The Absolutism was a political phenomenon that characterized the emergence and establishment of the State Modern Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. French absolutism, in particular, expressed all the strength of this political model. King Louis XIV (1643-1715) , known as “King Sun”, personified all the characteristics of absolutism, and to him was attributed the phrase “The State is I”. This characteristic of complete representation of the State made the king an absolute political element. Hence the term absolutism.
Modern European States and the absolutist model were born as a response to the deep political and social crisis arising from the civil and religious wars that ravaged Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. These wars were a result of the Protestant reforms and the confrontation that the kings of the Catholic dynasties gave to political proposals anchored in Lutheranism and Calvinism.
In France, the main architects of the state strengthened and centered on the figure of the king were the cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) , who had been prime minister to King Louis XIII, and Jacques Bossuet (1627-1704) , theologian who engendered one of the main theoretical defenses of absolutism, even claiming the intimate relationship of this type of government with the dynamics of History itself.
Richelieu prepared the ground for the centrality of power in the figure of the king:he limited the influence of nobles in administrative political decisions, increased the strength of royal officials and created a strong bureaucracy controlled by the king. All this supported by what he called “reason from state”.
Jacques Bossuet, in turn, was one of the main followers and admirers of King Louis XIV , successor of Louis XIII. His main work is entitled “Politics taken from the Holy Scriptures”. In it, Bossuet, based on the Catholic tradition, especially on authors such as Saint Augustine, sought to establish a theory of the divine right of the monarch, conceiving that all power was in the figure of the king. The king would thus be a sacred and incontestable authority, owing only obedience to God.
To assert itself as a political model, absolutism had to be relentlessly authoritarian. The historian Marco Antônio Lopes exemplified this incisive character of the absolute monarch in the following passage:“The French absolutist state was installed at the top of a complex pyramid of social hierarchies. If in its "foreign policy" it did not admit any power above itself, within the kingdom it stifled any speech that was unfavorable to monarchical propaganda, which was extended to the battlefields. The law of the gag imposed by the absolutist princes on History, which became an "art", was much criticized by eighteenth-century authors. (Lopes, Marcos Antônio. (2008). Ars Historica in the Old Regime:History before Historiography. Varia Historia , 24 (40).p 653.)
The 18th century authors who criticized this attempt to control History and the population by the absolutist state were the representatives of the Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, who defended the displacement of power from the figure of the king to the citizens, who would be represented by harmonious and interdependent institutions, configuring three powers:the Legislative, the Judiciary and the Executive.
By me. Claudio Fernandes