Merriman-Louis XIV Part 1

Louis XIV by John Merriman As will quickly become obvious, I wrote the footnotes. In Louis XIV’s France, architects and artists were paid to glorify the monarch. In 1662, the king chose the sun as his emblem; he declared himself nec pluribus impar—without equal. To Louis, the sun embodied virtues that he associated with the ideal monarch: firmness, benevolence, and equity. Henceforth, Louis XIV would frequently be depicted as Apollo, the Greek and Roman sun god. The rulers of continental Europe, including Louis XIV, relentlessly extended their power between 1650 and 1750. The sovereigns of France, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Sweden, in particular, became absolute rulers, in principle above all challenge from within the state itself…. They made their personal rule absolute, based on loyalty to them as individuals, not to the state as an abstraction. Absolute rulers asserted their supreme right to proclaim laws and levy taxes, appointing more officials to carry out the details of governance and multiplying fiscal demands on their subjects. They ended most of the long-standing municipal privileges… such as freedom from taxation, or the right to maintain independent courts.1 The absolute state affected the lives of more people than ever before through taxation, military service, and the royal quest for religious orthodoxy. Absolute rule thus impinged directly on the lives of subjects, who felt the extended reach of state power through, for example, more efficient tax collection…. Absolutism was, at least in part, an attempt to reassert public order and coercive state authority after almost seventy years of wars that had badly disrupted trade and agricultural production, contributing to social and political chaos.2 THEORIES OF ABSOLUTISM The doctrine of absolutism originated with French jurists at the end of the sixteenth century. Like absolutism itself, this doctrine arose in part as a reaction to the chaos of religious wars, which came to an end in the German states with the Peace of Augsburg (1555). This treaty stated that the religion of the ruler would become the religion of the land (cuius regio, eius religio). The emergence of theories of absolutism reflected contemporary attempts to conceptualize the significance of the rise of larger territorial states whose rulers enjoyed more power than their predecessors. France was a prime example of this trend. The legal theorist Jean Bodin (1530-1596) had lived through the wars of religion. “Seeing that nothing upon earth is greater or higher, next unto God, than the majesty of kings and sovereign princes,” he wrote in the Six Books of the Republic (1576), the “principal point of sovereign majesty and absolute power [is] to consist principally in giving laws unto the subjects in general, without their consent.”3 The ruler became the father, a stern but benevolent figure. Bodin, who like many other people in France longed for peace and order, helped establish the political theory legitimizing French absolute rule. 1 You may recall my Medieval presentation, in which I pointed out that people who reached towns had certain rights that they termed “liberties” and “freedoms.” Or you might not recall my Medieval presentation…. 2 Prof. Merriman points out that these wars included the Thirty Years’ War, the Dutch War of Independence, and the English Civil War, among others. 3 This quote is a good example of a primary source embedded within a secondary work. Louis XIV: Part I Almost a century later, the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) emerged as the thundering theorist of absolutism....4 In France, Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704), bishop and tutor to Louis XIV, postulated that kings ruled by “divine right,” that is, by virtue of the will of God…. Bossuet held that the ruler’s authority stemmed from God alone. Yet theorists of absolutism recognized the difference between absolute and arbitrary power. Inherent in their theories was the idea that the absolute ruler was responsible for looking after the needs of his people. As Bossuet wrote: “It is one thing for a government to be absolute, and quite another for it to be arbitrary. It is absolute in that it is not liable to constraint, there being no other power capable of coercing the sovereign, who is in this sense independent of all human authority.” But he went on, “it does not follow from this that the government is arbitrary, for besides the fact that all is subject to the judgment of God… there are also laws, in states, so that whatever is done contrary to them is null in a legal sense; moreover, there is always an opportunity for redress, either at other times or in other conditions.” Thus, even according to one of the most determined proponents of absolutism, the monarch, whose legitimacy came from God, nonetheless was subject to limits imposed by reason through laws and traditions. Western monarchs recognized, at least in theory, the necessity of consulting with institutions considered to be representative of interests such as the Church and nobility: parlements (noble law courts), estates, or the Assembly of Notables in France, the Cortes in Spain, and Parliament in non-absolutist England.5 CHARACTERIZING ABSOLUTE RULE Absolute states were characterized by strong, ambitious dynasties, which through advantageous marriages, inheritance, warfare, and treaties added to their dynastic domains and prestige. They had nobilities that accepted monarchical authority in exchange for a guarantee of their status, ownership of land, and privileges within the state and over the peasantry…. Absolute states contained an increasingly centralized and efficient bureaucracy able to extract revenue. And above all, the absolute state was characterized by the deployment of a large standing army capable of maintaining order at home and maintaining or expanding dynastic interests and territories in the context of European power politics. Although some western sovereigns were somewhat limited by representative bodies—diets, parlements, estates—absolute monarchies nonetheless created an unprecedented concentration of governing power. Between 1614 and 1788, no king of France convoked the Estates-General, an assembly of representatives from the three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—that had been created early in the fourteenth century as an advisory council to the king…. Absolutism and Warfare The regular collection of taxes and the expansion of sources of revenue increased the capacity of absolute rulers to maintain standing armies, maintain fortifications, and wage war. By the end of the sixteenth century, Philip II of Spain had allocated three-quarters of state expenditures to pay for past wars or to wage new ones. Appropriately enough, the bureau in Prussia that a century later 4 We will read and discuss some excerpts from Hobbes’ book Leviathan, in an upcoming lesson. 5 The similarity of the word parlements to the English word parliament can be quite confusing. The British parliament is, of course, the legislative branch of the government; the parlement in France was, as Merriman informs us, a part of the judiciary. Don’t be fooled. Page 2 Louis XIV: Part I would oversee tax collection itself evolved from the General War Office, making explicit the close connection between the extraction of state revenue and the waging of dynastic wars. Absolutist statemaking and warfare had direct and indirect consequences for most of the European population. Kings no longer depended on troops provided by nobles or conscripted by military contractors, thereby avoiding the risk that private armies might challenge royal power. Standing armies continued to grow in size during the eighteenth century. During the [sixteenth century], the peacetime armies of the continental powers had included about 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers; by the 1690s, they reached about 150,000 soldiers. For the first time, uniforms became standard equipment for every soldier. The French army, which soon stood at about 180,000 men in peacetime, rose to 350,000 soldiers during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)…. As absolute monarchs consolidated their power, the reasons for waging international wars changed. The wars of the previous century had been fought, in principle, over the rivalry between the Catholic and Protestant religions, even if dynastic interests were never far from the surface. Now, although religious rivalries still constituted an important factor in international conflict (as in the case of the long struggle between the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Catholic Habsburg Empire), “reasons of state” became a prevalent justification for the rulers of France, Prussia, and Russia to make war on their neighbors. Warfare both encouraged and drew upon the development of credit institutions, further expanding the capacity of the state to raise money to wage war…. [But] the French monarchy lacked the confidence of wary investors, and despite the sale of privileges, found itself in an increasingly perilous financial situation. Moreover, the French monarchy often had to pay higher rates of interest than private investors because it was a bad credit risk. Even in peacetime, military expenditures now took up almost half of the budget of the European state. In times of war, the percentage rose to 80 percent, or even more. Inevitably, there came a point even in absolute states when noble and other wealthy families upon which monarchies depended for financial support began to grumble. Absolutism and Religion Absolute monarchs intruded in matters of faith by both aiding established churches and limiting ecclesiastical authority within their states. An alliance with established churches helped monarchs achieve and maintain absolute rule. In particular, in Catholic states, the Church’s quest for uniformity of belief and practice went hand in hand with the absolutist monarch’s desire to eliminate challenges to his authority. Absolute monarchs lent their authority and prestige to the Church, the support of which, in turn, seemed to legitimize absolute monarchical power.

Load more