Louis XIV and Absolutism

Abstract

In the “discussion without end”¹ that is history at its best, or at least at its liveliest, there are many forms of debate. Perhaps the most practiced of these in recent years has been that method of historical controversy which consists in finding the mote in the adversary’s eye; that is, in demonstrating that his questions and his judgments about the past are conditioned by his interests and his commitments in the present. We are, I am sure, familiar with the transformation of mote into beam that occurs as one crosses the dividing aisle of politics and ideology. Yet, although historical debate in this mold has proved immensely fruitful, I should like to come at my problem in this paper as a controversialist, to be sure, but under the aegis not so much of the sociology of knowledge as of linguistic analysis. If I shall split hairs en quatre, en huit, and perhaps en seize, it will be because I am persuaded that the principal barrier to a profitable study of the absolutism of the Old Regime and, more specifically, of Louis XIV consists at the present time not in inadequate identification of the linkage between the different interpreta tions of absolutism and the various “present days”² of their propounders but in the tangle meaning of the key words we use in discussing absolutism.

Published originally in Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. John C. Rule (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970). Reprinted with permission.