Aristocracy and Absolutism

in the

Seventeenth Century

The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of relative political stability in Europe. Although wars still occurred, they lacked the intensity of the preceding period. In the ascendant states, such as France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and England, central governments were gaining authority. The primary power, and for many states the model of political authority, was France. There, Louis XIV, supported by a strong standing army, a policy of mercantilism, and a growing bureaucracy, wielded absolute power. There were similar situations in Prussia, Austria, and Russia. A different pattern occurred in England, where the central government remained strong while the monarchy itself weakened. There, after the return to power of the Stuart kings between 1660 and 1688, a revolution furthered the authority of Parliament.

During this period, important social, political, and economic changes occurred unevenly and generally benefited those who were already prominent and well to do. Aristocrats lost some of their independence to kings in countries such as France and Prussia, but they continued to staff most of the important government offices, to maintain their elevated prestige, and to influence cultural styles and tastes. For most people, the structure of society, the way of life, and the relevant institutions changed little throughout this period.

This material concentrates on two broad topics: the growth of central government and Early Modern society. The selections address a number of questions. For the first topic, what was the nature of monarchical absolutism in France? How did it differ from Prussian monarchical absolutism? How did the pattern of monarchical absolutism compare with the growth of parliamentary power in England? What institutions and policies were developed to facilitate the growth of central governments? For the second topic, what was the nature of the family in Early Modern Europe? What were typical attitudes toward childhood? What were the traditional values and patterns of life for commoners during this period?

This dual focus should provide some broad insights into Europe during the seventeenth century and help establish a background for eighteenthcentury developments.

Absolutism Myth and Reality

G. Durand

During the seventeenth century, several monarchs attained such unprecedented power and authority that historians have used the term "absolutism" to describe these political systems. Other historians have argued that the term is misleading, that neither the ambitions of the monarchs nor the results constituted political absolutism. In thefollowing selection G. Durand analyzes the myth and the reality of absolutism.

Consider: Why Durand prefers to view absolutism as a tendency; how Durand evaluates the goals and attitudes of the monarchs; whether the primary sources by Frederick William and Saint-Simon support Durand's analysis.

Viewed as a tendency rather than as a political system, absolutism is an undeniable reality. In every state the sovereign sought to free himself from pressure and control. The means were everywhere the same; the monarch tried to rule through councillors whom he chose rather than nobles who claimed such positions as their right. He also tried to recover control of the administration of justice which had been taken over by the feudal nobility and the church. These tendencies produced two institutions common to every state.

First a small, inner or secret council, a cabinet ('Conseil des Affaires'), distinct from the traditional councils which had grown from the division of the functions of the old Curia Regis. There is great similarity between, for instance, the Conse/o de Estado in Castile, the inner circle of the privy council in England, the Austrian Council of State of 1748 and the Imperial council set up by Catherine the Great in 1769.

Second, a system of unifying and centralising judicial institutions. In France the drafting of customary law in the sixteenth century and the publication of the Codes and Great Ordinances in the seventeenth, formed the basis for royal intervention in the judicial process. The procedures of ivocation to a higher court, or judgement by special commissioners named by the king, were specifically French; but an institution like the conseil des parties had its counterpart in the Royal Council of Castile, the English Star Chamber, or the Austrian Hofrat.

From this we may infer the existence of a general climate of absolutism, more or less pervasive, which offered the monarch no more than the opportunity to deliberate on matters of state without being affected by intrigue and pressure, and to ensure that the judicial process followed his wishes and directives.

As an actual political system, absolutism is a myth. The monarchs themselves never regarded themselves as absolute, except in the case of the autocrats of Russia, where the lack of fundamental laws, of established custoins and corporate orders within the state allowed the growth of a dictatorial form of government. In France, however, even Louis XIV never planned to abolish the Parlement, but merely curbed its pretensions and in December 1655 limited its right of remonstrance; nor did he try to abolish the estates. Monarchs did not try to create a system of institutions which would destroy any possibility of resistance throu h inertia. They merely sought to restrict the activities of persons who might cause trouble and to set up a new administrative structure parallel to the old; a handful of commissioners directed, urged on and controlled the system inherited from a time when counsel, remonstrance and shared power were the rule. Sovereigns also continued to delegate their administrative powers through the sale of offices, or to farm them out to financial potentates who became virtual states within the state. The kings of' Spain suffered the tyranny of their own councils. In practice absolutism seems much more the result of circumstances and personalities than of a deliberate intention to revolutionise the whole structure of the state.

