Absolutism in Western Europe

The rise of Absolutist monarchies in Western Europe, at the beginning of the 16th century has been attributed to a variety of social, political and economic reasons. But behind the façade of social change and political upheaval—the religious turmoil as witnessed in the Reformations, the departure towards scientific enquiry as seen in the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment etc.—behind these, the fundamental cause of the pre-eminence of Absolutism lies in the turmoil that the economic sphere witnessed in the 14-15th centuries.

Having said that, and before we begin on this quest of studying Absolutism in Western Europe, it must be mentioned that “the story of Absolutism has many, overlapping beginnings and disparate, staggered endings.” While the phase that was broadly encapsulated in the term Absolutism also saw concurrent rise and decay of such phenomenon as the rise of primitive capitalism, religious reformation, progressive scientific enquiry, expansion of overseas imperialism, the advent of industrialisation etc, one cannot give attention in equal measure to these events, mainly because even though the dates of these events are contemporaneous with the rise of Absolutism, their “times are separate.”

Absolutism began with the decay of the feudal mode of production and its limitations that were glaringly observed in the 14th-15th centuries. The long economic crisis of this period manifested itself in a politically decisive manner: a fundamental change resulted with the new centralised monarchies of Spain, England and France breaking away, often violently, from the parcellised sovereignty that was the hallmark of the feudal system. This is an obvious inference, given that the time periods that characterised the two periods—feudal and the subsequent Absolutist/capitalist—were different in all respects.

But there has been controversy over the historical nature of these monarchies. Did the rise of the Absolute Monarchies signal the end of feudal serfdom that characterized feudal relations in the countryside? If one were to look at the institutions these monarchies introduced: standing armies, permanent bureaucracy, national taxation, codified law, and the beginnings of a unified market, one would inevitably come to the conclusion that Marx arrived at: “The centralised state power with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchical division of labour originates from the days of Absolute Monarchy serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism.” Following this chain of thought, Engels pronounced that these new Absolutist states appeared as a balance between the nobility and the commoners: that the basic condition of the Absolute Monarchy was in equilibrium (Gleichgewicht) between the land-owning aristocracy and the Bourgeoisie. From here one could even move one step ahead and claim, as the communist manifesto claimed, that these new Bourgeoisie states were “serving either the semi-feudal or the Absolute Monarchy as a counter-poise (Gegengewicht) against the nobility, and as a cornerstone of the great monarchies in general.” In essence, one could declare that this epoch of Absolutism was, according to Marx, “an age in which the feudal nobility were made to understand that the period of their social and political domination had come to an end.”

One gathers from these assessments that Marx was primarily describing the rise of Absolutism as representing either equilibrium between the Bourgeoisie and the nobility, or even the outright dominance of capital itself, over the older feudal system of economic surplus extraction or exploitation.

But as Perry Anderson rightly shows, a careful study of the structures of the Absolutist states in the west goes against Marx’s premise and really questions his assumption as to the dominance of the Capitalist system. For one, the end of serfdom did not necessarily mean the disappearance of feudal relations in the countryside. A change in the structure of rent extraction did not necessarily mean a transformative change in the nature of the rent system itself. There is no doubt that the phase preceding this period witnessed the transformation of labour rent into rent in kind, but as long as labour was not separated from the social condition of its existence to become “labour power”, the rural relations of production remained feudal.

The relations of production remained the same. The owner, the producer and even the labour remained as before. There was a change in the form of rent, yet the functions of relations of production remained the same. Throughout the early modern epoch, the dominant class-economically and politically-was thus the same as in the medieval epoch itself: the feudal aristocracy. This nobility underwent profound metamorphoses in the centuries after the close of the middle ages: but from the beginning to end of the history of absolutism, it was never dislodged from its command of political power.

Perry Anderson puts it quite succinctly: “Absolutism was…a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination, designed to clamp the masses back into their traditional social position, despite and against the gains they had won by the commutation of dues. In other words, the Absolutist state was never an arbiter between the aristocracy and the Bourgeoisie, still less an instrument of the nascent Bourgeoisie against the aristocracy: it was the new political carapace of threatened nobility.”

As Christopher Hill summed it up: “The Absolute monarchy was a different form of feudal monarchy from the feudal-estates monarchy that preceded it; but the ruling class remained the same, just as a Republic, a constitutional monarchy, and a Fascist dictatorship can all be forms of the rule of the Bourgeoisie.”

