Province of Brittany
The Province of Brittany was a division of France that existed from 1532 until 1790. It was formed at the time that the previous Duchy of Brittany became unified with France by an edict. It was dissolved after the French Revolution in 1790 along with all the other provinces of France.
15th and 16th centuries
[edit]Although before 1536 Brittany was in theory under French control, it had been de facto independent. Its main government institution was the Estates of Brittany. It was created as a French province by the Edict of Union issued in 1532.[1]
The origins of the Province of Brittany start before it was fully integrated into France. It begins when Charles VIII took control in 1491. At that point he began to dismantle some of the institutions of the Duchy of Brittany. He also replaced the supporters of the Montforts with his own men. Many of the institutions were however restored in 1498 when Charles died and Anne of Brittany became the ruler.[2]
When Francis III, Duke of Brittany died in 1536 he was succeeded by his brother Henry, who was the first person to become both King of France and Duke of Brittany in his own right. Any trace of Breton independence ended with the accession of Henry to the French throne as Henry II. From then on the place is functionally the Province of Brittany. The French Crown and Breton Duchy were now united by inheritance, and the merging of Brittany into France was thus completed. Henry II was not crowned separately as Duke of Brittany. However Henry attempted to create a separate legal status for Brittany in relation to the Kingdom of France, similar to the position of the Duchy of Cornwall with respect to the Kingdom of England.[citation needed] According to some histories, Brittany was intended to be a ducal territory that the king would attempt to preserve for himself and his heirs if he were to lose the French Crown. However this attempt at legal separation did not survive Henry's reign.
Although Brittany was unified into France by the edict, it maintained several privileges. Among these were:
- It did not pay a tax on salt.
- Soldiers from the province were not allowed to be sent outside of Brittany.
- Its general tax rate was lower than in the rest of France.[3]
When Henry III (the last direct male descendant of Claude of France) died, Brittany passed as part of the Crown lands to the next heir of France, Henry of Navarre, rather than to Claude's most senior heirs (either Henry II, Duke of Lorraine or Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia). While these nobles were technically Henry's heirs, there were problems with both claimants to the ducal crown. The most important issue was that the crown, as a Sovereign Duke, could not be separated from that of the French Crown. Meanwhile, the French Crown and the Spanish Crown had been permanently separated, beginning with the reign of Philip of Spain.
In 1582, Henry III of France, last living male-line grandson of Claude, Duchess of Brittany, made Philippe Emmanuel, Duke of Mercœur, his brother-in-law and a leader of Catholic League, governor of Brittany. Invoking the hereditary rights of his wife Marie de Luxembourg, he endeavoured to make himself independent in that province from 1589 onward, and organized a government at Nantes, proclaiming their young son Philippe Louis de Lorraine-Mercœur "prince and duke of Brittany". (Infanta Isabella was the eldest daughter of the eldest sister of Henry III, but being female weakened her status, and her position as Infanta all but blocked inheritance to the Breton Duchy.) Through maternal ancestry he was the direct primogenitural heir of Duchess Joan, of the House of Penthièvre, wife of Charles of Blois. Mercœur organized a government at Nantes, supported by the Spaniards. He prevented Henry IV's attempts to subjugate Brittany until 20 March 1598, when Mercœur was forced to surrender. Henry IV then had one of his own illegitimate sons marry the young daughter of the Mercœurs, and thereby assured direct French control of the province. Mercœur subsequently went in exile to the Kingdom of Hungary.
The title "Duke of Brittany" largely ceased to be used as a title of the King of France. When it appeared, the title was bestowed by the king of France to one of his direct descendants, and it was in any event titular in status.
17th and 18th centuries
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Under the kings of France, the nobles of the Province of Brittany continued to enjoy the privileges that had been accorded them by the various independent dukes of Brittany. Brittany's Celtic legal traditions were maintained, to a degree, and the Estates of Brittany[4] and the Parlement of Rennes were kept separate from the French parliamentary system in Paris. The Breton noble privileges protected in this parliamentary system included exemption from taxes, representation in the Breton Parlement, and the maintenance of Breton titles in the tradition of the Duchy rather than that of France: including, in theory, the application of Brittany's form of semi-Salic, rather than pure Salic Law to the succession.
Initially after the creation of the Province of Brittany the place continued to have a prosperous trade. This changed shortly after Jean-Baptiste Colbert became the head of finances for France. He instituted a ban on exports of some of the products whose export was the backbone of the economy of the province of Brittany. This especially heavily hit Locronan. These actions led to what was known as the Bonnet Rouge revolt in 1675. It was suppressed.[5] The name was used again by tax protesters in Brittany in 2013 (see Bonnets Rouges).
After Henry II, the title Duke of Brittany was not used for over 200 years. It reappeared when a great-grandson of Louis XIV was named Louis, Duke of Brittany; He was the last holder of the title before the French Revolution and did not live to inherit the French throne. At his death the title in essence became defunct.
Claims on the titular ducal title by Spanish nobles at various times were not considered legitimate by the French, and its use by Louis XIV demonstrated that as the title had merged into the crown of France, only the king could assert the title himself or bestow it on another. Louis XIV's actions with regard to the ducal title also underscored the fact that the Spanish or cadet branch of the House of Bourbon had relinquished all French claims and inheritance rights as a condition of gaining the crown of Spain under the Treaty of Utrecht.
Shortly before the French Revolution, the leaders of the Parlement of Rennes issued Remonstrances to Louis XVI, in part to remind the king of his duties as duke and to preserve the privileges of the Breton people under the Treaty of Union. The king's response was to dissolve the Breton Parlement. The Remonstrances were delivered to the king by members of the Breton Parlement led by the Comte de Saisy de Kerampuil and others.
Louis dissolved the Breton Parlement to strengthen his claims as an absolute monarch (for whom a representative parliament was not necessary). He also did this to advance a centralized federal form of government, but in so doing he preserved the nature of the Brittany's autonomy by acknowledging its nobles' traditional privileges, and acted as the Duke of Brittany.
The Breton Parlement has not met since this event. During the French Revolution, the legal state of Brittany was dissolved by the French National Assembly. The province of Brittany was divided and replaced by the five départements that have continued in the modern French Republic.
The Duchy was legally abolished with the French Revolution that began in 1789 – and in 1790 the province of Brittany was divided into five departments: Côtes-du-Nord (later Côtes-d'Armor), Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine, Loire-Inférieure (later Loire-Atlantique) and Morbihan. Brittany essentially lost all its special privileges that had existed under the Duchy. Three years later, the area became a centre of royalist and Catholic resistance to the Revolution during the Chouannerie.
References
[edit]- ^ [1] The History of Brittany from the 13th to the 21st Century, Yves Coativy]
- ^ The History of Brittany from the 13th to the 21st Century by Yves Coativy, p. 50-51.
- ^ Coativy, p. 51
- ^ mentions the Estates of Brittany
- ^ Coatiny, p. 52