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  • Hi, I'm John Green and this is crash course European history

  • So today we're moving into the second half of the 17th century

  • The 30 Years War has ended with the Treaty of Westphalia and the Scientific Revolution is producing amazing new universal laws

  • but life is still pretty terrible for the vast majority of people. For Kings though, things were changing with the advent of absolutism

  • in which the king is said to have a divine right to the throne and the

  • Divinest divine right monarch of them all Louis XIV,

  • led Western Europe's most powerful Kingdom for more than 70 years

  • So this is a portrait of Louis XIV - the French Sun King, painted when he was 63

  • Louis XIV looks regal in his massive black wig and swaths of ermine

  • Embellished with fleurs-de-lis the symbol of the former french royal house

  • His high heels show off his shapely legs in white hose

  • demonstrating the king's

  • perfection. Men's legs garbed in tightly fitted stockings were a key indication of

  • desirability at the time and while he may not appear super masculine to us

  • Louis XIV was the model of powerful kingship and indeed absolute power

  • Louis was four years old when he started his reign in

  • 1643 while Europe was attempting to pull itself out of the 30 Years War earlier under Louis's father Louis XIII

  • rebellions abounded in the hundreds across the kingdom

  • Because of increasingly heavy taxation to pay for the war and the famine conditions due to the relentless little ice age

  • It seemed almost unthinkable to ordinary people that the king would betray his subjects with

  • rising taxes in a time of famine. So instead they usually blamed tax collectors and local officials

  • not the king after Louis XIII died, his

  • four-year-old son was a smidge small for France ruling

  • So the job was taken over by his Regent, his mother, Anne of Austria

  • With help from her sidekick and rumored lover the Italian born Cardinal Mazarin

  • The first years of Anne's Regency were the last years of the 30 Years War and she increased French military

  • deployments even amid all these protests with the simple and eventually successful goal of defeating the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs

  • To gain more territory alongside increasing the desperation of ordinary people. This constant warfare stretched

  • Aristocratic resources because Nobles raised and paid for their own armies in wartime

  • Louis's mother had to move him several times to keep him safe amid protests from peasants and nobility

  • Alike some of whom even went to the point of plotting Coups d'état

  • which is after all a French phrase. the Pieds Nus - or barefooted ones, the Croquants - or

  • crunchers or crispies, and even judges of Paris were among the people resisting. One judge listed the

  • sacrifices of ordinary people such as selling all their furniture and sleeping on straw in order to pay rising taxes

  • He said to maintain the luxury of Paris millions of innocent souls are obliged to live on black bread and oats

  • Did the center of the world just open? Is there a pumpernickel bagel in there?

  • It's the closest we could get to black bread. Now. This is a

  • properly great bagel

  • Hmm

  • I'm gonna eat that whole thing. Once this is done but black bread in 17th century, France...Not good. For one thing

  • It was often cut with sawdust, which you know, isn't ideal for bread making and also isn't ideal for nutrition

  • in fact, our contemporary bread is so good that it's hard for us to imagine just

  • How difficult the circumstances were in the 17th century?

  • Like just how desperate you have to be to add sawdust to your dough

  • So we're gonna jump back in time for a bit, earlier in the 17th century, a group of judges

  • managed to undermine the monarchy,

  • if only temporarily. You'll recall that France ended their religious civil war with Henry,

  • Paris's well worth amassed the fourth ruling. Henry was Louis XIV's

  • grandfather and to pay for ongoing wars Henry raised a new tax called the Paulette that was paid by government officials

  • including judges over a nine-year period

  • and if you paid the Paulette you could keep your job for life or even sell your job to a

  • successor and this created a powerful class of bureaucrats who were basically immune from state oversight

  • But Henry couldn't afford to get rid of the Paulette because he needed the cash to wage wars

  • The officials who bought their positions came to be known as the nobles of the robe as opposed to the old-school

  • nobles who were called the nobles of the sword because they'd gotten their status via military

  • service to the king

  • Flash forward a few decades Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin are trying to throw these Nobles of the robe out of office

  • Which the new nobles are of course not keen on leading and to threaten to arrest them

  • I mean after all they'd paid a lot of money for those robes all of this pushed the people of Paris to their most menacing

  • protests until the

  • monarchy back down and released the judges that they had imprisoned and this triumph over the monarchy made the nobility of the robe a force

  • to be reckoned with and also indicated that maybe the absolute power of the monarchy

  • Wasn't actually that absolute. Alongside these protesters another contender for influence arose a new Catholic movement

  • Jansenism, called for a complete purging of the self and a fervent

  • spirituality to replace the insufficient and even deluded practices of the church.

  • Like for instance being a cardinal who is probably hooking up with the king's mom

  • the Jansenist believe only intense and full religious commitment could pull France from its dire straits and their menaced

  • established authority, but the most threatening uprising was the Fronde, a series of opposition movements between

  • 1648 and

  • 1653 in which the old nobility and the courts were like, " you can't just raise our taxes willy-nilly without asking permission "

  • And Anne of Austria was like, " of course we can it's a kingdom and we are ,well

  • if not, exactly the king at least the Kings Regent and her sidekick ".

  • Let's go to the thought-bubble

  • Louis XIV was officially crowned king in 1654 when he was 15

  • And as he grew older his urgent task became organizing the administration of his kingdom

  • Raising funds and uniting his subjects in loyalty to him

  • part of his brilliance was to divert the nobility and in fact a good part of France with a

  • spectacular court life, rather how a parent might divert a relentless unhappy child would, say, an IPad

  • But Louie's court was even more diverting than, I don't know

  • what kids like? TiKTok ?

