IMPERIALISM IN THE MODERN ABSOLUTE MONARCHY

At the threshold of modern Europe there stands a form of imperialism that is of special interest to us. It is rooted in the nature of the absolutist state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which was, everywhere on the Continent, the result of the victory of the monarchy over the estates and classes. Everywhere on the Continent, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these struggles broke the political back of the people, leaving only the prince and his soldiers and officials on the devastated soil of earlier political factions. Of the whole family of constitutions in western and central Europe, only the English constitution maintained itself. Whenever there was enough power and activity in the autocratic state, imperialist tendencies began to stir, notably in Spain, France, and the larger territories of Germany. Let us take France as an example.

Of the eight virtually independent principalities that threatened to divide the West Frankish empire among themselves on the decline of the Carolingians, the duchy of France, through the rise of the Capets, came to be the foundation not only of the royal title but also of a royal policy that, despite certain relapses, continued steadfastly. Even Abbé Suger, under Louis VI and Louis VII, had already formulated the principles that were ultimately to lead that policy to victory. The obvious aims were to fight against the other seven principalities and against the rural nobility, which in France, too, enjoyed virtual independence and lived only for its private feuds and its own undertakings abroad. The obvious tactics were the representation of the interests of the Church, the cities, and the peasantry, with the help of a small standing army (maison du roi, originally formed from a few hundred poor noblemen). The Hundred Years’ War with England served to develop national sentiment and to bring the kingship to the fore. It had the effect of rallying the immense war potential of the aristocracy to the crown and of gradually disciplining the aristocracy as well. Crusades and other foreign operations were contributory factors. As early as Saint Louis, the kingship rested on a broad political foundation which was quite equal to the revolts of the nobles that kept breaking out all the time, and also to the power of the Popes. As early as the last Capet an orderly tax administration had developed. The house of Valois continued the policy—more accurately, the policy continued under that dynasty, for nothing is further from our mind than to seek to explain a historical process simply by the actions of individuals. Charles V temporarily subdued the nobility and mastered the cities for good, subjecting them to a policy of mercantilism. Under Charles VII the army was reorganized along modern lines (1439) and a larger standing army was established. Louis XI completed the construction of the unified national state, and under him the provincial estates lost much of their importance. The internecine warfare among the nobles during the religious wars of the sixteenth century did the rest, and from there the road led, by way of Sully and Richelieu, to the culmination of this development in Louis XIV. Let us examine his situation.

He was master of the machinery of state. His ancestors had gradually created this position by military force; or rather, in a military sense, it had been created in the course of the development of the national state, for that course manifested itself in military struggle, and the centralized state could arise only when one of the military powers originally present triumphed over the others, absorbing what was left of them in the way of military strength and initiative. In France, as elsewhere, the absolutist national state meant the military organization of the martial elements of the nation, in effect a war machine. True, this was not its entire meaning and cultural significance. Now that national unity was achieved, now that, since the victory over Spain, no external enemy offered a serious threat any longer, there might have been disarmament—the military element might have been permitted to recede. The state would not have ceased to exist or failed to fulfill its function on that account. But the foundations of royal power rested on this military character of the state and on the social factors and psychological tendencies it expressed. Hence it was maintained, even though the causes that had brought it to the fore had disappeared. Hence the war machine continued to impress its mark on the state. Hence the king felt himself to be primarily a warlord, adorned himself preeminently with military emblems. Hence his chief concern was to maintain a large, well-equipped army, one that remained active and was directly tied to his person. All other functions he might delegate to his subordinates. But this one—supreme command of the army and with it the direction of foreign affairs—he claimed as his own prerogative. When he was unable to exercise it, he at least made a pretense of personal military efficiency. Any other inadequacy he and the dominant groups might have pardoned. Military shortcomings, however, were dangerous, and when they were present—which doubtless was the case with Louis XIV—they had to be carefully concealed. The king might not actually be a hero in battle, but he had to have the reputation of being one.

The necessity for this attitude flows from the social structure of the period. In a political sense neither the peasantry nor the working masses carried weight—and this was true in the social sense as well. In its fight against the nobility, the crown had occasionally championed both, but essentially they were and remained helots, to be disposed of at will—not only economically exploited but even, against their will, trained to be blindly obeying soldiers. The urban middle class was also virtually beholden to the crown, though not quite so unconditionally. Once a valuable ally in the struggle against the nobility, it had become a mere servant. It had to obey, was molded by the crown along the lines of greatest financial return. The Church likewise paid for its national opposition to Rome with strict submission to the royal power. To this extent the king was actually, not merely legally, the master. It was of little concern to him—within eventually quite wide limits—what all these people who were forced to submit to him thought. But that was not true of the aristocracy. It too had had to submit to the crown, surrendering its independence and political rights—or at least the opportunity to exercise them. The stiff-necked rural nobility that once had both feet firmly planted in the soil amid its people had turned into a court aristocracy of extreme outward servility. Yet its social position remained intact. It still had its estates, and its members had retained their prestige in their own immediate neighborhoods. The peasants were more or less at its mercy. Each of the great houses still had its dependent circle among the lower nobility. Thus the aristocracy as a whole was still a power factor that had to be taken into account. Its submission to the crown was more in the nature of a settlement than a surrender. It resembled an election—a compulsory one, to be sure—of the king as the leader and executive organ of the nobility. Politically the nobility ruled far more completely through the king than it once did while it challenged his power. At that time, after all, the still independent cities did form a modest counterpoise to the nobility. Had the king, for example, conceived the notion of translating into action his pose as the protector of the lowest population strata, the nobility woud have been able to squelch any such attempt by mere passive resistance—as happened in Austria in the case of Joseph II. The nobles would have merely had to retire to their châteaux in order to bring into play, even outwardly, the actual foundations of their power, in order to become again a reasonably independent rural nobility which would have been capable of putting up a good fight.

