7.9: Conclusion

As an aggregate, the states of Europe were transformed by absolutist trends. Royal governments grew roughly 400% in size (i.e. in terms of the number of officials they employed and the tax revenues they collected) over the course of the seventeenth century, and standing armies went from around 20,000 men during the sixteenth century to well over 150,000 by the late seventeenth century.

Armies were not just larger. They were better disciplined, trained, and "standardized." For the first time, soldiers were issued standard uniforms. Warfare, while still bloody, was nowhere near as savage and chaotic as it had been during the wars of religion. Now, war was waged by professional soldiers answering to noble officers, rather than mercenaries simply unleashed against an enemy and told to live off of the land (i.e. the peasants). Officers on opposing sides often considered themselves to be part of a kind of extended family. A captured officer could expect to be treated as a respected peer by his "enemies" until his own side paid his ransom.

Disparate examples of absolutism, such as France and Prussia, had a shared concept of royal authority. The theory of absolutism was that the king was above the nobles and not answerable to anyone in his kingdom. However, he still owed his subjects a kind of benevolent protection and oversight. “Arbitrary” power was not the point. Power exercised by the monarch was supposed to be for the good of the kingdom, always known as raison d’etat, right or reason of the state. Practically speaking, the whole range of traditional rights, especially those of the nobles and the cities, had to be respected. Louis XIV famously claimed that "L'etat, c'est moi" - I am the state. In other words, there was no distinction between his own identity and the government of France itself, and his actions were by definition for the good of France.

Peasants suffered under absolutism, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Freedoms that had originally been enjoyed before 1500 began to increasingly vanish as the newly absolutist monarchs allowed nobility complete control over the peasantry. Already in place in much of the east, during the 17th Century, serfdom was hardened, and the free labor, fees, and taxes owed by peasants to their lords grew harsher. For example, the Austrian labor obligation was known as the robot, and consisted of up to 100 days of labor a year. In the east, nobles answered to increasingly powerful kings or emperors, but they were “absolute” rulers of their own estates and over their serfs.

The growth of both royal power and royal tax revenue could not keep up with the cost of war. Military expenditures were enormous. In a state like France, the military took up 50% of state revenues during peacetime, and 80% or more during times of war. Thus, monarchs granted monopolies on products and then taxed them. Noble titles and state offices were sold to the highest bidder. For example, the queen of Sweden doubled the number of noble families in ten years. The peasantry was relentlessly taxed. Indeed, royal taxes doubled in France between 1630 – 1650, and the concomitant peasant uprisings were ruthlessly suppressed.

In the absolutist systems, the rights and privileges of nobility were codified into clear laws for the first time. “Tables of ranks” were created that specified exactly where nobles stood vis-à-vis one another as well as the monarch and “princes of the blood.” Louis XIV of France had a branch of royal government devoted entirely to verifying claims of nobility and stripping noble titles from those without adequate proof.

The process from decentralized and fairly loosely organized states to "absolutism" was a long one. Even in the late 18th Century, numerous aspects of government remained strikingly "medieval" in some ways, such as laws from town to town and region to region based on the accumulation of various royal grants and traditional rights over the centuries. That being noted, there is no question that things had changed significantly over the course of the seventeenth century: governments were bigger, better organized, and more explicitly hierarchical in organization.