WORLD HISTORY: Volume II - Chapter 15 (p508-515)

RESPONSE TO CRISIS: THE PRACTICE OF ABSOLUTISM

In the seventeenth century, there were lots of crises in Europe. There were wars and a new, more modern way of fighting wars with new weapons.

Many people wanted order. They thought that if a king was strong, there would be more peace in the country. The result was absolutism, also called Absolute Monarchy. The idea was that kings had total, absolute, 100% power. A king could do whatever he liked. Kings said that they had a divine right to rule because God had given them their power. This is called the Divine Right of Kings. They believed, and so did many other people, that a king could make all the decisions for his country and not have to ask anyone else.

France Under Louis XIV

Louis XIV (1643-1715) was the King of France . The way he ruled is a good example of divine right monarchy. In seventeenth century Europe, French language and culture was very important. France was also very important and powerful in Europe. Louis XIV's court was copied everywhere in Europe because everyone thought it was wonderful.

Political Institutions

Louis had complete control over policy-making. He made all his decisions about the government of his country from in his palace. The court was in the Palace of Versailles, it was just outside Paris. The court was :

The greatest danger to Louis' power came from the very high nobles and royal princes. They wanted to be making some of the important decisions in running the country. Louis made sure this did not happen. He removed them from the royal council. This was the king's main administrative body or group. Louis made sure that these nobles and princes spent all their time at the court and out of politics. Louis had some ministers to help him but they were from new aristocratic families. He expected his ministers to do exactly what he told them. 'I had no intention of sharing my authority with them,' he said. This meant he would not share his power with them.

Life at court was very organized. The king had no privacy. His courtiers were around him almost all the time. All his everyday activities were carefully managed: getting up, washing, eating, praying, going to Mass in church and going to bed. The nobles all wanted to be involved in these activities. Even something simple like handing Louis his shirt was an honour. Court etiquette was very complicated. Nobles and princes were arranged according to who was the most senior down to who was the most junior. Everyone had to follow certain rules. There was a lot of discussion about who was allowed to sit down and who was not and what kind of chair they were allowed to sit on.

Louis had total power over his ministers and his secretaries. He decided what foreign policy France would have, he decided whether there would be war or peace, he decided when the state could overrule the church and he decided how much people should pay in taxes. However, Louis did not have so much control over the internal administration of France. The nobles, the town councils, the guilds and other organisations were too powerful and had more control over the lives of the ordinary people in France. The result of this was that often Louis' representatives in each area of France were bribed to do what other people wanted.

The Economy and the Military

Louis spent a lot of money on building palaces, running his court and having wars. He was lucky to have a man to help him with this. The man was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683). He was Louis' controller of finances. Colbert tried to make France richer through mercantilism. Mercantilism is when the government becomes very involved in business to make money for the state. Colbert wanted to decrease imports and increase exports so he gave subsidies to anyone who started up a new industry. He built roads and canals to make it easier to move goods and to improve communication. To decrease imports, he put high tariffs on foreign goods.

Louis had lots of power so he developed a big army of 100,000 men in peacetime and 400,000 men when there was a war on. Louis was an absolute king and so it was important to him to win lots of wars. It made him look good and gave him lots of power in Europe. Louis had four wars between 1667 and 1713. Other European countries got together and made coalitions against him to stop him becoming too powerful. Louis added some territory to France on the north-eastern border and made a member of his family the King of Spain but he left France very poor and surrounded by enemies.

Absolutism in Central and Eastern Europe

During the seventeenth century, three countries became very powerful. They were Prussia, Austria and Russia.

Prussia

Frederick William the Great Elector (1640-16880) was the ruler of Prussia. He inherited land known as Brandenburg Prussia. It was a small, open territory with no natural borders e.g. rivers or mountains, for defence. Frederick William therefore built up a big army of 40,000 men. It was the fourth largest in Europe. Frederick had to pay for this army so he started a group called the General War Commissariat. This Commissariat made people pay taxes to pay for the army and to develop it. This group became very powerful and was very important to Frederick. It helped him to keep control of his country. Many of the men in the Commissariat were from the Prussian aristocracy (nobles). They were called Junkers and they were also officers in the Prussian army.

In 1701, Frederick William died and his son, Frederick became king. He was called King Frederick I and Brandenburg-Prussia became just 'Prussia.' In the eighteenth century, Prussia became one of the most powerful countries in Europe

Austria

The rulers of Austria were from the Habsburg family. They had been an important family for many years. Some of them had been Holy Roman Emperors. They wanted to create an empire in Germany but after the Thirty Year's War ended, they realized they could not do this. Therefore, they created a new empire in eastern and southern Europe.

The centre of the new Austrian Empire was all the territory they had always owned: Lower and Upper Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, Styria and Tyrol. They had also added Bohemia and parts of northwestern Hungary. They defeated the Turks in 1687 and then took control of all of Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia and Slovenia. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Austrians had a large empire.

However, the Austrian monarchy never became an absolutist state, mainly because it had so many different national groups in it: Hungarians, Croatians, etc. It made it difficult to have total control. The Austrian Empire was a group of territories held together by the Austrian Habsburg emperor. He was called the archduke of Austria, king of Bohemia and king of Hungary. Each of these areas had its own laws and its own political life.

