How Were Kings In Both England And France Able To Increase Their Power Over The Nobles?

Chapter 8: Absolutism

"Absolutism" is a concept of political authority created by historians to describe a shift in the governments of the major monarchies of Europe in the early modern period. In other words, while the monarchs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries certainly knew they were doing something differently than had their predecessors, they did not apply the term "authoritarianism" itself. The fundamental idea behind absolutism was that the king or queen was, kickoff, the holder of (theoretically) absolute political power within the kingdom, and 2d, that the monarch'southward every action should be in the proper name of preserving and guaranteeing the rights and privileges of his or her subjects, occasionally even including the peasants.

Absolutism was in contrast to medieval and Renaissance-era forms of monarchy in which the male monarch was but first amidst equals, holding formal feudal authority over his aristocracy nobles, but often being merely their equal, or even junior, in terms of real authorisation and power. Every bit demonstrated in the instance of the French Wars of Religion, there were often numerous modest states and territories that sometimes rivaled larger ones in power, and even nobles that were part of a given kingdom had the right to raise and maintain their own armies outside of the straight command of the monarch.

That changed starting in the early on seventeenth century, primarily in France. What emerged was a stronger, centralized form of monarchy in which the monarch held much more power than even the virtually powerful nobleman. Royal bureaucracies were strengthened, frequently at the expense of the determination-making power and influence of the nobility, as non-noble officials were appointed to positions of real power in the authorities. Armies grew and, with them, the tax to back up them became both greater in sheer volume and more than efficient in its collection techniques. In short, more existent power and money flowed to the central government of the monarch than ever earlier, something that underwrote the expansion of military and colonial power in the same menstruum, as well as a dazzling cultural evidence of that power exemplified by the French "sun rex," Louis 14.

France

The exemplary instance of absolutist government coming to fruition was that of France in the seventeenth century. The transformation of the French state from a conventional Renaissance-era monarchy to an accented monarchy began under the reign of Louis XIII, the son of Henry Iv (the victor of the French Wars of Religion). Louis 13 came to the throne as an eight-year-old when his begetter was assassinated in 1610. Following conventional practice when a male monarch was likewise young to rule, his mother Marie de Medici held power as regent, ane who rules in the name of the rex, enlisting the help of a vivid French cardinal, Armand de Richelieu. While Marie de Medici eventually stepped downwards as regent, Richelieu joined the rex as his chief minister in 1628 and connected to play the primal role in shaping the French state.

Key Richelieu, in many ways the builder of absolute monarchy in France.

Richelieu deserves a great bargain of the credit for laying the foundation for absolutism in France. He suppressed various revolts against royal power that were led past nobles, and he created a system of royal officials called Intendants, majestic governors who were men who were unremarkably not themselves noble but were instead fatigued from the mercantile classes. They collected majestic taxes and supervised administration and military recruitment in the regions to which they were assigned; they did not have to answer to local lords.

Richelieu's major focus was improving taxation drove. To do and then, he abolished 3 out of six regional assemblies that, traditionally, had the right to approve changes in taxation. He fabricated himself superintendent of commerce and navigation, recognizing the growing importance of commerce in providing purple revenue. He managed to increment the revenue from the taille, the straight revenue enhancement on state, about threefold during his tenure (r. 1628 – 1642). That said, while he did curtail the ability of the elite nobles, nearly of those who bore the brunt of his improved techniques of revenue enhancement were the peasants; Richelieu compared the peasants to mules, noting that they were only useful for working.

Richelieu was as well a cardinal: ane of the highest-ranking "princes of the church," officially beholden only to the pope. His real focus, still, was the French crown. It was said that he "worshiped the state" much more than he appeared to concern himself with his duties as a cardinal. He fifty-fifty oversaw French support of the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years' War equally a cheque against the ability of the Habsburgs, and also supported the Ottoman Turks against the Habsburgs for the same reason. Just to underline this point: a Catholic cardinal, Richelieu, supported Protestants and Muslims confronting a Catholic monarchy in the name of French power.

