AGE OF ROYAL ABSOLUTISM

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27500, 6 November 1954, Page 3

AGE OF ROYAL ABSOLUTISM

[Reviewed by J.J.S.I The Age of Absolutism 1660-1815. By Max Beloff. Hutchinson’s University Library. 191 pp. In accordance with the design of this excellent series, Mr Beloff has produced, not a conventional textbook of kings and dates and battles, but an essay in Interpretation, the theme of which is unusual and deserves careful consideration. His subject is the history of Europe from Louis XIV to the French Revolution, the classic age of royal absolutism, when representative institutions decayed or disappeared, kings by divine right received the homage x>f nations, and wars were little more than family squabbles among the leading dynasties, to determine whether a Bourbon or a Hapsburg should have this province or that city. Newcomers to the European State-system, such as Prussia and Russia, built up absolute monarchies on the model of France and the older countries, and Sanssouci and the Winter Palace faithfully reproduced the baroque grandeur of Versailles. At the end of the eighteenth century came the American and French Revolutions which swept the royal. autocrats away and inaugurated the age of democracy. This is the generally accepted version, but Mr Beloff will have none of it He is concerned to make two points; first, that the kings of the age of absolutism had far less power than is commonly supposed; their authority being limited by the Church, the landed nobility and the privileged corporations, and secondly, that the Revolution of 1789, far from giving birth to political liberty, merely switched Europe from royal to democratic despotism, so that Napoleon wielded a might undreamt of by Louis XIV and Stalin ruled more ruthlessly than Peter the Great. His last chapter is entitled “Absolutism in Transformation”: instead of ending it, the revolutionaries merely changed its character.

This thesis is not indeed a novel one, but it has rarely been stated in such unqualified terms. It is unlikely to gain general acceptance. Mr Beloff does not consider that monarchy of the Louis XIV type was itself in its day new and almost revolutionary, and clean contrary to the ancient political tradition of Western Europe, Which favoured representative government and the limitation of power. Nor does he take into account the influence of British and American liberalism, which goes back to classical and medieval precedents and which stressed the rights of the individual citizen against the State itself. There are, of course, two forms o 4 democracy, liberal and totalitarian, which explains why the same word is used in different senses on either side of the Iron Curtain. The one starts from the individual, the other from the totality of society. Both conceptions have helped to shape the world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor is there yet any clear indication which will finally prevail, but any attempt to explain the history of modern Europe in forms of one only, produces a distorted and misleading picture.