The Absolutist monarchy for Althusser was basically a new political form that was needed for the maintenance of feudal domination and exploitation at a time when the general commutation of dues into money rents was leading to a threatened situation of free and wage labour , and a now somewhat free peasant mass.

Traditionally, the institution of serfdom was a mechanism for the extraction of surplus at the molecular level of the village, through economic exploitation and politico-legal coercion. But the commutation of dues and the transformation of payment of Rent that characterised the beginnings of feudal decay, created a situation of threat for the nobility, where their hold over the traditional peasantry was at stake. Thus, a weakness of coercive powers that were manifested in the feudal system at the molecular level of the village, led to a displacement of politico-legal coercion upwards towards a centralised, militarised summit—the Absolutist State.

While Absolutism mainly aimed at redeploying a coercive feudal apparatus towards the repression of the peasantry, by the aristocracy, the new system also kept the aristocracy in check. It was capable, often by use of force that it employed towards the aristocracy, to discipline dissidence within the nobility itself. Also, while the Absolutist period created a situation where the politico-legal provisions of the nobility were weakened (by a reorganisation of feudal fief systems, where landownership tended to become less “conditional” as sovereignty became correspondingly more “absolute.”), the change in the apparatus of the state (from feudal to absolutist) propped up an interesting scenario. A barter system was created—for the dilution of political privileges of the aristocracy, through usurpation by the absolutist monarchies, the latter re-compensated the nobility by increasing its efficacy, allowing it to economically benefit in a much more profitable manner, compared with the profits that the feudal system afforded.

As we shall see, the whole structure of the Absolutist monarchies reflected a surface ‘modernity’ but which was, in reality, merely a system that sought to maintain noble domination over the rural masses. It was, besides, a means of raising revenue—through taxation, trade, diplomacy or war—under conditions and terms that were profitable to the nobility and the mercantile bourgeoisie.

Changes in rent payment, a monetisation of the economy, and commutation of dues had created a precarious situation for the nobility, as it threatened its hold over the peasantry. But the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie was also problematic for the aristocracy. It had been the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie in the towns and cities of western Europe that had prevented the nobility here from smashing the resistance of the somewhat-free peasantry. This was in direct contrast with the situation in the East, where the nobility had effectively clamped down and had caused the second re-enserfment in the East.

The economic and social innovations that were taking place in the towns, under the guard of the mercantile communities sought to gravely undermine the primacy of the feudal noble classes, when the dependence of the state on them—militarily, economically and socially—was threatened. The improvements in silver and copper extraction techniques allowed for a new source of revenue for the state, reducing dependence on proceeds from the feudal lords; the development of military hardware like the bronze cannon and the three-masted stern-ruddered galleon for naval supremacy created a situation where the state did not need to depend on defences provided by the feudal land-owners. There was thus a gradual weaning away from feudal dependence, which was, in many ways, precipitated by the advancements in the socio-political and economic spheres in the autonomous urban centres. This autonomy that facilitated such innovations came from the rise of mercantilism in urban areas, which was ensured by a freeing-up of these urban economies from the death-grasp of the rural feudal ruling class. Thus, the growth of these towns, as John Merrington puts it, was as “internal” a development in Western Europe as was the dissolution of the manor: it led to the creation of autonomous urban mercantile-dominated hubs, from where the battle against feudal dependence was being waged, via socio-economic, political and technological innovation.

Perry Anderson talks about the factors that determined the character and subsequent rise of the Absolutist States. According to him, “when the Absolutist States were constituted in the West, their structure was fundamentally determined by the feudal re-groupment against the peasantry, after the dissolution of serfdom; but it was secondarily over-determined by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie which after a series of technical and commercial advances was now developing into pre-industrial manufactures on a considerable scale. It was this secondary impact of the urban bourgeoisie on the forms of the Absolutist State which Marx and Engels sought to capture with the misleading notions of ‘counter-poise’ or ‘cornerstone’.”

It was a time where the economic miracles and transformations of the urban zones were not reflected in the political structure; Engels said as much: “The political order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois.” Thus, the threat of peasant unrest was always conjoined with the pressure of the mercantile and manufacturing capital within Western economies; these threats sought to upset the precarious balance of power between the state and the nobility, in the symbiotic relationship that the two had developed in the feudal era. The contours of this new Absolutist era were drawn from the threat of this “double determination” that was increasingly making the nobility’s privileges insecure.

