History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VI

[Masada]

That's neither here nor there though. Most European states were centralizing, in one fashion or another, and had a lot of their political actors living in a limited number of sites. Most modern states have exactly the same thing now. I also think it's unfair to blame Louis XIV for events that happened long after his death.

 

[Traitorfish]

You can make the case that the very personal nature of Louis XIV's centralisation made it more vulnerable to the "point of failure effect" Kaiserguard talked about. There's always a lack of redundancy in strongman systems, where a crisis of personal authority quickly becomes a crisis of the entire structure of political authority, especially if there's the same degree of ideological investment in the person of the monarch as in Bourbon France. It's not necessarily Louis' fault, in so many words, but the system he left to his heirs was constructed with the assumption that they would be as competent and as politically savvy as he was, which turned out not to be the case.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I'm still not seeing that the Monarchy actually was a critical failure point. It rode out two years of revolution, and came down because of highly contingent events. This all seems very post hoc ergo hoc, here.

 

[Masada]

Sure, that was a potential structural weakness. But so far as I'm concerned, that's rather less important than more proximate events e.g. the Armoire de fer, the attempted flight to Varennes and the Declaration of Pillnitz. It was those events that killed the monarchy and not the Tennis Court Oath. With a little bit more luck, Louis XVI would have retained his throne and with a little bit more than that, he could have retained much of his power and gained the benefit of being able to blame problems on Parlement. (When you actually start looking at what some of the more popular approaches to how France should be run soon after the beginning of the Revolution, you end up with systems that look democrat, they have a standing Parlement, but which retain more or less all executive authority in the figure of the King and his appointed Ministers. The only difference would have been some measure of "English" fiscal control over the Crown's right to tax).

EDIT: What PCH said.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, the king rode out the first two years, but is that really the same thing as the monarchy as a political institution? Masada says that the king could have retained his power, and I won't disagree, but is it "retention" when those powers cease to be meaningfully exercised, to be restored at a later date on somebody else's terms? I think you could plausibly make the case that the monarchy of Louis XIV had effectively crumbled by the end of 1789, whether or not France retained a monarchy of some sort.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well, the king rode out the first two years, but is that really the same thing as the monarchy as a political institution? Masada says that the king could have retained his power, and I won't disagree, but is it "retention" when those powers cease to be meaningfully exercised, to be restored at a later date on somebody else's terms?

Well, yes. If the standard we're setting is that the Kings ability to exercise his power could never be curtailed, then Louis XIV had nothing to do with that. No king has ever been able to prevent that from happening, ever.

But this whole line of arguments seems based on the idea that the Bourbon state had invested it's power in a personality, and any resistance to the regime would naturally target the King, and this would cripple the bourbon state.

But this isn't what happened. As you say, the power structure had already failed when the Monarchy was deposed. It was the very last thing to fail.

 

[Masada]

From my perspective, the earliest responses to the French Revolution fell into one two categories. The first was essentially for the King to obey his own rules. You can see this in the Tennis Court Oath which, basically, bound all members of the National Assembly to ensure that the King carried out of the specific program of reforms that Minister Necker had proposed with the oath itself designed, quite deliberately, to be inoffensive as possible. In this view the King was the problem but also the solution. The members honestly thought the King wanted reform and that the reforms he wanted were, by and large, not incompatible with their own views and that for a variety of reasons the King had been unable, or unwilling, as yet to accede to the reforms but that he was not opposed necessarily to their goals. The second strand of thought basically held that the King himself was not the problem and that the solution to problem of France was not less King but rather more King. The March on Versailles looks rather like that. In the view of the crowd the issue wasn't the King but rather bad councilors and aristocrats who surrounded the King and came up with and executed his policies. Mixed with this was also recognition of some issues associated with the ancien regime but also more proximate issues like the need for bread. The crowds thought that if the king were free of this bad influence he would naturally fall into line with his people and that this could only be achieved by physically removing him to Paris.

Well, the king rode out the first two years, but is that really the same thing as the monarchy as a political institution?

With some more luck in the early days, the monarchy would never have been threatened and the essential structure of French politics, with the King both at the head and in control, probably wouldn't have changed. In large part, because most people at the start were not asking for huge changes or questioned much, if at all, the need for an active monarchy.

Masada says that the king could have retained his power, and I won't disagree, but is it "retention" when those powers cease to be meaningfully exercised, to be restored at a later date on somebody else's terms?

That was again a distinct possibility further down the track. But it wasn't the only means of the king retaining his power.

I think you could plausibly make the case that the monarchy of Louis XIV had effectively crumbled by the end of 1789, whether or not France retained a monarchy of some sort.

Sure. But that was true for all of his reign. Louis XIV ineffectiveness was a strength during the Revolution because it meant that people, quite rightly, blamed everyone else but him until that became essentially impossible. A more activist monarch might well have died earlier. Granted, a more activist monarch might have headed off the issue before it became an issue.

