Book Review:" W. Doyle. Venality: The Sale of Offices in 18th Century France."



Book Review:" W. Doyle. Venality: The Sale of Offices in 18th Century France."

Book Review

The night of August 4, 1789 is justly remembered as the most radical legislative session of the entire French Revolution, when the National Assembly abolished or condemned many of the customs and institutions which had shaped French life for generations. Among the unplanned casualties was venality of public offices. The first concrete evidence of primitive venality in France came from protests against it by assemblies of estates, and royal laws formally prohibiting or renouncing it. But the regular recurrence of both shows that well before the end of the fourteenth century, the basic elements of the system were tenaciously established. The 1520s saw the establishment of two institutions which were to give the French financial system much of its distinctive character until the Revolution: the rentes, government stocks offered for public subscription; and the parts casual, established in 1522 to generate and collect, as the name implied, occasional and non-recurrent income. Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw no advantages in venality and tried, but failed, to curtail it.

The Great War, which Louis XIV began when he invaded the Rhineland in September 1688, lasted nine years, forcing all the powers involved to marshal their resources more effectively than ever before. Eventually they were forced to impose new taxes and experiment with new financial institutions. France embarked on the sale and manipulation of public offices. However, it was not ordinary revenue that the king was seeking. His interest was in what were known as 'extraordinary affairs', or special expedients to help meet the extraordinary expenses of war. Extraordinary affairs were normally synonymous with trait ants, who were employed in every aspect of wartime venality. The turbulent history of venality between 1689 and 1722 did much to determine how it would operate and develop right down to the French Revolution. The return to the annual in 1722, though it brought back heavier payments, signaled that the government of Louis XV, too, accepted the permanence of this peculiarly French institution.

The number of venal offices in France was in constant flux. Jean-Baptiste Colbert determined to curb, and perhaps to eliminate, venality, found that in 1664 there were 45,780 offices of justice and finance in the kingdom. Even after the tide had ebbed in the 1720s, the number and range of venal offices remained much more extensive than before. Venality permeated almost every corner of the kingdom's public life, but when contemporaries thought or spoke about it, they normally had the judiciary in mind. Military authority was also in venal hands. The year 1787 brought to power an enthusiast for Jacques Necker's approach to financial administration, Loménie de Brienne; and in November of that year, as a prelude to a more general onslaught on financial offices, he decreed the abolition of the gold-mark department, and of the parts casual. Two years before the venal labyrinth was condemned to destruction, the lair at its heart ...