There is a claim often made in defence of the modernity that the new Absolutist monarchies typified. Recourse is taken in the revival of the Roman laws that were witnessed at the time of the rise of these monarchies: in the Renaissance. No doubt, the revival of the Roman law was one of the great cultural movements of the time. But a few questions come to mind: was there really a change in the economic and feudal relations of production at the time of the dawn of Absolutism? That has been already answered by Perry Anderson, when he shows us that this was not so; that Absolutism was really a re-deployment of the coercive apparatus of the feudal nobility against a now-somewhat independent peasantry, especially after the commutation of dues and the change in rent payments that were to go hand in hand with the transition period.

Next, does the revival of Roman law in the early Absolutist phase really betray the system’s modernity? Did it really typify a nascent struggle of the middle class society against a feudalist apparatus? Was the revival of Roman law a sign “in which the feudal nobility were made to understand that the period of their social and political domination had come to an end”?

These can be answered only by briefly delving into the constituencies of the laws. The Roman legal system comprised two distinct—and apparently contrary—sectors: its civil law regulated economic matters between citizens. Its public law sector, on the other hand, dealt with governing political relations between citizens and the State.

Economically, the recovery and introduction of Roman civil law was “fundamentally propitious to the growth of free capital in town and country.” The great distinguishing mark of Roman civil law had been its conception of absolute and unconditional private property. While the idea of absolute private property is a construct of the early modern epoch, and not of the Absolutist times, nevertheless, concepts such as “superficies solo cedit”—single and unconditional ownership of land—still came into effect, in varying degrees, at this time—hinting at a transition from feudalism to capitalism, especially in the realm of commodity relations of the countryside. The reception of Roman law in Renaissance Europe thus highlights a spread of capitalist relations in towns and country. It was welcomed so, mainly by mercantile urban bourgeoisie, precisely because it answered their capital-oriented economic needs.

But politically, things were very different. Revival of Roman public law was witnessed by the absolutist nature of imperial sovereignty that the new monarchies were exercising. It led to a concentration of aristocratic class power in a centralised State apparatus. In other words, this was merely a re-deployment of the coercive powers of the nobility, by different means, to achieve the same ends: subjugation of the peasantry and the newly-capitalist mercantile classes. Ulpian’s famous maxim: “the ruler’s will has force of law” became the motto of these new absolute monarchies. What’s more—the use of Roman Public law (the most powerful intellectual weapon available at the time) ignored traditional rights and subordinated private franchises that the Roman Civil law had so graciously empowered the mercantile classes, against the feudal aristocracy. But in one stroke, peasant insolence and mercantile-bourgeois’s capital privileges were done away with.

For the re-organised feudal states in Europe, the primary determinant for the adoption of Roman jurisprudence lay in the drive of the royal governments for increased central powers. The freedoms of private property and capital that came with the Roman Civil law were an evil necessity; the Roman Public law, however, ensured this centralisation of coercion. The so-called superiority of modernisation that came with the application of the Roman law in Western Absolutist monarchies was an anathema; it displayed beneath the shining veneer of modernity, a very feudal anarchism. The adoption of these laws, as in all other spheres of Western Absolutism, merely served to re-empower traditional feudal powers.

Western European Absolutism is often also credited with spawning apparatuses that were later to be seen as inherently capital oriented and pre-eminently characteristics that defined a modern Capitalist system: a standing army, an elaborate and permanent bureaucracy, a national taxation policy, trade (intra-national as well as international), a complex diplomatic system. But were these really inherently capitalist oriented? Did the arrival of these apparatus in the Absolutist context typify a departure from feudal systems? Were these systems only allowable in a scenario that was far removed from the dank-dusty vestiges of traditional feudal constructs? Was the presence of these new apparatuses a final signal that Absolutism had really shunned its feudal pasts for a pre-eminently capitalist future? Was this really heralding the ultimate triumph of Capital, in the garb of Absolutism, over feudal history, economy, society? Or was it entirely different; a chimerical delusion that we have seen till now? Were these incontrovertible instances of Capitalist influence on Absolutist monarchies really just “a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination?”

