Louis XIV of France
Prussia
Austria
Peter the Great of Russia
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Age of Absolutism
(1660-1789)
Time Line
Covering the ancient world through the age of technology, this illustrated lecture series by Eugene Weber presents a tapestry of political and social events woven with many strands — religion, industry, agriculture, demography, government, economics, and art. A visual feast of over 2,700 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art portrays key events that shaped the development of Western thought, culture, and tradition. Below is a list of media presentations by Dr. Weber; each one is approximately thirty-minutes (30) in length. These are being offered to the student as a supplement to other sources presented in this section. The student needs to provide “log-on” information to get access to the presentations; there is no cost to the student. Review Units
The Age of Absolutism
Exhausted by war and civil strife, many Europeans exchanged earlier liberties
and anarchies for greater peace.
Absolutism and the Social
Contract
Arguments about the legitimate source of political power centered on divine
right versus natural law.
The Enlightened Despots
Monarchs considered reforms in order to create more efficient societies, but
not at the expense of their own power.
Introduction
It's difficult to
determine precisely when the Enlightenment begins. Since the Enlightenment
is primarily about changes in the worldview of European culture, the process
cannot really be said to have a beginning, for when a worldview changes it
essentially draws on previous shifts in worldview.
The Enlightenment
is commonly dated to the middle of the eighteenth century and the activity
of the philosophes, the French rationalist philosophers who fully articulated
the values and consequences of Enlightenment thought. For our purposes then, we'll use the term "Pre-Enlightenment,"
since it's a standard historical category, but we'll use it in the sense of
"the transition to the full Enlightenment," or simply, "the
transitional period."
European history
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took a variety of contradictory
turns. England saw the complete overthrow of the monarchy in the middle of
the seventeenth century and its replacement first by a republic and then by
a weakened monarchy later in the century; finally, at the end of the seventeenth
century England would see the revolutionary erosion of the monarch's powers
in England's "Glorious Revolution."
For all this drama, however, the rest of Europe
saw an astonishing growth in the power of monarchs over their states. The
two centuries that bracket the Enlightenment saw the development of absolute
monarchies and more tightly centralized national governments; many historians
regard the growth of the absolute monarchy as the origin of the modern state.
Europe consequently
saw the gradual erosion of local power and autonomy and the rise of national
legislation and civil bureaucracies. Because of this growth in absolute and
centralized power of the national government and the monarchy, this age in
European history is generally called the Age of Absolutism. It begins in the reign of Louis XIV and ends
with the French Revolution.
Wars of Religion
Absolutism was by and
large motivated by the crises and tragedies of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The Reformation had led to a series of violent and cruel wars of religions;
states erupted into civil war and thousands of innocents
met their deaths in the name of national religions. Absolute monarchies
were originally proposed as a solution to these violent disorders, and Europeans
were more than willing to have local autonomy taken away in exchange for peace
and safety.
In order to achieve
this stability, absolutists asserted that in practical affairs several key
elements of the national government should be solely in the hands of the monarch:
the military, tax collection, and the judicial system. These were powers normally
enjoyed by the aristocracy and local gentry; the national administration of
these functions required the formation of a national civil bureaucracy whose
officials were answerable only to the king. This bureaucracy had to stand
against the most powerful institutional forces opposed to the king: the nobility,
the church, representative legislative bodies, and autonomous regions. In
order to centralize the administration of the state, the government had to
somehow take political authority out of the hands of the nobility and others
who were not especially interested in giving that authority up.
Protestant England
In Europe absolute monarchs
could not completely break the power of the nobility, so they incorporated
them into their new bureaucratic institutions. The church, however, was a
different matter. Most absolutist monarchs tried to get around the church
by nationalizing it, that is, by imitating the actions of England's Henry
VIII in the early sixteenth century. While Henry had himself named head of
the Church of England, the absolute monarchs in Europe only managed to gain
some administrative and judicial control over the clergy. The most difficult
battles, however, would be with representative legislative bodies; it was
such a battle that precipitated the French Revolution.
Medieval political theory justified
kingship by arguing that the king ruled by the will of God. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
(1627-1704) adapted the medieval concept of kingship in his theory of the
Divine Right of Kings, which argued that the king ruled absolutely by will
of God, and that to oppose the king in effect constituted rebellion against
God. Although the people should be excluded from power, God's purpose in instituting
absolute monarchy was to protect and guide society
Bossuet spelled out his arguments
in the treatise Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Scripture in
1709; most of these theories he developed for Louis XIV in France. In this
work, Bossuet argues that God institutes monarchy for the welfare of
the people; for that reason, absolute rule is not arbitrary rule.
The monarch cannot do as he pleases, but must rather consistently act in the
best interests of society. As a political theorist attached to Louis
XIV, he helped Louis establish the first and fullest absolute monarchy in
Europe.
Louis XIV of France
This monarch who fully
embodied absolutist principles Louis
XIV, the Sun King ruled France from 1643 to 1715. In many ways, Louis
was the embodiment of the modern age for the whole of Europe. Many countries
and monarchs turned to him as a model for the new, modern government, while
some countries, such as England, reacted against this model.
