The Dream of Absolutism

Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

Hall Bjørnstad

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226803975
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV. What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do?In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV's reign was not top-down propaganda in any modern sense, but rather a dream dreamt collectively, by king, court, image-makers, and nation alike. Bjørnstad explores this dream through a sustained close analysis of a corpus of absolutist artifacts, ranging from Charles Le Brun's famous paintings in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles via the king's secret Mémoires to two little-known particularly extravagant verbal and textual celebrations of the king. The dream of absolutism, Bjørnstad concludes, lives at the intersection of politics and aesthetics. It is the carrier of a force that emerges as a glorious image; a participatory emotional reality that requires reality to conform to it. It is a dream, finally, that still shapes our collective political imaginary today.

• Chapter 1 •

The Grammar of Absolutism

1. Introduction: The Dream of a Book Like No Other

What was absolutism and how was it transmitted? In this chapter, I look for an answer to the first question (the “what?”) by homing in on the second (the “how?”) through a close analysis of Louis XIV’s Mémoires for the instruction of his oldest son, the Dauphin. Historiography on both Louis XIV and absolutism has completely marginalized this document, for reasons that will be discussed—and rejected—shortly. The text of the Mémoires is driven by the same questions just asked, answering the “how” of absolutism through an inward-facing series of examples and counsel for the future king, geared toward the inner cultivation of an absolutist will. Already on the second page, the reader encounters a startling sentence that envisions the Dauphin’s use of this very book, and this is the starting point of my inquiry into the heart of absolutism:

Je me suis aussi quelquefois flatté de cette pensée, que, si les occupations, les plaisirs et le commerce du monde, comme il n’arrive que trop souvent, vous dérobaient quelque jour à celui des livres et des histoires, le seul toutefois où les jeunes princes trouvent mille vérités sans nul mélange de flatterie, la lecture de ces Mémoires pourrait suppléer en quelque sorte à toutes les autres lectures, conservant toujours son goût et sa distinction pour vous, par l’amitié et par le respect que vous conserveriez pour moi.

(I have also sometimes been flattered by the thought that if the occupations, the pleasures, and the affairs of this world should, as all too often happens, take you away from books and from histories, where alone, however, princes find a thousand truths unmixed with flattery, the reading of these mémoires might somehow compensate [suppléer] for all the other readings, always preserving its taste and its quality for you through the friendship and the respect that you would preserve for me.)1

What is absolutism and how can it be learned? The sentence above may sound like an answer to these two essential questions from the sovereign father to his future successor: his book, this book, is all that his son will ever need. But the form of the sentence is too convoluted for it actually to read like a promise. The statement is presented somewhat more hesitantly as a recurrent thought, with the envisioned impact of the reading simply brought up as an idea rather than with the performative force of a promise, as if in quotation marks (one could imagine the following inelegant reformulation: “sometimes I had this thought: ‘the reading of these mémoires . . .’ ”). It reads as the account of a pleasant dream occasionally had by the father about the book’s potential impact. Stranger still, while the main argument presented to the Dauphin for turning to his father’s text is that it would be advice free of flattery, the reflection itself is introduced by the king as a flattering thought. At the same time, the flattering thought at the core of that dream has nothing hesitant about it. Not only does it channel the paternal desire to effectively prepare his son for life in the world without him, but it also stages the royal absolutist desire to control the one element that by definition escapes the control of even the most absolute sovereign: the future beyond his own reign.

What comes after, what could possibly come after the sun? More sun? The moon? The deluge? Absolutism does not decline easily in the future tense. The sentence above attests to this absence through its use of the conditional mode, its hesitant, vacillating “pourrait [. . .] en quelque sorte” (“might somehow”). As argued later in the chapter, this is the dominant mode of the whole pedagogical enterprise, every paragraph of the book containing an unspoken if: if, my son, I should die before you, then I would want you to know that. . . . These mémoires are designed to come after the sun, prolonging somehow—but only somehow—its brilliance, but not, alas, with any certainty. Later, this initial inquiry into the peculiar grammar of absolutism will bring us to consider the tense linguists may call the futur du destin (“future of fate,” constructed with the French verb devoir)—“celui qui doit régner après nous” (“he who shall reign after us”) (section 3)—and, intriguingly, the futur antérieur—“ceux qui auront régné” (“those who would have reigned”)2 (section 4)—alongside considerations of the inception of sovereignty through the passé simple of the royal decision (section 3) and the practical initiation to such decisions, the becoming-absolute of the sovereign (section 5), before the exploration of the allegorical language of the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles in chapter 2 leads to absolutism as a permanent present. Throughout, Louis XIV’s concerns about royal succession force the absolute monarch to consider the limits of royal authority and agency, starting with the delicate intersection between his royal self and that of his son in the sentence above. And more important still, he starts with the power of his own example, as documented in the Mémoires.

