The Age of Absolutism (Routledge Revivals)

1660-1815

Max Beloff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317816645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The end of eighteenth century is often regarded as the watershed between the feudal Europe of the Middle Ages and the modern Europe of the nineteenth century and beyond. The chronology covered in this title, first published in 1954, is vast, but covers an intellectually stimulating and exciting period of European history. The pinnacle of absolute monarchy is cemented in Louis XIV's France, eventually giving way to reform and revolution; the Russian Empire becomes an important player on the Western stage under Peter I and Catherine the Great; America achieves independence; and, the ideas of the Enlightenment begin to change the intellectual and religious landscape. Max Beloff analyses the period in fascinating detail in a now reissued title that will be of particular interest to students of Early Modern History, Politics and European diplomacy.

1

THE AGE DEFINED

The choice of an historical period as the subject of a book is itself an intellectual commitment, since the notion of period is arbitrarily imposed upon a continuous development. But it is one of the choices that have to be made, if history is to be intelligible. The problem has often been avoided by recourse to the habit of thinking in centuries—a habit that comes naturally to people brought up on a decimal system of numerals. So pervasive is this tendency that some historians have written as though the centuries themselves were the subject of their inquiry, and have attempted to define an ‘eighteenth century’ or ‘nineteenth century’ attitude or style. The phrase fin de siècle meaning decadent is used about writers of the 1890s in oblivion of the fact that the 1790s were for a whole generation of poets an era of rebirth and renewal, when ‘to be young was very heaven’.

Equally dangerous are terms that carry in themselves the description of an age and are so broad and general that no precise chronological limits can reasonably be assigned to them. Anyone who is aware of the prolonged and sometimes acrimonious discussions as to when the ‘Renaissance’ took place or as to what centuries fall within the ‘Dark Ages’, can see into what purely verbal entanglements one is ensnared.

The period 1660–1815 designated here as the ‘Age of Absolutism’ can easily be assailed as providing a framework that helps to conceal as many important lines of demarcation as it suggests. And there is much truth in this argument.

The historian whose main interests lie in economic life would point out, for instance, that the first half of the eighteenth century saw little change in the techniques of production or in the economic relations resulting from them. In the latter half of the century, however, there took place the first of those major changes that are usually classed together as the ‘industrial revolution’, so that at the end of our period the ‘railway age’ with all that the phrase implies is almost upon us. The new science of the demographers has noted that it is at some point within the period probably about 1750 that there begins a considerable acceleration in the rate at which the population of Europe increased, after long centuries of relative stability. We may roughly estimate they tell us, the population of Europe in 1700 as 118,500,000, in 1750 as 140,000,000 and in 1800 as 187,000,000. And they are no doubt right in asserting that such a change of which the causes are still obscure, had profound intellectual as well as social effects, so that the middle of the eighteenth century becomes the real turning point.

Yet to those who argue in this way, it is possible to answer that the change in the economic structure and in mortality rates rested on technical developments that were themselves the product of major theoretical advances in the natural sciences, and that these were on their way to being accomplished in the middle of the seventeenth century. This scientific revolution that we may try to locate within the familiar history of this island by thinking of the discussions leading to the formation of the Royal Society as taking place during the turmoil of our own Interregnum in the 1650s, increasingly appears to historians as of at least equal importance with the revival of classical studies in Italy two centuries earlier. Nor of course was the development in technique, in the control and utilisation by man of natural resources, the only result of this scientific revolution. This was one of the ways in which it reacted upon the problems of society and government.

For only the relative peace and stability conferred upon the countries of western Europe by the strong governments of the early part of the ‘Age of Absolutism’ could provide the social atmosphere within which the sciences could flourish, and economic life with them. On the other hand the social impact of economic advance whose benefits were necessarily unevenly distributed as between one class or group and another, presented the biggest of the problems faced by the legislator and administrator. In a relatively static society the prescriptions of monarchical absolutism might have worked better and its institutions have proved more durable. And furthermore, this new preoccupation with mathematics was an essential element in the novel governmental attitudes of the period. In the second half of the seventeenth century men like Sir William Petty in England and Vauban in France, began to turn to the possibility of using the statistical method for the study and regulation of society, for purposes more far-reaching and subtle than the simple inquiries into individual and local taxable capacity that inspired Domesday Book and the other surveys of the Middle Ages.

