CHAPTER IV
CLASHES WITH MONARCHY
They are an assembly of republicans! Oh, well! Things as they are will last as long as
I do!
—LOUIS XV ON THE PARLEMENT OF PARIS, 1753
The Monarch is always more a friend to Democracy which is obedient to him than
to Aristocracy which stands in his way.
—THE MARQUIS D’ARGENSON, 1765
The constituted bodies faced a new situation at the close of the Seven Years’ War.
Fighting had gone on for a generation interrupted by a few years of truce; govern-
ments had accumulated great debts, which they had now to find means to carry or
repay. The search by governments for new sources of income met with resistance
from magistracies or assemblies in many countries. It therefore produced constitu-
tional crises. “From the need for money, which put into motion the machinery of
reforms, arose a great drama: the clash between autonomous entities and the cen-
tral power, between local governing classes and foreign rule.” These words, which
might apply to the dispute between the British Parliament and the American
colonies after 1763, actually refer to the conflict between the Hapsburg govern-
ment and the duchy of Milan.^1 Since in Hungary and Bohemia the government
at Vienna was often thought of as foreign, and even in France the more autono-
mous provinces often felt similarly toward that of Versailles, the same formula
would hold generally for the Hapsburg and Bourbon systems.
Other events, unrelated to the late wars, contributed to a change in the political
atmosphere. England received a new king in 1760, Russia a new empress in 1762.
The pressure of Catherine the Great upon Turkey and Eastern Europe committed
1 F. Va l s e c c h i , L’assolutismo illuminato in Austria e in Lombardia (Bologna, 1934), I, 194.