Hence the importance of the quotation as an entry point for the discussion of royal exemplarity in this chapter. As argued in detail below, the tension between a certain reserve in its enunciation (“quelque fois flatté”; “pourrait [. . .] en quelque sorte” [“sometimes been flattered”; “might somehow”]) and the force of its sweeping claim (“toutes les autres lectures” [“all the other readings”]) points to the ambiguity of the central verb suppléer. The text presents itself as a supplement whose meaning for a moment straddles the line between complement and replacement, and in doing so reflects a similar ambiguity in the period’s conception of royal exemplarity in general. By falling on the side of replacement, this text, the example of this king, comes to take the place of a whole tradition of royal exemplars. This absolutism, the whole project of power, is characterized by the same perplexing concurrence of ambition and reticence that I identified above and will continue to underscore throughout my reading of the Mémoires.

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My gambit in this chapter is that much is to be gained by giving this text’s particularity our full attention, from its grammatical details to the larger theoretical-historical work it does in constituting a particular image of absolutism. Generally ignoring if not plainly rejecting it as a source worthy of serious consideration, scholars at best approach the Mémoires as a source of quotable quips and bons mots and at worst as a compilation of self-indulgent niceties whose complacency demonstrates why they don’t deserve any further attention. The scholarly editors of the text’s modern editions don’t go that far, but even they, I contend, fail to see the value and pertinence of the text they are introducing. The reasons for the marginalization of this incontestably central early modern text are complex, rooted partly in a misunderstanding of its status as an expression of the king’s actual voice (related to the provenance of the text), partly in a misjudgment of the nature of the document as a historical source (its possible value as a source beyond its relation to empirical facts and what it would actually mean to take it seriously), partly in the discomfort provoked by a document that is still taken too seriously by present-day royalist readers.

For that reason, I start this chapter with a reflection on the need and justification for taking the Mémoires seriously as a historical source and, most importantly, on what it would mean to do so (section 2). Therefore, this section builds on the methodological considerations expressed in the introduction, making the case for us, as modern readers, to take a new approach to a wider set of early modern texts: a more humble, more open, more attentive approach, without necessarily assuming that we know ahead of time what the early modern text in front of us is about, what it has to tell us, and what its wider context is. It may seem puzzling to adopt such a stance of hermeneutic humility to a text that is not always itself an expression of humility (to say the least). Do the text and its author really deserve our respectful consideration? No, but we owe it to ourselves, in order to better understand the past and the world.

This initial inquiry into the composition and material support of the Mémoires, with the ultimate goal of reflecting on what it would mean to take them seriously, sets the stage for my close readings of the grammar of absolutism in the rest of the chapter. First (in section 3), I pay careful attention to the general image of absolutism (its structure and its foundation) conveyed to the Dauphin from the very opening of the text and beyond. Absolutism explained to a child, as it were. Obviously, this is not necessarily the full truth about the French monarchy at the time, possibly quite far from it, but it is still surprising that such an analysis of the self-image of absolutism as conveyed to the next person in line to become king has never really been done before. Formulated in polemical terms: the Mémoires certainly present the reader with a highly complacent and partial image of French absolutism, but, importantly, that complacency and partiality are consubstantial with absolutism itself. Interestingly, Louis XIV gives a prominent place to exemplarity, describing it as “the first and most important part of our politics.” The remaining sections explore this exemplarity at the textual level in the Mémoires. First in the way it presents and justifies itself and its own example, which returns me to the quotation discussed above (section 4). Then, finally, through the rhetoric the text deploys in its didactic effort, and the way the pedagogical focus of Louis XIV’s lessons in kingship oscillates between the minute labor of statecraft and the lofty enchantment of royal mastery, between expert analysis and God-given intuition, between (modern) instrumentalism and a (premodern) logic of royal glory (section 5). The actual readings are therefore the most important argument for the need to take the Mémoires seriously. What the king sets out to teach his son is the paradoxical art of enlightened absolutism, and the paradoxical nature of this enterprise—and thereby the constitutive tensions of absolutism itself—is legible throughout the Mémoires.

