The Theory of Absolutism and Louis XIV's France

Absolutism rested on the claim that a king concentrated all legislative, executive, and judicial power in his person, underwritten by the theory of the divine right of kings, which held that the monarch received his power directly from God. Jean Bodin, in his 1576 treatise The Six Books of the Republic, formulated the modern theory of indivisible sovereignty; Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet gave divine right its most forceful religious defense in Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture; and Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), justified the sovereign's absolute power instead through a rational pact trading obedience for security. This political realism had an earlier forerunner in Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (1532), which anticipated the later logic of "reason of state." Absolutism arose largely as a response to the devastating religious and civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it rested on two material pillars: administrative centralization and the creation of permanent standing armies.