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2. European Civilization(1648-1945): Absolutism and the State
Poziom:
Temat: Edukacja
Prof: So, what I want to do today--again,
this is a parallel holding pattern lecture.
I'm going to talk about absolute rule.
This parallels what you're reading.
It's just to make clear, with some emphasis,
about the importance of the development of absolute rule.
Now, one of the points I made last week,
for those of you who were here, is that one of the themes that
ties European history together is the growth of the modern
state, of state-making.
This tends to be an awkward expression or term that is used
by historians.
If you look at the way states are in Europe now,
whether they be relatively decentralized,
such as Great Britain, or extraordinarily centralized,
as my France, the origins of the modern state
must, in part, be seen in this kind of
remarkable period of European history from the early
seventeenth century through the middle of the eighteenth
century.
Now, we have a process in late Medieval Europe of the
consolidation of territorial monarchies.
You did have monarchies like Spain, England,
and France, namely.
Those were the three most important ones,
in which rulers consolidated to brush claimants to power aside
and consolidated their rule.
But the period of absolute rule really begins in the
mid-seventeenth century, and is to be found in those
states that had specific kinds of social structures.
This is a point we'll come back to,
particularly when we're talking about the two most important
states, two of the great powers of the
period that did not have absolute rule.
And which, in the case of England,
the civil war was largely fought,
to a great extent anyway, trying to prevent the English
monarchy from taking on characteristics of those
emerging absolute states on the continent.
I'll talk next Wednesday about English/British,
because Britain doesn't exist until 1707,
self-identity and how not being an absolute state is part of
what emerged in the sense of being British and being Dutch
certainly, arguably even more,
had to do with that because of the proximity of the direct
threat to the Dutch by the megalomaniac,
Louis XIV, who modestly refers to himself as the Sun King.
So, between 1650 and 1750, and this is right out of what
you're reading, the rulers of continental
Europe, of the biggest states,
extended their power.
And, so, there were two aspects of this.
One is they extend their ability to extract resources out
of their own populations; and, second,
they work to increase their dynastic holdings at the expense
of their neighbors munching smaller states,
or by marriages, or by wars against their big
rivals.
One of the most interesting examples of that is the Thirty
Years' War, which starts before this course
and ends before this course or with the beginning of this
course, 1618-1648, which I'm going to come back to
a little bit in a while--they say while it begins as a
religious war between Protestants and Catholics,
it ends up being a dynastic struggle between two Catholic
powers consolidating their authority over their own
peoples, and expanding their dynastic
domains, thus Austria and France.
That's an important point, because it tells you what
really is the big picture that is going to emerge.
So, when we're talking about the growth of absolute rule,
we're talking about France, that is, the Sun King;
Prussia, particularly Frederick the Great about whom you can
read; Russia, Peter the Great,
about whom I will have something to say in a week or
two, I don't know when; Austria, aforementioned;
and Sweden.
Sweden kind of disappears from the great power state when
they're defeated by Peter the Great in--when is it?--1709.
Now, what did it mean to be an absolute ruler?
What it meant was that in principle,
your power was greater than any challenge that could come from
those underlings, those craven reptiles in your
imagination over whom you ruled.
But there's a balance to it that I'll discuss in a while.
There really can't be a challenge to them from the state
itself.
So, they make their personal or dynastic rule absolute,
based on loyalty to them as individuals and not to the state
as some sort of abstraction.
Of course, one of the interesting things that we'll
hear about in a couple days is the fact that British national
identity, which is formed precociously
early in European history, arguably in the seventeenth
century and for elites perhaps even before,
has this sort of constitutional balance between the rights of
parliament, victorious in the English Civil
War, and loyalty to the monarchy.
So, absolute rulers assert their right to make laws,
to proclaim or to announce laws with the waive of their chubby
hands, to levy taxes and to appoint
officials who will carry out their will.
So, it's possible to talk about the bureaucratization of
medieval states if you want, but when you look at the
long-range growth of bureaucracies as part of
government, as part of state formation,
that's why the growth of these bureaucracies is one of the
characteristics of these absolute states in all of these
big-time powers.
So, what they do is--well, let me give you a couple of
examples.
One thing absolute monarchs don't want is they don't want
impediments to their personal rule.
What was a kind of impediment to their personal rule?
One would be the municipal privileges.
