In Alex de Tocqueville’s book called Democracy in America,
his written perspective about the monarchal history in France begins with discussing
a period 700 years prior to his generation during which he thought France’s
lands and arrondissement were partitioned amongst kings, queens, noblemen and
noblewomen and their royal descendants in the government. Tocqueville believed
all people within all categories of serfdom, lordship, poverty, and opulence
had opportunities for attaining officialdom in government via the church after
the prelacy began attaining power and increasing. Serfs could become priests
and ascend beyond the heads of kings.
As we read more into Tocqueville’s words, he tells us that
civil laws became a desideratum amongst the people as the social affairs
amongst men turned intricate with each step of the society’s advancements. The
administrative heads of law departments detached themselves from their
assignments in their separate tribunals to undertake responsibilities in the
monarch’s court alongside the feudal barons.
Furthermore, from Tocqueville's viewppint, the statuses of
the haut monde or elite classes during the 11th Century had no price and could
not be bought, but became procurable in the 13th Century. 1270 was the year
when privileges and eminence of the upper classes became conferrable to people
of low ranks and the elite allowed equality in government. Sometimes commoners
or proletariats were given political prestige and clout as a means of helping
noblemen oppose their crowned authorities or thwart their royal competitors.
Most often, the people of lower ranks were granted access to government power
by the king for the purpose of the king to exploit them as tools to stifle the
aristocracy. Each king varied from his predecessor. Some endorsed Democracy
scrupulously and others unscrupulously. Tocqueville defined them as always
having been “the most active and the most constant of levellers.” It seems as
though Tocqueville likened the French kings to the people of the Leveller movement during the English Civil War who were the Democratic pamphleteers and
malcontents rebelling against the French monarchy in defense of religious
tolerance, wider enfranchisement, and more sovereignty amongst the peoples.
Unfortunately, the Levellers were not wholehearted votaries of liberty, freedom
and equality considering they did not support the ballot being extended to
women, servants and people depending on charity. Tocqueville explains that
everyone of whatever title subordinated to the throne was equalized in the
extent to which they were placed under royal dominion during the rule of Louis
XI (1423-1483) and Louis XIV (1638-1715) whereas Louis XV (1710-1774) reduced
his kingdom until it became nil.
Tocqueville in his book expresses approval for how
commercial art, luxury, fashion, commerce, literature, and intellectualism
radically changed people's values and equalized people of poverty with people
of wealth while lands began to be purchased without fiefdom. Science and wealth
endowed the people with a unique strength, wealth, and power. A printing press
and a post office delivered literature to the doorsteps of the vassals and to the
gates of the castles. After the serfs gained liberty and freedom to bear arms,
enterprises apportioned weaponry amongst the serfs and enabled them to squelch
the noblemen during the Crusades and English wars. Tocqueville believed France
transformed with a “twofold revolution” at the end of every half of a century.
He thought this was occurring all throughout Christendom.
The Flowofhistory.com website says, for a certain length of
time during the Capetian dynasty, most of the population pledged allegiance to
the principle of their society being governed in similar fashion to the
Universal Empire or the Pentarchy which involved the masters or Patriarchs of
the Roman Empire’s five foremost bishop cathedrals in Rome, Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem exercising global government over all of
Christendom. The king of each monarchy was consecrated as god’s emissary with
the Church’s holy ointment being dabbed on the king’s forehead. Though people
had some difficulty ascertaining if it be the Church or the king who was truly
transmundane and had control over society, the people still had a
predisposition to slavishness enough to revere the king as god’s tool for
administering justice throughout the lands by evicting, expatriating,
convicting, comminating, and demoting whosoever deserved it. This was
advantageous for kings in harnessing recalcitrant noblemen. Applaudingly, at
the end of the Middle Ages the people stole the future from the Church and
Empire as the people coalesced into territorial units that drew their political
legitimacy from their status as sovereign entities. They were nation-states at
this point with France being distinguishable above all.
Elective monarchies in France were interrupted by the
Capetian dynasty (937-1328), a time when fathers always had their sons rule
alongside them to be readily available for facilely transitioning to the throne
after their fathers’ demise. Three kings were the underpinning upon which the
Capetian dynasty derived their strength for remaining on the throne.
Primogeniture, or the law mandating the firstborn son to inherit the family’s
estate, in this case the throne, was their means of power maintenance and
keeping one ruler as the main determinant of the outcome in everything. The
unchanging re-deliverances of male scions prevented the need for finding
someone outside of the family to be the successor when a king died.
During the agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages with
the creation of towns, the French kings often rivaled with their subordinate
counts and dukes. The kings had control over the lands being cleared for moving
the peoples into the towns where their new homes would be. Thereupon, the king
acquired the townsmen’s sympathies enough that they decided to form a militia
under him for his protection and donate to him money for buying mercenaries as
the paramount defense against the lower noblemen. Mercenaries were less
unwieldy than feudal armies. The pact between the king and the townsmen helped
the king to keep the lower noblemen underneath his heel.
Though the Capetian dynasty had many hallowed arbiters and a
substantial clench on the throne, for more than a century (987-1108) they faced
many obstacles challenging their rise to and retention of power. The many
autonomous feudal states of France were combined into five superior feudal
states named Flanders, Normandy, Toulouse, Aquitane, and Burgundy with the
king’s domain, the Ile de France, stationed around Paris in the year 1100. The
vassals were often mutinous against their king. At one time, the king was even
taken captive by a vassal and then later rescued by his militia of Paris. Seven
kings, three of which being Louis VI, Philip II, and Louis IX who were the most
adroit in governing, played a major role in aggrandizing the French monarchy
and the Capetian dynasty all across France beginning with Louis VI’s reign in
1108.
Louis VI controlled noblemen by adjudicating the crimes that
the vassals accused their noblemen of. After the noblemen’s disregarded the
demands for appearing in court, the king would expropriate the noblemen’s
lands, force the noblemen from their lands, burn their castles, liberate their
vassals, and excommunicate the noblemen, leaving them with no support.
Although, the noblemen could then later rebuild their castles and restore their
power, which thereby necessitated annual intrusions upon the former noblemen
trying regain their power.
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