THE CROWN AND THE PAYS D'ETATS

Breton elites, like those in other French provinces, relied upon a dense network of institutions to protect their power. These institutions could be royal, like the courts, local, such as a mayor, or a combination of the two, the Estates. Royal institutions, such as the Parlement, were also local because of the predominance of the local ruling elite in the court; local offices, such as mayor, were royal to the extent that the king granted permission for the office to exist (as at Nantes, in 1565) and ratified the local choice to fill the office. Under Henry IV, the king normalized his practice of choosing one from among the top three vote getters as mayor, rather than simply ratifying the choice of the electoral winner.

The dialectic royal–local existed in all early modern French regional institutions but it is most clearly demonstrated in representative bodies, provincial and local Estates. The local elites sought direct redress of grievances at their Estates; the king sought money and political cooperation. The Estates that survived the period 1550—1650 were those that effectively carried out their dual function of redress of local grievances and provisioning of the royal treasury. Although one of the famous aphorisms of this period was, “no money, no Swiss,” we might just as accurately say “no money, no Estates.” Before we consider the Breton case, we can briefly summarize events in the other pays d'Etats to show the extent to which the Breton example conformed to the general pattern, rather than being the exception it has so often been held to be.