1. - European practice

Summary

The mid-eighteenth century was a period when much thought was devoted to the nature of government. Probably the best known of the commentators was Montesquieu, who produced his De l'esprit des his in 1748; but the same kind of problem occupied many other writers, including Bielfeld, who produced his Institutions politiques between 1759 and 1774, d'Argenson, who wrote his Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France in 1765, and F. K. von Moser who discussed the duties of a prince in his Der Herr und der Diener in 1759. Yet the problems which interested these contemporaries are not always those which seem most important to later observers, who have to consider the political and administrative developments which have taken place in Europe since 1789. To the modern observer the most characteristic features of the governmental institutions of the period 1713-65 are the very general acceptance of more or less absolute monarchy, the increasing administrative specialisation at the centre and the increasing effectiveness of governmental control in the provinces.

The inspiration behind the very generally held eighteenth-century idea of monarchy was still the belief that kings ruled by a right derived from God himself. This view had found expression in the sixteenth century, when Bodin had described the king as the image of God on earth, and in the seventeenth century, when the Parlement of Paris assured Louis XIV that the seat of His Majesty represented the throne of the living God, and that the orders of the kingdom rendered honour and respect to him as to a living divinity, or when Bossuet had declared that princes were sanctified by their charge as being representatives of the divine majesty appointed by Providence to carry out its purposes. It was still familiar and acceptable in most of Europe until 1789. Even the Encyclopédistes, though they did not hesitate to question the authority of the Church, did not, for the most part, criticise the excellence of monarchy as a form of government.