请将“Already from 1568, lesser officials were allowed to pass on their positions by inheritance, on payment to the parties casuelles of a fee of one-third the value of the office. In 1604, the inheritance of office was newly regulated and expanded. By the introduction of the paulette, so-called after the king's secretary Paulet, the administration of offices was farmed out. Purchasers of an office received this as a heritable property, and had to pay a definite annual sum (initially set at 1 % per cent of the purchase price) to the farmer, who in turn made an annual payment to the treasury. The paulette reinforced the tendencies already in existence towards a privatisation of the generalised power, and in the long run restricted the room for manoeuvre of patronage practices of the high noblesse d'épée. What was new for the royal power in the early seventeenth century was also the basis of its propaganda. The group upholding this development were the 'officials' who had been insulted in the years of civil war as les politiques. They championed the view that the most important legiti- misation of royal rule arose from the order-maintaining character of its power monopoly. The most pregnant formulation of this new notion of government was supplied by Jean Bodin. Until 1572 Bodin had conceived the reform of royal rule he deemed necessary along traditional lines: as a limitation of royal arbitrariness by the participation of estate representatives. After the massacre of 1572 he shifted the basis of his argument to the need for the sovereignty of the king, his most unlimited power possible vis-à-vis all members of society. This notion found all the more widespread support, the further the exercise of rule by the nobility was distant from any notion of 'good order'. 
From the end of the sixteenth century, the theory of sovereignty was a fixed element in the foundation of generalised royal rule. Henri IV gave this theory a particular stamp, but only for the duration of his reign, depicting himself as peacemaker and father of the country.
b.	Contradictory development of the ancien régime
'L'Etat c'est moi!' This saying, attributed to Louis XIV, can be taken as the leitmotiv of an interpretation that prevailed for a whole century in historical study of the French ancien régime. It culminated in the theoretical construct of 'absolutism'. The rapid spread of this model of interpretation, which was coined in the second third of the nineteenth century, marked a change in the dominant self-conception of French society in the years after the Franco-Prus-sian war. The prevailing view up till then, if unsatisfactory to many, had seen the Revolution of 1789 as founding a special status for the French nation (so August Comte expressed it), but military defeat promoted the integration of a powerful and splendid pre-Revolutionary epoch into the national hall of fame.
The interpretative model of 'absolutism' stressed that the monarchy had succeeded, thanks to a powerful centralised ruling apparatus, in disciplining the nobility and other possessors of local power so that the country could be governed by the royal court from one end to the other. This was effected by a systematic mercantilist policy, the supervision of earlier administrative arrangements, appropriate population policies and rational policies of public order.
In a certain sense, the construct of 'absolutism' survived by being ignored. The social-historical research orientation that developed in France from the 1930s around the journal Annales turned its back on questions of political his-tory without criticising any of its specific concepts. The notion of 'absolutism' also found uncriticised entry into the works of Marxist historians. The high points of this incorporation were the (very different!) works of two foreigners, the Soviet historian B.F. Porshnev72 and the British social theorist Perry Anderson.73 Both took the centralisation and expansion of royal ruling power as a proven fact, and differed from earlier interpretations particularly by their judgement that despite outward appearance, absolutism was a form of power representing the general interest of the nobility. Even variants of Marxist his-toriography in which a critique of the interpretation of the ancien régime as a feudal society was undertaken by explaining the forms of this social formation as the expression of two simultaneously existing modes of production74 did not question the governmental effectiveness of the central power.
This accordingly found itself in close agreement with the developmental model of French history popular until recently in which the strengthening of the crown in the first half of the sixteenth century was given a positive value,75 and the birth of the modern French nation-state dated from the late sixteenth century. Following the 'anarchy' of the wars of religions, it became possible to discipline the nobility. Admittedly further resistance to the central power occurred in the form of the Fronde (see below). But from the time that Louis XIV governed personally, i.e. without support of a first minister, the crown finally established itself as an effective instance of government. In the wars of the late seventeenth century, however, a crisis situation arose. Depictions of the eighteenth century vary according to the chosen interpretation of the French Revolution. Either the ancien régime is seen as in decline from the start of the century, or else it remains stable until the mid-century and is only then shaken by rapid economic change and the crown's financial crisis. A further variant stresses the slow transformation of social relations, interpreting the Revolution as an interruption in the evolutionary process that was merely a historic accident.