The reason they did no such thing was, in essence, because the king did what they wanted and placed the domestic resources of the state at their disposal. But the king was aware of the danger. He was carefully intent on remaining the leader of the aristocracy. Hence he drew its members to his court, rewarded those that came, sought to injure and discredit those that did not. He endeavored successfully to have only those play a part who had entered into relations with him and to foster the view, within the aristocracy, that only the gens de la cour—court society—could be considered to have full and authoritative standing. Viewed in this light, those aspects that historians customarily dispose of as court extravagance and arbitrary and avoidable mismanagement take on an altogether different meaning. It was a class rather than an individual that was actually master of the state. That class needed a brilliant center, and the court had to be such a center—otherwise it might all too readily have become a parliament. But whoever remained away from his estates for long periods of time was likely to suffer economic loss. The court had to indemnify him if it wished to hold him—with missions, commands, offices, pensions—all of which had to be lucrative and entail no work. The aristocracy remained loyal only because the king did precisely this. The large surplus beyond the requirements of debt service and administration which had existed at the outset of the era of Louis XIV, together with all the borrowings the crown was able to contrive—all this fell only nominally to the crown. Actually it had to be shared with the nobility which, in this fashion, received a pension from the pockets of the taxpayers.

A system of this kind was essentially untenable. It placed shackles of gold on real ability that sought outlet in action, bought up every natural opportunity for such talent to apply itself. There they were at Versailles, all these aristocrats—socially interned, consigned to amuse themselves under the monarch’s gracious smile. There was absolutely nothing to do but to engage in flirtation, sports, and court festivities. These are fine pastimes, but they are life-filling only for relatively rare connoisseurs. Unless the nobles were to be allowed to revolt, they had to be kept busy. Now all the noble families whose members were amusing themselves at Versailles could look back on a warlike past, martial ideas and phrases, bellicose instincts. To ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, “action” meant military action. If civil war was to be avoided, then external wars were required. Foreign campaigns preoccupied and satisfied the nobility. From the view-point of the crown they were harmless and even advantageous. As it was, the crown was in control of the military machine, which must not be allowed to rust or languish. Tradition—as always surviving its usefulness—favored war as the natural pursuit of kings. And finally, the monarchy needed outward successes to maintain its position at home—how much it needed them was later shown when the pendulum swung to the other extreme, under Louis XV and Louis XVI. Small wonder that France took the field on every possible occasion, with an excess of enthusiasm that becomes wholly understandable from its position 1 and that left it quite indifferent to the actual nature of the occasion. Any war would do. If only there was war, the details of foreign policy were gladly left to the king.

Thus the belligerence and war policy of the autocratic state are explained from the necessities of its social structure, from the inherited dispositions of its ruling class, rather than from the immediate advantages to be derived by conquest. In calculating these advantages it is necessary to realize that possible gains to the bourgeoisie were not necessarily valid motives. For the king was in control of foreign policy, and bourgeois interests, on the whole rather impotent, weighed in the balance only when the king stood to gain by them. Certainly he stood to gain tax revenue when he promoted trade and commerce. But even then wars had already grown so costly that they might be doubtful risks to the king even though they offered indubitable advantages to business. Moreover, from the contemporary economic perspective—which is the one that must be adopted—by no means all the undertakings of Louis XIV were calculated to promote commercial interests. On the contrary, he showed little discrimination, eagerly seizing both on plans asserted, sometimes falsely, to be commercially advantageous (such as the subjugation of the Netherlands), and on those for which no one put forward any such claim (such as the plan of the “reunions”). Indeed, the king actually showed a certain indifference toward commercial and colonial undertakings,2 seeming to prefer small and fruitless undertakings in near-by Europe that appeared easy and promised success. The one man, incidentally, who, if anyone, should have been the driving power behind economically motivated wars, Colbert, was an avowed opponent of the war policy. It is time for the estimate of the share that mercantilism had in international military involvements at that time to be reduced to its proper dimensions. The theory that the wars of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries were commercial wars does represent an advance over the superficial judgment of political history expressed in the phrase “cabinet wars”—which does not mean that that phrase lacks all significance—but the commercial theory involves considerable exaggeration. Industrial life was then only in its infancy. It was only just beginning to discard craft forms. Capital exports—which is the thing that would really be relevant in this connection—were quite out of the question, and even production was quantitatively so small that exports could not possibly occupy a central position in the policies of the state. Nor did they, in fact, occupy such a position. The monarchs may have been avaricious, but they were far too remote from commercial considerations to be governed by them. Even colonial questions impinged only slightly on the European policies of the great powers. Settlers and adventurers were often allowed to fight out such problems on the spot, and little attention was paid to them. That the basic theory of mercantilism was quite adequate to justify violent measures against foreign powers, and that in every war economic interests, as conceived by mercantilism, were safeguarded whenever possible—these facts tend to exaggerate the mercantilist element. Certainly it made a contribution. But industry was the servant of state policy to a greater degree than state policy served industry.

