Journal inédit 1765-1766: Suivi du Mémoire remis par le duc de Choiseul au roi Louis

From 13 March 1765 until 21 April 1766 – a period of just over one year – Pierre –Étienne Bourgeois de Boynes (1718-1783) kept a diary almost daily.  By the time Bourgeois began this journal, he was already rich, powerful, and a close advisor of King Louis XV.  The son of an important government financier, he became Intendant of Franche-Comté in 1754, and soon thereafter, the king asked him to combine this role with that of the President of the Parlement of Besançon.  When the parlement’s magistrates eventually revolted against his extraordinary authority, Bourgeois was forced to retire to his estate.  Meanwhile, the King gave him a seat on the Royal Council.  His experience made him a unique and powerful advisor as the parlements grew more restless and the crown grew more desperate for funds.

While the diary is relatively short and the time period brief, its publication is nonetheless a very significant development in the study of the eighteenth-century France because of the author’s importance and the events described by him.  These were heady times for the reign of Louis XV.  Following the disastrous results of the Seven Years War, France found itself short of cash but needing to rebuild its expensive navy.  Unfortunately for the King, many powerful French nobles had different ideas.  Feeling already pinched by special wartime taxes, disgusted by France’s military losses, infected by Montesquieu and others with Enlightenment worries about a despotic monarchy, nobles coalesced around the nine parlements and specialized tax courts (e.g., the Cours des Aides) to challenge the king’s authority over raising taxes during peacetime.  In November 1763, the Parlement of Brittany, led by its procureur général, Louis René Caradeuc de La Chalotais, refused to register new taxes.  The king responded by ordering the arrest of La Chalotais, instantly turning him into a national celebrity and transforming “the Brittany Affair” into a perceived bulwark against monarchical despotism.  Over the next three years, as the case went through various legal proceedings, the Parlement of Paris and other French courts acted in solidarity with the Parlement of Brittany; increasingly it was clear to everyone that French political institutions were at a critical turning point.  

None of this story is news to historians.  At least since the 1970s, when Jean Egret and William Doyle published remarkable studies, the struggle between the parlements and the crown has been seen as the front-page story of Old Regime politics.  Nor has Bourgeois de Boynes’s contribution been ignored.  In the most recent history of this period, Julian Swann (Politics and the Parlement of Paris Under Louis XV, 1754-1774 [Cambridge, 1995]), makes use of the journal.  Nonetheless, Swann, like all scholars before him, had to acquire permission from a family relative to access the privately-held papers.  The diary’s publication brings Bourgeois’s perspective to center stage and will allow historians to better evaluate his own special role.

The journal is obsessively preoccupied with politics, and politics narrowly conceived as the struggle between the parlements and the crown for sovereign authority of the kingdom, or in the words of Bourgeois, to make certain that “nothing compromises or disadvantages royal authority (353).”  Unlike Saint-Simon’s journals, or the diaries of closer contemporaries such as the Duc de Cröy, there is nothing about sexual intrigues, royal or otherwise; nor is there any discussion of philosophy, church affairs, literature or the arts. Even more curiously, there is hardly anything on foreign affairs.  When we learn that the Duc de Choiseul (Minister of War and the Navy, and virtual prime minister) is ill with a kidney ailment, it is only because his absence creates problems for resolving the intricate discussions surrounding political affairs.  In short, the diary is virtually silent on anything unrelated to the impending threat to the King’s perceived absolutism.

Bourgeois himself seems to have been the go-to person between the Royal Council and the ministers of state.  In this regard, much of his business was done with Choiseul and others over supper, and he would apparently jot down what he learned when he got home.   The diary therefore reads like a kind of log, so that Bourgeois could recall for himself where and when (and most importantly, from whom) he learned developments surrounding the parlementary remonstrances and the royal responses.  Historians are familiar with the most famous of those responses, the 3 March 1766 “Séance de la flagellation,” in which Louis XV reasserted royal sovereignty over the resistance of the Paris Parlement.  Bourgeois worried about the effectiveness of the king’s speech, and his rendering of the details leading up to the historic meeting are exceptionally rich and informative.

Ultimately Bourgeois’s journal vindicates Keith Baker’s notion that the struggle between crown and parlement was not so much between the forces of feudalism against modernization, but rather a clash between two competing world views of French political life, a discourse of justice versus a discourse of reason (see Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution [Cambridge, 1990], 109-127).  Bourgeois believed that he was a servant for a modern administration seeking to improve government financing, in order to compete with new powers, such as Britain, Holland, and Prussia.  Here we find Enlightened Absolutism in practice.  

And yet, in what may be the most interesting dimension to the journal, Bourgeois reveals that while the ministers surrounding the king certainly viewed the crisis in stark terms, and did not hesitate to arrest and exile the leaders of the parlementary magistrates, the two camps never lost touch with one another.  Avenues of communication were everywhere.  For example, Bourgeois himself regularly dined with Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, President of the Cours des Aides and author of its most scandalous remonstrance.  Despite Malesherbes’s liberalism, Bourgeois and Malesherbes remained close friends, and Bourgeois never hesitated to ask him for his sincere advice.

This edition is well edited, with an informative introduction by Marion F Godfroy, and appropriate editorial material, such as a chart of the Royal Council and two short essays on the state of France penned by Choiseul.