  • in the 1660s the King began the task of removing his

  • Government from the tumult of Paris by converting a hunting lodge at Versailles outside of Paris into the most spectacular

  • European palace complex of its day it has some

  • 15,000 people when the court moved there in the 1680s and further thousands in the many adjacent

  • buildings for servants and smaller Chateau built for Louis's mistresses

  • The nobility was kept busy attending to the king and queen as well as serving the monarchs

  • legitimate and many illegitimate children

  • They also outdid themselves in maneuvering for status

  • One of the highest honors being to hand the king his nightshirt in the evening or to oversee his use of the commode. The king

  • also sponsored and sometimes starred in spectacular operas and concerts and plays to add to the feeling of his greatness and power

  • While the nobility enhanced the scene by behaving as if the King were in fact more than humanly powerful

  • It was almost like the king was a bright sun whose presence warmed all those it graced and indeed,

  • That's why Louis XIV came to be known as the Sun King

  • Thanks, thought-bubble ! In the days of absolutism monarchs across Europe embraced the idea that they had the divine right to their absolute

  • rule. The Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet preached in the royal chapel of Versailles that quote : " It is God who

  • establishes kings...he vested royalty in the House of David, and ordered him to cause Solomon, his son to reign in his place...

  • Princes thus act as ministers of God. "

  • He continued, " This is why we have seen that the royal throne is not the throne of a man, but the throne of God himself. "

  • To his mind, " God has placed in Princes something divine. " and in fact, Bossuet maintained,

  • " Princes are gods. ". The kings divinity allowed for his regime to be free from arbitrariness or the tyranny of

  • anarchy because whatever he did was

  • necessarily correct. Louis XIV probably never said the line most famously attributed to him,

  • " L'etat c'est moi " or " the state is me ", but it has endured for a reason

  • He really was the state's power and authority

  • and he felt that even if he never said it. But Divine Right theory also meant religious conformity. Louis XIV viewed the presence of

  • protestants in his realm as disorderly and sinful, causing him to revoke the Edict de Nantes in 1685

  • Thousands of Protestants then fled France, taking their skills and successful businesses to the Netherlands, the German states, North America, South Africa

  • and other places. And for all the surface grandeur of Louis's regime

  • it worked mostly because of accomplished bureaucrats including the intendants or

  • InEnDantS, if I'm pretending to be able to pronounce French, whose jobs were regularized to oversee tax collections, and the

  • administration's of the various regions of the kingdom. The most prominent and important of all Louis's officials was Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who oversaw

  • finances and public works among other things. Despite being of middle-class birth, Colbert drove the kingdom's economy

  • Including its merchants, shipbuilders and artisans. Colbert also oversaw French expansion into North America

  • sending out settlers and officials, traders combed the continent for the

  • desperately needed furs that were in high demand during the intense cold of the Little Ice Age

  • Colbert is most famous for his support of

  • mercantilism, a policy that saw economic development and trade as

  • akin to war. Merkin to his thinkers believed that there was only so much wealth in the world a finite and fixed amount

  • And in such a zero-sum world, the only way for one kingdom to win would be for other kingdoms to lose

  • We now know this isn't true. But mercantilism was an important driver of policy and foreign relations at the time

  • there were many applications of this theory refusing entry of another Kingdom ships for instance or

  • enacting high tariffs on competitors goods

  • We can see one example of this in cotton textiles, which were

  • wildly popular but Europeans had no idea how to produce such lively and washable fabrics

  • So they were outlawed in France

  • Smuggling, however, thrived with women and men alike

  • Wearing cotton and even high officials brought them in illegally. In this and other areas of life people did disobey

  • Absolutist rules. Still, Louis had a lot of power, including the power to wage war

  • He waged four major ones first the war of devolution in which France gained territory in the north

  • Second, the Dutch war which gained additional land to the north and along the eastern border

  • Third, the War of the League of Augsburg

  • In which he lost much of the land won in the Dutch war. And fourth, the war of the Spanish Succession

  • again with significant losses

  • including in Canada this time to Britain, who you might not have expected to be mixed up in the Spanish war of succession

  • but

  • Everyone wanted in on warring in 17th century Europe. Clearly, like the ideal reality TV contestant, Louis was not there to make friends

  • but we can see through this exchange of lands, through endless war how a

  • zero-sum, I can only win if you lose world view ends up exhausting resources rather than expanding them. By the

  • end of his reign, the idea of absolutist rules was being thrown into question. An English critic called

  • absolutist France a " State full of boils and wounds and putrid sores "

  • exiled Huguenots called the French under Louis " slaves. " his rule directed only " to satisfy both his

  • ambition and his vengeance ." Again, satisfying ones ambition and ones vengeance makes you a great reality TV contestant

  • But maybe not necessarily the perfect king

  • So absolutism can be seen as a form of tyrannical rule demanding religious, economic and social conformity

  • based on a political theory of monarchical divinity

  • It cost huge amounts in taxation and loss of life in wars to create this system of civility to royal power and

  • it was pretty disempowering to the French public. But then again the rise of a political system of power sharing in England called

  • Constitutionalism wasn't really less violent. Although it did enshrine certain ideas about human rights

  • Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time

  • Thanks for watching crash course European history

  • Which is made by all these nice people and filmed here in the Jaden Smith studio in Indianapolis

  • Our animators are thought cafe. We have lots more crash course available. You want to learn about astronomy ? computer science ? We've got you covered !

  • Thanks again for watching and don't forget to be awesome !

Hi, I'm John Green and this is crash course European history

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絶対王政。クラッシュ・コース ヨーロッパの歴史 #13 (Absolute Monarchy: Crash Course European History #13)

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    林宜悉 に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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