The construction of 'territorial sovereignty' in France

Résumé du document

In 1797, after long negotiations, Bonaparte, then general of the French army, and Cobenzl, the Austrian representative, agreed on the following deal: Austria recognized France's rights on the Belgium territory and was granted in exchange the Venetian Republic. By selling Venice, Bonaparte did not only humiliate it, he put an end to a centuries-old tradition of the city-state being the spatial and organizational leading unit in Italy. He eradicated the city that was once the embodiment of economic prosperity; and he also exampled the formidable hold of the territorial state over any other form of spatial and political organization. How did this happen? Only five centuries before, in 1302, the variable forms of city and empire were the only units that anyone could think of, having prevailed for more than a millennium, and the pope Boniface VIII could rightly quote Jeremiah in his Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam bull, 'I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms', thus reasserting the clout of the spiritual power over the temporal one. How is it that the sovereign territorial state, inexistent at that time, could possibly arise and become in five centuries the spatial and political reference for the exercise of power?

Extraits

[...] Jean Bodin is considered to be the other great thinker of the state's move towards sovereignty. In his book Les Six Livres de la République, written between 1530 and 1596, he gives a definition of what is sovereignty. The sovereign hold must be absolute and permanent; an elected official is not sovereign. The 5 major attributes of sovereignty are to name magistrates, to promulgate or abrogate laws, to declare war and conclude peace, to judge in last resort all magistrates and at last to have the right of life and death were law is unyielding. [...]

[...] Besides, not only positive factors have contributed to the rise of the territorial state. The only thing sure is that there are both positive and negative sources, and that those sources are as numerous as heteroclite, depending on things as different as urban density, religion, the strength of the links between agrarian communities, the size of the state, its insularity Hence the following questions: How did the territorial state become modality of government best suited to the requirements of its times” (René Rémond)? [...]

[...] As far as Joseph II is concerned, major breakthroughs are accomplished towards the sovereignty of the state: under his reign are added 11,000 new laws designed to reorder and regulate any aspect of the Empire. He acts in favor of a monetary system, abolishing serfdom in 1781, because serfdom has to be paid in cash rather than in labor obligations. Chiefly, he promotes unity by making in 1784 German the compulsory language of the Empire, as sovereigns from Western Europe did (such as François Ier with Villiers-Cotterêts). [...]

[...] Yet, the fact that the early structures of the state already existed when the crises of the 14th century occurred casts doubt on this theory. Since the middle of the 14th century in countries such as Castile, France or Great-Britain, the royal administration had succeeded in taking advantage from the expansion of rural economy and the demographic pressure to nurture the tax system. For example, the kingdom of France creates the function of treasurer in 1379, responsible for collecting funds all over the state-owned property. [...]

[...] The battles become far more violent, and the number of dead bodies skyrockets. The mercenary armies, relatively low compared to the hundreds of thousands of people that the French army could deploy by the end of its reign, begin an inexorable decline. Finally, the rationalization and standardization of the state triumphs with the invention of the salvo: this mechanization of the clash, as deadly as possible, is consciously used by the state as a psychological effect tending to dishearten the enemy. [...]