请将“In each of the kingdoms under investigation here, noble rule was both lim-ited and sanctioned by royal rule, in other words it existed from then on in the form of privilege. But the management of privileges, which in both kingdoms comprised the basis of generalised monarchical power under the ancien régime, was subject right from the start, and throughout the whole existence of the ancien régime, to structurally different conditions. Whilst in ‘France' the crown was confronted by many different privileges, basically in a competitive situation with one another, the English crown had to act in a context of partially generalised interests of the holders of privilege. If they were successful in this, English kings, despite having no ‘apparatus' at their disposal with members who were materially dependent on them, were able to govern the land, whereas the French crown, despite having appropriated de facto the prerogative of taxation and with it the possibility of autonomous organisation of armed force, remained in a situation of regulated diplomatic relations vis- à-vis the particular territorial and local ruling powers.
3.	Contradictory development of the ancien régime
Structural crises under the ancien régime were crises in the system of rule. They had a material basis in structural changes in the conditions of appropriation, but a crisis of landlordship did not in all circumstances find expression in a crisis of the system of rule. Crises that put in question the personal structure of rule resulted far more commonly from struggles for position within the ruling estates. Class-type contradictions led to crises of reproduction, and provoked strategies of crisis management and structural changes which in turn endangered - or else improved - the position of the appropriators. To this extent, conflicts between lords and peasants, or between masters and journeymen, could be the cause of such crises of rule. If social conflicts of this kind led to a regularisation or a general formalisation of ruling practice, they also influenced a change in the forms of rule. The central dynamic of change in the generalised structures of rule under the ancien régime, however, resulted from competition among the possessors of personal power competences, and from the influential demand of rising social forces who wanted either to participate in such possession, or else to curtail it.
The structural preconditions for conflict over the distribution and scope of personal rule were different in the two kingdoms. Their specific character depended on whether material threats to the lords' existence were transformed into a crisis of the system of rule, or could be negotiated without any fundamental shock. In this respect, the following structural features were decisive: the extent and forms of centralised appropriation, the extent and material basis of the political strength of the high nobility, along with the structural relationship between this strength and the generalised interests of the lower nobility, and the conditions of individual advance into the noble estate along with the correspondence between estate hierarchy and distribu-tion of wealth.
The emphasis on structural differences between the forms of estate rule in England and France stands in contradiction with the tendency in English historiography, reinforced in recent years, to overestimate the common char-acter of English nobility and its continental counterparts. It is in this connec-tion that historians maintain the noble character of the gentry, and revise the long-established notion that access to the English nobility was more open than was the case in France. Reference is also made to the fact that the privileges of the high nobility in England were not so extensive and provocative as those of the continental noble estates, even if they should by no means be seen as incidental. None of these contentions is contested here. But they simply justify the subsuming of both kingdoms under the concept of ancien régime. And it is only possible to proceed in this way if the gentry are not seen - in a temporarily influential view - as bearers of a ‘bourgeois revolution' directed against the king and ‘feudalism' (aristocracy), and the revolutions of the seventeenth century are not interpreted as the end of the ancien régime in England. Rejection of this interpretation requires an emphasis on structural commonalities; the question of the structural causes for the very different development of the ancien régime in France and England, however, demands an analysis of their differences.
Extent and structure of centralised appropriation
Forceful efforts were made in both kingdoms to increase the extent of cen-tralised appropriation. The most important occasions for this tendency arose from efforts to finance military projects and dynastic power politics. What is particularly significant in the present connection is the fiscally provoked extension of the permanence of offices. This could lead to financial burdens on the crown, if the payment of salaries was envisaged. In so far as the crown sold offices, the expansion of 'state' power served to increase the 'state's' finances.
Efforts to extend the possession of office, and hence - in one form or another - private appropriation by way of centralised power, proceeded for the most part from the government. By offering profitable office power, the crown was able to tie to itself those nobles who, as a result of difficulties of appropriation in the seigneurial sphere, or rising costs in the expenses pertaining to their lordly status, sought new sources of income. To the extent that lucrative offices whose actual exercise was either perfunctory or could be performed by substitutes achieved the material integration of the high nobility into monarchical rule, they offered an opportunity in the short term to counter threats to the established system of rule.
In so far as possession of a particular office endowed or confirmed a social rank, the crown at the same time established and defended its competence to authoritatively define the social hierarchy. This in turn had the consequence that hopes of social advance could be satisfied, and a further cause of crisis in the system of rule 'resolved', by status-enhancing private participation in centralised power. Yet strategies of this kind came up against structural limits. Extraction by way of centralised power competence could certainly be increased by main force, but in the long term such strategies competed with demands for the material or even biological reproduction of the labouring population, and also with other private appropriation. At the same time, the expansion of offices led to a competition between office-holders for sources of income, expressed in violent conflicts over jurisdiction, while the profitability of offices fell and with it at least their material, if not necessarily their social, attractiveness.
In France, the political and fiscal opportunities for granting office power were used right to the limit. This was possible because the costs that these offices involved for the government were financed by taxes that fell chiefly on the peasants, besides raising the government debt and to this extent also the prospects for 'state' creditors to draw more interest. As against the situation in England, there was no social group in France that was in a position to impose a restriction on offices. The crown consequently used the fiscal possibilities of selling office power and the 'taxation' from office property. Although property in office power - which, with few exceptions, became inheritable in the seventeenth century - could, in certain circumstances, prove a less profitable investment in strictly material terms, the demand persisted, since office property promised direct or future access to the noblesse de robe. Though the unity of the noble estate had been maintained in France until the end of the sixteenth century, and ennoblement along with gradual de facto advance had meant the confirmation by the ruling power of a single nobility, the increase in office nobility effected a regular separation between the noblesse d'épée and the noblesse de robe. Since, at the same time, the possibility of advance by gradual integration into already established strata of the nobility was abolished - or at least made immensely more difficult -, investment in office property developed into a structural feature of strategies for family advance.
By the creation of ever new offices, the crown did not so much improve the effectiveness of its 'apparatus' as promote, on the contrary, a competition for competences and the tendency of office-holders to make use of the means of generalised power to secure their own profit. In this sense, the royal 'admin-istration' stood in a certain contradiction to the expansion of material repro-duction. In view of this structural importance of office property, particular development measures that were decreed and implemented by office-holders (most commonly, by the intendants) were hardly significant.
In England, too, there were regular sinecures. Yet the fact that the nobility was not fiscally privileged, and the generalisation of gentry interests in Par-liament - along with the possibility of successful resistance to costly practices of government - meant that the crown, if it wanted to provide nobles with incomes, had in general to resort to involving them in the 'administration' of its feudal appropriation power. The administrators of the 'central' government received regular salaries, along with the incumbents of court offices. Local government, on the other hand, was largely carried out by representatives of the local nobility and - after the Reformation - clergy of the Church of England, who did not receive payment from the crown.”翻译为中文