a decisive elimination of what Montesquieu in the next century was to theorize nostalgically as the ‘intermediary powers’ between the monarchy and the people. In other words, the Estates systems progressively went under as the class power of the nobility assumed the form of a centripetal dictatorship exercised under the royal ensign. The actual power of the monarchy as an institution, of course, in no way necessarily corresponded to that of the monarch: the sovereign who actually directed administration and conducted policy was as much the exception as the rule, although for obvious reasons the creative unity and efficacy of Absolutism was always at its height when the two coincided (Louis XIV or Frederick II). The maximum florescence and vigour of the Absolutist State of the grand siècle was necessarily also a stifling compression of the traditional rights and autonomies of the noble class, which dated back to the original mediaeval decentralization of the feudal polity and were sanctioned by venerable custom and interest. The last Estates-General before the Revolution was held in France in 1614; the last Castilian Cortés before Napoleon in 1665; the last Landtag in Bavaria in 1669; while in England, the longest surcease of Parliament in a century occurred, from 1629 to the Civil War. This epoch is thus not only that of a political and cultural apogee of Absolutism, but also of widespread aristocratic disaffection and alienation from it. Particularist privileges and customary rights were not abandoned without a struggle, especially in a time of pervasive economic recession and tautened credit.
The 17th century was thus repeatedly the scene of local noble revolts against the Absolutist State in the West, which often blended with incipient sedition by lawyers or merchants, and sometimes even utilized the suffering rage of the rural and urban masses themselves, as a temporary weapon against the monarchy.13 The Fronde in France, the Catalonian Republic in Spain, the Neapolitan Revolution in Italy, the Estates Revolt in Bohemia and the Great Rebellion in England itself all had, in very different proportions, something of this aspect of a nobiliary revolt against the consolidation of Absolutism.14 Naturally, this reaction could never become a full-scale, united aristocratic onslaught on the monarchy, for the two were tied together by an umbilical class cord: nor was there any case of a purely noble revolt in the century. The characteristic pattern was rather an overdetermined explosion in which a regionally delimited part of the nobility raised the banner of aristocratic separatism, and was joined by a discontented urban bourgeoisie and plebeian mobs in a general upheaval. Only in England, where the capitalist component of the revolt was preponderant in both the rural and urban propertied classes, did the Great Rebellion succeed. Everywhere else, in France, Spain, Italy and Austria, insurrections dominated or infected by noble separatism were crushed and Absolutist power reinforced. Necessarily so. No feudal ruling class could afford to jettison the advances achieved by Absolutism, which were the expression of profound historical necessities working themselves out right across the continent, without jeopardizing its own existence; none, in fact, ever was wholly or mainly won to the cause of revolt. But the regional or partial character of these struggles does not minimize their significance: factors of local auto-nomism merely condensed a diffuse dissatisfaction that often existed throughout the nobility, and gave it a violent politico-military form. The protests of Bordeaux, Prague, Naples, Edinburgh, Barcelona or Palermo had a wider resonance. Their ultimate defeat was a central episode in the difficult travail of the whole class in this century, as it slowly transformed itself to fit the new, unwonted exigencies of its own State power. No class in history immediately comprehends the logic of its own historical situation, in epochs of transition: a long period of disorientation and confusion may be necessary for it to learn the necessary rules of its own sovereignty. The Western nobility in the tense age of 17th century Absolutism was no exception: it had to be broken in to the harsh and unawaited discipline of its own conditions of government.
This is essentially the explanation of the apparent paradox of the later trajectory of Absolutism in the West. For if the 17th century is the noon of turmoil and disarray in the relationship between class and State within the total system of aristocratic political rule, the 18th century is by comparison the golden evening of their tranquillity and reconciliation. A new stability and harmony prevailed, as the international economic conjuncture changed and a hundred years of relative prosperity set in for most of Europe, while the nobility regained confidence in its capacity to direct the fortunes of the State. A polished rearisto-cratization of the higher bureaucracy occurred in one country after another, making the previous epoch seem by illusory contrast assorted with parvenus. The French Regency and the Swedish Hat oligarchy are the most striking examples of this phenomenon. But it can be seen in Caroline Spain and even in Georgian England or Periwig Holland, where bourgeois revolutions had actually converted state and dominant mode of production to capitalism. The Ministers of State who symbolize the period lack the creative energy and austere force of their predecessors: but they were serenely at peace with their class. Fleury or Choiseul, Enseñada or Aranda, Walpole or Newcastle are the representative figures of this epoch.
The civilian perrormance of the Absolutist State in the West in the age of the Enlightenment reflects this pattern: there was a trimming of excesses and a refinement of techniques, a certain further imprint of bourgeois influences, coupled with a general loss of dynamism and creativity. The extreme distortions generated by sale of offices were pared away, and the bureaucracy rendered correspondingly less venal: but often at the price of a public loan system for raising equivalent revenues which, imitated from the more advanced capitalist countries, soon tended to waterlog the State with accumulated debts. Mercantilism was still preached and practised, although the new ‘liberal’ economic doctrines of the physiocrats, advocating free trade and agrarian investment, made some limited headway in France, Tuscany and elsewhere. Perhaps the most important and interesting development within the landed ruling class in the last hundred years before the French Revolution, however, was a phenomenon outside the ambit of the State itself. This was the European spread of vincolismo – the rash of aristocratic devices for the protection and consolidation of large landed property against the disintegrating pressures and vagaries of the capitalist market.15 The English nobility after 1689 was one of the first to pioneer this trend, with the invention of the ‘strict settlement’, preventing owners of estates from alienating family property and vesting rights in the eldest son only: two measures designed to freeze the whole land market in the interests of aristocratic supremacy. Soon, one after another, the main Western countries developed or perfected their own variants of this ‘vinculism’ or tying of the land to its traditional owners. The mayoraigo in Spain, the morgado in Portugal, fideicommissum in Italy and Austria, and the maiorat in Germany, all fulfilled the same function: to preserve intact great blocks of magnate estates and large latifundia against the dangers of fragmentation or sale on an open commercial market.16 Much of the recovered stability of the European nobility in the 18th century was doubtless due to the economic underpinning provided by these legal devices. There was, in fact, probably less social turnover within the ruling class in this age than in the preceding epochs, when families and fortunes had fluctuated far more rapidly amidst greater political and social upheavals.17
It was against this background that a cosmopolitan élite culture of court and salon spread across Europe, typified by the new preeminence of French as an international idiom of diplomatic and intellectual discourse. In fact, of course, beneath its veneer this culture was more deeply penetrated than ever before by the ideas of the ascendant bourgeoisie, now triumphantly finding expression in the Enlightenment. The specific weight of mercantile and manufacturing capital within most of the Western social formations was rising throughout this century, which saw the second great wave of commercial and colonial expansion overseas. But it only determined State policy where a bourgeois revolution had already occurred and Absolutism had been overthrown, in England and Holland. Elsewhere, there is no more striking sign of the structural continuity of the late feudal State into its final phase than the persistence of its traditional military traditions. Actual troop strengths generally levelled off or dropped somewhat in Western Europe after the Treaty of Utrecht: the physical apparatus of war had ceased to expand, at least on land (at sea, it was another matter). But the frequency of war and its centrality to the international state system did not seriously alter. In fact, perhaps more geographical territory – classical object of every aristocratic military struggle – changed hands in Europe during this century than either of its
