The Absolutist Experience in France, 1515–1715

Abstract

“Absolutism” is the name given to the political doctrine that royal authority in France was unchallenged. However, the idea that the king’s authority was absolute provoked repeated opposition from the kingdom’s important social groups and institutions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word “absolute” is derived from the Latin, solutus, found in Roman law. It can be translated as “exempt from the law,” or “above the law.” The word “absolute” only became an “-ism” in the late eighteenth century. From Roman law kings also took the principle that “what pleases the prince has the force of law”: the king’s power to legislate was absolute. The king’s juridical absolute authority possessed ultimate coercive powers over life or death for both private and public crimes. By 1300, Roman law had become the foundation of monarchical authority, but in the sixteenth century courts increasingly relied on customary and natural law to support royal absolutism. However, six times between 1515 and 1715 France lacked a healthy, mature heir to the throne. Regents had to be named, which posed problems for notions of the king’s absolute authority. Each time there was a regency a weakened royal authority was the inevitable result. In the end, the absolutist argument would only be as strong as the coercive powers of the monarchy to enforce it. Opposition to absolutist governance came from high-ranking nobles and the parlements [superior courts]. The nobles constantly pressed for the return of what they considered to be their right to govern as princes, dukes, and peers. The parlements, especially the Parlement of Paris, supported the king’s policies, but during regencies it always sought to recover more political influence than simply reviewing new legislation. There were frequent clashes between the parlements and stronger kings who, needing increased funding for military campaigns, increased taxes and sold newly created judgeships in the parlements. Two moments of opposition during regencies went from contestation to civil war: the Wars of Religion starting in 1562 and the civil war known as the Fronde starting in 1648. In the midst of the Wars of Religion, the jurist Jean Bodin proposed a new philosophical argument to support absolute sovereign power. In his Six livres de la République [Six Books of the Republic], he added “indivisible and perpetual” to the word “sovereignty” to sustain the Crown against all other arguments in favor of shared power. The monarchy also drew on Giovanni Botero’s notions of “reason of state.” Furthermore, in the early seventeenth century Louis XIII’s chief minister Cardinal Richelieu also deployed the Roman law doctrine of “necessity.” Necessity dictated increasing taxes to pay for war against Spain, as it did government actions that appeared to exceed ethical boundaries. During the Fronde, parlementary and aristocratic opposition to royal absolutism, along with popular revolts in provincial cities, almost brought about the complete destruction of monarchical power. After 1661 when Louis XIV declared that he would govern by himself without the aid of a prime minister, he consolidated his power by canceling the parlements’ right to remonstrate (i.e., to present criticisms of royal policies before registering edicts), claiming ecclesiastical revenues (incomes attached to church positions) in a dispute with the papacy, revoking the Protestant minority’s right to practice their faith, and investing increased authority in his intendants (officials who governed provinces in the king’s name). He thereby made his power absolute. However, his actions would provoke new criticisms of royal absolutism from aristocrats, parlementary judges, exiled Protestants, and Protestant rebels in the south. Strong opposition to royal absolutism developed in the first decade of the eighteenth century, sparked by the high costs of warfare and the famine years of 1693–4 and 1709.