One can find precedents indeed, for the attention paid by Louis XIV’s great minister Colbert to the collection and analysis of statistics. But it was during his period of office that the regularity and continuity of the practice was first established. In an absolute monarchy the purpose of statistical inquiries—such as those in the 1690s by the Intendants (chief administrative officers) of the thirty-two ‘generalities’ into which France was divided for governmental purposes—was still to aid the monarchy in its task, and their findings were consequently regarded as State secrets, as they continued to be in absolutist Russia well into the nineteenth century. The Swiss banker Necker, who was the French minister of finance in the period immediately before the Revolution was one of the earliest advocates of the publication, and interchange, of statistical information.

Because of the popular belief that such knowledge could benefit only the government and not the subject, the collection of this information was unpopular. A bill for a census in Great Britain was rejected in 1753 as dangerous to the liberties of the subject. And although there were partial and inaccurate attempts at a census in countries as far apart as Spain and Sweden, and in various other lands, it was necessary in this field of government as in others, to await the coming of democracy to do what the old absolutism had proved too weak to accomplish. The first modern census was that of the United States in 1790; the French Constituent Assembly ordered one in 1791 but it was not carried out properly; and the first real census in France as in Britain dates from 1801.

This relative inaccessibility of the necessary information—even though compensated for to some extent by non-official investigations such as the celebrated inquiry of Gregory King into the population and wealth of England in the reign of William III—may help to explain why the theoretical apparatus of economics in its modern sense took so long to develop despite the long history (going back at least to the fifteenth century) of intellectual inquiry into isolated economic phenomena such as foreign exchange rates.

The final major impact of the scientific revolution—and in the long run, the most decisive and dramatic—is the secularisation of society and thought that it helped to promote. The period might be regarded from this point of view as an age of comparative scepticism and toleration—at least where the educated strata of society were concerned—between the fierce wars of religion following the Protestant Reformation and the conflicts of the ‘secular religions’ of our day which are in large part a legacy of the French Revolution. The impact of the scientific revolution was only one of the factors in the destruction of the old certainties. The development of a new critical approach to history—itself paradoxically the work of devout churchmen such as the French Benedictines of St Maur—was another. And still more important was the widening of geographical horizons leading to an amateur but influential dabbling in what would now be described as comparative social anthropology (though the terms were then unknown) and a consequent weakening of the notion that civilisation itself was identical with what had been transmitted to the moderns from Jerusalem, Athens and ancient Rome.

It was because they diffused this new scepticism rather than because they themselves were pioneers of the scientific spirit that the French ‘philosophes’ of the eighteenth century retain their great rôle in European history. A Fontenelle was as necessary from this point of view, as a Newton from the other. And it was the diffusion of scepticism that made it impossible, at least in the areas profoundly touched by the ‘enlightenment’, for political absolutism to rely upon divine authority. It was compelled to argue its case in the human arena, as Hobbes a forerunner had argued it in seventeenth-century England; and as the ‘Levellers’ and ‘Diggers’ in the England of that age had shown, once one begins to take to pieces the social fabric and to question its origins, the process is difficult to stop.

Thus did the Age of Absolutism engender the instruments of its own destruction, or rather of its metamorphosis into the democratic absolutism of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic age. But it is well not to overlook the fact that the transition from belief to scepticism was neither a rapid nor an even process. It would manifestly be wrong to believe that the religious issues of preceding ages had vanished with the end of the ‘wars of religion’—with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. On the contrary, the map of Europe according to religions—Orthodox, Catholic, Uniate and Protestant—must always be superimposed upon the maps of Europe according to racial stock, language and social pattern, to make intelligible the politics of our period, as indeed of much later ones. And where the religious frontier was not clear-cut, where Catholic overlapped with Protestant as in western Germany, or where Catholic, Uniate and Orthodox collided on the disputed and moving border between Russia and her western neighbours, new possibilities of conflict still existed. Nor where Christian Europe met the Moslem East in the Mediterranean or the Balkans had a still deeper and more ancient conflict ceased to have meaning. As late as 1716, Pope Clement XI was talking of a crusade against the Turk.

