Dissertation Information for Stephan Jacobus MillerNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: State finances, elite conflict and revolution in France: 1780--1795 Abstract: State Finances, Elite Conflict and Revolution in France, 1780-1795 , probes the origins and the course of the French Revolution. Instead of ascribing the revolutionary rupture to a cultural and intellectual movement, or to an attempt of the nobility to reassert its feudal control over the monarchy, I ascribe the rupture to the budgetary crisis of the 1780s, which turned different groups of nobles and wealthy commoners against each other. While historians generally see the king as a power unto himself, my work shows that royal absolutism was built with the collaboration of nobles and wealthy commoners, who enforced royal authority for their own economic benefit. Different groups of nobles and wealthy commoners, however, used royal authority to generate income in distinct ways. The greatest nobles of the realm made enormous profits from the monarchy's taxes and shaped its policies. The rest of the nobility enjoyed privileges via ownership of state offices. These ordinary nobles used their offices to obtain market advantages, tax exemptions and greater authority on the land over the last twenty years of the old regime. Royal budget deficits detonated a struggle between high placed nobles, who profited from state taxation, and the rest of the nobility, whose offices diverted resources away from state taxation. This struggle brought about a collapse of authority, which made it possible for wealthy commoners to take posts away from the entire nobility after 1789. Yet, it also made possible peasant revolts, reducing the benefits wealthy commoners could derive from public posts. These commoners responded by strengthening the state during the first five years of the Revolution in order to subdue the peasantry and increase taxation. |
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