When power becomes tyrannical, it ends up exploding. Without a moral bond, power solves nothing. This explains the French Revolution.
Newsdesk (28/08/2024 7:42, Gaudium Press) At the end of the Middle Ages, a situation of chaos arose in which the great feudal lords, generally princes of the reigning house who ruled lands with a certain degree of autonomy from the king, tended to revolt against the monarchs. Not to proclaim an aristocratic republic, but to reduce royal power.
The kings would resist. And the nobles – many of them at the pinnacle of nobility – culpably rose up against those to whom they owed allegiance, vassalage and obedience. They had no choice but to rely on the people, on the most powerful class of the common people, which was the bourgeoisie, in order to resist and not be overwhelmed.
Louis XIV, in particular, dreaded the return to feudalism, and this is because he wrongly identified feudalism with chaos and therefore wanted absolutism with order.
Louis XIV’s mistake was to confuse absolutism with order. He saw the problem like this: if these nobles do not need the king to live in their fiefdoms, if they have their own rights that the monarch cannot eliminate and they pass them on by heredity to their children, then there is no power that can compel them to obedience. Therefore, in order to force them into obedience without completely destroying them, this power must be Herculean. We are either heading for a Herculean monarchy or a rickety one.
In other words, since the unity of the nation comes from the monarch’s strength, its unum must be very strong or it disintegrates. Therefore, the king must be Herculean, or in this case, absolute: he can do anything, he is omnipotent.
Louis XIV: a precursor of the French Revolution?
Louis XIV wanted to establish order in the kingdom by a means in which order did not exist: a nobility poisoned by the principles of a decadent Christendom. From a nobility in this condition, every manner of evil was bound to emerge, because Christ the King was not present there in the totality of His power, leading the nobleman to love his duty of loyalty, his submission to the king, as had so many feudal lords in the past. Without a moral bond, power resolves nothing.
To maintain order under these conditions, power becomes tyrannical. And by virtue of being tyrannical, it ends up exploding. This explains the French Revolution.
Because of this, Louis XIV, who in some ways symbolizes the opposite of the French Revolution and whom it hated with all its might, was himself a forerunner of that Revolution.
The Sun King lacked a sacral conception of life
He was the Catholic King – he committed great sins and also had very good sides to his reign – but he did not have a sacral conception of life; he was not able to see temporal problems within a spiritual framework. In any case, he should have favoured the elements of the Church that reacted against errors, in order to be able, based on the Church, to change that situation.
In the memoirs he left his son, he acknowledges that he did not intervene in the religious quarrels of his time because he was completely ignorant of religious issues. Therefore, he was not fit to be king.
However, with Louis XIV, art, culture and civilization reached their peak. He sought to build the splendorous palace of the absolute king, who represents the nation’s glory, its luxury, its splendour, and its power. He is the monarch who shines like the sun, and in his presence the stars disappear; he is not the feudal king who illuminates the stars but does not devour them.
It is said that Louis XIV was short. A great, Herculean or Leonine stature would have greatly enhanced him. However, with this short stature, he imposed respect, knowing how to dominate with such majesty that, as reported by his enthusiasts – or, according to others, his sycophants; in a regime of absolute monarchy, these things are confused – they began to call him Apollo, the sun god. He was le roi Apolon, the sun among men: le roi soleil, “the Sun King”.
Although he gave France splendour and elegance, Louis XIV introduced frivolity and levity into the country, which further developed in the time of Louis XV and became almost toxic, and set the stage for the French Revolution.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Text extracted, with adaptations, from Heralds of the Gospel Magazine, n. 202, August 2024.
The post How the ‘Sun King’ Set the Stage for the French Revolution appeared first on Gaudium Press.
Compiled by Roberta MacEwan