From Muscovy to Russia

In the fifteenth century, the principality of Muscovy was the most important part of Russia. Its leaders were grand dukes. In the sixteenth century, Ivan IV (1533-1584) became the first leader of Russia to call himself 'Tsar' which is the Russian word for 'Caesar.' Ivan made Russia's territories bigger and made the Russian nobles less powerful. Ivan IV was known as 'Ivan the Terrible' because of the awful things he did. He even stabbed his own son to death in an argument! When he died in 1598, there was fifteen years of anarchy in Russia, with no real leader until the Zemsky Sobor national assembly - a kind of government) asked a man called Michael Romanov to be the new Tsar. The Romanov family ruled Russia for more than four hundred years. One member of the Romanov family was Peter the Great.

Peter the Great (1689-1725) was an unusual man. He was very strong and very tall. He had a low sense of humour - he enjoyed belching contests and dirty jokes. He also liked to punish people in a very cruel way - floggings, impalings and roastings. Peter went to visit the West in 1697-1698 and when he came back to Russia, he wanted to westernise it. He wanted to borrow Western technology to build up the army and navy and make Russia a great power.

He started to reorganize the army and navy. He employed both Russians and Europeans as officers, and he conscripted peasants to work in the army for twenty-five years. He soon had an army of 210,000 men. He also made the first navy that Russia ever had.

Peter divided Russia up into provinces so that he could control it more easily. He wanted to make a 'police state' where everything was in order and everyone followed the laws. However, his bureaucrats did not think in this way. They were not loyal to the state. Peter wanted everyone to have a strong feeling of civic duty with people all working together because it was good for the country. However, Peter's strong personality just made everyone live in fear and this 'good feeling' about the state did not happen.

Peter wanted to make Russia into a great state and military power. He wanted to 'open a window to the west.' By this, he meant he wanted a port which was ice-free (it did not freeze over in winter) and that his ships could use to get to Europe easily. He wanted a port like this on the Baltic coast. However, the Baltic was controlled by Sweden at that time. He had a long, hard war with Sweden and he won. In 1703, Peter began the building of a new city. It was called Saint Petersburg and it was his 'window to the west.' By the time Peter had died in 1725, Russia had become a great military power and an important European state.

ENGLAND AND LIMITED monarchy

Not all states were absolutist in the seventeenth century. In England, the king and parliament fought with each other to decide how much power a king should have.

Conflict between King and Parliament

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603. She had no children so the Tudor family dynasty ended and the Stuart family took over as England's rulers. King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England (1603-1625). James believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Parliament did not like this. The Tudors had ruled with Parliament, they had ruled the country together. This was called 'balanced polity.' There were also problems with the puritans. They were Protestants but believed in Calvin and wanted the Church of England (also called the Anglican Church) to have no parts of Catholicism in it. They did not like the way that King James wanted to keep the Church as mildly Protestant with some Catholicism still in it. Many of England's gentry, especially the rich landowners, had become Puritans. They were in the House of Commons which was the lower part of Parliament. James died and his son Charles I (1625-1649) became king. The trouble between the King and Parliament got worse. Charles believed, like his father, in the Divine Right of Kings. The religious differences with the Puritans also added to the trouble between Charles I and Parliament. Charles tried to make the Church of England (Anglican Church) more Catholic and less Protestant. The Puritans were angry and thousands of them went off to live in America.

Civil War and the Commonwealth

The problems got worse and England had a civil war (1642-1648). Parliament's army won. They had the New Model Army to help them. This was run by a man called Oliver Cromwell who had lots of military skills. The New Model Army had men in it who were very extreme Protestants. They were called the Independents. They were like Calvinists and believed they were fighting for God. Cromwell trained these soldiers very well.

On January 30, 1649, Charles was executed. Parliament abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords (the upper part of Parliament) and said that England was a republic or 'commonwealth.'. However, Cromwell and his men could not work with Parliament and stopped them from governing England. They used force. They started a military dictatorship. Cromwell died in 1658 and the army decided that military rule was not a good idea. They restored (brought back) the monarchy and they made Charles I's son, Charles II, king of England.

Restoration and a Glorious Revolution

Charles liked Catholicism and in 1672, he issued the Declaration of Indulgence. This stopped the laws against Catholics and Puritans after the restoration of the monarchy. Parliament said the king had to take back his declaration. When Charles II died, his son, James II (1685-1688) became king. James was a Catholic and he wanted to give Catholics important and powerful jobs. Once again, religion was a cause of trouble between the King and Parliament. James wanted to give Catholics important jobs in the government, the army, navy and in universities. Parliament was angry but they knew that James was an old man and that his two daughters, his successors, were Protestants. Their names were Mary and Anne and their mother was James' first wife, a Protestant. However, on June 10, 1688, James' second wife (also a Catholic) gave birth to a son. This meant that the boy would be Catholic, too. Parliament was very worried that England would get a long line of Catholic monarchs. The ruler of Holland was William of Orange. He was the husband of James' daughter, Mary. A group of important English nobles, asked him to invade England. William and Mary got an army together and invaded England. King James II, his wife and their baby son ran away to France. There was almost no fighting. England had had its 'Glorious Revolution.'

In January 1689, Parliament asked William and Mary to become king and queen of England. They said yes but they had to agree to a Bill of Rights. This said that Parliament had the right to make laws and bring in taxes. It also said that ordinary people had the right to keep guns and also to have a trial by jury if they were arrested. Parliament had destroyed the whole idea of the Divine Right of Kings. They had got rid of James II and they, Parliament -not God -had chosen William to be king. Parliament had also now got the right to be part of governing the country - not just do what the king told them to do. Parliament did not have total control over governing the country but it joined with the king in making important decisions. Over the next century, Parliament became the real authority in the English system of government. This system was called a limited (constitutional) monarchy.

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