Louis Fourteen – the Lord's day Rex

Louis 13 died in 1643, and his son became king Louis Xiv. The latter was yet too immature to take the throne, so his mother became regent, ruling forth Richelieu'southward protégé, Jules Mazarin, who continued Richelieu's policies and focus on tax and imperial centralization. Nigh immediately, however, simmering resentment confronting the growing power of the king exploded in a series of uprisings confronting the crown known every bit The Fronde, essentially a noble-led ceremonious state of war against the monarchy (the rebels even formed a formal alliance with Spain). They were defeated by loyal forces in 1653, but the uprisings fabricated a profound impression on the young king, who vowed to bring the nobles into line.

When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis ascended to total power (he was 23). Louis went on to a long and dazzling dominion, achieving the elevation of royal power and prestige not but in France, merely in all of Europe. He ruled from 1643 – 1715 (including the years in which he ruled under the guidance of a regent) meaning he was king for an amazing 54 years; consider the fact that the average life expectancy for those surviving infancy was but about forty years at the time(!). Louis was chosen the Lord's day King, a term and an image he actively cultivated, declaring himself "without equal," and beingness depicted as the dominicus god Apollo (he one time performed as Apollo in a ballet before his nobles, to rapturous applause – he was an excellent dancer). He was, amongst other things, a primary marketer and propagandist of himself and his own authority. He had teams of artists, playwrights, and architects build statues, paint pictures, write plays and stories, and build buildings all glorifying his paradigm.

Famously, Louis adult what had begun as a hunting lodge (first built past his father) in the hamlet of Versailles, about xv miles southeast of Paris, into the nearly glorious palace in Europe, built in the baroque style and lavishly decorated with ostentatious finery. Over the decades of his long dominion, the palace and grounds of the Palace of Versailles grew into the largest and most spectacular seat of purple power in Europe, on par with any palace in the world at the time. There were 1,400 fountains in the gardens, i,200 orangish trees, and an ongoing series of operas, plays, assurance, and parties. x,000 people could live in the palace, counting its additional buildings, since Louis ultimately had 2,000 rooms built both in the palace and in apartments in the hamlet, all furnished at the state's expense. The grounds cover nearly two,000 acres, or just over iii square miles (by comparing, Central Park in New York City is a mere 843 acres in size).

A contemporary photograph of the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, a spectacular case of baroque compages and interior pattern.

Louis expected high-ranking nobles to spend role of the year at Versailles, where they were lodged in apartments and spent their days bickering, gossiping, gambling, and taking part in elaborate rituals surrounding the person of the rex. Each morning time, loftier-ranking nobles greeted the king equally he awoke (the "rising" of the king, in parallel to the rising of the sun), hand-picked favorites carried out such tasks as tying the ribbons on his shoes, so the procession accompanied him to breakfast. Comparable rituals connected throughout the day, ensuring that only those nobles in the male monarch's favor ever had the opportunity to speak to him directly. The rituals were advisedly staged not only to stand for deference to Louis, but to emphasize the hierarchy of ranks amongst the nobles themselves, undermining their unity and forcing them to squabble over his favor. One of the simplest ways in which Versailles undermined their power was that it toll then much to maintain oneself there – about l% of the acquirement of all but the very richest nobles present in the town or the château was spent on lodging, clothes, gifts, and servants.

Around the king's person, courtiers had to exist very conscientious to wear the right clothes, make the right gestures, use the right phrases, and even brandish the correct facial expressions. Departure could, and more often than not did, lead to humiliation and a sometimes permanent loss of the king's favor, to the delighted mockery of the other nobles. This was not just an elaborate game: anyone wishing to "get" anything from the regal government (eastward.k. having a son appointed equally an officeholder in the army, joining an elite majestic university of scholars, securing a lucrative imperial alimony, serving equally a diplomat abroad, etc.). had to convince the king and his officials that he was witty, poised, fashionable, and respected within the court. One false move and a career could be ruined. At the same time, the rituals surrounding the rex were not invented to humiliate and impoverish his nobles per se; instead, they celebrated each noble'southward ability in terms of his or her proximity to the male monarch. Nobles at Versailles were reminded of two things at in one case: their dependence and deference to the male monarch, but too their own dignity and power every bit those who had the correct to be near the king.