For example, in the German port towns,
Lübeck and Hamburg and the others,
they formed this Hanseatic League,
and Germany remains to be centralized.
There are all sorts of states.
Some are more powerful than others.
But Germany is not unified until 1871.
But if you think of Spain, if you‘re hitchhiking
through Spain or something like that,
or through the south of France, or Eurail passes,
and if you go to a town like Avila in Spain.
Avila is one of the most fantastic fortified towns in
Europe.
Or, if you go to Nimes in the south of France,
you'll see boulevards that people race motorcycles around
all the time and they keep you up all night.
There are no walls there anymore, because the king had
them knocked down.
So, what happens with municipal privileges,
towns that had municipal privileges,
these are eroded and then virtually eliminated by powerful
potentates.
In the case of Nîmes, N-I-M-E-S,
which was largely a Protestant town,
they knocked down the wall so the Protestants of Nimes could
not defend themselves against this all-conquering Catholic
monarch.
So, municipal privileges--walls were put up for a variety of
reasons around towns.
Plague, for example.
Dubrovnik, one of my favorite cities in Europe.
Dubrovnik had these magnificent walls you could walk all the way
around.
They have a quarantine house where they would put people who
were travelers arriving there, because walls kept out plagues.
Walls keep out malfaiteurs--;evil doers.
They keep out bandits and things like that.
The doors literally slam shut at night.
There was a case of a very minor insurrection in an obscure
Italian city in 1848 where the people of the town literally
locked the ruler out of the town--and Italy remains
decentralized.
The tradition of these decentralized city-states that
were the heart of the Renaissance.
Italy is not unified--to the extent it has ever been
unified--until the 1860s and 1970s.
What these kings do, these kings and queens is they
get rid of these impediments to their authority.
Even take the word burgher or bourgeois.
Bourgeois is a French word.
It's more of a cultural sense, but it also has a class sense.
A bourgeois or a burgher was somebody who lived in a city and
assumed that some of the justice that was levied against him or
her would be the result of decisions taken locally.
Now, big-time, powerful absolute monarchs
don't want that.
So, part of the whole process is the elimination of these
municipal privileges and replacing municipal officials,
to make a long story short, with people that they have
appointed.
They eliminate--the one privilege above all that the big
guys want to get rid of is the right to not be taxed.
Part of being an absolute ruler is being able to levy taxes
against those people who have the joy or the extreme
misfortune of living in those domains,
and more about that later.
So, what happens with all this is that absolute rule impinges
directly on the lives of ordinary people more than
kingly, or queenly, or princely,
or archbishiply power had intruded on the lives of
ordinary people before that.
So, these rulers have a coercive ability in creating,
and I'll come back to this, large standing armies that will
be arriving not immediately, they're not arriving by train
or being helicoptered in at some distant command,
but they will get there if there's trouble.
They will arrive and they will get there and they will enforce
the will of the monarch.
We'll see the statistics are really just fascinating about
how big these armies become.
The argument that I'm going to make,
drawing upon again Rabb--he's not the only one that's made
this argument, but he's made it more
thoroughly than most people--absolutism may be seen
as an attempt to reassert public order and coercive state
authority after this period of utter turmoil.
The English Civil War, the Thirty Years' War,
in which in parts of central Europe a quarter of the
population disappeared, were killed,
murdered in ways that I will unfortunately show you in a
while.
More than this, what happens is that the
nobles, who in all these countries
going back to the Medieval period,
had privileges that they were asserting vis-à-vis their
monarchs, they will say,
"We agree to be junior partners in absolutism in
exchange for the protection that you,
the big guy, and your armies can provide us,
so that we don't have to lie awake wondering who is coming up
the path to the big house.
Is it peasants who are come and assert the rights of the poor
against us?"
And at a time of popular insurrections in all sorts of
countries.
Think of all the insurrections or all the people who followed
false czars to utter slaughter in Russia.
The nobles say, "All right.
We agree to be junior partners in absolute rule in exchange for
recognizing your supreme authority over us in exchange
for the protection that you will afford us."
Private armies are disappearing.
The armies of the state, as you will see in a while,
are growing, and moreover,
"you, oh big guy, you will assert our own
privileges.
You will recognize our privileges as nobles."
So, it's a tradeoff.
But in absolute states, there's no doubt who rules and
who helps rule.
