The Attack On Feudalism In Eighteenth-Century France

The Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1973) – John Quentin Colborne Mackrell
Routledge & Kegan Paul | ISBN: 0710075839
Condition: Very Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Feudalism. That splendid arrangement whereby the aristocracy owned practically everything, the peasantry did practically all the work, and everybody was expected to regard the entire system as perfectly natural because their ancestors had been putting up with it for centuries. It was a remarkably durable method of organising society, particularly if you happened to be the person collecting the rents rather than the unfortunate individual paying them.

Unfortunately for the French nobility, the eighteenth century produced an increasingly troublesome development: people began asking questions. Awkward questions. Questions about property, privilege, taxation, ancient obligations and why somebody who had never lifted a finger in productive employment should enjoy hereditary rights over people who worked from dawn until dusk.

In The Attack on Feudalism in Eighteenth-Century France, historian John Quentin Colborne Mackrell examines the intellectual, legal and political assault upon the feudal institutions of the ancien régime, tracing the arguments and developments that helped undermine one of Europe’s most deeply entrenched systems of social privilege.

The story is rather more complicated than a simple confrontation between wicked aristocrats and virtuous peasants armed with pitchforks. Eighteenth-century French society was governed by a bewildering collection of traditional rights, obligations, dues and exemptions, many of which had accumulated over generations with all the organisational elegance of an elderly solicitor’s filing cabinet.

Landownership, seigneurial rights, taxation and customary obligations formed an intricate system in which competing interests frequently collided. Reformers, lawyers, political thinkers and property owners increasingly challenged aspects of this inheritance, although agreement about precisely what should replace it was considerably harder to achieve.

Mackrell’s study explores the growing criticism of feudal institutions before the French Revolution, illuminating the intellectual and political circumstances in which ancient arrangements came to be viewed not as sacred foundations of society but as obstacles to economic development, justice and rational government.

Naturally, the established beneficiaries were not universally enthusiastic. There is nothing quite like discovering that your hereditary entitlement to extract money from the local population has become the subject of fashionable philosophical criticism.

The book also offers an important perspective on the origins of the French Revolution. The spectacular events of 1789 did not emerge from nowhere, nor did centuries of privilege suddenly become objectionable because a few Parisians woke up in a particularly argumentative mood. The assault on feudalism had a history of its own, involving debates and conflicts that preceded the revolutionary upheaval.

Published in 1973 by Routledge & Kegan Paul, this scholarly study is a valuable contribution to the history of eighteenth-century France, the ancien régime and the gradual erosion of Europe’s traditional social hierarchies.

This 1973 edition, offered in Very Good condition by Crappy Old Books, is an appealing acquisition for historians, students of the French Revolution and readers interested in the political and economic ideas that helped dismantle the old European order.

A fascinating examination of a society discovering that privileges enjoyed for hundreds of years might not necessarily be privileges worth preserving.

Particularly when the people doing the preserving were not the people paying for them.

As the French aristocracy would eventually discover, hereditary entitlement is a wonderful institution right up until the moment somebody starts questioning the inheritance.

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