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.