even intervene to destabilize the Empire in the Thirty Years War.
These successful revolts had are characterized by their wide base throughout society. While pure peasant revolts failed even in the Holy Roman Empire (despite being harder to put down than in England and France), revolts encompassing burghers, knights and even some noblemen as well as peasants were successful.
Once we think of them not as "popular revolts" but as revolts of Imperial states, in which the rebelling community is in cross-class agreement of the need to challenge Imperial authority (while the minority of Imperial loyalists are being ejected), we find that even in the Empire, Feudalism was dead - that the various fiefs and principalities of the Empire had converted into administrative, impersonal states, while the Emperor converted himself into an impartial arbiter in a loose confederation of such states.
V: The Parliaments
The respective roles and histories of the English Parliament and the French Parlements are instructive.
In England, where the native system of national deliberative bodies (Moots and Wittangemotes) were, together with the class of thegns and earls that have supported it under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy (which was internally stronger than the French one), the king had ruled, for awhile, alone with his counselors. The only body in the realm which could officially advise the King on matters of policy was the Magnum Concilium made up of his greatest vassals, but also sheriffs and whoever else the King had saw fit to invite as he summoned the Council.
The right of the Council, later to be called in the French word "Parliament" to embody the nation (or at least the nobility) and accept or reject taxation was conquered by force from the King in the early 13th century. This body would make the earliest act still known to us in 1229, 163 years after the conquest. When the idea of bringing in lower ranking knights and burghers to represent incorporated communes (whether urban or rural) was introduced, the House of Commons was born.
In France, the various regional Parlements were a natural growth of Feudalism, but also its last significant remnant.
Originally, under the Feudal order, each great noblemen had taken to himself the right to act as a judge in the district he had dominated. That arrangement was not only inescapable in the absence of a strong state, it was necessary, since only the strongest man in a given district could enforce the ruling of any judge, and would therefore demand a say in the matter.
Meanwhile, as the power of the King grew, he had claimed for his council judicial powers encompassing the entirety of France. To facilitates the acceptance of this authority, the King had invited these regional judges into it, which have established the Paris Parliament as a separate entity from the King's council. Over the course of the 14-5th centuries, various regions would be granted their own Parlements to signify their autonomy and importance, meeting in towns designated as regional royal courts. The Service Nobility would find itself appointed to these courts, as well as representatives of various towns - and the right to sell or pass such appointments to One's sons was soon recognised.
And so we find that by the end of the Hundred Years War, in England, what was left of the nobility had converted their political power from control of territory within the realm to influence of the national government, in partnership with the Crown, through Parliament, which they could still influence through their wealth and personal influence. In France, however, while the Seigneurs maintain some of their old judicial authority in the Parlements, those are not effective means to influence national politics nor an adequate compensation for the control of their local fiefs which was lost to them. Ironically, it was the country in which the old nobility had survived where their power was most diminished.
The Conflict Erupts
In the 17th Centuries the great conflict between the respective two dominant elements in these realms came to open blows: In France, the Wars of Religion were the first stage in the struggle between the great nobles (allied to the mercantile interest of the town) and the royal power, allied to the administrative State. While the great nobles had won this stage of the conflict, it culminated with their candidate, Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV), converting to Catholicism before the gates of Paris, whose examples they have followed, abandoning in their hour of victory their mercantile allies to gain the support of the administrators. This, they reasoned, was a form of general reconciliation since the remaining burgher Huguenots were still allowed, by the Edict of Nantes the exercise of their religion. The next stage of the conflict took place during the minority of Louis XIV and the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria, under the administration of the Noble of the Robe par-excellence, Cardinal Mazarine.
Mazarine, who had started his career in the Papal States, had attempted to impose on France a national taxation system to fund the last stages of the Thirty Years War.
The very attempt to do so show how little did Mazarine understood the Realm of France. While the national community have being in the making for two centuries, the country had not being governed by a single code of Law, but by various privileges, prerogatives, traditions and precedences dating in some cases to medieval times. Henri IV had won the Wars of Religion by extending further privileges to his allies, be they noblemen or compliant corporate entities such as the City of Paris.
This led to the reemergence of the alliance of the grand seigneurs and the burghers. The Fronde Revolts had not tried to depose the King or replace him, but merely to force the Crown to dismiss Mazarine and to place the King under the regency of some great nobleman instead of his mother.
In other words, it sought not a return to the Feudal past but the preservation of the traditional privileged place of the grand seigneurs in the life of the French State.
In England, for ten years King Charles I had not called Parliament into session (as was and, in theory, still is the prerogative of the monarch).
