The Enlightenment Mind

From the opening pages

Europe around 1650 was not a place in which authority felt obliged to apologize for itself. Kings ruled because kings were supposed to rule; bishops taught because bishops were supposed to teach; nobles enjoyed privileges because their ancestors had, with admirable foresight, arranged to be nobles. Institutions presented themselves as parts of an inherited order, not temporary arrangements awaiting review. One might complain that a ruler was unjust, a bishop corrupt, or a tax excessive. It was a larger step to ask why monarchy, religious establishment, or inherited rank should exist at all. The usual questions were more practical: who was the rightful king, which church was true, and which privileges were ancient.

An objection is necessary at once. Europe was not one giant absolute monarchy with identical peasants arranged beneath identical bishops. France and Spain were monarchies, but the Dutch Republic won formal recognition of its independence from Spain in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Venice was a republic. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had an elective monarchy and a powerful nobility. England had gone further: Charles I was publicly beheaded on 30 January 1649, and the monarchy was abolished. Even kings had to contend with estates, diets, parlements, provincial liberties, noble jurisdictions, and old privileges. Royal sovereignty sounded magnificent in theory. Tax collection tended to discover that local customs had not read the theory.

France shows the difficulty. Louis XIV had been king since 1643, but in 1650 he was still a child. His mother, Anne of Austria, served as regent, while Cardinal Jules Mazarin directed much of royal policy. The kingdom was also in the Fronde, a series of rebellions beginning in 1648 involving judges of the Parlement of Paris, high nobles, provincial interests, court factions, and urban crowds. This was not a democratic uprising in the modern sense. Many participants defended privileges of their own. A nobleman could resist royal power in the name of liberty while showing little interest in the liberty of his tenants.