Bureaucracy and Royal Administration in the Seventeenth Century – French Absolutism and the State

The pressures of warfare, technological change, the extraction of resources, and the changes in international power relations all had a hand in the development of more modern systems of information management. As the example of Louis XIV’s royal government in France demonstrates, it was the growth in the ability of the early modern state to gather and to deploy information in systematic and regular ways that led to the development of modern systems of governance as well as the centralization of state power, slowly replacing the old patrimonial systems of shared noble and royal power.