If on the international scene such motives now played a secondary part as compared with the greed of dynasts or of expanding mercantile economies, if the Turk was not so much an infidel to be annihilated as a counter in the diplomatic game, as indeed he had been at least since the alliance between Francis I of France and the Sultan in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, the internal politics of European countries were still dominated by the belief—almost universal—in the desirability of religious conformity, for political reasons if for no others. It was in this age after all, that the French religious compromise enshrined in the Edict of Nantes broke down. In cancelling his grandfather’s guarantee to his Protestant subjects in 1685 and in sharpening the persecution against them, Louis XIV not only exacerbated European suspicions of his intentions abroad but contributed, in the long run, to widening the gap between the French monarchy and important classes among his subjects. So too, the persecution that befell the Jansenist element within the Catholic fold was not without its political effects.

The religious issues were consequently now fought out for the most part within the framework of the several states, rather than internationally. The failure of Louis XIV to make good his efforts to sustain a Catholic Stuart dynasty on the English throne might be regarded as a postscript to the wars of religion properly speaking. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this change is marked by the almost total effacement of the Papacy as a factor in European politics, and by the expulsion of its militia, the Jesuit order, from successive States at the behest of their Catholic monarchs, a process culminating in the dissolution of the order by Clement XIV in 1773. The renewed emphasis upon religion after 1789 as a counterweight to the godlessness of the French Revolution marks not only a new phase in the history of religious sentiment, but in many countries, a new era in the perennial problem of Church and State.

This new phase is, of course, linked with an even wider reaction against many of the dominant cultural attitudes of the enlightenment—a reaction to which the name romantic is often loosely attached. From this point of view and from others as well, it can be argued that the period that begins roughly in 1660 ends not in 1815, but a generation earlier. It has, indeed, been traditional to take the American and French Revolutions as a major dividing line in European history. But the implications of this tradition have not always been appreciated. It was in fact based upon a conviction easier to hold fifty years ago than today, that the essential process of modern history has been a process in the direction of greater democracy, meaning by this the more widespread participation of the masses of the people in the regulation of their political affairs. From this point of view, the previous period, the period of the ancien régime was above all to be regarded as an age of class privilege in which the keys of power, both economic and political were firmly gripped by restricted social groups, landed or urban oligarchies, under whose selfish domination the many were ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of the few and whose cultural creations were to be seen as merely a veneer over the depths of primitive poverty and ignorance. The main historical interest of the era looked at in this light was in the accumulation of discontent, and in the development of new social forces and new systems of belief, under whose combined assault the older systems of power eventually crumbled. The American and French Revolutions were important not only for themselves, but in the example that they provided for others to follow. The fate of all empires was prefigured, it was thought, in the downfall of British dominion in America, and that of all monarchies in the collapse of the French Bourbons.

In our longer perspective such a view may seem superficial. Although the democratic principle has continued to make strides not only in the western world, but even in those parts of the globe that were in the eighteenth century only just beginning to fall under western influence, the principle itself has undergone many changes of interpretation, and has aroused violent and at times successful reactions. The ideas and programmes that the eighteenth-century revolutionaries believed to be indissolubly connected with the democratic principle have proved by no means so simply interrelated.

The famous triad of revolutionary France, ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, has failed to preserve its hypothetical unity. It is hard to see that liberty (as eighteenth-century thinkers would for the most part have defined it) has made important advances except in limited areas, and for limited periods of time. Equality after the French Revolution made gigantic strides in the social sense. It took only two generations to uproot from the Continent the predial serfdom that had for centuries provided the base of a relatively rigid class structure, enshrined in law as well as in custom. But economic inequality was actually fortified for a time by the impact of the new industrial order, before provoking the mighty egalitarian reaction of our own day. Finally, fraternity has found little or no scope among the conflicting nation-states, empires and races: hat have battled for hegemony or survival in the nineteenth and twentieth-century worlds.

The movement towards a theory of economic individualism, in the second half of the eighteenth century, whether under the ‘legal depotism’ postulated by the French physiocrats or in the more liberal guise given to it by the Adam Smith school, was relatively short-lived. The basic social doctrine of the preceding era, the complex system of State intervention and control known as mercantilism, that seemed so totally discredited not only by the arguments of its critics but by events themselves, re-emerged in a new guise at the end of the nineteenth century and became the accepted canon in practice, if not in theory, for the more benevolent and respectable of governments.

