HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Enlightened Absolutism, Parlement, Montesquieu
1. Absolutism in France
1. Some philosophes, such as Voltaire, believed that the king was the best
source of reform while the aristocracy drew on thinkers such as Montesquieu
to limit the king’s power
2. Favored by the regent duke of Orleans, the French nobility regained much of
the power it had lost under Louis XIV after his death
1. Restored the right of the parlements to evaluate royal decrees publicly in
writing before they were registered and given the force of law
(counterweight to absolute power)
1. Asserted that the king could not levy taxes without the Parlement of
Paris’s consent
3. The French chancellor René de Maupeou began the restoration of royal
absolutism under Louis XV
1. Abolished the existing parlements and exiled the members of the
Parlement of Paris to the provinces
2. Established a new parlement of royal officials
3. Began to tax the privileged groups
4. Maupeou’s measures were responded to with widespread criticism; most
philosophes and educated public opinion as a whole sided with the old
parlements
1. These attacks on the monarchy ate away at the foundations of royal
authority: presented the king as a loathsome degenerate as opposed to
God’s ordained one
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