Louis the Fourteenth became king in 1643 at the age of four. Six years later he was woken in the night and taken out of Paris in secret, because the city had risen against the government run in his name.
The rising, known as the Fronde, ran on and off for five years. It was a mixture of a revolt by the sovereign law courts against fiscal expedients, an aristocratic rebellion by princes with private armies, and Parisian street politics, and at one point the royal family lived in a cold palace with the silver pawned and food short.
He was ten and eleven and twelve while this was happening, and he never forgot it. Almost every feature of his later system, the removal of the court from Paris, the exclusion of great nobles from real power, the reduction of the law courts to registration offices, the standing army under royal command, is explicable as an answer to what he had watched.
That is worth stating because absolutism is often presented as a theory that rulers applied. In France it was a set of practical arrangements built by a man who had been chased out of his own capital and intended never to be again.
Versailles was his father's hunting lodge. He rebuilt it over decades, moved the government there in 1682, and housed several thousand people.
It is easy to read as pure display, and the display was real. But the building is best understood as an instrument for managing the aristocracy, and it worked by making access the currency.
The king's day was a public ritual from the moment he woke. Attending the rising, handing him a shirt, holding a candlestick at the going to bed, being spoken to in a corridor: these were graded honours, competed for ferociously, and recorded. A nobleman who was present had influence and could hope for a pension, a regiment, a bishopric for a younger son. A nobleman who stayed on his estates had none of those things and watched his rivals get them.
So the men whose grandfathers had raised armies against the crown spent their careers arguing about who could sit on a stool in the queen's presence. They were not disarmed by force. They were given a game that could only be played at court, and it was expensive enough to keep them in debt to the king who paid their pensions.
It should be said that Versailles was also, by any modern standard, an unpleasant place to live. Several thousand people were crammed into apartments allocated by rank, with inadequate sanitation, no privacy, and a constant traffic of petitioners, servants and sightseers, since the palace was in principle open to any respectably dressed person. Courtiers complained endlessly about the cold, the smells and the expense, and went on competing for the right to endure it.
The wider point is that ceremony was policy. A duke who has ruined himself buying clothes to be seen at Versailles is not raising troops in Burgundy, and everybody involved understood the trade.
The theory was stated plainly, most influentially by a bishop who tutored the king's grandson and argued that royal authority was sacred, paternal, absolute and subject to reason, and that the king answered to God alone.
The practice was considerably more limited, and this is the part usually left out.
He could not tax whatever he liked. Enormous exemptions protected the nobility and the clergy, and many provinces had their own estates that negotiated their contributions. The tax system was a patchwork of local privileges that no minister of the reign managed to rationalise, and the failure to do so is a direct cause of the crisis in chapter thirty six.
He could not raise money without borrowing, and his credit was mediocre. The state sold offices to raise cash, which created thousands of hereditary officials who owned their jobs and could not be dismissed, which is the opposite of a centralised bureaucracy.
He could not administer the country directly. He worked through around thirty intendants, provincial administrators answerable to him rather than to local interests, and they were genuinely effective, but thirty men cannot govern twenty million.
He also could not make the church his own department, though he tried. A long quarrel with Rome over royal rights in vacant bishoprics, and a declaration by the French clergy in 1682 asserting that a general council outranked the pope and that papal judgements in France required the church's consent, ended with the king quietly withdrawing the declaration when he needed papal support elsewhere.
And he could not overturn custom. French law was a mass of regional codes, guild privileges, seigneurial rights and municipal charters, and the crown negotiated with them constantly. Historians now generally describe the system as administrative monarchy or as absolutism in aspiration rather than in fact, and one influential formulation is that the king was absolute in the sense that no institution could formally say no to him, and constrained in the sense that a great many could quietly decline to act.
He fought for most of his reign: four major wars over fifty four years, and the last two were ruinous.
The objectives were consistent, and they were the objectives of chapter twenty nine continued by other means. Weaken the Habsburgs, secure defensible frontiers on the north east where France was open to invasion, and expand where opportunity allowed. His engineer built a double line of fortresses along the northern border that shaped European campaigning for a century and a half.