Not just nobles participated in the dizzying web of favor-trading, gossip, and bribery at Versailles, notwithstanding. Possibly surprisingly, any well-dressed person was welcome to walk through the palace and the grounds and confer with those present (Louis 14 prided himself on the "openness" of his courtroom, contrasting it with the closed-off court of a tyrant). Both men and women from very humble origins sometimes rose to prominence, and made a salubrious living, at Versailles by serving every bit go-betweens for elites seeking royal positions in the bureaucracy. Others took advantage of the state'southward desperate demand for acquirement by proposing new tax schemes; those that were accepted ordinarily came with a payment for the person who submitted the scheme, so information technology was possible to brand a living by "brainstorming" for revenue enhancement acquirement on behalf of the monarchy. Despite the vast social gap between the nobility and commoners, many nobles were perfectly happy to form working relationships with useful social inferiors, and in some cases real friendships emerged in the procedure.

Some aspects of life at Versailles seem comical today: the palace is and then huge that the food was normally cold before it made information technology from the kitchens to the dining room; on one occasion Louis' wine froze en road. Some of the nobles who lived in the palace or its grounds would use the hallways to relieve themselves instead of the privies because the latter were and so inadequate and far from their rooms. The palace had been designed for display, not comfort.

The costs of edifice and maintaining such an enormous temple to monarchical power were enormous. During the height of its construction, 60% of the royal revenue went to funding the elaborate court at Versailles itself (this later dropped to v% under Louis XVI, but the old figure was well-remembered and resented), an enormous ongoing expenditure that nevertheless shored upwardly regal prestige. Louis himself delighted in life at courtroom, refusing to return to Paris (which he hated) and dismissing the financial costs as beneath his dignity to take notice of. At Versailles, life orbited effectually his person and, by extension, his power, which was never seriously challenged during his lifetime.

Louis did not merely preside over the ongoing pageant at Versailles, yet. He was dedicated to glorifying French achievements in art, scholarship, and his personal obsession: warfare. He created important theater companies, founded French republic's first scientific university, and supported the Académie Française, the body dedicated to preserving the purity of the French linguistic communication founded before past Richelieu (during Louis Fourteen'due south reign, the University published the first official French dictionary). French literature, art, and scientific discipline all prospered under his sponsorship, and French became the language of international diplomacy among European states.

The above martial portrait of Louis Fourteen depicts him, symbolically, in his part as supreme war machine commander. He is dressed in full (ceremonial) armor, holding a sword, and presiding over a battle in the groundwork.

To keep up with costs, Louis connected to entrust acquirement collection to non-noble bureaucrats. The most of import was Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619 – 1683), who doubled royal revenues by reducing the cut taken by revenue enhancement collectors (merely a quarter of revenue used to reach majestic coffers; he got it up to fourscore% in some cases), increasing tariffs on foreign trade going to France, and greatly increasing France'southward overseas commercial interests. Colbert was the model of a powerful commoner despised past the dignity: not simply was he part of the system that held noble power in check, he was a mere shopkeeper's son.

While Louis' chief legacy was the paradigm of monarchy that he created, his applied policies were largely destructive to France itself. Commencement, he relentlessly persecuted religious minorities, going later various small groups of religious dissenters but concentrating most of his attending and ire on the Huguenots. In 1685 he officially revoked the Edict of Nantes that his grandfather had created to grant the Huguenots toleration, and he offered them the choice of conversion to Catholicism or exile. While many did catechumen, over 200,000 fled to parts of Germany, kingdom of the netherlands, England, and America. In one roughshod swoop, Louis crippled what had been among the about commercially productive sectors of the French population, ultimately strengthening his various enemies in the process.

Second, he waged constant war. From 1680 – 1715 Louis launched a series of wars, primarily against his Habsburg rivals, which succeeded in seizing small chunks of territory on France's borders from various Habsburg lands and in saddling the monarchy with enormous debts. Colbert, the architect of the vastly more efficient systems of taxation, repeatedly warned Louis that these wars were financially untenable; Louis merely ignored the question of whether he had enough money to wage them. The threat of France was so great that fifty-fifty traditional enemies similar England and the netherlands on one hand and the Habsburgs on the other joined forces confronting Louis, and after a lengthy state of war, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forced Louis to abandon further territorial ambitions. Furthermore, the costs of the wars were and then high that his authorities desperately sought new sources of revenue, selling noble titles and bureaucratic offices, instituting notwithstanding new taxes, and further trampling the peasants. When he died in 1715, the state was technically bankrupt.