Let us look at each of them briefly. It has been often stated that the Absolutist State pioneered the professional army. This has been used to supplement the argument that Absolutist states favoured a transition towards capitalism, in Western Europe. Indeed, the military revolutions of the 16-17th centuries saw a military revolution of sorts, with Gustavus Adolphus’and Wallenstein’s innovations in war techniques; Philip II’s and Louis XIV’s massive armies numbering 60,000 and 300,000 respectively etc. But what is common to all armies of this era was the constant and central role that foreign mercenaries played. Albanian, Swiss, Irish nationals took part in the armies of Spain, France, England, Austria etc.

Confounding as this phenomenon may appear initially, the large numbers of foreign individuals in a nation’s troops largely stemmed from simple causes: the refusal of the noble class to arm its own peasants wholesale. Jean Bodin said as much: “It is virtually impossible to train all the subjects of the commonwealth in the arts of war, and at the same time, keep them obedient to the laws and the magistrates.” The other reason was that mercenary troops from foreign lands could be easily relied upon to eradicate local dissent. German mercenaries dealt with the East-Anglian peasant uprising of 1549 in England, while Italians ensured the liquidation of rural revolt in the West Country. Swiss guards helped to repress Camisard Guerrillas of France in 1662 and 1702. While it is not possible for us to differentiate the role of war in different modes of production-capitalist or feudal—what is certain, according to Perry Anderson, is that “war was possibly the most rational and rapid single mode of expansion of surplus extraction available for any given ruling class under feudalism.” The social definition of the ruling class was hence military. War was a fundamental tool used in the “maximization of wealth.”

The idea that standing armies and the war that they wrought were capitalist in conception is fundamentally flawed because inter-capitalist competition is not propagated through military means, but through economic struggle. The structure of capitalist competition is inherently additive: rival parties can prosper more by peaceful economic competition than through military confrontation. This is because in a capitalist mode of production, the amount of commodities manufactured is inherently unlimited.

On the other hand, military conflict, large or small, is a feature of inter-feudal rivalry, mainly because the commodity on which the conflict is waged, is fixed in quantity. More often than not, the commodity is land, which cannot be indefinitely extended. Land is a fixed commodity which can only be re-divided and the group or the state with the largest potential for waging conflict has the potential t access the largest share of the land.

The stupendous amount of preparation for war, and the massive number of incidents of conflict in the 16th and 17th centuries, by early Absolutist states, did not display a capitalist influence. On the contrary, war was, for Machiavelli, “the only art expected of a ruler.” One of the hallmarks of the whole climate of Absolutism was the permanence of international armed conflict. For the west, peace was an “exception.” The 16th century saw only 25 years without any large-scale military operations Europe; the 17th Century saw only 7. For Perry Anderson, such calendars are foreign to capital. “Warfare was not the sport of princes, it was their fate,” says Anderson. It was a social necessity of their estates. What Machiavelli was alluding to in his determination of the role of war in a ruler’s life, was the fundamental, but often mistaken, role of large of large armies in the Absolutist Era: war and its elaborate machinery served the age-old feudal purpose of consolidation of authority for a now threatened nobility, against an uprising peasantry.

The reluctance to arm indigenous peasants out of a fear of disobedience (and in the bargain, use foreign mercenary troops to clamp down on local populations), the use of war for rapid surplus extraction, indeed the very idea of capitalist competition being “additive” makes war, and thereby standing armies, an anathema to prospective, potential capitalist systems. On the contrary, it is precisely the advantages of war in a zero-sum conflict, which is characterized by inter-feudal rivalries, that makes large standing armies useful for feudal constructs. The idea that Absolutist states pioneered professional armies is not in doubt. However, it is erroneous to link large standing armies of the modern capitalist system, with those of the Absolutist states; it is even more erroneous to then contend that this bears witness to the fact that Absolutist states were inherently capitalist, or tending towards being so. The use of large standing armies in both systems is for diametrically opposite reasons: for Absolutist states, this “does not correspond to a capitalist rationality; it represents a swollen memory of the medieval functions of war”—a redeployment of the coercive apparatus on an increasingly freed up peasantry.