 

[Tahuti]

I'm still not seeing that the Monarchy actually was a critical failure point. It rode out two years of revolution, and came down because of highly contingent events. This all seems very post hoc ergo hoc, here.

EDIT: What PCH said.

Well to repeat in different wording, my point would be that with feudalism as a powerful institution, the storming of the Bastille would have been a local revolt at best, as opposed to a French one.

 

[Masada]

The storming of the Bastille was a local revolt? It involved Parisians, storming a prison in Paris.

 

[gay_Aleks]

It could be argued that the French Revolution, started at Paris, remained in Paris, and died off somewhere near Moscow.

 

[Flying Pig]

Napoleon did claim to be the Revolution, though I'd go further and argue that it died in Vienna in 1848.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

FThe second strand of thought basically held that the King himself was not the problem and that the solution to problem of France was not less King but rather more King. The March on Versailles looks rather like that. In the view of the crowd the issue wasn't the King but rather bad councilors and aristocrats who surrounded the King and came up with and executed his policies. Mixed with this was also recognition of some issues associated with the ancien regime but also more proximate issues like the need for bread. The crowds thought that if the king were free of this bad influence he would naturally fall into line with his people and that this could only be achieved by physically removing him to Paris.

The analyses of this event that I've seen always portray it as a move by the women of Paris to exert more power over the King by bringing him back where the mob could control him [to the Tuilleries in Paris, rather than outside the city]. The aim being to yes, isolate him from his ministers, but with the goal of removing from him and his decision-making the drag, if you will, of the aristocracy's concerns. So not that he would naturally fall in line with their concerns, but rather that they might more effectively force him to do so.

 

[Masada]

Yeah I understand that view. But I'm not sure if I agree with it. At the end of the day I do t think it undermines my central point, namely that the King was not the problem, so much as the solution even if, as might be the case, he had to be dragged along.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Also, I'd be suspicious of putting that specific of a motive on an action taken up spontaneously by so many people. The motive you're familiar with Cheezy, and the one Masada is proposing could perfectly well co-exist, and overlap, even for the participants who had thought that far ahead.

 

[CaptainLost]

What kinds of soldiers/weapons did Babylonians field? Is the bowman from CIV accurate?

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yeah, more or less. Middle Eastern armies as a whole were huge fans of the Composite Bow (think Thermopylae and "their arrows will blot out the sun"). This is particularly true of the Neo-Babylonian Army following in the footsteps of the Assyrian army (because the Assyrians used them so effectively). Aside from that, they used levee spear-based armies that fought in Phalanxes (traditional army formation since the Sumerians). I'm sure they also had axes, swords, etc.

If first Babylonian Empire would also have used chariots. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, following the Assyrian model, would have used horse archers rather than chariots.

 

[CaptainLost]

Great, thanks.

 

[Antilogic]

Any idea on the proportions of archers to spears to various cavalry units in ancient armies? Is there a good go-to reference for those kinds of numbers?

 

[Flying Pig]

Depended massively on where and when the army was raised, but Classical Greek and Roman armies were formed around heavy infantry with small numbers of cavalry (if any; Sparta's 'knights' were an infantry force) in a supporting role and various missile-firing troops as an almost incidental part. In a Roman legion of the Republic there would be about 4200 legionaries supported by maybe 300 cavalry, and the ratio of infantry to support troops increased as time went on. Only the Macedonians and a few small states such as Taras/Tarentum, Thessaly and Campania ever became truly capable horsemen, and Macedonian expertise was largely lost - except in the Seleucid Empire - within a few decades of Alexander's death, as only the Seleucids had both the resources to field cavalry and the wealth to equip them to the standard of Alexander's troops. In Persia the story was different; they were famous for archery and horsemanship, and renowned for being able to exercise both at once.

EDIT: There wasn't the rock-paper-scissors effect of the Early Modern period - light infantry were used as skirmishers and a prelude to the main action, in order to antagonise the enemy into attacking, while heavy infantry provided the bulk of the action. Macedonian and Hellenistic powers had heavy cavalry capable of creating the hammer-and-anvil effect for which Alexander became famous, but most armies kept cavalry as a means of chasing vulnerable troops or engaging each other in what occasionally seemed like a rather redundant confrontation, as at Cannae.

 

[Phrossack]

Any idea on the proportions of archers to spears to various cavalry units in ancient armies? Is there a good go-to reference for those kinds of numbers?

Depends a lot on the army, and what you mean by "ancient." The Scythians and other steppe peoples were basically purely cavalry and mainly archers. With other groups? It's important to remember that for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, from the pointed stick to the 16th-century pike, the primary weapon of most groups of people has been the spear and its variants. Archers usually played a supporting role, but they were more for weakening and demoralizing the enemy and breaking up formations, while the spearmen engaged the enemy and cavalry warded off enemy cavalry, scattered skirmishers, scouted, attacked from the flank or rear, and pursued a defeated foe.