The Intendant, the Dragoons, and the Silk Weavers: Enforcing the Revocation
October 1686. The intendant of the generality of Lyon must answer Versailles within three weeks. Since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes eleven months earlier, roughly 340 Protestant households - many of them master silk-weavers and dyers - have petitioned for passports to leave for Geneva and Amsterdam. The guild estimates that cloth output is down 18 percent and that royal taille and gabelle receipts for the quarter will fall about 12,000 livres short. Two hundred dragoons are quartered in the faubourg Saint-Vincent, and the archbishop has written that any leniency will be read in Paris as complicity in heresy. The intendant's own brother-in-law holds a share in a Compagnie des Indes contract that depends on the silk trade. He cannot defy the king openly, but he can choose what to report, what to delay, and what to recommend. The controller-general wants a single page: numbers, names, and a proposal.
1. Explain what ends the revocation served, and why the intendant's fiscal objection would not by itself have refuted those ends.
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The fiscal argument only bites if it is translated into the regime's own currency. Louis XIV's policy rested on three supports, none of them primarily economic.
First, sovereignty. The Edict of Nantes (1598) had left a legal Protestant minority with its own assemblies, courts, and garrisoned towns - jurisdictions the crown had spent the 1660s to 1680s dismantling piece by piece. Residual legal pluralism was an anomaly in a monarchy whose authority was increasingly argued as unitary: one king, one law, one faith.
Second, the king's religious role. As Most Christian King, Louis claimed a special relationship with the Gallican church, which had its own reasons to want uniformity and which supplied the crown with credit and legitimacy.
Third, court politics and glory: conversion of the 'heretics' was a triumph that could be advertised, and the myth of spontaneous mass conversion (the 'conversions of the dragoons') made retreat humiliating.
So the intendant cannot say 'tolerance.' He must argue that rigorous enforcement is destroying the tax base, that false conversions produce subjects who are Catholics in name only, and that the king's justice is being discredited by quartering troops on men who have not been tried. That is an argument about the king's interests, not about rights - which is the only kind of argument that can travel to Versailles.
2. Recommend a course of action and assess its risks. What can the intendant actually do within these constraints?
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The realistic menu has three items.
Full enforcement. Speed the dragonnades, certify conversions, seize goods of departers. Cost: further collapse of the silk trade, capital flight, and - worse - a report to Versailles that the intendant was brutal but ineffective.
Passive obstruction. Slow-walk the passports, misreport the shortfall, let the wealthiest masters slip away with their looms. Risk: the archbishop and the guild rivals denounce him, and he has no cover if the controller-general reads the accounts.
Reframing and bargaining. Certify the conversions that occur, keep the essential masters by offering tax abatements and monopoly privileges conditional on abjuration, and send Versailles a memorandum that argues, in figures, that each departing master takes a workshop's know-how with him and that the loss is permanent, not a one-quarter dip. Attach a specific proposal: a temporary suspension of passport refusals for men whose departure would idle more than twenty looms, in exchange for a levy on the guild.
The third path is the only one that is both defensible and survivable. Its logic: the intendant cannot reverse royal policy, but he can exploit the gap between the edict's text and its administration, and he can make the crown pay attention by framing the damage as a permanent loss of revenue rather than as a moral objection. He should also share the risk - get the archbishop to co-sign a request that conversions be genuine rather than nominal, which converts the bishop into a partner rather than a denouncer.
3. What does this episode reveal about the practical limits of absolutist power?
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It shows that 'absolute' monarchy was absolute in claim, not in reach. Four limits are visible in the scenario.
Information. Versailles knows what its agents report. The intendant decides what a shortfall is, what a conversion means, and who counts as a master weaver. Policy is only as good as the paperwork that reaches the controller-general, and the paperwork is written by men with interests.
Execution. The crown has no bureaucracy of its own at the workshop level; it works through guilds, municipal officers, and clergy, all of whom have their own agendas. The archbishop can denounce; the guild can hide looms; the dragoons can only be in one faubourg at a time.
Credit and revenue. Absolutism was expensive. A policy that destroys the tax base undermines the army that makes the claim credible, which is precisely why the intendant's argument has any purchase at all.
Unintended consequences. Expelling skilled Calvinists strengthened rival states: Brandenburg's Edict of Potsdam (1685) welcomed them, and Huguenot bankers and printers carried capital and crafts to Geneva, Amsterdam, and Berlin. The crown's attempt to make its territory uniform made its competitors stronger - the classic result of treating subjects as a confession rather than as a productive population.