I

Absolutism is a troublesome word. Arthur O. Lovejoy warned that isms are ‘trouble-breeding and usually thought-obscuring terms, which one sometimes wishes to see expunged from the vocabulary of the philosopher and the historian altogether’. If this remark sounds harsh and reductive, Lovejoy's other consideration whereby isms ‘are names of complexes, not of simples’ could not be more appropriate to frame what has been attempted with this volume. ‘Absolutism’ is both a problematic historiographical category and a complex ‘compound’ of different elements: like a great many ism-terms it is a later coinage. But exploring the ways in which isms can be applied as well as the ways in which they fit with past terminology can be illuminating for the historian's work in understanding different sets of political ideas.

Our approach moves away from the three major views of absolutism: the ‘conservative’ for which it has always existed; the ‘Marxist’ for which it was an epoch between feudalism and capitalism and one contaminated by and linked to both; the ‘revisionist’ for which there was no absolutism and, therefore, we should not speak of it. Whereas these interpretations rest upon large-scale generalizations about historical process, ours is more modest but more concrete, namely the analysis of political thought in diverse historical contexts.

Introduction

To participate in a conference on ‘absolutism’ probably implies to know whether something like absolutism existed and, if so, what it was. Far from making bold statements, this chapter will nonetheless show that a plausible answer to both questions is possible. In the first case, we say that absolutism did exist in the early modern period across Europe, at least in the heads of some people. It was articulated in treatises and polemical tracts by thinkers, clergymen, kings and politicians. Regardless of contrasts, all of these deemed that the best form of government was one where power was held in an absolute manner. Thus, even though many historians have argued more or less persuasively that absolutism in practice did not exist because of the fragmented structure of the nascent national state, it is altogether true that in the realm of ideas absolutist doctrines3 were widespread and constituted a central cultural feature of early modernity. We propose answering the second point by looking at what political writers said and how they did so. This entails recovering the plurality of languages they spoke. Hence the following pages hope to stimulate new reflections on the absolutisms informing late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century political discourse in England and France.

The protagonists of our narrative are three interesting but often superficially studied theorists whose treatises were conceived in the early 1630s.