The Administration and Reforms of Henry II

Beyond the présidiaux already created in 1552 and the collapse of the Grand Parti de Lyon, the reign methodically pursued the work of centralisation begun by Francis I, spanning reform of the finances, of justice and of the army.

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👑 Royal Government

Henry II’s power was exercised through several specialised councils — a council of affairs for the important matters of state, a council of finances for the management of the Treasury, a council of parties for justice and litigation, a privy council for everyday business —, but the king’s personal authority remained, in the last resort, the sole source of every decision. As early as 1547, Henry II generalised and systematised the use, already begun under his father, of secretaries of state responsible for the dispatch of business: recruited from the company of the king’s notary-secretaries, initially each responsible for a geographical sector of the kingdom, they took in 1557 the official title of secretaries of state and of finance — an administrative evolution that foreshadowed, well ahead of its time, the modern ministerial organisation.

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💰 Finances Between Reform and Chronic Debt

Henry II inherited a Treasury already burdened by a considerable debt, bequeathed by thirty-two years of wars and lavish patronage under Francis I. To cope with this, the kingdom relied on its traditional sources of revenue — the royal domain, the taille, the gabelle, the aides, the traites — while increasing them substantially: raising the taille, extending the gabelle to new regions, raising customs duties. The Trésor de l’Épargne, created under Francis I, was maintained and strengthened, its accounts kept more rigorously, while recourse to Italian bankers and to rentes on the Hôtel de Ville grew in order to bridge the persistent gap between revenue and expenditure — a credit system whose fragility the failure of the Grand Parti de Lyon, in 1558, brutally exposed.

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⚖️ Justice: Beyond the Présidiaux

The creation of the présidiaux in 1551-1552 — sixty intermediate courts, each made up of nine judges, established at the seats of the bailliages and sénéchaussées to relieve the burden on the parlements — was not the reign’s only judicial reform. In 1553, a royal ordinance provided that the maîtres des requêtes would visit the provinces every year, strengthening central control over local administration and the fight against abuses. In 1557, Henry II ordered the application of a single standard of weights and measures, first in the outskirts of Paris and then throughout the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, with a reference standard deposited at the town hall — an early attempt at unification that was only to succeed, across the whole kingdom, centuries later. The sale of offices, by contrast, continued to proliferate despite attempts to limit it, in the long run weakening the competence of the royal administration.

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🗺️ Provinces and Army

In the provinces, the king relied on governors drawn from the greatest families — Anne de Montmorency in Île-de-France, François de Guise in Normandy, Claude of Lorraine in Burgundy —, tasked with representing royal authority on the military, administrative and judicial planes; alongside them there began to appear extraordinary commissioners, direct ancestors of the future intendants of the Ancien Régime, dispatched directly by the king to oversee finances, justice and police in the provinces. The army, too, became professionalised: compagnies d’ordonnance forming a permanent heavy cavalry, stable infantry regiments, numbers reaching about fifty thousand men in peacetime, frontier fortifications modernised with the help of Italian engineers, and a navy developed both in the Mediterranean, in conjunction with the Ottoman fleet, and along the Atlantic coast.

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• From 1547: generalisation of the system of secretaries of state, who took the official title of secretaries of state and of finance in 1557
• Debt inherited from Francis I, worsened by the wars of the reign, despite the strengthening of the Trésor de l’Épargne
• 1551-1552: creation of the présidiaux (60 courts, nine judges each); 1553: annual visits by the maîtres des requêtes to the provinces; 1557: first attempts at unifying weights and measures
• Provincial governors drawn from the great families (Montmorency, Guise, Lorraine) and the emergence of the first extraordinary commissioners, foreshadowing the intendants
• A permanent army of about 50,000 men in peacetime, modernised fortifications, a navy active in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic

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Next zoom: The Protestant Reformation and the Persecutions.