Memoires: The Aristocracy Undermined in France

Saint-Simon

Louis XIV of France was the most powerful ruler of his time. He had inherited the throne as a child in 1643. He took personal command by 1661, ruling France until his death in 1715. Contemporary rulers viewed him as a model ruler. One of the

ways in which he reinforced his position was by conducting a magnificent court

life at his palace of Versailles. There, nobles hoping for favors or appointments

competed for his attention and increasingly became dependent upon royal whim

One of those nobles, the Duke of Saint-Simon (1675-1755), felt slighted and grew to resent the king. Saint-Simon chronicled life at Versailles in his Memoires. In the following excerpt, he shows how Louis XIV used this court life to his own ends.

Consider: How the king's activities undermined the position of the nobility; the options available to a noble who wanted to maintain or increase his own power; how the king's activities compare with the Great Elector's recommendations to his son.

Frequent fetes, private walks at Versailles, and excursions were means which the King seized upon in order to single out or to mortify [individuals] by naming the persons who should be there each time, and in order to keep each person assiduous and attentive to pleasing him. He sensed that he lacked by far enough favors to distribute in order to create a continuous effect. Therefore he substituted imaginary favors for real ones, through jealousy - little preferences which were shown daily, and one might say at each moment - [ and ] through his artfulness. The hopes to which these little preferences and these honors gave birth, and the deference which resulted from them -no one was more ingenious than he in unceasingly inventing these sorts of things. Marly, eventually, was of great use to him in this respect; and Trianon, where everyone, as a matter of fact, could go pay court to him, but where ladies had the honor of eating with him and where they were chosen at each meal; the candlestick which he had held for him each evening at bedtime by a courtier whom he wished to honor, and always from among the most worthy of those present, whom he named aloud upon coming out from saying his prayers.

Louis XIV carefully trained himself to be well informed about what was happening everywhere, in public places, in private homes, in public encounters, in the secrecy of families or of [amorous] liaisons. Spies and tell tales were countless. They existed in all forms: some who were unaware that their denunciations went as far as [the King], others who knew it; some who wrote him directly by having their letters delivered by routes which he had established for them, and those letters were seen only by him, and always before all other things; and lastly, some others who sometimes spoke to him secretly in his cabinets, by the back passageways. These secret communications broke the necks of an infinity of persons of all social positions, without their ever having been able to discover the cause, often very unjustly, and the King, once warned, never reconsidered, or so rarely that nothing was more [determined]. . . .

In everything he loved splendor, magnificence, profusion. He turned this taste into a maxim for political reasons, and instilled it into his court on all matters. One could please him by throwing oneself into fine food, clothes, retinue, buildings, gambling. These were occasions which enabled him to talk to people. The essence of it was that by this he attempted and succeeded in exhausting everyone by making luxury a virtue, and for certain persons a necessity, and thus he gradually reduced everyone to depending entirely upon his generosity in order to subsist. In this he also found satisfaction for his pride through a court which was superb in all respects, and through a greater confusion which increasingly destroyed natural distinctions. This is an evil which, once introduced, became the internal cancer which is devouring all individuals - because from the court it promptly spread to Paris and into the provinces and the armies, where persons, whatever their position, are considered important only in proportion to the table they lay and their magnificence ever since this unfortunate innovation - which is devouring all individuals, which forces those who are in a position to steal not to restrain themselves from doing so for the most part, in their need to keep up with their expenditures; [a cancer] which is nourished by the confusion of social positions, pride, and even decency, and which by a mad desire to grow keeps constantly increasing, whose consequences are infinite and lead to nothing less than ruin and general upheaval.

Politics in France and England

Kingsley Martin

The establishment of monarchical absolutism was not a uniform political trend in the seventeenth century. In England the monarchy lost in its struggle with Parliament for power. Historians have made many attempts to explain why English and French political events differed so greatly. In the following selection Kingsley Martin, British scholar and noted editor of the New Statesman and Nation, argues that the differences between the royal houses and the aristocracies of England and France help to explain why their political histories were so different.

As you read this passage, consider the following ideas:

1. The ways in which the royal houses and the aristocracies of England and France differed;

2. Other factors that might help to explain the different political patterns in these two countries.

In the seventeenth century the English and the French monarchies were both engaged in a struggle to secure their sovereignty. In both countries the absolute power of Pope and Emperor had passed to the national King; in France sixteenth -century lawyers had made Henry IV the reesiduary legatee of the Roman Empire and, in England, Hobbes, with even greater assurance, had justified the irresponsible sovereignty of the Stuarts on a Utilitarian basis. In England Divine Right was effectively countered by the doctrine of fundamental law; behind all human laws, Coke held, there existed a law of nature, a moral law, which no Government was entitled to violate. Its practical expression was to be found not only in Biblical precepts but also in the Common Law of England; English kings had recognized its final authority, embodied in the Coronation Oath and the provisions of Magna Charta. The Puritan House of Commons willingly utilized Coke's theory in its struggle with Charles I, but the revolutionary settlement of 1689 resulted not in the recognition of a fundamental Constitution but in the doctrine of government by consent and the assumption by Parliament of the sovereignty wrested from the Stuarts. "The divine right of the Whig landowner" took the place of the divine right of the monarchy.

In France the seventeenth-century contest ended in the complete triumph of the monarchy. The Bourbons were stronger than the Stuarts for many reasons. The power of the French monarchy, like that of the English, was founded on national opposition to the Papacy and the desire of the trading middle class and populace for the destruction of the lawless power of the feudal aristocracy. But the humiliation of the aristocracy had been of a different kind in the two countries: in France, as Tocqueville said, the aristocracy had lost their powers and kept their privileges, while in England they had lost their privileges and kept their power. The new English aristocracy, created by the Tudors and employed by them in local and central government, itself led the rebellion against the monarchy which had called it into existence. Religious and economic grievances also united a large section of the middle class against the Stuarts.

The Emergence of the Great Powers

John B. Wolf

Although individual kings played an important role in the rise of absolutism, absolutism resulted from more than personal ambition. Economic and political competition with other states and the consequent expansion of the army and the government bureaucracy contributed to the growing sense of the state as a distinct entity. This new sense of the state is analyzed in the following excerpt from The

Emergence of the Great Powers. In it John B. Wolf underscores the movement toward modern politics among European governments during this period.

Consider: The evidence o the change in the conception and the reality of the f

state during this period; how the policies of Louis XIV and the Great Elector relate to Wolf's interpretation o the seventeenth-century state; whether Wolf s f

claim that "European governments were assuming a characteristically modern shape" is an exaggeration.

In the Europe of the late seventeenth century the idea that the state encompassed and transcended crown and land, prince and people, was becoming established, reflecting a great revolution in political conceptions. Hailed by Grotius and the coterie of publicists who were developing the concept of international law, this new ideal was written into the public law of Europe by the great treaties from Westphalia (1648) to Nystad (1721). Thenceforth, not princes ruling by divine right, but civil and military bureaucracies provided order and form to society. Driven by the demands of war, kings and statesmen were forced to concentrate their attention upon the political and economic realities and to shape their policies to suit the interests of their states. Machiavelli had insisted upon state interest as the proper basis for politics; in the seventeenth century his ideas, buttressed with doctrines of natural law and natural rights, increasingly became the motive power of political action.

The pace of the revolution that transformed the king into the chief of a bureaucratic machine was accelerated by the very forces that created it. In earlier centuries lay scribes had joined the king's government and, as secretaries, had discharged many administrative and judicial functions. But in the course of the seventeenth century these men of the pen had won a sensational victory over the men of the sword even in the domain of political action. At the opening of the century the councils of princes had still been composed of great noblemen and of clergymen who were the sons of noblemen, in short of men whose feudal conceptions were ill suited to the political requirements of the emerging states system. But within the century these aristocrats had been displaced by the rising class of career bureaucrats, whose relatively humble origins made them conscious of the state rather than of estates. These officials, many of them learned jurists with university educations or sons of royal officials with bourgeois backgrounds, together with a sprinkling of great lords who were willing to stake their fortunes on the state, formed the nucleus of the civil and military bureaucracies. Their careers and fortunes depended upon their service to the state and the favor of the prince; their duties almost forced them to see the problems of politics in operational terms. Commerce, finance, fortifications, the delineation of frontiers, the collection of taxes, the administration of revenues, and the organization of armies and navies were their daily tasks. Such problems were becoming the primary concern of governments and therefore became inevitably issues of high politics. Louis XIV may well have dreamed of the Bourbon dynasty's ruling Germany, France, and Spain, but the Rhine frontier, the Dutch commercial monopolies, the growth of English commerce, the strategic importance of fortifications, and the problems of maintaining a navy at sea were the concerns of his principal advisers. In time the exigencies of war and politics forced even Louis to accept the role of chief official, administrator of a civil and military bureaucracy.

The same process was at work elsewhere. As Europe came to be ruled by great military states, those states had to act increasingly in terms of state interest. The great political problems that grew out of the decay of the Holy Roman and Spanish empires seemed to reflect dynastic politics, but in the actual course of events political realities, based upon military, commercial, and financial considerations, became the predominant counters. The rise of great standing armies and their maintenance in the field made strenuous demands upon the treasury and the credit of the kings. In order to assure a continuous flow of revenue from taxation, required to meet the mounting costs, governments had to formulate and implement policies that would increase the riches of their potential taxpayers, and officials primarily interested in maintaining the power of their state inevitably urged policies that coincided with state interest. Thus European governments were assuming a characteristically modern shape and thereby rendering dynastic politics altogether anachronistic.

The English Revolution, 1688-1689

George Macaulay Trevelyan

In England two blows to monarchical authority proved to be turning points. The first was the Civil War and the execution of Charles I in the 1640s. But although this was a victory for Parliament, the Cromwellian period that followed and the return from exile of Charles II in 1660 cast doubt on the permanence of Parliament's victory. The second was the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which removed James II from power without the turmoil of the first revolution. In the following selection, Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan compares the two revolutions and analyzes the significance of the second one. Following the Whig tradition, Trevelyan views these trends in British history as constructive and progressive. More than most historians, he sees this revolution as an admirable triumph for Parliament.

Consider: Why the second revolution was a more clear-cut victory for Parliament than the first; factors that contributed to the victory of Parliament; how Kingsley Martin might react to the following analysis.

The fundamental question at issue in 1688 had been this -Is the law above the King, or is the King above the law? The interest of Parliament was identified with that of the law, because, undoubtedly, Parliament could alter the law. It followed that, if law stood above the King's will, yet remained alterable by Parliament, Parliament would be the supreme power in the State.

James II attempted to make the law alterable wholesale by the King. This, if it had been permitted, must have made the King supreme over Parliament, and, in fact, a despot. The events of the winter of 1688-9 gave the victory to the opposite idea, which Chief justice Coke and Selden had enunciated early in the century, that the King was the chief servant of the law, but not its master; the executant of the law, not its source; the laws should only be alterable by Parliament- Kings, Lords and Commons together. It is this that makes the Revolution the decisive event in the history of the English Constitution. It was decisive because it was never undone, as most of the work of the Cromwellian Revolution had been undone.

