I’m a fan of Peter Turchin and his work in the historical field he has termed “cliodynamics”. He’s quantified and articulated a number of the things that those of us in the pattern recognition business had only dimly recognized, and it’s very exciting to see that he’s now permitting us to see more of his work outside his very good books, such as this recent post on the so-called French Wars of Religion:
I asked ChatGPT to give me a one-sentence explanation of the causes of this bloody and lengthy civil war. Here’s what it said: “The French Wars of Religion were primarily caused by growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) in France, fueled by religious intolerance, political rivalries among noble families, and a weak monarchy unable to maintain order.” This answer perfectly encapsulates the standard story as seen in popular historical books, or online encyclopedias (LLMs, such as ChatGPT, are great at summarizing such common wisdom).
Readers of my books and blog posts would immediately realize that Cliodynamics gives a very different answer. Noble rivalries and religious tensions were what happened on the surface. But the deep structural causes of the FWR were popular immiseration, elite overproduction leading to intraelite conflict, and fiscal collapse of the state. In other words, the usual suspects when we talk about structural-demographic crises.
The Day of the Barricades (Paris, 1588), an ostensibly spontaneous popular uprising, which was in reality organized by counter-elites
What I’d like to do in this post series is delve a bit into these structural causes (for a deeper dive read Chapter 5 of Secular Cycles). I have two reasons to do so. First, the onset of the FWR gives us a nearly perfect example of how structural-demographic trends lead to state collapse and civil wars. Second, it was the fiscal collapse of the state that triggered warfare in c.1560. I wrote about the possibility of such a trigger for the America today in a recent post, where I concluded that we are fairly immune against it. But France in the sixteenth century was, most emphatically, not immune.
The ultimate driver, as usual in agrarian states, was population growth. During the integrative phase of the cycle (1450 to 1560) the population of France doubled: from 10–11 to 20–22 million. The French Kingdom in the sixteenth century was an overwhelmingly agrarian state and agricultural productivity couldn’t keep up with such massive population growth. As a result, food prices exploded. The price of a setier (a measure of volume) of wheat in livres tournois (the standard monetary unit in early-modern France) increased 10-fold between the 1460s and 1560s. Overpopulation created a high demand for food, inflating its price, and it increased the supply of labor, deflating its price. During the sixteenth century real wages lost two-thirds or more of their buying capacity. The daily wage of the Parisian laborer could buy 16 kg of grain in the 1490s, compared to less than 4 kg one century later.
Turchin makes it easy to see how the mainstream historical narrative is every bit as dumbed-down and falsified as the current news reporting. If you’ve got any interest in history or the truth, and if you’re here, you probably do, I highly recommend taking a gander at his substack.
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