Lecture 3: Power and Grandeur: State Building and Absolutism in the 17th Century

Context and Connection: the 17th Century Crisis

• Rebellions in France, England, Catalonia & Portugal, Naples, and the Netherlands during the 1640s to 1650s were mainly reactions against the increased demands of monarchs and princes for new taxes which rulers used primarily to finance escalating wars. One could argue that the revolts were nearly simultaneous reactions against a dynamic absolutism that was seen to violate customary laws and threaten the social position of elites and the livelihoods of ordinary people.
• These revolts aggravated developing uncertainties about the nature and location of legitimate political authority. Were does political sovereignty reside? In the prince, a representative assembly, the people? What role should nobles, townsmen, or the commercial classes play in government? What was good government?

Theme: Political development and the centralization of power in territorial states

Terms:

Composite state: a dynastic or territorial state composed of a collection of formerly independent provinces, regions, principalities, or other historically distinct units.

Consolidation of Power: increasing state power over the population and resources of a specific territory and political unit by extending degrees of control, extraction, and integration.

Accumulation of Power: augmenting power through the accumulation of additional territory and its resources, by marriage (dynastic accumulation), by conquest, by seizure, etc.

A Model of State Formation

Leopold I, 1640–1705, Holy Roman emperor (1658–1705), king of Bohemia (1656–1705) and of Hungary (1655–1705), second son and successor of Ferdinand III. The most formidable rival of Louis XIV for European hegemony.

Louis XIV: The Projection of Grandeur and Power (1638-1715, ruled 1654-1715)

The annotated images that follow the above link seek to show how the Louis XIV sought to transform the idea of kingship from Henry IV's First Gentleman of the Realm to majestic supremacy of the Sun King. Centuries before the advent of "mass media," rulers like Louis devoted themselves to projecting political imagery that would impress aristocrats, the privileged classes, and foreign rulers and courts with their power, grandeur, glory, and legitimacy, often by representing themselves as the heirs of Rome or other historic empire.

From this essay in images, we turn now to key features of the consolidation of power in France under Louis XIV

Extending Control

• Over the tax collecting machinery through the permanent establishments of provincial administrators known as Intendants who supervised the collection of taxes and the recruitment of soldiers, who kept a close eye on public order, who was charged with the enforcement of royal legislation, and who general served as the "eyes and ears" of the crown in the provinces of the kingdom. Unlike previous royal officials and administrators who purchased their posts, the intendant served at the pleasure of the king and his ministers.
• Over the army by creating a new officer, the Lieutenant Colonel, who was promoted on the basis of merit and not on the basis of venal office, i.e., an office that could be obtained by purchase.
• Over the provincial and upper nobility through the creation of a court for aristocrats. Summoned to reside at Versailles, aristocrats were under the eye of the king and made dependent on his patronage. Separated from their aristocratic patrons, provincial nobles largely withdrew from involvement in high politics of the realm.
• Reducing the constraints on royal power by eliminating some provincial estates, by not calling the national representative body known as the Estates General (last meeting in 1604), and by disallowing the supreme courts of the kingdom (the parlements) to delay the registration and enforcement of royal legislation.

Extending the Extraction of Money and Manpower

• Increased royal revenues by increasing direct taxes on the unprivileged (peasants, artisans, the middles classes) and indirect (sales) taxes that touched nearly everyone (tax on wine, salt, goods brought into towns, etc.)
• Increased revenues from privileged or semi-privileged groups through the sale of titles and offices, the most expensive of which conferred nobility after a specified length of time. The sale of titles and offices was known as venality of office. It would an important issue in the French Revolution.
• Increased the yield of taxation through closer supervision by the royal intendants.
• Expanded recruitment for the royal army, which rose to some 400,000 at its peak, many times larger than any European army since the Roman Empire.

Accumlating Power by extending the frontiers of France.

• From the 1670s, Louis and his ministers deployed the growing army to expand the eastern borders of France, setting off a nearly continuous period of war that would not end until the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.
• Added by conquest and annexation were territories in the northeast around the city of Lille, Alsace, and Franche Comté--all territories that were previously held by the Spanish or Austrian Habsburgs.

The Integration of more or less privileged groups into the regime

• incorporation of the high nobility in the court system of honors and patronage
• and as the officer corps in the growing royal army
• incorporation of wealthy non-noble bourgeois through the sale of offices, status, and, in some cases, nobility itself.

Implications and Significance of French and European Absolutism

• Absolutism was a process of augmenting the ruler's power through the accumulation of more territory and the centralizing of government power in a territory. Rulers sought to diminish the constraints on their rule that were imposed by representative assemblies (diets, estates, parlements, and parliaments) or through resistance by nobles and aristocrats. Absolutist rulers never obtained complete freedom of action, and they recognized that they, too, were subject to divine and natural or moral law.
• Louis XIV and other absolutist rulers made no real attempt to destroy existing, traditional institutions but merely sought to mold and control them. Louis XIV muted the resistance of the judges of the parlements (supreme courts) but did not attempt to do away with these institutions.
• No attempt was made to overturn the established hierarchies of social prestige, wealth, and status, and indeed venality of office was a means of allowing wealthy non-nobles to buy their way into upward social mobility.
• With few exceptions, Louis XIV and his peers did not rule through organized terror. One exception did occur in Louis XIV's campaign to force French Protestants to convert to catholicism or leave the kingdom. After the dwindling religious freedom for Protestants were fully abolished by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1683, royal armies were sent to Protestant strongholds in the South to coerce conversion and repress Protestant religious practice. One tactic was to billet soldiers in the homes of Protestants who thereby became financial responsible for the food and shelter of the solider's. This would continue until the household converted.

• IN SUM, absolutism was not totalitarianism of the kind that would later emerge in the 20th century under Hitler and Stalin, made possible in part by revolutionary changes in technology, such as the telegraph, the public address system, the radio, and mass media generally.