Despite these great differences in interpretation of the ancien régime in the eighteenth century, the core of the absolutism construct long remained unaf-fected: in the reign of Louis XIV and to a lesser extent also those of his suc-cessors, 'the state' ruled society. The view represented by Marxists, that the crown was 'in reality' the instrument of the ruling class, could be integrated into this conception to the extent that the state was understood as representa-tive of an overall interest of the nobility, albeit coming into conflict with the limited particular interest of individual nobles.
In the last three decades, the theory of absolutism has been brought into question, initially in particular aspects, but increasingly as a whole. In a cer-tain sense, Eugen L. Ashers's study published in 1960, on the difficulties that Colbert encountered in implementing his naval policy, in particular the man-ning of ships, can be seen as the starting point for a new view of French gov-ernment policy. The whole notion of Colbertism as a systematic mercantilist practice very rapidly crumbled, given the manifold indications of a contrary reality. Eventually the role of the intendants as unbending instruments of cen-tralisation efforts was also contested, thus undermining one of the main pillars of the ‘absolutism' construct. The focus on local research made it increasingly clear that the old aristocracy remained powerful in the provinces, and that the crown could only govern with its assistance. Even the assumption that the material position of the nobility had deteriorated with the inflationary deval-uation of payments due from the peasants, in comparison with that of the urban bourgeoisie, is no longer taken as proven. Scarcely anything remains of the thesis that 'absolutism' marked the beginning of the modern state, since historical studies constantly show the opposite of bureaucratisation and rationalisation.
A counter-thesis has gradually crystallised. Society was not ruled by the 'state', rather society had the 'state' completely in its grip. Just as earlier on, the old nobility were the decisive force, not only in the provinces but also at court. At the local level, however, otherwise than was previously assumed, an inte-gration of the noblesse de robe into the existing noble strata had already taken place in the seventeenth century.76 In the eighteenth century, this tendency towards a homogenisation of élites also became clear at a national level.77 One high point of this literature challenging the 'absolutism' concept was Roger Mettam's Power and Faction in Louis XIV's France.78 Whereas many works of recent years confined themselves to establishing the erroneousness of the 'absolutism' construct for an individual province or city, or for a particular area of politics, Mettam summarised the results of these detailed studies in an overall interpretation of the system of rule that put paid once and for all to the misunderstanding of 'absolutism'. Interpretation of this historical epoch cannot base itself on the preambles to laws, but must rather seek to reveal the hidden power structure.79 It should also be acknowledged at last that the crown had no intention of appropriating the competence to regulate local affairs. It was only for Paris that it claimed a specific governmental power. Mettam's work is characteristic of the stage of discussion that is regularly reached in historiography when interpretations long handed down are put in question. The ‘revisionists' are first of all concerned not to leave a single stone of the former interpretative edifice in place. This means right away, however, that even though their intention is critical, they are still oriented towards the previous interpretation and its problematic. Anyone who already ventures to assert a new synthesis at this stage generally succumbs to the temptation to highlight aspects that have formerly been neglected. It generally takes a 'second generation' before evaluations are no longer simply the product of an attack on the previously prevailing opinion.
For the ancien régime in France (by which most people understand the period from the end of the sixteenth century to the Revolution), it is now stressed above all how structurally decisive the medieval elements in state and society still were. In a certain sense, so it seems to me, a good part of present-day research on the ancien régime continues to reproduce an analytical weakness of the notions it criticises. Whilst the 'absolutist state' is certainly no longer seen as a modern rational edifice, distinct from later forms of state chiefly by a particularly glamorous representation, the back-projection of a separate existence of 'state' and 'society' is not overcome in the revisionist shifting of the power centre on to 'society'. The personal character of power still remains part of the tradition. The possessors of seigneurial judicial power, however, were not just 'social' forces, they were owners of a part of the power that is nowadays described as 'state' power. Conversely, the majority of 'state' offices in the developed ancien régime were not part of a public (state) power, but were private property. 'State' activity was a social process, the dynamic of which was determined to a large extent by private interests of appropriation and status. ”翻译为中文