1583 Assembly of Notables
The 1583 Assembly of Notables was a gathering of much of the political elite of the kingdom of France in addition to financial and technical experts in administration. The meeting hoped to reform France's shaky financial situation. Efforts towards the financial reform of the kingdom had been a feature of the reign of king Henri III since the Estates General of 1576. The crown was in a great amount of debt, and the royal taxes were increasingly insufferable to the French people. In the Grand Ordonnance de Blois issued in 1579, which summarised many of the requests of the Estates General, a large number of financial reforms were put forward. However, Henri was forced to turn to various expedients due to the financial demands of first the civil wars, then his brother the duc d'Alençon's military exploits in the Netherlands and then the needs to pay off the foreign mercenaries to whom the crown was indebted. By 1582 Henri, faced with increasing resistance to the crowns financial policy from the provinces, was resolved to break the pattern of expedients.
In August 1582 he established commissioners who were to go out into the provinces and find out the grieviances of the royal officers and the representative assemblies of the kingdom. Where they identified officials to be guilty of abuses they were also to apply sanctions. Having toured the kingdom, the various groups of commissioners were summoned to arrive back in Paris for September 1583. The conclusions of their tour were to be summarised for council and then form the basis for an Assembly of Notables. The Assembly of Notables opened in November 1583 and contained 66 participants, largely embodying administrative experts and functionaries, but also many of the great nobles of the kingdom such as the cardinal de Bourbon. Opening the Assembly on 18 November, Henri presented to the notables a radical tax plan, first presented to the Estates General of 1576 by which several existing taxes would be abolished and replaced with a single income/wealth tax structured over 30 bands. This was unpalatable to the assembled notables who proposed instead that Henri work towards the redemption of the royal domain rather than raising new taxes. The cardinal de Bourbon implored Henri to re-establish unity of religion in the kingdom, but Henri dismissed his pleas. After two months of deliberation, the Assembly presented to Henri in February a host of proposals, among which were a reduction in the size of the army, a reviewal of the contracts made with the tax farmers and those to whom he had alienated elements of the royal domain a revitalisation of French manufacturing and a suppression of abuses in tax collection. Over the following year, Henri's edicts would embody many financial policies championed by the Assembly, including a reform of the military, the reissuing and consolidation of several tax farms at a more favourable rate, the establishment of a court to punish financial abuses and the suppression of the unpopular taille in areas it had been recently introduced into. In 1585 Henri enjoyed the fruits of these efforts in a radically reduced royal deficit. However the reforms were not able to entrench further as France fell into a politico-religious crisis as represented by the uprising of the Catholic ligue.
Financial crisis
Debt and mismanagement
During the latter 1570s the kingdom's financial situation was precarious. In 1576, for example, the royal revenues totalled around 14,000,000 livres, while the state debt equalled 101,000,000 livres. In light of this situation, king Henri III abandoned the notion of sweeping away venal office expanded the alienation of the royal domain and undertook a program of taxing the towns while also subjecting them to forced loans. In an effort to control inflation in 1577, it was proposed that the écu be re-valued as being equivalent to three livres. In the edict of Poitiers the accounting system of the kingdom was tied to the écu au soleil as opposed to a fictional accounting unit. While this controlled inflation to a certain degree, over time the accounting unit of the écu began to diverge from the physical currency.The provinces baulked at the fiscal demands of the crown in 1578–1579, with the provincial Estates of Burgundy, Brittany and Normandy refusing to yield despite the sending of royal commissioners. To this end they cited their privileges. Real reform was demanded. In 1579 Henri issued the Grand Ordonnance de Blois which was composed of 363 articles and aimed at addressing grievances raised in the Estates General of 1576. This ordonnance declared a reduction in the membership of the sovereign courts and présidieux courts, prohibited the venality of office and legislated on the alienation of the royal domain. It also weighed in on the king's household, the functioning of the army, access to ecclesiastical office and the various responsibilities of members of the royal courts. While the peaces of Bergerac in 1577 and Fleix in 1580 relieved some of the financial pressures on the crown this was not to last. During 1580 Henri tasked four financial specialists with studying the practicality of the redemption of the royal domain. This commission informed him of the overall value of the royal domain, which was put at around 50,000,000 livres. The exploration of the possibility of repurchases was not able to progress significantly before Henri was obliged to alienate more of the royal domain.