Historians like to consider
the reign of Louis XIV as the beginning of the modern state. Most of the practices
of the modern state were more or less instituted in the France of Louis XIV:
centralized government, a centralized civil bureaucracy, national legislation,
a national judiciary that controlled most judicial activity, a large, standing
military under the direct, rather than indirect, control of national authorities,
and a national tax collection mechanism in which taxes went straight to the
national government rather than passing through the hands of regional nobility.
Historians also credit Louis
with inventing the "theater" of national government. This claim, though compelling
in some ways, is not entirely true. Earlier monarchs had, since the beginning
of the sixteenth century, largely thought of the monarchy as theater, as show,
and as display. The purpose of this theater was to demonstrate both the power
and the benevolence of the individual monarch; such a display was integral
to the legitimating of the monarch's authority and the dedication of the monarch's
subject to the state itself. Louis, however, elevated the "theater
of power" to unprecedented heights and clearly thought that every public
aspect of the monarch should contribute to this theater of power.
Fundamental to
Louis's theater of power was the display of monarchical wealth, power, and
largesse. To this end, he moved the monarchical residence out of the center
of Paris to a suburb in Versailles. There he built the single most opulent
palace ever built for a king of Europe: the palace of Versailles.
It was an awe-inspiring structure and was built as a stage on which to perform
the public rituals and to display monarchical power. The building itself was
a little over a third of a mile long; magnificent gardens and over 1400 fountains
employing the newest hydraulic technologies surrounded the outside. The inside
was an altar to French military might, room after room decorated with paintings,
tapestries, and statues celebrating French military victories, heroes, and,
especially, French kings.
Louis required
every noble to spend some time at the palace at Versailles. There he would
stage elaborate performances and rituals designed to show the nobility both
his power and his benevolence. In these displays of monarchical power he assumed
the role of "Sun King." Neoplatonic philosophers of the Renaissance
and seventeenth century argued that the sun, as the source of light, was the
proper symbol for god and wisdom. Louis adopted the Neoplatonic symbol for
God to symbolize his own role as God's monarchical representative.
The power and the benevolence
that Louis put on display were to some measure real power and real benevolence.
In order to secure his power, Louis had to centralize the military, take control
of national taxes, reign in independent territories such as Brittany and Languedoc,
break up the legislative assemblies, and impose a religious unity on the country
Until Louis XIV, the military in France had been largely a private affair.
Individual regions raised and paid for their own armies; when the king required
military help, the army came from these semi-private sources. Louis began
to build a state army of professional soldiers and began to bleed the military
power from these individual regions. This new centralized military would owe
allegiance only to the king; the danger of factionalism and rebellion subsequently
declined.
In order to pay for his new military as well as his expensive
theater of power, Louis seized control of national taxes. Until Louis's time,
largely individual nobility collected taxes throughout Europe on a region-by-region
basis. Nobles had been required to submit a certain amount of taxes to the
crown, but they were free to collect whatever they pleased and keep the excess.
In all the states in Europe, this was a massively inefficient affair, at least
from a monarch's perspective. When Louis assumed power, only 30 percent or
so of the taxes due to the monarch actually got paid.
In the matter of legislative assemblies, Louis had no patience whatsoever.
The parlements of France were largely regional in nature rather than
national. Not only did these parlements represent a diffusion of power
from the king to the populace, they also represented a diffusion of power
from the king to separate regions. Louis solved the problem of the parlements
directly and simply: if any parlement vetoed monarchical legislation,
all the members of that parlement would be exiled from France. Simple
as that. Louis never called the national legislative assembly, called the
Estates General, into session; in fact, it would not be called until 1789
at the heart of the crisis that precipitated the French Revolution.
Finally, decades of bloodshed
over religion made it obvious that political unity would only be a dream unless
religious unity was achieved first. To that end, Louis, a Roman Catholic,
actively worked to get rid of heterodox religious groups: the Protestant Huguenots,
the Quietists (mystical Christians), and the Jansenists, whose beliefs were
a combination of Calvinism and Catholicism. The greatest threat to religious
unity, as Louis saw it, were the Protestant Huguenots. He destroyed their
churches and burned their schools and forced Protestants, under pain of imprisonment
or death, to convert to Catholicism. Finally, he overturned the Edict of Nantes
and declared Protestantism to be a crime against the state. All Protestant
clergy were exiled from France. Most French Protestants chose to leave France
rather than convert; the latter half of the seventeenth century saw the expansion
of French culture throughout Europe as middle-class French Huguenots brought
their culture, language, and artisan skills to countries all over Europe.
In all the documents that we
can find, it seems that Louis conceived his role as absolute monarch in terms
of benevolence. His reign, he argued, was primarily about benefiting the people
of France materially, spiritually, and militarily. He saw the political and
religious unification of France as a means of protecting his French subjects
from the ravages of political unrest and religious civil war. The collecting
of taxes made this possible, and the reinvesting of taxes in infrastructure
and industry were seen as means of increasing the general national wealth
of the country.
