H-France List Archives

• Message-Id: <199606071435.PAA21174@listserv.rl.ac.uk>
• Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 09:18:07 -0500
• From: Jim Farr <jrfarr@purdue.edu>
• Subject: H-Fr Book Review: Slaven on Woodbridge,

John D. Woodbridge.  _Revolt in Pre-Revolutionary France:  The
Prince de Conti's Conspiracy against Louis XV, 1755-1757_.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.  xvii + 242 pp.
Frontispiece, bibliography, and index.  $39.95 US (cloth).  ISBN 0-
8018-4945-4.

Review by Michael D. Slaven, California University of Pennsylvania,
for H-FRANCE, June 1996

The middle of the 18th century was a tumultuous time for France.
It was perhaps the most brilliant period of Louis XV's reign, yet
fraught with great problems.  Enlightenment thought, marked by
Denis Diderot's volume-by-volume publication of the _Encyclopedie_
challenged aspects of the traditional political and economic order.
Jansenism, which opposed Jesuit theories of free will with a strict
Augustinian emphasis on the necessary role of divine grace for
human salvation, had been banned several times since 1653.  The
movement had regained strength through the _parti janseniste_ in
the _Parlement de Paris_ and seemed to threaten the religious and
political stability of the state.  Jansenism, like Protestantism, was not
only a religious stance, but also a political one: to admit Jansenism
as orthodoxy meant a negation of the premise that the Roman
Catholic religion was the only one in France, an important legal
fiction upheld by the monarchy.  Structural imbalances in the
French economy were deepening, thanks to an antiquated system of
taxation and the widening gulf between the expectations of the
growing merchant and commercial class and the resistance of the
nobility to the encroaching bourgeoisie.  Political and economic
reforms were proving impossible; and intermittent warfare with
England went on from the 1740s to the end of Louis' life (d. 1774).

                  Yet for all of the looming trouble, court life
reached new levels of refinement during the period of royal mistress
Madame de Pompadour's enormous personal and political influence
(1743-1757).  Underneath the glitter of courtly spectacle, however,
bitter rivalries formed in opposition to the _maitresse-en-titre_'s
hold over the king.  One of the leaders of the anti-Pompadour
faction was the King's cousin, the powerful and popular prince de
Conti.  Conti, a military hero, a supporter of the Jansenists in the
_Parlement de Paris_, and a trusted advisor, suddenly fell from royal
favor in 1756 and 1757, later to be publicly, but not privately,
reinstated into the King's good graces.  What had happened?

                  In _Revolt in Pre-Revolutionary France_, John D.
Woodbridge, a professor of history at the Trinity Evangelical School
and a visiting professor at Northwestern University, claims
that religious disputes were the backdrop to a serious political
threat to Louis XV, which occurred between 1755 and 1757, when the
prince de Conti conspired to force the king from his throne in what
Woodbridge characterizes as an "eighteenth-century Fronde" (p.
136).  Further, this seditious activity impeded the ability of the
monarchy to preserve its sacred authority, later subverting, for
instance, Louis XVI's attempts to reinforce the sacred bond of king
and nation during his coronation at Rheims in 1775.  "Too much of
the monarchy's sacred aura had been obliterated during the politico-
religious revolt against Louis XV; too many 'enlightened' and
'frondish' views of the state now contested this sacred ideology in
both clandestine and licit literature" (p. 171).  This argument is
consistent with Dale Van Kley's work (see, for example his _The
Damiens Affair and the Unravelling of the Ancien Regime, 1750-1770_
[1984]).  Van Kley points to a change in the king's sacramental
policy, which played a part in the unbinding of state and king.