The army grew from perhaps seventy thousand men to something approaching four hundred thousand, which required a supply system, standardised uniforms, a chain of magazines, barracks, and a ministry to run it. That machine, not the palace, is what other rulers were actually copying.
Paying for it required a fiscal apparatus his ministers built and rebuilt: a controller general reorganising the accounts, new taxes that for the first time in principle fell on everybody including the nobility, and a great deal of borrowing through tax farmers, annuities and the sale of offices. The new universal taxes were the most interesting thing the reign did fiscally, and they were repeatedly weakened by exemptions bought back by the people they were meant to reach.
The last war was a catastrophe. When the Spanish line died out and his grandson inherited that throne, the rest of Europe combined to prevent one dynasty holding both crowns. France was defeated repeatedly, invaded, and in the winter of 1709 suffered a famine so severe, after an extraordinary freeze, that the death toll is estimated at several hundred thousand. He appealed publicly to his subjects for support, which is not the act of an absolute monarch, and got it.
France kept the Spanish throne for his grandson on condition the crowns were never united. It also emerged with a debt that the monarchy never brought under control, and which is still there, compounded by two further wars, in 1789.
The reason this reign matters beyond France is that everybody imitated it, and what they imitated tells you what they thought was worth having.
The palaces went up first and are the easiest to see: a great baroque residence outside the capital, with axial gardens, a hall of mirrors or its equivalent, and a court calendar. Versions appeared in Vienna, in Berlin, in Dresden, in Naples, in Madrid, in Stockholm and in Saint Petersburg, and in dozens of smaller German courts that could not remotely afford them and built them anyway.
Underneath the architecture, the serious borrowings were administrative: a standing army with uniforms and numbered regiments, a war ministry with magazines and depots, provincial officials answerable to the centre, academies to organise science and the arts, and manufactures established under state privilege. Prussia and Russia took these further than France did, because they had less entrenched local privilege in the way.
The imitation was cultural too, and it went deep. French became the language educated Europeans used with each other, French cooking, dress, furniture and manners were exported, and rulers who fought France conducted their diplomacy in French while doing it. That is a form of power that outlasted the armies by a long way.
What almost nobody copied was the part that had made it possible: seventy two years on the throne with no minority after the first, in the richest and most populous kingdom in western Europe. The model was widely adopted by states that lacked the resources to sustain it, and several of them bankrupted themselves trying.
Set the ledger out honestly, because the reign is usually presented either as a golden age or as a case study in vanity, and it is neither.
On the credit side, a state that worked better than most in Europe, a professional army and navy, a road and canal network including a canal joining the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, an academy system for science and the arts, and a cultural prestige so great that French became the language of European diplomacy and courts for two hundred years.
On the debit side, a tax system left unreformed because reforming it meant confronting the privileged, wars whose costs exceeded their gains, a debt that outlived him, and the revocation described in chapter twenty seven, which drove out a productive minority and shocked Protestant Europe into a coalition against him.
The palace itself, which is usually the first item cited, was not the main expense. Modern estimates of its construction cost put it at a small percentage of state expenditure over the decades involved, while the wars consumed the majority in single years. The building is the visible symbol of the reign's cost and it is not where the money went.
He is reported to have said on his deathbed that he had loved war too much, and to have advised his five year old successor not to imitate him in it. The remark may be authentic. It is at least the right conclusion.
Firm: the administration. This reign generated a colossal archive of correspondence, financial accounts, intendants' reports and army records, and it has been studied exhaustively.
Firm: the court, thanks partly to an aristocratic memoirist who spent decades at Versailles loathing most of it and recording everything.
Soft: that memoirist. He is indispensable, he is malicious, he was excluded from the influence he thought he deserved, and his portraits should be read with that in mind.
Soft: the famous quotations. The declaration that he was the state is not attested in any contemporary source and is almost certainly invented. The deathbed remarks come from later accounts.
Contested: absolutism itself. A generation of research has argued that the concept flatters the propaganda and misdescribes a monarchy that governed by bargaining with entrenched interests. Others reply that the bargaining was real but that the direction of travel, towards a single centre of legitimate authority commanding a standing army and a permanent revenue, is exactly what the word is for. The safest position is to use the word for the claim and to check the practice in each case, which is what this chapter has tried to do.