Elsewhere in Europe

About everywhere in Europe, other monarchies tried to imitate both the style and the substance of Louis XIV's court and style of dominion. They built palaces based on Versailles fifty-fifty equally the early-modernistic military revolution, not to mention Louis' constant wars, obliged them to seek out new forms of taxation and reliance on royal officials to build up their armies and fortifications. In almost cases, from Sweden to Austria, monarchs worked out compromises with their nobles that saw both sides benefit, generally at the expense of the peasantry.

Prussia

Arguably the nearly successful absolutist state in Europe besides France was the small northern German kingdom of Brandenburg, the forerunner of the later High german state of Prussia. In 1618, the king of Brandenburg inherited the kingdom of East Prussia, and in the following years smaller territories in the west on the Rhine River. From this geographically unconnected series of territories was the country at present known as Frg to evolve.

In 1653, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm struck the "Neat Compromise" with his nobles . He received a armed services subsidy in the form of taxes, along with the right to make police contained of noble oversight. In return, the nobility received confirmation that only nobles could ain land and, further, that they had full control over the peasants on their land. In essence, the already-existing status of serfdom on Prussian lands was made permanent. Serfs could non inherit property or even leave the country they worked without the permission of their lord. One Prussian recalled existence taught, presumably in a church-run primary school, that "the king could cut off the noses and ears of all his subjects if he wished to do and then, and that nosotros owed information technology to his goodness and his gentle disposition that he had left us in possession of these necessary organs."

In plow, Friedrich Wilhelm supervised the cosmos of the first truly efficient state appliance in Europe, with his revenue enhancement collection agency (which grew out of the war part) operating at literally twice the efficiency of the French equivalent. The major country office was chosen General Directory Over Finance, War, and Purple Domains; it was perhaps one of the original sources of the stereotypes of ruthless German efficiency. His son, Frederick I (r. 1688 – 1713) farther consolidated the power of the monarchy, built upwards the royal majuscule of Berlin, and received the right to merits the title of "King of Prussia" from the Holy Roman Emperor.

Prussia began every bit the union of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, eventually growing to get 1 of the about powerful German states.

His grandson, confusingly also named Friedrich Wilhelm ("Friedrich Wilhelm I" every bit opposed to just "Friedrich Wilhelm," r. 1713 – 1740) built on the work of his grandpa and father primarily by concentrating all country ability on the military. He more than doubled the size of the Prussian army (from 30,000 to 83,000, making it the quaternary largest in Europe), lived modestly in a few rooms in the palace, wore his officer'south compatible everywhere, and occasionally punched out the teeth of judges whose sentences he disagreed with. It was said during his rule that "what distinguishes the Prussians from other people is that theirs is non a country with an army. They have an army and a country that serves it." Most importantly, Frederick Wilhelm created formal systems of conscription (i.e. "the draft"), meaning more men in Prussia, per capita, served in the armed forces than did men anywhere else in Europe. He also established the first system of military reserves, with reservists drilling for two months a year during the summers. In short, Prussia became the most militarized society in Europe.

Over the class of the eighteenth century, Prussia was embroiled in a series of wars that confirmed its condition as a European "great power." Its version of absolutism, one centered on the dominance of the rex, the rights of the nobles, and an overwhelming focus on the armed services, proved effective in transforming information technology from backwater to the just serious rival to Austria for say-so in Key Europe. Notably, Prussia joined Republic of austria and Russia in dividing up the entire kingdom of Poland in 1772, extinguishing Polish independence until the twentieth century.

Austria

Prussia's great rival in the eighteenth century was Austria. Austria, as the ancestral state of the Habsburgs, had ever been the single nigh powerful German state inside the Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburgs, nevertheless, found that the diversity of their domains greatly hampered their ability to develop along absolutist lines. In some cases, they were able to reduce the power and independence of some of their nobles by supporting even more onerous control of peasants: for case, in Bohemia, peasants were made to piece of work three days a week for their nobles, for free, and in return the Maverick nobles allowed the emperor more control of the territory itself. In other territories like Republic of hungary, however, nobles successfully resisted the encroachment of their Habsburg rulers.