The characteristic civilian bureaucracy and tax systems of the Absolutist states are often used as other examples towards propagating the argument that these Absolutist states were tending towards being capitalist. However, the prevalent practise of treating such offices as saleable property to private individuals brings this contention into conflict. As Perry Anderson says: “The prevalent mode of integration of the feudal nobility of the Absolutist state in the west took the form of “acquisition of offices”. He who privately purchased a position in the public apparatus of the state could then recoup himself by licensed privileges and corruption…in a monetarized caricature of investiture in a fief.” It was an ingenious system, whereby the sale of offices was used as an indirect means of raising revenue from the nobility and the mercantile bourgeoisie on terms profitable to them. Such office holders, who proliferated in France, Italy, Spain, Britain, or Holland, could make upto 300-400 percent profit. This system brought in money for the state; in the pursuit of buying such offices, potential purchasers were naturally encouraged to raise their own personal revenues so that they could afford purchasing these offices. It integrated the nobility within the newly formed Absolutist system, mainly because it was only the nobility which could afford buying these offices. An unexpected by-product of this entire arrangement was the stimulus that mercantile and manufacturing activities received because the mercantile class was also interested in these openly available, albeit, expensive privileges. For them the only way to purchase the offices, was ironically, to do well in their business and raise money. However, once integrated into the Absolutist system, and as we have seen earlier, the apparatuses of the state were once again used to crush peasant rebellion, as well as mercantile capital. In a bizarre way, this was the perfect kick-back that the nobility-dominated bureaucracy could receive for supplying the state with revenue, when it was forced to purchase offices of privilege. Absolutist bureaucracy thus registered the rise of mercantile capital, and then arrested it.

While it is true that certain apparatuses of the Absolutist system have been given a more than required credence for harbouring capitalist tendencies, it is nonetheless true that the feudal state of Absolutism was constantly and profoundly over-determined by the growth of capitalism within the composite social formations of the early modern period. These formations were, of course, a combination of different modes of production under the waning dominance of feudalism. A new economy was at work within the framework of the older system.

One of the ultimate paradoxes of the Absolutism in Western Europe was that it fundamentally represented an apparatus for the protection of aristocratic interests, while at the same time the means by way of which this protection was promoted could simultaneously ensure the interests of the nascent mercantile and manufacturing classes. In other words, it accomplished certain partial functions in the primitive accumulation necessary for the eventual triumph of the capitalist mode of production itself. The Absolutist system could perform this dual role of maintaining aristocratic privilege while promoting mercantile interest mainly because at this time the emergent capitalist classes—the mercantile and manufacturing groups of the urban bourgeoisie—were not fully dependent on mass production (which was characteristic of later day capitalism) and did not demand a radical rupture from the feudal order of things. The nascent mercantile interests grew within the limits of the established, albeit waning, feudalism.

There are certain instances where glimpses of mercantile interest being sponsored by the Absolutist state are visible: in France, Richelieu’s campaign against the Huguenot did away with a large number of internal barriers of trade and sponsored external tariff against foreign competitors; Pombal’s measures in Enlightenment Portugal provided a lucrative, if risky, investment in public finance for usury capital—the earliest 16th century Auxberg bankers and 17th century Genoese oligarchs would make fortunes from their loans to the Spanish state; colonial enterprises for trading companies to America, to India, to Africa, to Brazil, to the far east—all these were instances where the ground work for future capitalist establishment and expansion was being laid.

Even foreign trade, where the mercantile and the urban bourgeoisie classes flourished, much to the detriment of the established feudal classes, one sees a field of compatibility between the absolutist state and the mercantile classes. Every monarchy has a stake in promoting trade under its own barrier, in the struggle against its rivals. This is the progressive character that historians have so often conferred on the official policies of Absolutism. “Economic centralization, protectionism and overseas expansion aggrandized the late feudal state, while they profited the early bourgeoisie. They increased the taxable revenues of one by providing business opportunities for the other,” says Perry Anderson.

And yet the feudal character of Absolutism remains. It was a system which was founded to preserve and even propagate the interests of the aristocracy at a time when the privileges of the nobility were coming under intense pressure form the monetization of the economy, the commutation of dues, the rise of free wage labour and the establishment of nascent proto-capitalist mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie in the urban areas. The nobility would deposit power with the monarch, and would even accept to a large degree, the benefits that were being accrued by the very class that was an anathema to its existence—the mercantile bourgeoisie. And yet in the bargain, despite making concessions to the emergent capitalist classes, the nobility ensured that the peasantry and the masses were still at its mercy.

As Perry Anderson concludes: “The rule of the Absolutist State was that of the feudal nobility in the epoch of transition to capitalism. Its end would signal the crisis of the power of its class: the advent of the bourgeoisie revolution and the emergence of the capitalist state.”