On 7 September 1782, French foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, acknowledged in a letter to his eventual successor, Armand-Marc, comte de Montmorin, that England had “in its constitution and in the establishments which it has permitted her to form, resources which are lacking to us.” Eight weeks later, the foreign minister again referred to English “advantages which our monarchical forms do not accord us.” It is striking that Vergennes, however loyal to his country's absolutist traditions, should nevertheless have ruminated so uneasily upon differences between the constitutional systems of the two rival powers. His reflections point to a basic discrepancy in the old France – that between the far-reaching objectives of its foreign policy and the national means actually marshaled to attain those objectives.

In retrospect, it is clear that those ruling France in the years before 1789 confronted a challenge that in time became an unmanageable dilemma. The challenge was to preserve French influence in an increasingly competitive system of West Eurasian states while at the same time maintaining fiscal, constitutional, and social stability at home. The dilemma was that the pursuit of what became an ever more ambitious foreign policy could not, in the end, be judged strategically realistic – or be squared with the sociopolitical tenets undergirding the ancien régime in France.

The statesmen/politicians of revolutionary France would find themselves similarly bedeviled by the interrelated complexities of foreign and domestic policy. But that is a matter for later chapters to address.