We do not seek to underestimate the immediate advantages, at the time, of an expansion of the national domain. This is an element that then had a significance much greater than it has today. At a time when communications were uncertain, making military protection of commerce necessary, every nation undoubtedly had an interest in national bases overseas as well as in Europe, and in colonies too, though not so much in the conquest of other European countries. Finally, for the absolute monarch conquest meant an increment in power, soldiers, and income. And had all the plans of Louis XIV succeeded, he would undoubtedly have “made a go of it.” The inner necessity to engage in a policy of conquest was not distasteful to him. Yet that this element could play a part is explained only from the traditional habit of war and from the fact that the war machine stood ready at hand. Otherwise these instincts would have been inhibited, just as are predatory instincts in private life. Murder with intent to rob cannot be explained by the mere desire for the victim’s money, any more than analogous suggestions explain the expansive policy of the absolutist state.

At the same time, it remains a peculiarity of this type of imperialism that the monarch’s personal motives and interests are far more important to an understanding of its individual aspects than is true in the case of other types. The prince-become-state made foreign policy his own personal business and saw to it that it was the concern of no one else. His personal interests became the interests of the state. Hereditary claims, personal rancor and idiosyncrasy, family politics, individual generosity and similar traits cannot be denied a role as real factors shaping the surface situation. These things may have been no more than individual manifestations of a social situation, social data processed through an individual temperament; but superficially, at least, they aid make history to the extent that they, in turn, had consequences that became elements of the social situation. It was this period that gave rise to the notion, so deeply rooted in the popular mind down to recent times, that foreign policy can be explained by the whims of sovereigns and their relations to one another. It gave rise to the whole approach that judges events from the viewpoint of monarchial interest, honor, and morality—an approach stemming directly from the social views of the time (as seen, for example, in the letters of Mme. de Sevigné) and one that adapts itself only slowly to changing times.

Invaluable evidence in this respect is furnished by the memoirs of Frederick the Great, mainly because his keen mind analyzed itself with far less prejudice than our Assyrian king ever did. In all cases of this kind the psychological aspects were surely determined by the desire to shine, to play an important role, to become the cynosure of discussion, to exploit existing power resources—all the while pursuing one’s own advantage. Tradition and the availability of appropriate means are entirely sufficient to explain why these motives tended toward war. Domestic contingencies were subordinate, for in Germany, at least, the sovereign had triumphed over the nobility to such an extent that little political effort was required in that direction. The farther east we go, the more completely we see the sovereign able to regard state and people as his private property—with the noteworthy exception of Hungary, which can be compared only with England. The absolute monarch who can do as he pleases, who wages war in the same way as he rides to hounds—to satisfy his need for action—such is the face of absolutist imperialism.

The character of such absolutism is nowhere plainer than in Russia, notably the Russia of Catherine II. The case is particularly interesting because the Slavic masses never have shown and do not now show the slightest trace of militancy or aggressiveness. This has been true ever since the distant past, the time of settlement in the swamplands of the Pripet. It is true that the Slavs soon mingled with Germanic and Mongol elements and that their empire soon embraced a number of warlike peoples. But there never was any question of imperialist trends on the part of the Russian peasant or worker. Triumphant czarism rested on those Germanic and Mongol elements, elaborated its empire, created its army, without essentially impinging on the sphere of the peasant except to levy taxes and recruits for the army. In the time of feudalism as well as later, after the liberation of the peasants, we have the singular picture of a peasant democracy—one that was at times sorely oppressed by the nobility, but on which a bureaucratic and military despotism was superimposed in only superficial fashion. Once this despotism was securely established—and this occurred definitively under Peter the Great—it immediately exhibited that trend toward limitless expansion which our theory readily explains from the objectless “momentum of the machine in motion,” the urge to action of a ruling class disposed to war, the concern of the crown to maintain its prestige—but which becomes quite incomprehensible to any rational approach from existing interests. Such interests—that is, those springing from vital needs—ceased to exist in the case of Russia from the moment that access to the Baltic and the Black Seas was won. This is so obvious that the argument of vital interest has not even been put forward. