Major forms of absolutism
France
Certain assumptions influenced the way in which the French state developed. The sovereign held power from God. He ruled in accordance with divine and natural justice and had an obligation to preserve the customary rights and liberties of his subjects. The diversity of laws and taxes meant that royal authority rested on a set of quasi-contractual relationships with the orders and bodies of the realm. Pervading all was a legalistic concern for form, precedence, and the customs that, according to the French jurist Guy Coquille, were the true civil laws. The efforts of successive ministers to create the semblance of a unitary state came less from dogma than from the need to overcome obstacles to government and taxation. Absolutism was never a complete system to match the philosophy and rhetoric that set the king above the law, subject only to God, whom he represented on earth. For 60 years after the Fronde there was no serious challenge to the authority of the crown from either nobles or parlement. The idea of divine right, eloquently propounded by Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and embodied in the palace and system of Versailles, may have strengthened the political consensus, but it did little to assist royal agents trying to please both Versailles and their own communities. Absolutism on the ground amounted to a series of running battles for political control. In the front line were the intendants (administrative officials), first used extensively by Richelieu, then, after their abolition during the Fronde, more systematically and with ever-widening responsibilities, by Louis XIV and his successors until 1789.
Throughout the ancien régime the absolutist ideal was flawed, its evolution stunted through persisting contradictions. The fiscal demands of the crown were incompatible with the constant need to stimulate trade and manufacturing enterprise; and only a resolute minister operating in peacetime, such as Colbert in the 1660s and Philibert Orry in the 1730s, could hope to achieve significant reforms. There was tension between the Roman Catholic ideal of uniformity and pragmatic views of the state’s interest. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, a harsh if logical resolution of the question. It was what his Catholic subjects expected of him, but it proved damaging to the economy and to France’s reputation. A further contradiction lay between measures to overcome the hostility of the nobles to the aggrandizement of the state and the need not to compromise state authority by conceding too much. Richelieu’s actions, including the execution of the duke de Montmorency for treason (1632), taught the lesson that no subject was beyond the reach of the law. Louis XIV’s brilliant court drew the magnates to Versailles, where social eminence, patronage, and pensions compensated for loss of the power for which they had contended during the Fronde. It merely fortified the regime of privilege that defied fundamental reform to the end. There was another side to the politically advantageous sale of office. Capital was diverted that might better have been employed in business, and there was a vested interest in the status quo. For the mass of the nobility the enlargement of the army, quadrupled in the 17th century, provided an honourable career, but it also encouraged militarism and tempted the king and ministers to neglect the interests of the navy, commerce, and the colonies. When France intervened in the War of the Austrian Succession in 1741, the economic consequences undermined the regime. The achievements of the Bourbon government, with able ministers working in small, flexible councils, were impressive, even when undermined by weak kings such as Louis XV (1715–74) and Louis XVI (1774–92). In the 18th century, France acquired a fine network of roads, new harbours were built, and trade expanded; a lively culture was promoted by a prosperous bourgeoisie. It is an irony that the country that nurtured the philosophes was the least affected by the reforms they proposed, but it would have been a remarkable king who could have ruled with the courage and wisdom to enable his servants to overcome obstacles to government that were inherent in the system.
The empire
The character of Austrian absolutism was derived from a dual situation: with the exception of Maria Theresa, who was debarred by the Salic Law of Succession, the head of the house was also Holy Roman emperor. He directly ruled the family lands, comprising different parts of Austria stretching from Alpine valleys to the Danubian plain, which were mainly Roman Catholic and German; Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, which were mainly Slavic in race and language; a fraction of Hungary after the reconquest following the failure of the Turkish Siege of Vienna (1683); and Belgium and Milan (by the Peace of Rastatt in 1714). Each region provided a title and rights pertaining to that state, with an authority limited by the particular rights of its subjects. As an elected emperor, his sovereignty was of a different kind. In effect, the empire was a German confederation, though Bohemia was in and Prussia was outside it; the Mantuan succession affair (1627–31), when the emperor sought to arbitrate, recalls an obsolete Italian dimension. Each German state was self-governing and free to negotiate with foreign powers. Princes, both ecclesiastical and secular, enjoyed the right of representation in the Reichstag. The first of the three curiae in the Reichstag was the college of electors, who elected the emperor; the second comprised princes, counts, barons, and the ecclesiastical princes; and the third, the imperial free cities. The 45 dynastic principalities had 80 percent of the land and population; the 60 dynastic counties and lordships comprised only 3 percent. Some of the 60 imperial free cities were but villages. A thousand imperial knights, often landless, each claimed rights of landlordship amounting to sovereignty and owed allegiance only to the emperor in his capacity as president of the Reichstag. Numbers varied through wastage or amalgamation, but they convey the amorphous character of a confederation in which the emperor could only act effectively in concert with the princes, either individually or organized in administrative circles (Kreis). Bound by weak ties of allegiance and strong sentiment of nationality, this empire represented the world of medieval universalism with some aspects of the early modern state, without belonging wholly to either. Religious schism had created new frontiers and criteria for policy, such as could justify the elector palatine’s decision to accept the crown of Bohemia from the rebels who precipitated the Thirty Years’ War. The failure of the emperor Ferdinand II to enlarge his authority or enforce conformity led to the settlements of Westphalia in which his son, Ferdinand III, was forced to concede again the cuius regio, eius religio principle. Thereafter he and his successor, Leopold I, devoted their energies to increasing their authority over the family lands. It would be wrong, however, to assume that they, or even the 18th-century emperors, were powerless.
The political climate in which the empire operated was affected by the way universities dominated intellectual life and by trends within universities, in particular the development of doctrines of natural law and cameralism. German rulers respected the universities because the majority of their students became civil servants. With earnest religious spirit went an emphasis on the duty to work and obey. Even in Catholic states the spirit of the Aufklärung (Enlightenment) was pious and practical. Exponents of natural law, such as the philosopher-scientist Christian Wolff, advocated religious toleration but saw no need for constitutional safeguards: the ideal ruler was absolute. Such commitment to civic virtue explains both the development of the German state and the survival of the empire as a working institution. Territorial fragmentation meant a prince’s combining his executive role with that of representative within the Reich: there could be no stimulus to the development of constitutional ideas. The German associated political liberty with the authority of his ruler. He was loyal to his own state, which was the “fatherland”; “abroad” was another state. When judgment was required, the prince would still go to the imperial court, the Reichskammergericht. There were limits to his loyalty. The emperor was expected to lead but could not always do so. So the authorities were ineffective, for example, in the face of Louis XIV’s seizure of Strasbourg in 1681. Yet Louis found that German opinion was not to be underestimated; it contributed to his defeat in the War of the Grand Alliance.
Religious animosities persisted into the age of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), but his rational approach and quest for religious unity corresponded to the popular yearning for stability. When interests were so delicately balanced, arbitration was preferable to aggression. The mechanism of the Reichskammergericht saved the counties of Isenburg and Solms from annexation by the ruler of Hesse-Darmstadt. More than a court of law, the Reichskammergericht functioned as a federal executive in matters of police, debts, bankruptcies, and tax claims. Small states such as Mainz could manage their affairs so as to turn enlightened ideas to good use, but it was the rulers of the larger states who held the keys to Germany’s future, and they took note of the emperor; thus, his ambivalent position was crucial. Frederick William I of Prussia accepted the ruling of Emperor Charles VI, confirming his right of succession to Berg. In return, the king guaranteed the Pragmatic Sanction, asserting the right of the emperor’s daughter to succeed. Charles repudiated Prussia’s claim, however, in 1738 when he made a treaty with France. In 1740, when both sovereigns died, Frederick II made Austria pay for this slight to his father. The War of the Austrian Succession followed his invasion of Silesia; that valuable Bohemian province remained at the heart of the Austro-Prussian conflict. Its final loss taught Maria Theresa and her advisers, notably Friedrich Haugwitz and Wenzel von Kaunitz, that they must imitate what they could not defeat. She created, in place of separate Austrian and Bohemian chancelleries, a more effective central administration based on the Direktorium, which her son Joseph (coruler from 1765, when he became emperor; sole ruler 1780–90) would develop in ruthless fashion. Maria Theresa respected the Roman Catholic tradition of her house, even while curtailing the powers of the church. Joseph pursued his mother’s interests in education and a more productive economy and was concerned with equality of rights and the unity of his domains. Yet he joined in the partition of Poland for the reward of Galicia and showed so little regard for the rules of the empire that he was challenged by Frederick II over the Bavarian succession, which he had sought to manipulate to his advantage. After the ensuing Potato War (1778), the empire’s days were numbered, though it required the contemptuous pragmatism of Napoleon to abolish it (1806).
Prussia
Frederick II had inherited a style of absolute government that owed much to the peculiar circumstances of Brandenburg-Prussia as it emerged from the Thirty Years’ War. Lacking natural frontiers and war-ravaged when Frederick William inherited the electorate in 1640, Brandenburg had little more than the prestige of the ancient house of Hohenzollern. The diplomacy of Jules Cardinal Mazarin contributed to the acquisition (1648) of East Pomerania, Magdeburg, and Minden, and war between Sweden and Poland brought sovereignty over East Prussia, formerly held as a fief from Poland. A deal with the Junkers at the Recess of 1653, which secured a regular subsidy in return for a guarantee of their social rights, was the foundation of an increasingly absolute rule. He overcame by force the resistance of the diet of Prussia in 1660: as he became more secure economically, militarily, and bureaucratically, he depended less on his diets. So was established the Prussian model: an aristocracy of service and a bureaucracy harnessed to military needs. The Great Elector’s son became King Frederick I of Prussia when he pledged support to the emperor’s cause (1701). His son, Frederick William (1713–40), completed the centralization of authority and created an army sustained by careful stewardship of the economy. Personally directing a larger army in wars of aggression and survival, Frederick the Great (1740–86) came close to ruining his state; its survival testifies to the success of his father. Of course Frederick left his own impress on government. He should not be judged by his essays in enlightened philosophy or even by new mechanisms of government, but by the spirit he inspired. He lived out his precept that the sovereign should be the first servant of the state. All was ordered so as to eliminate obstacles to the executive will. Much was achieved: the restoration of Prussia and the establishment of an industrial base, in particular the exploitation of the new Silesian resources. Legal rights and freedom of thought were secure so long as they did not conflict with the interest of the state. A monument to his reign, completed five years after his death in 1786, was the Allgemeine Landrecht, the greatest codification of German law. Perhaps his greatest civil achievement was the stability that made such a striking contrast with the turbulence in Habsburg lands under Joseph II.