The long-term design was that, especially afterward the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 rendered the political construction of the Holy Roman Empire almost meaningless, "Habsburg" meant "Austrian." The Habsburgs ruled Republic of austria itself and exercised existent control over the elective kingdoms of their empire like Hungary and Bohemia, only had virtually no authority over the other Holy Roman states. With the Spanish branch of the family dying off in 1700 (the last Castilian Habsburg, Charles II, died without an heir in 1700), this identification was even stronger.

Despite existence unable to impose absolutism across the vast breadth of their territories, the Habsburg line produced highly constructive rulers in the eighteenth century in particular. The empress Maria Theresa (r. 1740 – 1780), the just surviving heir to the Habsburg throne when her begetter died, proved a proficient administrator who rationalized the offices of the Austrian state, shored up the loyalty of her non-Austrian subjects, and even won the grudging admiration of the Prussians. Her rule represented a nearly impossible balance in the gender expectations of the fourth dimension. She was on the one paw a devoted wife (to a rex "espoused" – her hubby held no power over the empire) and female parent to some sixteen children (non all of whom survived infancy, still). On the other hand, she successfully projected an image of imperial power that included her direction of Austrian forces during war and of applied administration during peacetime. Her son Joseph II was obliged to dominion aslope his female parent until her death in 1780, inheriting the empire at the height of its power and prosperity.

Spain

Practically every kingdom in Europe saw at least an attempt by a male monarch or queen to reorganize the state along the absolutist lines followed by French republic. From Sweden, to England, to Spain, monarchs tried to consolidate royal ability at the expense of their nobles and on the backs of their peasants. Those efforts were at to the lowest degree partly successful in places similar Sweden and Denmark, merely were disastrous failures in places like Espana and England.

Spain had been the most powerful kingdom in Europe in the sixteenth century. Thanks to its takeover of Central and S America, it had enormous reserves of bullion in the sixteenth century, and cheers to shrewd marriages by the Habsburgs, Spain was role of the largest dynastic organization in Europe. All the same, both the failed invasion of England in 1588 and the ongoing debacle of the Dutch Revolt resulted in enormous losses of both wealth and prestige by the Spanish. By the 1620s and confronting the backdrop of the Thirty Years' State of war, the monarchy was bankrupt and Spain itself was divided between numerous small-scale but more often than not independent kingdoms and territories. Spain became almost like a smaller version of the Holy Roman Empire, with the Spanish king only directly ruling the central territory of Castile (it was the Castilian dialect, centered on Madrid, that became the official Castilian language).

Spanish nobles came to agree their ain kings in contempt and asserted their own sovereignty against the pretensions of the monarchy. Attempts by royal officials to enact reforms like to those undertaken by Richelieu in French republic met with failure; even as Espana was losing the Dutch Revolt, it was trying to bankroll the Catholic forces of the Thirty Years' War, thereby undermining its own financial reserves and stretching its armed services power to the breaking signal. The regional parliaments of various Spanish territories revolted confronting the cardinal monarchy in the mid-seventeenth century, with Portugal achieving complete independence in 1640.

Simultaneously, there was petty economical dynamism in Spain. At that place was a minor middle form, and Espana'southward conservative nobility succeeded in preventing non-nobles from achieving positions of authority within the Castilian regal bureaucracy. The earlier assaults on Jews and Muslims had already driven out the almost dynamic economical elements from Kingdom of spain, and the set on on the Moriscos and Conversos (descendants of the Muslims and Jews who had converted to Catholicism) drove many of them away as well. Spain'south vast empire continued to produce great wealth, just relatively little of that wealth ended up in the coffers of the monarchy, and the sheer scale of the slave-based extraction of precious metals from the New World ran up against simple economic science laws: by the seventeenth century this bullion-based system was in dire straits thanks to the aggrandizement silverish imports introduced to the European economy.

There was a strong mood of low and nostalgia amid aristocracy Spaniards of the time, well-nigh memorably expressed in one of the groovy works of Castilian literature, Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote (published in two parts, 1605 and 1615), portraying a delusional small nobleman trying to alive out a glorious tale of fighting giants and dragons while actually attacking windmills. Especially as its royal line grew moribund in the second one-half of the seventeenth century, and following the inconclusive cease of the Thirty Years' War Spain had largely financed, the ability of the Spanish state grew ever weaker.