Attempting to finance a disastrous war of attrition in Ireland by archaic fines and tolls, a rebellion in Scotland had finally forced him to call Parliament into session. After various constitutional crises, the King have attempted to dissolve Parliament and arrest its more recalcitrant members, which Parliament did not take kindly to.
The English Civil War and the Fronde had very different ends, but they were similar in their coalitions. The great landlords and the burghers of England had fought on the side of Parliaments just like their equivalent in France.
In England the great landlords were, for the large part, of recent vintage, rising from the service nobility. They were integrated or have risen from the Parliamentary represented Burghers and country squires. Cooperation was therefore easy and natural for these two classes, which in truth already became one.
The French grand seigneurs, on the other hand, were a distinct class. They have viewed the Burghers - whether common merchants or ennobled jurists and administrators - with utter contempt and disregard.
French seigneurs did not exercise power within the realm by participating in Parliamentary coalitions and controlling the revenue available to the Crown. Their social and economic domination of their surrounding allowed them to raise military units to augment the royal army, of which they would take command. The ability of the Crown to wage war was dependent on them, and they knew it full well. Nevertheless, this was a far cry from the Feudal system in which each great lord had had a unique and personal association to the monarch, independent of the larger community of the realm.
As a result, the Fronde was fought with poor coordination and little trust between its component parties. In the end, the seigneurs had signed a compromise with the Crown and the Administrative State represented by the Cardinal and left the Bourgeoise to its fate. When Louis will reach his majority, he would renege on his promises to the nobles and grind their power to dust.
After the seigneurs gave up the fight, the King made sure they stay down and that their military power was broken forever by removing the walls around their castles and the formation of a true royal army. While these endeavors were taking place, the King had drawn into his court, by force or by temptation of office, all the greatest nobles. Louis made sure life at court would be ruinously expensive and that credit would be available to noble debtors. He, who had the income of the entirety of France, after all, could outspend any nobleman. He thus had turned the seigneurial sense of dignity and peerage with the king against them. Once ensnared in the web of debt and the need to sink deeper and deeper into it to maintains his standing, a man of noble birth and breeding would welcome any emolument or position offered by the King with gratitude. Thus the last remnants of French Feudalism were reduced into the nobility of administrative service which they had so long despised.
The English Parliamentarians, on the other hand, had managed to not only triumph over the Royalists, but had also deposed and executed Charles I and raised a Commonwealth that have lasted until the Restoration while fully integrating the landlords into the government of the House of Commons, the Lords exercising less and less power over time.
In France, however, there would be no check to the power of the Crown until the Revolution of 1789.
Leviathan Beheaded- The Administrative State after the English and French Revolutions.
The thing which the English gentry had learned very quickly was that Parliament was capable of checking the power of the Administrative State but not to direct it.
The most pressing matter was that of the newest institution of the State, the New Model Army. This army had to be paid. Parliament not only failed to establish a coherent system of payment, it even failed in its traditional role to allocate sufficient funds for pay.
Under those conditions, Cromwell found himself an opportunity to insert himself into the hole at the heart of the State and dissolve Parliament.
The Restoration found a Parliament which had acquiesced to the role of the monarch as the head of the Administrative State, but only as long as he let Parliament limit the scope and funding of that State and establish its broad lines of policy. After the Glorious Revolution, the role of the monarch was reduced further and further, until at last, in the Hanoverians, Parliament found itself a monarch that was willing to yield his power to a "Prime-Minister", always a member of Parliament and subject to censure and removal by the House of Commons.
In France, the Revolution of 1789 ended in the symbolic beheading of King Louis XVI and the establishment of all the powers of the State in the National Convention which soon learned of its incapability to control the administrative machinery of the State.
This task was first exported to the Committee for Public Safety, which had proven itself more tyrannical, fanatical and bloodthirsty than Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, and within a year, Robespierre had met the same fate as the King.
The Constitution of Year III that was established afterwards (August 22, 1795) had attempted to establish an independent executive authority in a five men Directorate chosen by the upper house of the Legislature from a list prepared by the lower house, with one member, chosen by lot, replaced every year.
The virtue of that system was that it gave the Legislature not only a role similar to that of the British Parliament in regards to the limitations placed on the Executive and the choosing thereof, it also allowed for continuity without giving any member of the Directory assurance in his place. A Director could serve, in theory, for a single year or for twenty. Thus he could, if he was lucky, form a deep understanding of the Administrative State without becoming detached from the Legislature.
This government soon gave, under threat of arms, way to the Consulate headed by Napoleon Bonaparte, soon to be reformed into an Empire, which in turn gave rise to the Bourbon Restoration. All these regime had one thing in common - they all had a strong, almost independent executive at the head of of the administrative state and a legislature that ran from complete impotence to a significant competence, but lesser than that of the British Parliament.