So, in absolute states big noble families are very happy to
send their offspring to become commanders in the army and navy,
where they never do a damn thing,
or to become big bishops like Talleyrand,
and to profit from the state while recognizing that the big
guy, the king and the queen,
have absolute authority over them.
Now, the classic case, of course, Louis XIV you can
read about.
Louis XIV when he was a kid, he was about twelve or thirteen
years old, he lived in Paris.
He lived in the Tuileries palace along the Seine,
which was burned in 1871 during the commune.
There was a huge old insurrection called the Fronde,
F-R-O-N-D-E.
A fronde was a kind of a slingshot that Paris street
urchins used to shoot fancy people with rocks as they rode
their carriages through the muddy streets of Paris.
It's a noble insurrection against royal authority,
and in Auvergne in central France you have people rising up
against their lords saying, "Hell with you.
We're not going to pay anymore."
When he's a boy, he hears the crowd shouting
outside of the royal palace in Paris.
It scares the hell out of him.
At one time they burst into his bedroom and he's a little guy.
When royal authority conquers these rebels,
the frondeurs--;you don't have to remember any of
that, F-R-O-N-D-E,
it's good cocktail party conversation,
or something like that, but it's important--he makes
them, literally, he's a bigger guy
then, they literally come and they
bow down, and they swear allegiance to
him in exchange for protection and the recognition of their
privileges as nobles, as titled nobles.
That's really the defining moment in absolute rule.
What does Louis XIV do?
He goes out and builds Versailles.
He only goes back to Paris I think three times ever.
He doesn't like Paris.
Versailles is only eighteen kilometers away.
It's about eleven or twelve miles away.
The women of Paris in October, many of them will walk to
Versailles to bring the king back to Paris.
After that, he's essentially, well to put it kind of
ridiculously, toast, French toast,
when that happens.
He builds this big--I call it a noble theme park,
basically, at Versailles.
It's not the most interesting of the châteaux at all.
The most interesting is Vaux-le-Vicomte,
which is southeast of Paris.
It's a big sort of sprawling--gardens everywhere.
Ten thousand nobles lived there.
How boring!
But the point was that they could be watched,
that they're not going to--they can chase each other's wives and
mistresses around, and they can eat big drunken
meals.
The château was so big that when it freezes,
they were trying to get to the bathroom and most of them never
made it and peed on these long corridors that some of you have
seen.
The wine would freeze on the way from the kitchen through--it
is sad--to the big dining hall.
But he has 10,000 of these dudes and dudesses there that
he's going to watch over.
They can conspire against each other, and they can hit on each
other's wives and mistresses.
He could give one damn.
But he can control them there.
He only goes back to Paris three times ever.
All the time he's expanding his own personal power
vis-à-vis his own population,
conquering Alsace and parts of Lorraine and going to these
inevitable natural frontiers.
Napoleon thought the natural frontier was the Pacific Ocean.
That would be another story.
So, this is what, in a nutshell,
kind of what absolutism was.
But let me say two things now, after having said that.
There were doctrines.
You can read about this stuff--geez, it's obvious.
But there were doctrines of absolutism that originated with
jurists early.
This was out there.
There was a theoretical conceptual framework for having
a king or queen having absolute powers.
Even the development of this theory of absolute rule is in
response to the rise of these territorial states like Spain,
and France, and Russia later.
France is a good example.
I quote in here a guy who croaks before this course
starts, Jean Bodin, B-O-D-I-N.
He says, "Seeing that nothing upon
earth is greater or higher next unto God than the majesty of
kings and sovereign princes,"
he wrote in Six Books of the Republic,
"the principal point of sovereign majesty and absolute
power was to consist principally in giving laws,
dictating laws, onto the subjects in general
without their consent."
So, for absolute rulers, the link to religion you can
read about, but there's always the sense
that he or she is doing God's will by exploiting ordinary
peasants, ordinary people and conquering
other territories.
But there's a theoretical framework,
and it will catch up with the French monarchs,
among others, later--that the ruler must be a
father, a benevolent figure.
As I said, in some context last time,
how many Russian peasants died in the 1890s thinking,
"Oh my god, if the czar only knew that
we're starving, how angry he would be with his
officials."
Well, he could have given one damn how many millions of them
died.
But this was the image, that the big person is there to
protect you, and that his glory is your glory.
But along with this conceptual framework,
provided by none other than Thomas Hobbs in England,
who had lived through the English Civil War and thought
that you shouldn't mess around with this rights business,
you need some sort of big powerful monarch there--but
there was a sense inherent in all of this.
This will be important to try and understand the French
Revolution, La Révolution
française, that there's a difference
between absolutism and despotism.
And that even conceptually, theoretically,
if the monarch goes too far against the weight of the past
that there is inherent in this the idea that he or she might
well go.
Of course, you can imagine the thoughts of
Louis XVI as they were cutting back his hair to await the fall
of the guillotine on the 21^(st) of January, 1793.
In the cabarets and the estaminets,
the bars of Paris of which there are many,
many, many--happily so--in 1789,
when ordinary people are drinking to the Third Estate,
and talking about despotism, and finding examples from what
they saw around them as representing despotic behavior.
That line had clearly been crossed and helps explain why it
was that in a country in which there weren't ten people who
wanted a republic in 1789.
It was possible to imagine life without a king.
Imagine that.
So, that's there as well.
Now, let's characterize--oh, geez.
we've got to move here.
Let's characterize absolute rule.
Now, you did have, in many of these countries,
diets, or parliaments, or some representative bodies.
Again, the king doesn't have to call them.
In the case of France again, since we're talking so much
about Louis XIV, they call the Estates General,
which is to represent all the provinces after the
assassination of Henry IV in 1610 or 1612.
Appropriately enough, he was stabbed to death in a
traffic jam in Paris when his carriage gets blocked in the
center of Paris, and this mad monk sticks a big
knife into him.
So, they call the Estates General then,
but the king never calls it again until 1789.
So, you have these diets and you have these parliaments,
but one of the characteristics of absolute rule is that you
don't have to call these bodies, because the king is the big
person.
Now, in the case of England, one of the causes of the
English Civil War is the refusal of the kings to pay any
attention, to recognize the rights of
parliament that people in the British imaginaire,
in the British collective memory--I believe started on
June 15^(th), which is my birthday,
1215, although I wasn't born yet in 1215.
And, so, the idea of the freeborn Englishperson,
Englishman is what they would have said in those days,
meant that rights of parliament had to be respected.
When it looks like those kings are going to restore
Catholicism, at least have lots of paintings
of swooning cherubs, and cupids,
and Baroque Italian art in Windsor, and London,
and these other places, then you've got a revolution.
So, absolute rulers didn't really have to pay attention to
these assemblies.
The best example I can think of offhand,
I should let this wait, but Peter the Great,
the czar of the Russians, who may or may not have beaten
his son to death, at least he ordered him
tortured.
Peter the Great was a huge sort of power-forward-sized guy at a
time when people were very small.
He had this thing called the drunken assembly,
which was in a way kind of a mockery of parliamentary
representations where his cronies would come and just get
wasted and would make all sorts of flamboyant proclamations that
seemed to represent what a real parliament would do.
But in fact, Peter the Great listened to
whom he wanted to and ignored the others.
And sometimes had them killed if he had to,
if he thought that's what he should do, because there wasn't
any sort of challenge to his authority.
That, my friends, is part of what it meant.
So, I already mentioned about how nobles become junior
partners in absolutism.
That's not a bad phrase, junior partners in absolutism.
So, what happens?
Two ways of measuring how this happened and what difference it
made is to realize, to return to what I said
earlier, that big state structures
involve bureaucracies.
So, the king's representatives go out in the name of the king.
They give out justice, or the lack of justice,
or they send armies in, or taxes, or this stuff.
Now, the Renaissance city-states of Italy had
relatively efficient administrations,
to be sure.
But these are royal bureaucracies that expand
dramatically in size.
Even though decentralized England expands its bureaucracy
and collected taxes much more efficiently than across the
channel in France, state-making involved more
officials there.
So, in order to raise money, you have to enforce taxes.
So, you may farm taxes out to someone.
They'll keep as much of the cut as they can possibly steal.
Or to make money you'll sell noble titles.
This gets the French kings into trouble.
Or you sell monopolies.
Peter the Great had a monopoly on dice, because people gambled
a lot.
The nobles gambled all the time.
You could gamble serfs, real people.
You could gamble them.
You could lose them with a bad hand.
This was Russia.
So, the monopoly on dice he sells.
He sells the monopoly on salt.
Salt was a big commodity, obviously, for storing meat.
That monopoly is sold in various places.
So, these officials, nobles get these kinds of
officials, and really, they could rake it in,
get these titles and they are representing the king.
They're governors, or intendants you call
them in France.
And it expands the number of officials dramatically.
Then there's warfare.
There is nothing more symptomatic of the growth of
absolute rule than the growth of powerful armies.
Again, when you traveling around Europe,
if you're lucky to do that, you'll see these big fortified
towns.
In the case of France again, they are the work of a
brilliant military engineer called Vauban,
V-A-U-B-A-N.
You go to a place like Perpignan or Lille or
Montmédy, they're all over the place.
And these are fortress-like defenses in an age of
essentially defensive warfare.
But if you're going to have a big old fort,
and you're going to have lots of cannon that you hope to use
against your craven, reptile enemies that would want
to get in your way, you've got to have people to
try out the cannon.
You have to have people who live in these fortifications.
So, the size of the armies for these megalomaniac wars,
these dynastic wars between Austria and France--and then
they changed partners in 1756, and all of this business.
You can read about that.
But the big story is huge, huge, huge amount of troops.
During the sixteenth century, the peacetime armies of the
Continental Powers were about 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers--very,
very little.
By the 1690s, 150,000 soldiers.
The French army, which was then in the 1690s
180,000 people.
That's twice the Michigan football stadium.
Can you imagine a stadium packed with soldiers and all
that?
How boring.
But, anyway, it rose to 350,000 soldiers,
the largest in Europe.
I think I have in this edition a table the size of European
armies.
Habsburg empire, 1690,50,000; 1756,200,000.
A polyglot army, too, because of all the
different nationalities.
Prussia identified with the Junkers,
the nobles who were army officers,
the dueling scars that they had--that Bismarck would have in
a unified Germany, a mere 30,000 people in 1690;
195,000 people during the Seven Years' War;
in 1789,190,000; in 1812, as they're fighting
Napoleon, 270,000 people.
This is in a state that barely extends beyond Brandenburg and
Pomerania in what now is Western Poland, and still Prussia in the
unified Germany.
Even Sweden, 100 at the time of the Battle
of Poltava.
Forget it.
Well, don't forget it, but read about.
In 1709, that's when Sweden loses to Russia.
The Swedish army was 110,000 people, soldiers.
That's an awful lot.
So, that's one of the things that happens.
The modern state in action, the absolute state in action is
the army.
Even in peacetime, military expenditures take up
almost half of the budget of any European state,
and in times of war, eighty percent.
Having said all that, let me just--oops,
try to turn this baby on.
Did that go on?
Why didn't that go on?
Oh, I've got to put this thing down.
That's it.
Again, these just illustrate my point, which is:
Why did nobles and even other people agree to all of this?
If they're being exploited, they've got big armies that can
crush them like grapes if they get in the way.
But one argument that can be made is that things were so
terrible and so out of control in the earlier period that the
strengthening of the state is something that people saw as
beneficial.
Again, Hobbes is over the top.
Hobbes wants this sort of dictatorship to keep people from
brawling in the state of nature.
Again, the elite in Britain were scared,
because you've got all these Ranter groups and Levelers and
people who believe that everybody ought to have the
right to vote, whether they have property or
not and people that believe in the right of women.
This is pretty scary.
So, people like Hobbes thought, "Well, we need a really
strong state."
But that's not the outcome of the English Civil War.
But how did this work in other places?
Theodore Rabb's argument is basically that the terrible wars
of religion that had ripped central Europe apart in the
middle of the nineteenth century led people to look for the kinds
of safety provided by a strong ruler.
That what had begun, and we'll see this in a minute,
as a war between protestants and Catholics,
a war that began in Prague when somebody gets defenestrated,
which is a fancy word for throwing somebody out of a
window, that this ended up being a war
fought by just vicious mercenaries who slaughtered the
populations of central Europe.
It didn't matter if they were Protestants or Catholics or
anything else.
They simply killed them.
And that this terrified elites in much of Europe and had the
same equivalent of what the Fronde did for scaring elites in
France.
One of the arguments that he makes, and I can't make it as
strongly because I don't know enough about it,
is the scientific revolution.
What I know about it is what you're kind enough to read.
It was hard to piece all of this stuff together.
But there is this sort of sense of uncertainty that you see in
someone like Descartes, who finally just goes back to
basics and says, "I think,
therefore I am."
Here I am.
They go from there to a methodology of science,
a methodology of trying to study things in a rational way,
to get rid of the kinds of blind faith that seem to have
led to this, this utter catastrophe of mass
slaughter in Europe.
There are signs all over the place that this has happened.
"I think, therefore I am."
There is a return to these kinds of theoretical defenses of
absolutism that even preceded the growth of the absolute state
as I've described it.
Absolutism did not simply just emerge out of this turmoil.
As I already suggested, and I would insist upon this
again, that the consolidation of
territorial rulers had already given the basis to an expanding,
more formalized state structure,
even in England.
This is for sure.
It all just doesn't start like that.
Louis XIV was preceded in number by Louis XIII.
Louis XIII helped expand the compelling course of structures
of the French state.
But yet when you look at all of this,
you can see that the kind of chaos,
the political upheavals finds in response in the growth of
central government authority and the growth of bureaucracies.
It wasn't only in Sweden, Austria, Russia,
France, etc.
where you found this.
Even in smaller states like Württemberg,
a state in Germany which was a sort of middle-sized state.
Even there you see the same phenomenon on a very lower,
smaller level, at least in terms of the size
of the state, where people are giving up,
willing to compromise on their privileges in order for the
protection of the ruler of Württemberg,
who would never be confused with Louis XIV or Peter the
Great.
So, this really becomes a sort of European-wide phenomenon.
You can apply this also to the Glorious Revolution in England
as well.
People are happy to have a monarch back who is going to
reassert control.
In the case of England, they're very happy to have a
monarch back who was not threatening to turn England
again into a Catholic state.
So, this is the sort of argument that you can make,
even in a state that had a constitutional monarch such as
England.
Let me just give you a couple examples of what one can mean
here.
Again, these are painters that you may have come across.
It doesn't matter if you've never heard of them or if you
never think of them again--but, Titian.
The famous Titian.
This is his picture of Charles V at a battle in Germany in
1648.
This is a pretty dramatic representation of war.
This is like Clint Eastwood, The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly. This is a guy, he's armored up;
he's ready to go.
He's somebody to be emulated from the point of view of the
viewer.
But at the same time, this is slightly earlier,
this is a painting--thanks, Dan--this is a painting of
Bruegel the Elder.
The first is the Triumph of Death,
where you see what happens in real battle when people are just
sort of slaughtered, and the commanders are off at a
safe distance.
Here again, the massacre of the innocents, where villages are
just being executed because they are there.
The Triumph of Death, the dialogue of the
mathematician Pascal is quoted by Rabb.
"Why are you killing me for your own benefit?
I am unarmed."
"Why?
You do not live on the other side of the water,
my friend.
If you lived on this side, I should be a murderer.
But since you live on the other side, I'm a brave man and it is
right that I kill you."
When the Swedes get into the act,
Gustavus Adolphus brings this huge old Swedish army down and
they do a lot of damage, too,
and people are absolutely being devastated.
Here's Reubens' The Horror of War.
There's a reason why the first attempt to even write about
international law comes at this period.
Again, this is before the course, but why not?
Hugo Grotius writes the Law of War and Peace.
He publishes it in 1625.
The goal was to stop stuff like this,
to try to create a legal framework in which states could
resolve their kind of differences without kind of
butchering each other.
So, there we go.
But somewhat here in war and peace of battle is slowly being
relegated to the background.
But let me give you another example.
Here's the famous Spanish painter.
Again, don't worry about it.
Velazquez, who died in 1610, I think.
No, it's 1660, sorry.
This is his portrait of Mars.
Mars is the god of war.
Now, how different that is than the portrait of Charles that you
saw by Titian.
Here, this guy looks like kind of an overweight NFL player who
hasn't really gotten ready for the drill.
He's very human.
There's nothing admirable about him.
It's just war is being dissed by those people that are just so
tired of the killing.
And Mars has this sort of human, flabby torso that's
not--it's sympathetic, but it's a different portrayal
of war.
People are getting tired of the whole damn thing.
He's dull.
He's uncouth and he's extremely human.
Now, one of the reasons why people would--it's unthinkable
for someone like me or for probably most of you to imagine
giving up your rights to a kind of absolute rule,
though we seem to be in a situation like that,
where that's happened quite a lot recently,
even in this own country.