It is true that the first Civil War had been fought partly on this same issue: -the Common Law in league with Parliament had, on the field of Naseby, triumphed over the King in the struggle for the supreme place in the Constitution. But the victory of Law and Parliament had, on that occasion, been won only because Puritanism, the strongest religious passion of the hour, had supplied the fighting force. And religious passion very soon confused the Constitutional issue. Puritanism burst the legal bounds and, coupled with militarism, overthrew law and Parliament as well as King. Hence the necessity of the restoration in 1660 of King, law and Parliament together, without any clear definition of their ultimate mutual relations.

Now, in this second crisis of 1688, law and Parliament had on their side not only the Puritan passion, which had greatly declined, but the whole force of Protestant- An glic anism, which was then at its height, and the rising influence of Latitudinarian scepticism-all arrayed against the weak Roman Catholic interest to which James had attached the political fortunes of the royal cause. The ultimate victor of the seventeenth-century struggle was not Pym or Cromwell, with their Puritan ideals, but Coke and Selden with their secular idea of the supremacy of law. In 1689 the Puritans had to be content with a bare toleration. But law triumphed, and therefore the law-making Parliament triumphed finally over the King.

Centuries of Childhood

Philippe Arie's

Through analysis of paintings such as Maternal Care by Pieter de Hooch (see p. 13) as well as other kinds of evidence, historians have changed our assumptions about attitudes toward childhood in Early Modern times. The most important Of these historians is Philippe Ari& The following is a selection from his Centuries of Childhood.

Consider: How this reading relates to Hooch's painting; the differences between the seventeenth-century family, the medieval family, and the modern family according to Aries.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century, the child had won a place beside his parents to which he could not lay claim at a time when it was customary to entrust him to strangers. This return of the children to the home was a great event: it gave the seventeenth-century family its principal characteristic, which distinguished it from the medieval family. The child became an indispensable element of everyday life, and his parents worried about his education, his career, his future. He was not yet the pivot of the whole system, but he had become a much more important character. Yet this seventeenth-century family was not the modern family: it was distinguished from the latter by the enormous mass of sociability which it retained. Where the family existed, that is to say in the big houses, it was a center of social relations, the capital of a little complex and graduated society under the command of the paterfamilias.

The modern family, on the contrary, cuts itself off from the world and opposes to society the isolated group of parents and children. All the energy of the group is expended on helping the children to rise in the world, individually and without any collective ambition: the children rather than the family.

Parents and Children in History

David Hunt

Over time the family has remained the most basic institution of social life in Western civilization. In many ways, the family is resistant to change, and thus we can recognize traits of family life in the past as similar to our own. Nevertheless, the family has changed in important ways over time, reflecting the evolving nature of Western societies. In the following selection, David Hunt uses some of the insights of modern psychology and sociology to analyze the family in seventeenth-century France.

As you read this passage, consider the following ideas: How the family reflected the broader social system; the importance of the distinction between marriages of love and those of interest; how this reading complements the selection by Ari~s and Hooch's painting.

[I]n the seventeenth century people felt strongly the contrast between the loyalties and duties incumbent upon them as a consequence of their station in society on the one hand, and their natural inclinations on the other. Institutional arrangements always implied a gradation of rank and were thus held to be incompatible with friendship, in which equality between the partners was so important. Far from accepting the fact that personal relations were almost always arranged according to hierarchical principles, individuals were made acutely uncomfortable by this situation. In personal letters, writers often distinguished sincere and spontaneous affection from the more perfunctory good will which went with the formal relationship to their correspondent. Thus Madame de Sevigne, in sending good wishes to her daughter, stipulated that, "In this case, maternal love plays less of a part than inclination."

As the quote indicates, the family was caught up in this system. To be a brother, son, or wife was a status, with its special obligations, its place in a grid of rule and submission. Members of the family were supposed to love one another; paternal, maternal, fraternal love were all often cited as models of human fellow feeling. At the same time, even within the family, it was terribly hard to imagine a relationship of mutual affection which was not simultaneously one of ruler and ruled. Like the bond between master and servant, between seigneur and peasant, between king and subject, family ties, while steeped in a folklore of pious harmony, implied as well the power to dominate others, to claim rewards, or, on the contrary, the awareness of a helpless dependence.

