Absolute Monarchs of the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries
Louis XIV: The Ideal Monarch Who Domesticated the Nobility
Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) was four when he ascended the throne of France. His mother was his regent, and she chose Italian Cardinal Mazarin (16021661) as prime minister.
- • Like Richelieu, Mazarin was a capable administrator, and he protected Louis’s claim to the throne during the tumultuous Wars of the Fronde, which reached their height from 1650 to 1652.
- • The Frondeurs were nobles who sought to limit the powers of the monarch and to decentralize the government in order to extend their own influence. With the support of the bourgeoisie and the peasants, who had little to gain in a return to the feudal order, Mazarin was able to subdue the Frondeurs and their ally, Spain.
- • When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis declared himself as his own prime minister .
- ○ “L’Etat, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) became the credo of this most absolutist monarch during the age of absolutism.
- ○ Bishop Jacques Bossuet (1607-1704) provided the philosophical justification for the divine right theory of rule.
- ○ He claimed that Louis, like any absolutist monarch, was placed on the throne by God, and therefore owed his authority to no person or group.
- • According to feudal tradition, French society was divided into three Estates, made up of the various classes.
- ○ The First Estate was the clergy, up to 1 percent of the population.
- ○ The Second Estate was the nobility and comprised 3 to 4 percent of the population.
- ○ The Third Estate included the great bulk of the population: the bourgeoisie or middle classes, the artisans and urban workers, and the peasants.
- ○ Since France was, as were all European nations at this time, predominantly agrarian, 90 percent of its population lived on farms in the countryside.
- • Louis XIV reigned over the Golden Age of French culture and influence:
- ○ With a population of 17 million (about 20 percent of Europe’s total), France was the strongest nation on the continent.
- ○ Its industry and agriculture surpassed that of any other European country.
- ○ Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), “The Father of French Mercantilism,” revitalized trade as Louis’s finance minister by abolishing internal tariffs and creating a free trade zone in most of France.
- • He stimulated industry by subsidizing vital manufacturing and by building up the military.
- • He hoped to make France self-sufficient by building a large fleet that would rival that of the English and Dutch and enable the French to acquire an overseas empire.
- • Since even France could not afford both a powerful army and navy, Louis opted for the army.
- • The result was the global supremacy of the British, whose navy ruled the seas of the world for over a century over an empire so large that the sun literally did not set on it.
- • French became the “universal tongue,” spoken by diplomats and in the royal courts of all Europe.
- ○ Louis patronized artists and especially writers such as Corneille, Racine (1639-1699), Moliere (1622-1673), de Sevigne, de Saint-Simon (1607-1693), La Fontaine, De La Rochefoucauld (1621-1695).
- ○ French literature and style (in dress, furniture, architecture) became standards by which all Europeans measured their sophistication.
- • France developed Europe’s first modern army.
- ○ Continuation of the military revolution begun by France during the Habsburg-Valois Wars.
- ○ Artillery, usually supplied by civilian private contractors, · was made a part of the army.
- ○ The government, instead of officers, recruited, trained, equipped, and garrisoned troops.
- ○ A chain of command was established, and the army was increased from 100,000 to 400,000, the largest in Europe.
War Was an Instrument of Louis’s Foreign Policy
For two thirds of his reign, France was at war.
- • The War of the Devolution (1667-1668): France’s unsuccessful attempt to seize the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) as part of a feudal claim.
- • The Dutch War (1672-1678): Revenge for the Dutch role in defeating France in the War of Devolution and an attempt to seek France’s “natural boundary in the west,” the Rhine River – largely unsuccessful.
- • The Nine Years’ War (1688-1697): Also called the War of the Grand Alliance or the War of the League of Augsburg was a major war of the late seventeenth century.
- ○ France, was opposed by a European-wide coalition, the Grand Alliance, fought primarily on mainland Europe and its surrounding waters.
- ○ A campaign in colonial North America between French and English settlers and their respective Indian allies, called “King William’s War” by the English colonists was a part of this war.
- ○ Although France retained Luxembourg, most of Louis’s ambitions were frustrated.
- • The War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714): Louis threatened to upset the Balance of Power (the theory that no single state should be predominant on the continent) in Europe by laying claim to the Spanish throne for his grandson.
- ○The Grand Alliance, which included the major states of Western Europe, fought to prevent this union of the French and Spanish thrones.’
- ○ The Treaty of Utrecht (1713-1714): Restored the balance of power by allowing Philip V, Louis’s grandson, to remain on the Spanish throne as long as France and Spain were never ruled by the same monarch.
- • Also awarded to the victors various European and overseas possessions of the Spanish Empire.
Summary of Louis XIV’s Reign
Although his reign solidified the central government and marked the high point of absolutism in France, his many wars exhausted the treasury. This left the bourgeoisie and the peasantry with an enormous tax burden since the clergy and nobility were exempted from most taxes. His personal extravagances aggravated the situation: The Royal Palace at Versailles cost over $2.3 billion in 2015 U.S. dollars to build, and added to that was the money spent on his elaborate entertainments for the “captive nobility” at court. He defanged the nobles by making participation in court life a social requirement. He suppressed religious dissent, outlawing Jansenism, a form of Catholic Calvinism, revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed toleration for the Huguenots, and made Catholicism mandatory.
Accomplishments of Louis XIV
- • The central government that developed in France from the era of the religious wars to Louis’s reign was efficient.
- • The power of the nobles was weakened.
- • Tax collection was systematized.
- • Royal edicts were enforced.
- • The bourgeoisie was given a role in administration.
- • The economic system was successful.
- ○ Agriculture and trade were stimulated.
- ○ The seeds for revolution were sown in the national debt that had to be paid off by the Third Estate, which bore many responsibilities and enjoyed few privileges.
Russia
Russia became a state in the fifteenth century when the Duchy of Muscovy, under Ivan the Great (r. 1462-1505) overcame subjugation by the Central Asian Tartars. After the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, Russia became not only the inheritor of Byzantine culture and the center of the Orthodox Church, but an empire with Moscow as “the third Rome” and a czar (Caesar) or tsar on the throne.
- • Under Basil (Vasily) III (r. 1505-1533) and the much maligned but very capable Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584), expansion and consolidation of the new empire continued in a sporadic fashion with some advances and some reversals.
- ○ In order to attain soldiers, the empire gave aristocratic landowners, the Boyars, control over their peasants, who gradually fell into serfdom, a condition of being bound to the land that had ended in virtually all of Western Europe.
- ○ The Boyars influenced government policy through a council, the Duma.
- • A theme common in most nations with a monarchy, there was a continuing battle for supremacy between a strong central government and a powerful aristocracy.
- • Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725), a Romanov and a contemporary of Louis XIV of France, gained vast territories from the Baltic Sea in the north, to the Black Sea in the south, and eastward toward the Pacific Ocean. Probably his greatest contribution was the Westernization of Russia.
- ○ Peter the Great expanded the power of the state and of the czars by establishing a powerful standing army, a civil service, and an educational system to train technicians in the skills developed by western science and technology. He imposed economic burdens, Western ideas, and social restrictions on the peasants to further his power, erected the planned city of St. Petersburg on the Baltic, and built magnificent, ornate baroque palaces, churches, and public buildings to glorify his reign. Russia became one of the major powers of Europe during this period.
- ○ Although he could not be considered an Enlightened Despot, he recruited hundreds of Western artisans, built a new capital on the Gulf of Finland, St. Petersburg, his “window to the West,” reformed the government bureaucracy and the Russian Orthodox Church, reorganized and equipped the army with modern weapons, and encouraged commerce and industry.
