Absolute Monarchy: Crash Course European History #13 (1)
Hi, I'm John Green and this is crash course European history
So today we're moving into the second half of the 17th century
The 30 Years War has ended with the Treaty of Westphalia and the Scientific Revolution is producing amazing new universal laws
but life is still pretty terrible for the vast majority of people. For Kings though, things were changing with the advent of absolutism
in which the king is said to have a divine right to the throne and the
Divinest divine right monarch of them all Louis XIV,
led Western Europe's most powerful Kingdom for more than 70 years
So this is a portrait of Louis XIV - the French Sun King, painted when he was 63
Louis XIV looks regal in his massive black wig and swaths of ermine
Embellished with fleurs-de-lis the symbol of the former french royal house
His high heels show off his shapely legs in white hose
demonstrating the king's
perfection. Men's legs garbed in tightly fitted stockings were a key indication of
desirability at the time and while he may not appear super masculine to us
Louis XIV was the model of powerful kingship and indeed absolute power
Louis was four years old when he started his reign in
1643 while Europe was attempting to pull itself out of the 30 Years War earlier under Louis's father Louis XIII
rebellions abounded in the hundreds across the kingdom
Because of increasingly heavy taxation to pay for the war and the famine conditions due to the relentless little ice age
It seemed almost unthinkable to ordinary people that the king would betray his subjects with
rising taxes in a time of famine. So instead they usually blamed tax collectors and local officials
not the king after Louis XIII died, his
four-year-old son was a smidge small for France ruling
So the job was taken over by his Regent, his mother, Anne of Austria
With help from her sidekick and rumored lover the Italian born Cardinal Mazarin
The first years of Anne's Regency were the last years of the 30 Years War and she increased French military
deployments even amid all these protests with the simple and eventually successful goal of defeating the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs
To gain more territory alongside increasing the desperation of ordinary people. This constant warfare stretched
Aristocratic resources because Nobles raised and paid for their own armies in wartime
Louis's mother had to move him several times to keep him safe amid protests from peasants and nobility
Alike some of whom even went to the point of plotting Coups d'état
which is after all a French phrase. the Pieds Nus - or barefooted ones, the Croquants - or
crunchers or crispies, and even judges of Paris were among the people resisting. One judge listed the
sacrifices of ordinary people such as selling all their furniture and sleeping on straw in order to pay rising taxes
He said to maintain the luxury of Paris millions of innocent souls are obliged to live on black bread and oats
Did the center of the world just open? Is there a pumpernickel bagel in there?
It's the closest we could get to black bread. Now. This is a
properly great bagel
Hmm
I'm gonna eat that whole thing. Once this is done but black bread in 17th century, France...Not good. For one thing
It was often cut with sawdust, which you know, isn't ideal for bread making and also isn't ideal for nutrition
in fact, our contemporary bread is so good that it's hard for us to imagine just
How difficult the circumstances were in the 17th century?
Like just how desperate you have to be to add sawdust to your dough
So we're gonna jump back in time for a bit, earlier in the 17th century, a group of judges
managed to undermine the monarchy,
if only temporarily. You'll recall that France ended their religious civil war with Henry,
Paris's well worth amassed the fourth ruling. Henry was Louis XIV's
grandfather and to pay for ongoing wars Henry raised a new tax called the Paulette that was paid by government officials
including judges over a nine-year period
and if you paid the Paulette you could keep your job for life or even sell your job to a
successor and this created a powerful class of bureaucrats who were basically immune from state oversight
But Henry couldn't afford to get rid of the Paulette because he needed the cash to wage wars
The officials who bought their positions came to be known as the nobles of the robe as opposed to the old-school
nobles who were called the nobles of the sword because they'd gotten their status via military
service to the king
Flash forward a few decades Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin are trying to throw these Nobles of the robe out of office
Which the new nobles are of course not keen on leading and to threaten to arrest them
I mean after all they'd paid a lot of money for those robes all of this pushed the people of Paris to their most menacing
protests until the
monarchy back down and released the judges that they had imprisoned and this triumph over the monarchy made the nobility of the robe a force
to be reckoned with and also indicated that maybe the absolute power of the monarchy
Wasn't actually that absolute. Alongside these protesters another contender for influence arose a new Catholic movement
Jansenism, called for a complete purging of the self and a fervent
spirituality to replace the insufficient and even deluded practices of the church.
Like for instance being a cardinal who is probably hooking up with the king's mom
the Jansenist believe only intense and full religious commitment could pull France from its dire straits and their menaced
established authority, but the most threatening uprising was the Fronde, a series of opposition movements between
1648 and
1653 in which the old nobility and the courts were like, " you can't just raise our taxes willy-nilly without asking permission "
And Anne of Austria was like, " of course we can it's a kingdom and we are ,well
if not, exactly the king at least the Kings Regent and her sidekick ".