This line of argument will help to explain further the distinction which, as we have seen, observers made with such clarity between marriages of love and those of interest. Marriages of love implied spontaneous affection between the two lovers, who were concerned primarily with their own happiness. Marriage of interest involved social and financial considerations to be arranged for the benefit of families. These observers understood very well that in a social system which attempted to subordinate the wishes of marriageable children to the ambitions of their parents, and in which the wife was regarded simply as the means of cementing alliances between families, marriage could not at the same time be expected to provide for the happiness and the emotional satisfaction of the partners.

. . . [G]radations of rank within the household were interpreted simply as a matter of power and of usage, and that people believed this situation discouraged close and mutually satisfying relationships among family members. Ideally, those of lower rank should have accepted the eminence of their superiors and been warmed by the benefits they received from an admittedly unequal partnership. In fact, inequality within the domestic unit filled people not with love and warmth, but with resentment and a feeling of "shame and envy."

The World We Have Lost: The Early Modern Family

Peter Laslett

The family is a tremendously important institution in any society. Changes in its structure and functions occur very slowly and gradually. With the passage of centuries since Early Modern times, we can see some sharp differences between the family of that period and the family of today. In the following selection Peter Laslett, a social historian from Cambridge who has written extensively on the Early Modern period, points out these differences.

Consider: The economic and social functions of the family revealed in this selection; what this document adds to the image of the family provided in the painting by Hooch and the accompanying document by Ari~s; how the structure of this family differs from a typical twentieth-century family.

In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread. They sent in support of their claim a complete description of a bakery and an account of its weekly costs. There were thirteen or fourteen people in such an establishment: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two apprentices, two maidservants and the three or four children of the master baker himself. . . .

The only word used at that time to describe such a group of people was "family." The man at the head of the group, the entrepreneur, the employer, or the manager, was then known as the master or head of the family. He was father to some of its members and in place of father to the rest. There was no sharp distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife' was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in. place of mother to the rest.

The paid servants of both sexes had their specified and familiar position in the family, as much part of it as the children but not quite in the same position. At that time the family was not one society only but three societies fused together: the society of man and wife, of parents and children and of master and servant. But when they were young, and servants were, for the most part, young, unmarried people, they were very close to children in their status and their function. . . .

Apprentices, therefore, were workers who were also children, extra sons or extra daughters (for girls could be apprenticed too), clothed and educated as well as fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, unpaid and absolutely dependent until the age of twenty-one. If apprentices were workers in the position of sons and daughters, the sons and daughters of the house were workers too. John Locke laid it down in 1697 that the children of the poor must work for some part of the day when they reached the age of three. The sons and daughters of a London baker were not free to go to school for many years of their young lives, or even to play as they wished when they came back home. Soon they would find themselves doing what they could in bolting, that is sieving flour, or in helping the maidservant with her panniers of loaves on the way to the market stall, or in playing their small parts in preparing the never-ending succession of meals for the whole household.

We may see at once, therefore, that the world we have lost, as I have chosen to call it, was no paradise or golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness. It is so important that I should not be misunderstood on this point that I will say at once that the coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation along with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which we have begun to explore were not new in the England of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. They were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and not confined to Europe. And it may well be that they abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria. When people could expect to live for only thirty years in all, how must a man have felt when he realized that so much of his adult life, perhaps all, must go in working for his keep and very little more in someone else's family?

Chapter Questions on Aristocracy and Absolutism

1.    What conditions aided and helped the development of monarchical absolutism in the seventeenth century? What policies were used by kings to this end? And what role did the aristocracy play in helping and hindering the development of absolutism?

2.    Write a paragraph in which you compare Durands short article with Saint- Simon and one of the other historians, either Martin, Wolf, or Trevelyan.  How do they differ in their attitude toward Monarchialism?  What is their attitude toward the new system, and the old aristocracy.

3.    Why might mercantilist doctrines be particularly appealing to seventeenth-century monarchs?

4.    How does family life reflect broader social, economic, and political aspects of the seventeenth century?