                  Woodbridge also acknowledges a debt to Jeffrey
Merrick's research into the "desacralization" of the monarchy (_The
Desacralization of the French Monarchy_ [1990]), asserting that a
similar loss of position occurred in the aftermath of the Conti
conspiracy (p. 173).  The author ties the political and religious
controversies of the 1750s into a larger context of the eroding
status of monarchy in France, which raises another question.  If
Conti's plot, attempting, as it did, to exploit religious and political
discontents and to recreate a Fronde-like revolt, severely
damaged the monarchy through desacralization, why was the original
Fronde (1648-1652), certainly a more serious rebellion, unable to
undermine permanently Louis XIV's absolutism?  Further, if Conti's
plot was successfully covered up by its protagonists, as Woodbridge
claims, to what extent can it have served to destroy the sacred
status of the monarchy in France, helping to pave the way for the
French Revolution?

                  Woodbridge's book is both thought-provoking and
curious.  The author adroitly uncovers a conspiratorial prince de
Conti, plotting in collusion with high Protestant clergy.  He suggests
that the conspiracy involved the British government, and implies
that Conti may have been implicated in the assassination attempt on
Louis XV by Robert-Francois Damiens in 1757.

                  In his attempt to uncover what would have
been, even at the time, shadowy and secretive plots, Woodbridge has
made ingenious use of reports from government spies and
correspondence from the principal participants, and a wide variety
of other primary sources.  The difficulty in sifting through the
labyrinth of deceit, innuendo, and coded information is that the
sources ultimately remain elusive and ambiguous, full of tantalizing
hints, which sometimes necessitate important leaps in interpretation.
Occasionally, Woodbridge's conspiracy theory seems to take on
a life of its own, reading too much into the sources.  Woodbridge
writes that, "[a]s the byzantine story of intrigue began to unfold,
I came to realize that the conspiracy was far more complex and
expansive than I had ever envisioned" (p. xiv).  In fact, what
appears to have been a well-planned conspiracy to Woodbridge, may
have been no more than Conti's improvised stratagems to oppose
Madame de Pompadour's political positions.  Conti was eager to offer
himself as the leader of opposition to Pompadour, and he attempted
to ally himself with her enemies, the Jansenists and the _Parlement
de Paris_.

                  According to Woodbridge, the conspiracy may be
summarized in three points: first, between 1755 and 1757 the prince
de Conti tried to use the issue of freedom of conscience for French
Protestants to gain allies in an attempt to topple Louis XV from the
French throne; secondly, William Pitt the Elder, the British secretary
of state and the architect of the British victory in the Seven Years`
War, planned a British naval landing on the French west coast, in
hopes of sparking a Huguenot rebellion or a mass emigration of
Protestants from France.  Finally, there was a further conspiracy
aimed at a coverup of these plots, with the collusion of both Conti
and the French King in an attempt to avoid embarrassment for either
party.  Louis XV could not afford to offend Conti's many followers,
while the disloyal prince would only set back his attempt to regain
favor at court by public revelations of his failed conspiracy.

                  The author's thesis rests on the proposition that
the quest for Huguenot freedom of conscience left the Protestant
minority far more inclined to disobedience and rebellion than is
commonly supposed.  Conti needed to find an armed group of willing
conspirators with whom to raise the standard of insurrection, and he
looked to the Protestants as potential allies.  The Huguenots did
pose a potential threat to the monarchy, for while the religious
minority generally proclaimed loyalty to the King, many of them
carried out officially forbidden acts, such as public worship
ceremonies and the construction of new churches.  The very
existence of non-Catholics in France, of course, was technically a
form of disobedience since France gave no legal status to persons
not baptized in the Catholic church.  However, most protestants tried
to reconcile their obedience to God, as they saw it, with loyalty to
the King.

