3.7 Absolutist Approaches to Power

Absolutism is a system where the monarch holds supreme power, makes laws and taxes without a parliament's consent and controls the army, bureaucracy and church. In practice, no king could rule alone. Monarchs made deals with nobles: nobles lost real political power but kept their titles, land, tax exemptions and social rank. Many historians stress that absolutism worked through cooperation with elites, not just force.

Louis took personal control in 1661, after Cardinal Mazarin died, and never appointed another chief minister. He is often quoted as saying I am the state, though he probably never said it; it does capture his style.

• Versailles: he turned a hunting lodge outside Paris into a huge palace and moved the court there in 1682. Great nobles were expected to live at court, where they competed for royal favor through elaborate rituals, far from their power bases in the provinces.
• Intendants: royal officials, often from non-noble backgrounds, who ran the provinces, collected taxes and reported directly to the king.
• No Estates-General: France's national assembly never met during his reign (it met in 1614 and not again until 1789), and he restricted the right of the Paris parlement, a high law court, to object to his laws.
• Army and economy: he built one of Europe's largest armies, and Colbert's mercantilist policies (see 3.4) funded it.
• Religion: one king, one law, one faith. In 1685 the Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes, banning Protestant worship. Perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots fled to the Dutch Republic, England, Prussia and elsewhere, taking valuable skills with them.

Peter wanted to make Russia a modern European power. On his Grand Embassy (1697–1698) he traveled through western Europe, even working in Dutch shipyards. Westernization meant adopting western European technology, institutions and customs.

He built a modern army and Russia's first navy, beat Sweden in the Great Northern War and founded a new capital, St. Petersburg (1703), on the Baltic as his window to the West. He crushed a revolt by the streltsy, Moscow's palace guards, ordered nobles to shave their beards and wear Western clothes, and created the Table of Ranks (1722), which tied noble status to state service in the army or bureaucracy. He opened schools of mathematics and navigation and planned the Academy of Sciences, which opened in St. Petersburg in 1725. He replaced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch, with a council called the Holy Synod under state control.

Peter's reforms rested on the peasants. He raised taxes, introduced a head tax on every male peasant, and serfdom grew harsher. Catherine the Great (reigned 1762–1796) later continued westernization and expanded Russia, while giving nobles more privileges in her Charter of the Nobility (1785).