Louis XIV - Royal Absolutism and the Nation State

"Louis XIV, 1673," painting by Pierre Mignard. One of a considerable number of royal portraits representing Louis in terms of martial and classical glory.

I. Absolute Monarchy

The religious division of Europe after the Reformations favored both the development of the nation state as an autonomous power and as a focus of religious loyalty, the churches becoming more distinctly national churches. In France, which became the most formidable European power in the C17th, the political and ideological formation of the nation state was mediated through the development of royal "absolutism."

In 1654, Louis XIV was crowned king of France. The France he inherited was fiscally ruined, politically corrupt, bitterly divided with warring factions of nobles and private armies, and dangerously insecure, the threat of popular riot persisting in the cities and, in particular, in Paris. During at least the first part of his reign, Louis achieved a far-reaching reform of the state, of its political, economic, and cultural life. France became the paradigm example of "absolutism" - the nation unified and ordered around royal power. Louis' was an "absolute monarchy." "Absolute" meaning that there was, in the state, "no power capable of coercing the sovereign" (Bossuet, see class notes and resource reader). In the theory, as expounded by Bossuet, "absolute" did not mean tyrannical or arbitrary. As Bossuet points out, in "arbitrary" government "there is no law other than [the prince's] will," "absolutism," on the other hand, acknowledged the existence of a body of law, reflecting the will of God, that established rights and limits and which was to be protected by the sovereign.

Three important aspects of Louis XIV's "absolute monarchy:"

i) Centralization

"Consider the king in his council-chamber. From there are sent the orders which unite the efforts of magistrates and captains, citizens and soldiers, provinces and armies on sea and land. It is the image of God who, seated on His throne in the highest heavens, causes nature to function" (Bossuet).

The monarch is represented here as the directing center of the social and political universe. Amongst Louis' first political acts were the reduction of the number of governmental ministers, the limitation of their independent power, and, corresponding to these initiatives, the establishment of a working monarch. By a mixture of threat, bribe, and legal action, Louis negotiated the control or removal of long-standing practices of delegated power. The central government was drastically reduced and the large numbers of minor office-holders left with very limited powers. Essential to this policy of centralization was control over local centers of power: provincial and urban authorities. The process left provincial governors, for instance, with both reduced powers and limited tenure, their continuance thus dependent on the central government. Paris, the notorious center for dissidence and popular revolt was brought under military control and the dangers of rebellion reduced by public building, widening streets, and mounting charitable programs.

ii) Economic Reforms

Under the guidance of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83) a "modern" system of accountancy and yearly state budgeting was introduced. Colbert also supervised systematic attacks on corruption, removing, punishing, or paying off office holders. He also introduced tax reforms - ending exemptions, tax-farming, and military collection of taxes - and state support for industry, science, trade, and the arts. As regards the operations of the state, Colbert raised government income to the point when it could pay for quite massive expenses. Government subsidizing and directing of industry and manufacture increased productivity, raised wages, and brought France into the trade wars with the English and the Dutch. Colbert's considerable success was later undermined by the costs of Louis' foreign policy.

iii) Ideology: the Theater of Absolute Monarchy

An aerial view of the Palace of Versailles with the formal gardens and the park extending west from the Garden Front. The Palace was begun in 1669 under the supervision of Louis Le Vau and continued, after his death a year later, by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. The external archetecture, the interiors - the design of which was dominated by the work of the painter, Charles Lebrun - and the gardens, attempt to unite the full range of the arts under the single purpose of glorifying the sovereign, an artistic ordering that corresponds to Bossuet's description of the absolute monarch as the center of the human world.

According to the theory of absolutism, sovereignty is grounded in God - not in the people - and this justifies the independence of the monarch. Controls upon monarchical power are, therefore, religious and moral and not directly political or legal. The glory of the monarch is, as it were, the earthly point at which is expressed both the glory of the state - as a social whole ordered around and dependent upon the monarch - and the glory of God from whom the monarch derives power and role.

The theory of absolutism was embodied in an extraordinary development of the "theater of monarchy," the public representation of royal power and royal glory. The staging of royal events and visitations aimed at demonstrating the state as concentrated in the person of the king. Understandably, Louis and his ministers pressed the arts into the service of this royal display and, here, of course, the most famous - and expensive - of Louis' representations of royal glory was his palace at Versailles. In their deployment of the arts, Louis' government attempted to control and centralize the arts under royal power: absolutism had its official style - classicism (now generally referred to as "Baroque classicism"), its official great artists, such as Poussin, and its official center of training and cultivation, the Royal Academy.

Nicholas Poussin, "Landscape with the Burial of Phocon," 1648. Poussin argued that the highest purpose of painting is to represent humanity at its noblest. The artist must, therefore, strive to represent nature and history as if they were in a state of perfection: only in this way, he thought, would art attain to its proper moral role.

II. The Cost of Absolutism

"Absolute monarchy" was expensive, not just because of its representation in public events or artistic ventures but, most particularly, because war was an essential element. The glory of the state was bound up with the acquisition and extension of property, the seizure of land. It's sometimes hard to distinguish, in the C17th, peacetime from wartime. "Peace" meant that the struggle for trade, territorial, and status advantage was being carried out by negotiation, bribery, marriage, or threat. "War" was another way of conducting the same business. Peace negotiations were frequently carried on during conflict and conflict was frequently carried on with little direct military advantage - part of the "display," as it were.

Such a foreign policy cost dearly and it is remarkable that the French government could pay the bills for as long as it did. Eventually, though, Louis was defeated by the violent logic of international power. Put simply, nation states sought to achieve security though a system of alliances, a motive that was also accompanied by the wish to secure advantage - territorial, military, and economic. The logic of this meant that no system of alliances would ever be stable (something Immanuel Kant pointed out toward the end of the following century). French military and diplomatic success produced a shift in the system of alliances by which France, rather than Spain or the Hapsburg Emperor, became the focus of hostile international agreements. The cost of war, especially when combined with bad harvests, took a frightful toll from the French economy with rising poverty, famine, the threat of revolt, and disastrous resort to old, corrupt methods of raising fast money. Fenelon, friend and advisor to Louis and Archbishop of Cambrai wrote, in 1694, a courageous letter to the king admonishing him for his foreign and domestic policy (see resource reader). The letter was probably never shown to Louis. It illustrates and condemns the cost of "absolute monarchy" as Louis had practiced it. Referring to Louis' war against the Dutch, Fenelon condemns this part of the theater of national power as "throughly unjustified...the true source of all the evils from which France is suffering."