Foreign policy and financial crisis

The 18th-century French monarchy lacked both the ambition and the means to pursue a foreign policy as far-reaching as that of Louis XIV. From the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), when France had been invaded and nearly beaten, French statesmen pursued a double goal—the preservation of the balance of power in Europe and, in the world at large, the expansion of the French colonial empire and the containment of England. In the first decades after Louis XIV’s death, French leaders sought to avoid a renewal of large-scale conflict. After 1740, when Prussia’s aggressive monarch Frederick II (the Great) attacked Austria, France was drawn into a war against its traditional Habsburg foe and Vienna’s ally, Britain. The end of this War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) brought France little. By 1754 France was again fighting Britain in North America. On the Continent, Prussia’s rapprochement with the British drove Louis XV to break tradition and ally with the Austrians in the "diplomatic revolution" of 1756, leading to the Seven Years’ War. Frederick the Great’s army inflicted humiliating defeats on the poorly led French armies, while the British captured French possessions in Canada, the Caribbean, and India. After the peace settlement of 1763, the foreign minister, Étienne-François, duc de Choiseul, began military reforms that laid the basis for French successes in the Revolutionary era, but France was unable to stop its Continental rivals Prussia, Austria, and Russia from seizing territory from its traditional client Poland in the First Partition of 1772.

The one French success in the century-long competition with Britain was the support given to the rebellious North American colonies in the American Revolution (1775–83). French military officers, most notably the young marquis de Lafayette, fought with the American forces, and for a short while the French navy had control of the high seas. The real victor of the Siege of Yorktown, Virginia (1781), in which the British were defeated, was less General George Washington than Admiral François-Joseph-Paul, comte de Grasse (1722–88), whose fleet had entered Chesapeake Bay. The American victory enhanced French prestige but failed to bring any territorial gains or economic advantages.

Regardless of defeat or victory, colonial and naval wars were problematic because of their prohibitive cost. In Bourbon France (as in Hanoverian England and the Prussia of the Fredericks) a high percentage of the governmental income was earmarked for war. Navies were a particularly costly commodity. The crown’s inability to manage the ever-swelling deficit finally forced it to ask the country’s elites for help, which, for reasons unrelated to the various wars and conflicts, they were unwilling to extend unconditionally. Money thus was a large factor in the collapse of the monarchy in 1789.

Ultimately, to be sure, it was not the crown’s inability to pay for wars that caused its downfall. Rather, the crown’s extreme financial difficulties could have led to reforms; the need for funds might have galvanized the energies of the monarchy to carry forward the task of administrative reordering begun during the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. A more determined king might have availed himself of the problems raised by the deficit in order to overwhelm the defenders of traditionalism. In so doing, the monarchy might have satisfied enough of the desires of the Enlightenment elite to defuse the tense political situation of the late 1770s and the ’80s. Although in 1789 a program of “reform from above” was no longer possible, it might well have succeeded in the early 1770s.