HY 106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Miguel De Cervantes, Fronde, Classical Antiquity
Chapter 16 – Absolutism and Constitutionalism in Western Europe
Absolutism
1. Introduction
1. In the absolutist state, sovereignty is embodied in the person of the ruler
and absolute kings claimed to rule by divine right, (they were responsible
to God alone)
2. Absolute kings secured the cooperation of the nobility, the greatest
threat to monarch
3. The key to the power and success of absolute monarchs lay in how they
solved their financial problems and the absolutist solution was the
creation of new state bureau-cracies that forced taxes ever higher or
devised alternative methods or raising revenue
1. Bureaucracies were posed of career officials appointed/accountable
to the king
2. The key difference between seventeenth-century bureaucracies and
their predecessors was that they served the state as represented by
the king (public or state positions and not supposed to use their
positions for private gain)
4. Absolute monarchs also maintained permanent standing armies (secret
police)
5. Rule of absolute monarchs was not totalitarian
1. Totalitarianism: seeks to direct all facets of a state’s culture—art,
education, religion, the economy, and politics—in the interests of the
state (lacked resources)
2. Resembled totalitarianism in glorification of the state over all other
aspects of the culture and in the use of war and an expansionist
foreign policy to divert attention
2. The Foundations of French Absolutism: Sully and Richelieu
1. The Huguenot-turned-Catholic Henry IV ended the French religious wars
with the Edict of Nantes and with his minister Maximilian de Bethune,
duke of Sully, laid the foundations of later French absolutism
1. Henry lowered the taxes on the overburdened peasantry
2.
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3. Sully began to build up the treasury by reviving an annual tax,
the paulette, on people who had purchases judicial and financial
offices who had preciously been exempt from taxation (provided a
specific amount of revenue each year)
4. In twelve years, Henry IV and Sully restored public order in France
and laid the foundations for economic prosperity -- Henry IV
murdered in 1610
2. After the death of Henry IV, Marie de’ Medici headed the government for
the child-king Louis XIII but the feudal nobles and princes of the blood
dominated politics
3. In 1624, Marie de’ Medici secured the appointment of Armand Jean du
Plessis (Cardinal Richelieu) to the council of ministers -- became first
minister of the Crown
1. Richelieu’s policy was the total subordination of all groups and
institutions to the French monarchy and broke up the power of the
nobility by reshuffling the royal council, leveling castles, and
executing aristocratic conspirators against the king
2. He divided France into thirty-two generalites (districts) in each of
which a royal intendant had extensive responsibility for justice,
police, and finances
3. Intendants recruited soldiers for the army, supervised tax collection,
kept an eye on the local nobility, presided over the administration of
local laws, and regulated economic activity
4. Intendants were to use their power to enforce royal orders in the
generalites of their jurisdiction and to weaken the power and
influence of the regional nobility
4. French foreign policy under Richelieu was aimed at the destruction of the
fence of Habsburg territories that surrounded France (factor in political
future of Germany)
5. Richelieu supported foundation of the French Academy and
standardization of French language by the academy of philologists
6. Richelieu and Louis XIII temporarily solved their financial problems by
sharing the money from increased taxation with local elites
7. Jules Mazarin was appointed as the successor of Richelieu and when
Louis XIII died in 1643, a regency headed by Queen Anne of Austria
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