Let's go to the thought-bubble
Louis XIV was officially crowned king in 1654 when he was 15
And as he grew older his urgent task became organizing the administration of his kingdom
Raising funds and uniting his subjects in loyalty to him
part of his brilliance was to divert the nobility and in fact a good part of France with a
spectacular court life, rather how a parent might divert a relentless unhappy child would, say, an IPad
But Louie's court was even more diverting than, I don't know
what kids like? TiKTok ?
in the 1660s the King began the task of removing his
Government from the tumult of Paris by converting a hunting lodge at Versailles outside of Paris into the most spectacular
European palace complex of its day it has some
15,000 people when the court moved there in the 1680s and further thousands in the many adjacent
buildings for servants and smaller Chateau built for Louis's mistresses
The nobility was kept busy attending to the king and queen as well as serving the monarchs
legitimate and many illegitimate children
They also outdid themselves in maneuvering for status
One of the highest honors being to hand the king his nightshirt in the evening or to oversee his use of the commode. The king
also sponsored and sometimes starred in spectacular operas and concerts and plays to add to the feeling of his greatness and power
While the nobility enhanced the scene by behaving as if the King were in fact more than humanly powerful
It was almost like the king was a bright sun whose presence warmed all those it graced and indeed,
That's why Louis XIV came to be known as the Sun King
Thanks, thought-bubble ! In the days of absolutism monarchs across Europe embraced the idea that they had the divine right to their absolute
rule. The Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet preached in the royal chapel of Versailles that quote : " It is God who
establishes kings...he vested royalty in the House of David, and ordered him to cause Solomon, his son to reign in his place...
Princes thus act as ministers of God. "
He continued, " This is why we have seen that the royal throne is not the throne of a man, but the throne of God himself. "
To his mind, " God has placed in Princes something divine. " and in fact, Bossuet maintained,
" Princes are gods. ". The kings divinity allowed for his regime to be free from arbitrariness or the tyranny of
anarchy because whatever he did was
necessarily correct. Louis XIV probably never said the line most famously attributed to him,
" L'etat c'est moi " or " the state is me ", but it has endured for a reason
He really was the state's power and authority
and he felt that even if he never said it. But Divine Right theory also meant religious conformity. Louis XIV viewed the presence of
protestants in his realm as disorderly and sinful, causing him to revoke the Edict de Nantes in 1685
Thousands of Protestants then fled France, taking their skills and successful businesses to the Netherlands, the German states, North America, South Africa
and other places. And for all the surface grandeur of Louis's regime
it worked mostly because of accomplished bureaucrats including the intendants or
InEnDantS, if I'm pretending to be able to pronounce French, whose jobs were regularized to oversee tax collections, and the
administration's of the various regions of the kingdom. The most prominent and important of all Louis's officials was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who oversaw
finances and public works among other things. Despite being of middle-class birth, Colbert drove the kingdom's economy
Including its merchants, shipbuilders and artisans. Colbert also oversaw French expansion into North America
sending out settlers and officials, traders combed the continent for the
desperately needed furs that were in high demand during the intense cold of the Little Ice Age
Colbert is most famous for his support of
mercantilism, a policy that saw economic development and trade as
akin to war. Merkin to his thinkers believed that there was only so much wealth in the world a finite and fixed amount
And in such a zero-sum world, the only way for one kingdom to win would be for other kingdoms to lose
We now know this isn't true. But mercantilism was an important driver of policy and foreign relations at the time
there were many applications of this theory refusing entry of another Kingdom ships for instance or
enacting high tariffs on competitors goods
We can see one example of this in cotton textiles, which were
wildly popular but Europeans had no idea how to produce such lively and washable fabrics
So they were outlawed in France
Smuggling, however, thrived with women and men alike
Wearing cotton and even high officials brought them in illegally. In this and other areas of life people did disobey
Absolutist rules. Still, Louis had a lot of power, including the power to wage war
He waged four major ones first the war of devolution in which France gained territory in the north
Second, the Dutch war which gained additional land to the north and along the eastern border
Third, the War of the League of Augsburg
In which he lost much of the land won in the Dutch war. And fourth, the war of the Spanish Succession
again with significant losses
including in Canada this time to Britain, who you might not have expected to be mixed up in the Spanish war of succession
but
Everyone wanted in on warring in 17th century Europe. Clearly, like the ideal reality TV contestant, Louis was not there to make friends
but we can see through this exchange of lands, through endless war how a
