CHAPTER X - THE DECLINE OF DIVINE-RIGHT MONARCHY IN FRANCE

Summary

During the period extending from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century monarchy in most of the States of western and central Europe represented a compromise between medieval and modern conceptions of government; medieval ideas of the divine sanction of kingship were combined with an increasingly absolute form of rule. This phase in the history of European polity reached the completest development possible within its own limits in France. In his capacity as a Divine-Right monarch, Louis XIV embodied a tradition that went back to the rois thaumaturges; but the rays that darted from the roi soleil were not the effulgence of a setting sun. The new absolutism, allied to the old Divine Right, had given the French monarchy a renewed and more vigorous life. It must be remembered that the effete and decadent system of 1789, the ancien régime of the historians, only a century before was the new deal of Louis XIV and Colbert. At the close of the seventeenth century, by the efficiency of its administrative and governmental structure, France was in advance of every other country in Europe. True, Louis XIV did not leave his country at the height of her greatness. He outlived his own glory both at home and abroad and bequeathed more problems than solutions to his successors. In France distress and discontent were widespread before he died; and in Europe, during his long reign, Louis had first used and then abused the power with which the cardinals had endowed France, until the Treaty of Utrecht registered his defeat and opened what has been called, though hardly with justice, the age of ‘the English preponderance’.