Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson

dominated European political thought for a century, eloquently embodies these contradictions of Absolutism. For Bodin was the first thinker systematically and resolutely to break with the mediaeval conception of authority as the exercise of traditional justice, and to formulate the modern idea of political power as the sovereign capacity to create new laws, and impose unquestioning obedience to them. ‘The principal mark of sovereign majesty and absolute power is essentially the right to impose laws on subjects generally without their consent. . . . There is indeed a distinction between justice and law, for the one merely implies equity, while the other implies command. Law is nothing other than the command of the sovereign in the exercise of his power.’¹⁰ Yet while enunciating these revolutionary axioms, Bodin simultaneously upheld the most conservative feudal maxims limiting the basic fiscal and economic rights of rulers over their subjects. ‘It is not within the competence of any prince in the world to levy taxes at will on his people, or seize the goods of another arbitrarily’; for ‘since the sovereign prince has no power to transgress the laws of nature, which God – whose image he is on earth – has ordained, he cannot take the property of another without a just and reasonable cause.’¹¹ Bodin’s passionate exegesis of the novel idea of sovereignty was thus combined with a call for the reinvigoration of the fief system for military service, and a reaffirmation of the value of Estates: ‘The sovereignty of a monarch is no way altered or diminished by the existence of Estates; on the contrary, his majesty is the greater and more illustrious when his people acknowledge him as sovereign, even if in such assemblies princes, not wanting to antagonize their subjects, grant and permit many things to which they would not have consented without the requests, prayers and just complaints of their people. . . .’¹² Nothing reveals more clearly the real nature of Absolute Monarchy in the later Renaissance than this authoritative theorization of it. For the practice of Absolutism corresponded to Bodin’s theory of it. No Absolutist State could ever dispose at will of the liberty or landed property of the nobility itself, or the bourgeoisie, in the fashion of the Asian tyrannies coeval with them. Nor did they ever achieve any complete administrative centralization or juridical unification; corporative particularisms and regional heterogeneities inherited from the mediaeval epoch marked the Ancien Régimes down to their ultimate overthrow. Absolute monarchy in the West was thus, in fact, always doubly limited: by the persistence of traditional political bodies below it and the presence of an overarching moral law above it. In other words, the sway of Absolutism ultimately operated within the necessary bounds of the class whose interests it secured. Sharp conflicts between the two were to break out as the dismantling of many familiar noble landmarks by the monarchy proceeded in the next century. But throughout them, it should be remembered that just as no absolute power was ever exercised by the Absolutist State of the West, no struggle between these States and their aristocracies could ever be absolute either. The social unity of the two determined the terrain and temporality of the political contradictions between them. These, however, were to have their own historical importance.

      The next hundred years witnessed the full emplacement of the Absolutist State, in a century of agrarian and demographic depression and downward-drifting prices. It was now that the effects of the ‘military revolution’ made themselves decisively felt. Armies rapidly multiplied in size, becoming astronomically expensive, in a series of ceaselessly expanding wars. Tilly’s operations were not so much larger than those of Alva; they were dwarfed by those of Turenne. The cost of these massive military machines created acute revenue crises for the Absolutist States. Tax pressures on the masses generally intensified. Simultaneously, the sale of public offices and honours now became a central financial expedient for all monarchies, and was systematized in a way that it had not been in the previous century. The result was to integrate a growing number of arriviste bourgeois into the columns of State functionaries, which became increasingly professionalized, and to reorganize the links between the nobility and the State apparatus itself.

      For the sale of offices was not merely an economic device to raise revenue from the propertied classes. It also served a political function: by making the acquisition of bureaucratic position a market transaction, and vesting ownership of it with rights of inheritance, sale of offices blocked the formation of grandee clientage systems within the State dependent not on impersonal cash equivalents, but on the personal connections and prestige of a great lord and his house. Richelieu stressed in his Testament the critical ‘sterilizing’ role of the paulette in putting the whole administrative system beyond the reach of tentacular aristocratic lineages like that of the House of Guise. Of course, one parasitism was only exchanged for another: instead of patronage, venality. But the mediation of the market was a safer one for the monarchy than that of the magnates: the Parisian financial syndicates who advanced loans to the State, farmed taxes and bought up offices in the 17th century were much less dangerous to French Absolutism than the provincial dynasties of the 16th, who not only had sections of the royal administration beholden to them, but could field their own armed troops as well. The augmented bureaucratization of office in its turn produced new types of ruling administrators, normally recruited from the nobility and expecting the conventional benefits of office, but imbued with a rigorous respect for the State as such and a fierce determination to uphold its long-term interests against short-sighted cabals of ambitious or disaffected grandees. These were the austere reforming Ministers of the 17th century monarchies, essentially civilian functionaries, with no autonomous regional or military base, directing the affairs of State from their cabinets: Oxenstierna, Laud, Richelieu, Colbert or Olivares. (The complementary type in the new era was the feckless personal intimate of the reigning sovereign, the válido of whom Spain was to be so prodigal, from Lerma to Godoy; Mazarin was a strange mixture of the two.) It was these generations which extended and codified the practices of bilateral 16th century diplomacy into a multilateral international system, of which the Treaty of Westphalia was the founding charter, and the magnified scope of the wars of the 17th century the material crucible.

      Escalation of war, bureaucratization of office, intensification of taxation, erosion of clientage, all led in the same direction: towards a decisive elimination of what Montesquieu in the next century was to theorize nostalgically as the ‘intermediary powers’ between the monarchy and the people. In other words, the Estates systems progressively went under as the class power of the nobility assumed the form of a centripetal dictatorship exercised under the royal ensign. The actual power of the monarchy as an institution, of course, in no way necessarily corresponded to that of the monarch: the sovereign who actually directed administration and conducted policy was as much the exception as the rule, although for obvious reasons the creative unity and efficacy of Absolutism was always at its height when the two coincided (Louis XIV or Frederick II). The maximum florescence and vigour of the Absolutist State of the grand siècle was necessarily also a stifling compression of the traditional rights and autonomies of the noble class, which dated back to the original mediaeval decentralization of the feudal polity and were sanctioned by venerable custom and interest. The last Estates-General before the Revolution was held in France in 1614; the last Castilian Cortés before Napoleon in 1665; the last Landtag in Bavaria in 1669; while in England, the longest surcease of Parliament in a century occurred, from 1629 to the Civil War. This epoch is thus not only that of a political and cultural apogee of Absolutism, but also of widespread aristocratic disaffection and alienation from it. Particularist privileges and customary rights were not abandoned without a struggle, especially in a time of pervasive economic recession and tautened credit.

      The 17th century was thus repeatedly the scene of local noble revolts against the Absolutist State in the West, which often blended with incipient sedition by lawyers or merchants, and sometimes even utilized the suffering rage of the rural and urban masses themselves, as a temporary weapon against the monarchy.¹³ The Fronde in France, the Catalonian Republic in Spain, the Neapolitan Revolution in Italy, the Estates Revolt in Bohemia and the Great Rebellion in England itself all had, in very different proportions, something of this aspect of a nobiliary revolt against the consolidation of Absolutism.¹⁴ Naturally, this reaction could never become a full-scale, united aristocratic onslaught on the monarchy, for the two were tied together by an umbilical class cord: nor was there any case of a purely noble revolt in the century. The characteristic pattern was rather an overdetermined explosion in which a regionally delimited part of the nobility raised the banner of aristocratic separatism, and was joined by a discontented urban bourgeoisie and plebeian