ABSTRACT
A central purpose of this book is to modify recent Marxist interpretations of the genesis, function and nature of absolute monarchy through a study of the French variant which reached its apogee under Louis XIV. The general thrust of my argument is that the various attempts to relate absolutism to the rise of capitalism have failed to show any significant or necessary connection. This view also involves a challenge to liberal treatments which stress the modernity of the absolute state. Both Marxist and liberal approaches have contributed to a widespread tendency to minimise or reduce the differences between the social and institutional evolution of France and England. The Soviet historian Lublinskaya firmly bracketed them together with the United Provinces as the three countries which had embarked on the capitalist road.1 If this view has never received outright endorsement, it has, ironically enough, received support from revisionist historians of the eighteenth century who have pointed in the same general direction. By minimising the speed of English industrialisation and stressing the rapidity of French economic growth, the disparities in performance have become very blurred. More cautiously, but persistently, some French social and economic historians have also drawn parallels between the agrarian structures of northern France and those of England.2
Meanwhile, revisionist historians have been busy nibbling away at the institutional differences between the two countries. The legitimate desire to deconstruct the vulgar conception of French absolutism as unlimited personal rule has overflowed into suggestions that, at heart, it was little different from the constitutional monarchy which emerged across the Channel. Such notions have been reinforced, rather indirectly and innocently, by revisionist attempts to eradicate every vestige of the Whiggish emphasis on the power and peculiarity of the English Parliament.3 Much less innocently, the long endeavour to deny the revolutionary significance of the political crises of 1649 and 1688 has been carried to the point of declaring England to be an ancien régime in