But these are just illustrations that come out of
the Thirty Years' War, which people are trying to put
behind them.
This is a French painter, drawer, lithographer called
Jacques Callot.
These are just many ways that people died during the Thirty
Years' War.
This is simply The Execution.
You don't even need the formal titles of these.
But these get around.
Peddlers who had these big, big leather bags that would go
around Europe and sell things like pins and miraculous images
of the Virgin Mary and the stories of saints and all this
kind of stuff and Joan of Arc or Robin Hood,
in the case of England, become part of the collective
memory.
These kinds of images do get around of the horrors of war
that the misfortunes and horrors of war,
which is basically what he calls this entire series.
Here's the people sort of standing around watching this
execution.
This is somebody being tortured at the stake for merely
existing, for having not confessed to being a Protestant
or a Catholic or whatever.
I'll tell you, in the south of France near
where we live, when there was a lot of
resistance in World War II against the Germans,
there were some Protestant villages there that were
noteworthy for their resistance.
A lot of Catholics resisted, too.
But one of the interesting things about some of the
villages that I know down there is that there were big mission
crosses that were put out after the wars of religion that were
sort of symbols of conquest by the all-Catholic king.
Is it in the collective memory that people remember three
centuries later that the Catholic Church was identified,
at least as a hierarchy, with the Vichy Regime in World
War II?
That's interesting, a fascinating subject.
But, anyway, this poor guy's not doing very
well up there and becomes this sort of big spectacle.
These are dying soldiers along the side of the road.
It's sort of a sympathetic look at--that's the name of this--of
these expiring dudes there.
Here's the attack on a stagecoach.
The point of this is it didn't matter who you were.
If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
you were history.
That was all.
There were new ways to be killed.
Certainly in Europe, not until the massacres of the
Armenians, and arguably some Napoleonic
atrocities, and Napoleon's armies'
atrocities in Palestine, or in the south of Italy,
or in Spain as well.
But there was nothing like this really, including World War I.
There were some atrocities at the beginning of World War I,
but there was nothing like this again until World War II and,
of course, Bosnia.
The point is this is why lots of people thought,
"I don't like this guy sending people around and taking
my taxes, but I don't want to get offed
by some marauders.
Just hang ‘em high, hang ‘em all high."
These were real ways that people were executed--stakes,
massacres, and this sort of business.
There's a convent, church that's going to go.
It's a Catholic church.
You can tell from the top.
So, maybe these are Protestant mercenaries.
It didn't matter, because the Protestant armies
had Catholic mercenaries and the Catholic armies had Protestant
mercenaries.
Everybody had Dalmatians, people from the Dalmatian
coast, and Swiss.
You have to imagine a time when Switzerland wasn't extremely
wealthy.
Swiss were great, famous mercenaries fighting in
these armies.
Again, the Swedish, the "Swedish
cocktail" was sort of suffocating people
by stuffing manure down their throat until they died.
This was a nasty time.
I guess this is what Hobbes meant by "nasty,
short, and brutish," or whatever the fourth was.
I don't remember, but what life was in the Thirty
Years' War, that was the way it was.
Now, out of all of this, again to repeat,
we are not making the argument that the Thirty Years' War
itself led to absolute rule, that the growth of state
structures can be seen in the beginning and the late medieval
period with the consolidation of these territorial monarchies.
There were already bureaucrats representing the royal will.
There were already armies.
But many, particularly two--bureaucracies and powerful
standing military forces--are characteristics of modern
states.
And to try to explain why it was that absolute rule came to
Europe at the time it did, one has to not only look at the
particular structures of states, but one has to look at the
overview and the sheer horror of it all.
The boy king, Louis XIV, hearing the crowd
shouting outside of his room.
He goes out to Versailles and creates this noble theme park
and sort of a Euro Disney for nobles where he can watch these
nobles.
They agree to be junior partners of absolute rule and
they weren't the only ones.
The great power struggles of the eighteenth century would be
very different than this bloodletting of civilians that
had preceded it.
There were professional kinds of armies and all of that.
But those are more themes for future lectures.
Wednesday I'm going to talk about exceptions to absolutism,
what the Dutch and what the English had in common that gave
them very different political outcomes.
That's important, too, in the emergence of the
country in which many of you live.
See you.
