The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity by Hall Bjørnstad

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity by Hall Bjørnstad Anna Rosensweig Hall Bjørnstad. The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. xii + 230. $30.00. In his erudite and exciting new book, Hall Bjørnstad urges those of us who study premodern France and its afterlives to take another look at absolutism. We moderns may think we already know all about this political system in which kings received their power and authority from God. We can easily identify absolutism's most spectacular avatars in the royal person of Louis XIV and his palace at Versailles. Bjørnstad argues, however, that our presumption of knowledge about absolutism, and our familiarity with its signs and wonders, has inhibited our ability to understand fully its logic and appreciate its inner workings. A key methodological problem with scholarship on absolutism is a tendency to label it "mere propaganda," and as a result anachronistically to reduce absolutism to a modern mechanism of political communication, persuasion, and control. The conceptual model of propaganda requires a sender and receiver of a specific message. Those with power must transmit their message to those without in order to gain or maintain authority. To view seventeenth-century texts and images that celebrated Louis XIV as propaganda is to presume that seventeenth-century readers and viewers needed to be persuaded of the king's glory. What the model of propaganda fails to account for, Bjørnstad explains, is how absolutism eschews the need for communication or persuasion by presenting itself as fully realized in the figure of Louis XIV. There is no audience to convince of the king's glory because absolutism's true audience is the king himself. Bjørnstad proposes that in order better to comprehend absolutism's own logic, we must approach it as a collective dream. He writes, "The logic at work in the absolutist expressions analyzed here is dreamlike in that it seems to imply the dimming of rational exigencies and allows for the integration of contradictions" (34). Identifying and elaborating this notion of absolutism as a dream allows Bjørnstad to take seriously the notion that Louis XIV received his glory from God, rather than to dismiss this idea as either a cynical political mystification or a naïve belief in the supernatural. With each chapter Bjørnstad provides detailed analyses of texts and images that allow us to approach this collective reverie. Chapter 1 examines a tension at the heart of the Mémoires that Louis XIV addressed to the dauphin, namely, the challenge of bequeathing unparalleled glory to one's successors. Chapter 2 takes us to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and Charles Le Brun's painting on its vault, Le Roi gouverne par lui-même, 1661, in which the king seeing himself announces the immaculate conception of absolutism as such. Chapter 3 demonstrates how texts that seem excessively exuberant in their praise of Louis XIV—Claude-Charles Guyonnet de Vertron's Parallèle de Louis le Grand avec les princes qui ont été surnommés grands (1685) and Jean de Préchac's fairy tale "Sans Paragon" (1698)—offer unique insight into the premodern political imaginary. Finally, Bjørnstad's concise conclusion provides a helpful summary of the dream's constitutive features and provocatively suggests that this dream continues to occupy our political unconscious. As Bjørnstad so powerfully observes, modernity's fervent claims of disenchantment, demystification, and rationality belie its own participation in this supposedly premodern dream. Although The Dream of Absolutism is most explicitly a book about the past, the present lurks behind every gilded corner. Incisive and capacious, Bjørnstad's book should be read widely, by specialists of early modern France, of course, but also by intellectual historians, political theorists, and students of contemporary politics. [End Page 168] Anna Rosensweig University of Rochester Copyright © 2022 L'Esprit Créateur