Prior to absolute rule, a king of France worked with the Estates. He was still a powerful ruler but in one sense he shared his authority with them. When this system broke down, a country could descend into civil war. He had access to a standing royal army that was loyal only to him. A career in the military appeared to be one worth pursuing for someone with a noble background. For those on the receiving end of absolutism, the army played a key role.
In absolutist states, the army invariably collected taxes; a large part of this revenue was invested in the army which got larger and more powerful; a larger army was capable of becoming even more effective at collecting taxes which were then further invested in the army. First of all, how do you define absolutism? Simply, it is a system in which all sovereignty resides in the king; he does not share power and has no real partners in rule.
The king rules by divine right, a view even claimed by medieval kings. But now, the king claims to embody the state. This is a transcript from the video series The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Rise of Nations.
Watch it now, on The Great Courses. It was an idea that the king himself has all the authority in the state; there are no independent centers of power outside the king.
This growth in power, especially the growth in the power and size of the state, alienated many people and caused quite a lot of opposition. To build an absolute monarchy, there are essentially five major steps that a king will want to undertake successfully.
First, it is necessary to subjugate the nobility or to get the nobility into an inferior position concerning the king. In absolutism, nobles do not share power with the king at all. Second, it is necessary to build a huge, all-pervasive bureaucracy. This was the groundwork for the bureaucratic state. As part of this structure, kings staff this bureaucracy with middle-class officials—not with nobles.
Third, the king needs to collect more tax money, and the need for taxes is almost unending, meaning it continues to increase. In the past, European kings mustered their army together when there was a war to fight. They would fight in the war, and when it ended, the army would be disbanded. This army was used for numerous things, including defense against foreign foes, but it will also be used as a kind of internal police force to make sure that nobles are subjected and to make sure peasants pay taxes.
Finally, the last step is one that may or may not be accomplished. Absolutism can be established without doing this, but if possible, the king should establish religious uniformity.
This means one religion for the whole country, with the population unified religiously, and the king, of course, in a position to control that religion. Absolute monarchs in the 17th century begin to build the structure of a powerful, military, bureaucratic, modern state. Learn more about the complexities of overthrowing a monarchy and constructing a democracy. His first significant action toward establishing royal power was issuing the Edict of Nantes in It gave religious toleration to the Huguenots—the Calvinists in France—with the hope to end religious disputes, to bring religious peace to the country, and to end the quarreling over religion.
Henry no doubt hoped that the Edict of Nantes would essentially remove religion from the governmental sphere. That hope was not completely borne out right away, but he made an effort with the Edict to remove religious disputes out of the realm of government as much as was possible. To further build up the power of his monarchy, one of the first things Henry did was to restore order in the wake of the religious wars.
There were still, out in the countryside, a few factions of rebellious nobles, loyal to the Holy League: the alliance between the Guise and Philip II of Spain.
Henry took to the battlefield and defeated those noble factions one by one, and in doing so, reduced the opposition to his monarchy. He then took steps to reduce the influence of nobles in his government. Henry tried to replace nobles in the royal council with middle-class advisers, middle-class ministers, middle-class bureaucrats.
Some nobles, however, remained on the royal council; his efforts created a new administrative class, based in the middle class, that was now the governmental class. Learn more about the two plays named after Henry IV. One of the important efforts that he does to raise money is he uses the sale of the government office. Many royal government offices are up for sale to the highest bidder. This has a couple of obvious benefits: Firstly, it raises revenue and becomes a main source of royal revenue, and it creates and staffs a bureaucracy, but it has problems.
One of these problems is inflation of office. The more you sell, the less each one is worth. Another disadvantage to the sale of office is that the offices become the personal property of the person who buys them, and that person can then do with the office whatever he wants.
The sale of office has existed since Philip Augustus in the 13th century and it had been a continuous problem. There had never been a good solution to the difficulties involved.
And if you pay the king this Paulette Tax, you can then hand your office down in your family, to your sons, grandsons, etc. That was a pretty good incentive to get officeholders to do at least part of the job they were supposed to be doing. Every officeholder wanted to hand their office down to their heirs, because, after all, they consider it like any other personal property.
This measure established some control on the part of the king over these venal officeholders. Learn more about how the politics of hunger took over in the streets and the crowds stormed the Bastille.
Mercantilism holds that there is a limited amount of wealth in the world. Therefore, each country, each government, has to get as big a share of this wealth as it possibly can, and obviously, it wants to get a bigger share of the wealth than rival nations.
They accomplish this by exporting more goods than they import, and when that happens, it establishes a flow of bullion into the country. Essentially, this favorable trade balance will bring money into the country. The money will largely go to businesses and industries, increasing the size of the tax base.
Then the king can get at that money through taxation, and the money ultimately ends up in the royal government. In , Henry IV was assassinated. Luckily, he had an extremely capable first minister by the name of Cardinal Richelieu, who took several giant steps on the way to absolutism.
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