From 1581 Henri was burdened with a new expenditure, the financial support of his brother military exploits in the Netherlands. The alternative to backing this endeavour would be to face another revolt from Alençon in France. Thus peace with the Protestants alone would not be sufficient to restore the kingdom to financial stability. In November 1581 he declared the expansion of retrait lignager would be in force throughout the kingdom of France, including those areas in the south of the kingdom which operated on written law as opposed to customary law. In July 1582 Henri renewed the French alliance with some of the Swiss cantons and made a treaty with them at Solothurn concerning the arrears of their pay as mercenaries that cost the crown 600,000 écus. These expenses forced him to once more turn to expedients and he alienated more of the royal domain, created more venal offices, took out 6 new loans and instituted further taxes on the clergy, cloth and wine. In Picardy and Champagne there were riots against paying the new aide on cloth and wine during the summer of 1582. With these disorders threatening to spread into the south, Henri turned to his brother in October to aid with matters. Chevallier argues that fortunately for Henri, the duc d'Alençon refused. On 2 August, it was admitted in conseil that the royal budget deficit equalled around 200,000 écus.
Breaking bad habits
By 1582, Henri was looking for a way out of the cycle of financial expedients required to keep the balance sheet afloat. According to the English ambassador he kept scribes nearby him at all times to record his ideas for fiscal remedies.The first step in this direction was taken on 27 May 1582 when the conseil des finances received orders to meet from 13:00 every day for two hours to explore methods by which the king could be restored to his domains and other incomes, such that he could live off his own lands and spare the people their troubles. During a meeting of the conseil d'État on 16 July, Henri announced his intention that an investigation would be undertaken towards the dual purpose of the domain's redemption and the relief of the people's sufferings.
The realm was divided into six sections, each of which would be the responsibility of a group of four commissioners. The commissions were sent out to the commissioners from 3 to 6 August. Each area was to be overseen by a commission of four and was led by a prelate, and contained a member of the conseil privé who had experience of war, a magistrate and an expert in finance. The historian Karcher notes that the second figure of the group was a 'noble of average importance who had offered years of service to Henri either as a soldier or a diplomat'.
- The Lyonnais, Dauphiné and Provence were entrusted to the bishop of Nantes, the seigneur d'Abain, Jacques Baillet an advisor to the grand conseil and Charles Le Comte one of the maître des comptes.
- Languedoc and Guyenne were the responsibility of the archbishop of Vienne, the sieur de Maintenon, Jean Forget a conseiller in the Paris Parlement and Denis Barthélemey one of the maìtre des comptes.
- For Normandy and Brittany were given the archbishop of Lyon, the seigneur de La Mothe-Fénelon, the seigneur de Blancmesnil one of the maître des requêtes and Pierre de Fitte de Soucy a former trésorier de l'Épargne.
- The final group whose membership is known is that responsible for the Île de France, Picardy and Champagne which was composed of the bishop of Châlons, the comte de Marennes, Jacques de Bauquemare one of the maître des requêtes and a man named Beaurains who Karcher imagines to be a financier.
Alongside this, in early 1583, Henri looked to bring about the alienation of 100,000 écus of the churches property. This was greeted with strong resistance form the clergy in a Paris assembly on 28 March. Henri also ran into opposition on the conseil privé. He dispatched his sécretaire Jules Gassot to negotiate on the matter with the Pope in Rome. Through the Papal Nunzio, the Pope warned Henri that if he persisted in his designs against church property the sacrament would be refused to him. Stung, Henri was forced to retreat from the project. On 19 March, Henri declared the prohibition of the importation of foreign luxury goods into the kingdom. That same month a new regulation of the taille was instituted by the king.