Estates General (France) - Rise and Fall of Power

Rise and Fall of Power

The effective powers of the Estates-General likewise varied over time. In the 14th century they were considerable. The king could not, in theory, levy general taxation. Even in the provinces attached to the domain of the Crown, he could only levy it where he had retained the haute justice over the inhabitants, but not on the subjects of lords having the haute justice. The privileged towns had generally the right of taxing themselves. To collect general taxes, the king required consent of the lay and ecclesiastical lords, and of the towns. This amounted to needing authorization from the States-General, which only granted these subsidies temporarily for fairly short periods. As a result, they were summoned frequently and their power over the Crown became considerable.

In the second half of the 14th century, however, certain royal taxes, levied throughout the Crown's domain, tended to become permanent and independent of the vote of the estates. This sprang from many causes, but from one in particular; the Crown endeavoured by transforming and changing the nature of the "feudal aid" to levy a general tax by right, on its own authority, in such cases as those in which a lord could demand feudal aid from his vassals. For instance, it was in this way that the necessary taxes were raised for twenty years to pay the ransom of King John II of France without a vote of the Estates-General, although they met several times during this period. Custom confined this tendency. Thus during the second half of the 15th century the chief taxes, the taille, aids and gabelle became definitely permanent for the benefit of the Crown, sometimes by the formal consent of the Estates-General, as in 1437 in the case of the aids.

The critical periods of the Hundred Years' War favoured the Estates-General, though at the price of great sacrifices. Under the reign of King John II they had controlled, from 1355 to 1358, not only the voting, but through their commissaries, the administration of and jurisdiction over the taxes. In the first half of the reign of Charles VII they had been summoned almost every year and had dutifully voted subsidies. But when the struggle was over they renounced, through weariness and a longing for peace, their most precious right, the power of the purse.

At the estates of 1484, however, after the death of Louis XI, the Duke of Orleans sought to obtain the regency during the minority of Charles VIII, but the Estates sided with Charles's sister Anne de Beaujeu and refused.

Deputies of the three orders united their efforts in the hope of regaining the right of periodically sanctioning taxation. They voted the taille for two years only, at the same time reducing it to the amount it had reached at the end of the reign of Charles VII. They even demanded, and obtained, the promise of the Crown that they should be summoned again before the expiry of the two years. But the promise was not kept, and the Estates-General were not summoned again until 1560. There was thus a 76 year interim, during which successive kings expanded the role of the centralised state through various means.