Indeed from our own point of view, as has been suggested earlier, the century before the French Revolution is of special significance precisely because of the development of governmental techniques that were to be appropriated by the successors of the absolutist regimes that created them. Ever since Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime—that is to say for almost a century—it has been a platitude of historical writing to point out that the French monarchy by its levelling and destroying tendencies paved the way for the achievements of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, that the institutions of modern France, most of which appear to date from that era, represent only an adaptation of the earlier practices of monarchical absolutism. That absolutism was limited partly, as Tocqueville saw, by the existence of intermediary powers in the shape of privileged classes or centres of local autonomy, but also because of the fact that outside of those groups through whom power was actually exercised, its reliance had perforce to be upon a passive obedience that could not easily, or for long, be brought to undergo major sacrifices for public ends. These restraints disappeared when loyalty to the State was given a new warmth by its identification with a community. Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ has been the butt of logicians ever since the Social Contract first appeared; but within a generation of his death the reality of the concept in practical politics was being dramatically and conclusively affirmed by the conduct of Revolutionary France, and in the struggle against France of other national groups. Democracy, it was found by 1815, could call forth energies that no absolute monarch had been able to utilise for long; and subsequent history has seen governments consistently exploit this fact. French conscription and the British income-tax, the two great weapons of the modern State were both creations of the 1790s. The ‘Age of Absolutism’, as we have defined it, comes to an end only to give way to the new age of ‘Democratic Absolutism’ that is our own.

With this in mind, it may be seen that to choose for consideration the period 1660–1815, and to call it the ‘Age of Absolutism’, indicates an intention to concentrate upon the development of political and administrative institutions, upon the social forces that contributed to their development, and upon the presuppositions that underlay, consciously or not, their creation and employment. Since the period after 1789 involves so much besides, and since it is in its own right the most studied and most familiar of all periods of European history, it will be dealt with here largely by way of postscript, by way of an attempt to show the prolongation into it of the tendencies of the preceding age—an age not only further removed from us in time, but one whose atmosphere is much harder to enter into, and about which historians still have much to learn. And even here, we shall be forced to concentrate upon the years 1715–89 during which the institutions of monarchial absolutism reached the culminating point of their development.

If we look back over the century and more of European history that end for the diplomat with the four peace treaties of the mid-seventeenth century—the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 and the Treaties of Oliva and Copenhagen which ended the northern wars in 1660—its striking feature is the complexity of the forces that were in armed conflict. The phrase, ‘The wars of religion’ turns out to be only a name for a struggle whose participants included political organisations of all types and sizes from city-states to the multi-national empires of the Habsburgs or the Turkish Sultans, as well as national groups, social classes and religious organisations whose loyalty was to themselves in the first place, and often to themselves alone.

It becomes clear that despite the well-established habit of talking of the ‘new monarchies’ of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the political world of the next hundred and fifty years still showed the deep imprint of a feudalism that had nominally ceased to exist. The Middle Ages did not suddenly come to an end because an Italian sailor in Spanish service made landfall in the West Indies, or because a renegade German monk hurled defiance at Pope and Emperor.

The characteristic feature of feudalism, and of the Middle Ages, the intimate association of political power with the ownership of land showed considerable powers of survival. The petty autocracies of the Imperial knights of Germany lingered on as living reminders of the fact, just as the shadowy precedence accorded to the Imperial title lingered on after the power of its holders, the Austrian Habsburgs was reduced to that which they could exercise in their own hereditary lands.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the modern idea of political sovereignty, the notion that over every man and every foot of ground, there must exist some single supreme authority was still something to be argued and fought over rather than the underlying presumption of all political action. Our ordinary technique of printing maps with a separate colour for each country can be very misleading indeed when applied to earlier ages, if one tries to draw from it conclusions about the relative strength of the units thus apparently comparable. The process by which maps of this kind came to be a faithful representation of the facts was still incomplete in 1660 in most of Europe, and in parts of Europe was scarcely complete until the drastic tidying-up of the Napoleonic e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Age Defined
• 2 The European Scene: 1660–1789
• 3 France
• 4 Spain and Portugal
• 5 Prussia and Austria
• 6 Russia and Poland
• 7 The Maritime Powers and the American Revolution
• 8 Absolutism in Transformation: 1789–1815
• A Note on Books
• Map 1: The Great Powers of Europe: 1660
• Map 2: The Great Powers of Europe: 1789
• Index