First of all, however, since many readers will not be familiar with this text that the king in the paragraph quoted above calls “ces Mémoires,” some words are needed about its content and structure—and about what it is not. It is not a political treatise, nor advice literature in any traditional sense (e.g., a mirror for princes), nor the retrospective reflections of an elder statesman. The material covered by the Mémoires corresponds to five early years in the personal reign of Louis XIV, written strictly from the king’s perspective (although not necessarily by the king himself). The text frequently uses the royal “I” and generously attributes royal agency. The king organizes his instruction throughout the Mémoires according to a principle articulated in the second sentence of the text. There, Louis XIV ascertains that kings are not “dispensés de l’obligation commune des pères [. . .] d’instruire leurs enfants par l’exemple et par le conseil” (“dispensed from the common and natural obligation of fathers to instruct their children by example and by counsel”) (49/21). The order of the two terms is significant: first by example, then by counsel. This is in fact the way the king proceeds through the whole book, first retelling the principal actions and events from his reign, and then presenting concrete advice extracted from each episode in a didactic tone that often borders on pedantic, cordial at times, and self-aggrandizing by default. The ambition of the text, then, is not only to convey specific pieces of political advice, but above all to lead its only intended reader, the Dauphin, next in line to the crown, to adopt, embrace, and uphold the sole perspective that is properly political under absolutism: that of the king.

2. Taking Louis XIV’s Mémoires Seriously

It is a remarkable yet widely ignored fact that in the late 1660s and early 1670s amidst glorious exploits abroad and splendid endeavors at home, Louis XIV devoted a considerable amount of time to preparing his Mémoires based on the early years of his personal reign for the instruction of his oldest son, the Dauphin. Specialists of French absolutism are, of course, aware of the existence of the king’s Mémoires, but it is a testimony to the marginal status of the text that the general public and even colleagues working on other aspects of early modern French culture—or on issues related to kingship in other national traditions—often have not heard about it at all. The text is certainly available to modern readers: there is an excellent English translation from 1970—which also doubles as the best-researched scholarly edition—by the American historian Paul Sonnino. More recently, two eminent French historians, Pierre Goubert and Joël Cornette, published new scholarly editions of the French text, in 1992 and 2007, respectively.3 Critical attention has, however, remained minimal, and it is still possible to read most of the scholarship on the Mémoires from the last fifty years in the course of a long afternoon. This lack of critical interest in Louis XIV’s representation of himself is all the more surprising since there has been such rich work over the last few decades focusing on the representation of this very king in the social, political, and artistic system surrounding him. In the words of Ran Halévi, who has written one of the few seminal articles on the subject, the scholarship has “preferred to decipher the political portrait of the prince in the court system, in the iconographic programs of Versailles and in the imagery of royal greatness brought forth by the Petite Académie.”4

How, then, to explain the lack of scholarly interest in a text that we could have expected to be central, if not canonical? First of all, it is important to acknowledge the presence of a certain unease among modern academics, especially in France, in their encounter with a text that they may feel other readers take too seriously. It is not surprising that the Mémoires were mobilized for royalist purposes in the nineteenth century. For example, the earliest publications of the text enter into projects aiming to (re)construct the image of a glorious philosopher-king, as in the multivolume Œuvres de Louis XIV from 1806, and, even more intriguingly, several competing editions in the 1820s of the Pensées de Louis XIV, based on highlights from the Mémoires (at once shaped by and named after the Pensées of Pascal).5 But still today there are readers whose cultic veneration of the Mémoires risks making certain other readers uncomfortable with, if not suspicious of, even a detached academic approach to the text. For example, a royalist like Daniel Hamiche ends his preface to a 2001 edition of the Mémoires with the following impassioned peroration: “this elegance of thought and style, this clarity of reflection [. . .], this lofty sentiment of the dignity, the sovereignty and the grandeur of the State [. . .] can induce, in all Frenchmen worthy of the name, nothing but admiration for the work and respect for the Prince who embodied it.”6 Basically, what Hamiche asks from the modern reader is the same devotion to the image held forth by the text as the Mémoires themselves hoped to instill in their only intended reader, the Dauphin.

There are, however, other philologically more tangible factors that complicate scholars’ approach to and assessment of the text. The first question is whether it is legitimate to speak of “the text” using the definite article, implying that the identity of the noun is known to the reader. Second, and somewhat linked to the first, is the question of in whose voice the text speaks or, in other words, whether the first-person singular pronoun “I” can rightly be identified as the king’s. French historian Stanis Perez, in one of the most recent articles to tackle these questions head-on, masterfully demonstrated the instability of both the textual support and the authorial voice. My methodological argument in what follows is twofold: First, in agreement with Perez, that in ...