                  Woodbridge convincingly shows that Conti tried to
persuade the Protestants to play the role of co-conspirators: he
appealed to the Protestant national synod and he asked for
intelligence on Huguenot military strength.  Conti appears to
have miscalculated, however, for the overwhelming majority of
Protestants appear to have opposed the rebellion, and in fact prided
themselves on their loyalty to the crown.  But Woodbridge points to
the radicalism of some of Protestant leaders, such as pastor
Jean-Louis Gibert, to suggest that Huguenots, particularly in the
south, were discontented, because of government persecution, and
ready to rise up against the King.  Here Woodbridge holds to the
position, argued so effectively by Philippe Joutard in _La Legende
des Camisards: une sensibilite au passe_ (1977), that protestations of
obedience and devotion to the monarchy sometimes disguised the
desire "to take up arms in imitation of their Camisard forebears"
(p. xi).  Huguenot leaders wanted official toleration from the crown
and permission to worship publicly, but most found the prospect of
open rebellion to be frightening and unlikely to succeed.

                  The weaknesses of the book are in two areas:
first, Woodbridge asks the reader to accept a level of cooperation
and collusion between the Protestant leadership, the British
government, and Conti which the evidence does not fully
support.  The author does a creditable job of identifying the
connections between Huguenot leaders and Conti, but is less
successful in implicating Conti directly with British agents.

                  When he discusses the planning of Pitt's "Secret
Expedition" to the French west coast, Woodbridge asserts that the
British government believed that Conti had promised protection to
Gibert and his radical Huguenot followers.  It is not clear, however,
whether Conti's bargain with the Protestants implied backing for a
British-supported rebellion or was only a promise to protect the
Huguenots from persecution.  The British would certainly have
relished a Fronde-like rebellion in France, led by a great prince,
but the author's evidence does fully sustain this scenario.

                  Secondly, the author asserts that Louis may have
very nearly abdicated as a result of Conti's conspiracy and
the abortive attempt on his life.  In the aftermath of the
assassination attempt, the secret correspondence of an unidentified
spy alluded to a possible abdication, but Louis XV was often moody
and depressed and the spy may have reported no more than the
King's frequents bouts of despondency.

                  The great strength of Woodbridge's work is its
combination of meticulous research and provocative interpretation.
The existence of at least substantial elements of Conti's plot seems
indisputable.  Woodbridge presents both direct and collateral
evidence of Conti's discussions with pastor Paul Rabaut, in which the
idea of a Conti-led Protestant revolt was raised.  The split in the
Huguenot ranks over Conti's plot is effectively discussed and
well-documented.  The difficulty with what Woodbridge calls the
"moderate" position was that "... the caveat that Protestants
submitted to the monarchy except when it forbade public worship
permitted foes to impugn the sincerity of the Protestants' repeated
professions of loyalty" (p. 20).  Woodbridge nonetheless demonstrates
the clear victory of the more numerous "moderate" Huguenots over
their vocal, but outnumbered radical co-religionists.

                  In conclusion, _Revolt in Pre-Revolutionary
France_, succeeds in uncovering the machinations of the
troubled prince de Conti's relationship with Louis XV and in
describing the hopes and fears of the influential Huguenot leaders.
If the book falls short of proving the existence of a pervasive
conspiracy in which all of the principals were committed to a common
goal, it does convincingly and lucidly place the tangled threads of
Conti's conspiracy into a larger context of "desacralization" of the
monarchy.  Woodbridge declares that "[i]t provided a precedent of
sorts and arguments for revolt for some of those who defied another
king in the turbulent days preceding a much larger 'revolution'
three decades later" (p. 183).  This last statement sums up both the
strengths and weaknesses of the book: for while the author
substantiates his supposition that the monarchy was hurt by the
Conti conspiracy, his further assertion that the cover-up was
successful, undercuts the theory that the prince's disloyalty
inspired other subsequent revolutionaries.

Michael Slaven,
California University of Pennsylvania
slaven@cup.edu

                  Copyright (c) 1996 by H-Net.  All rights reserved.
This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper
credit is given to the author and the list.  For other permission,
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***********************************
James R. Farr
Co-Editor, H-France
Professor of History
jrfarr@purdue.edu [Note my new address!]
Purdue University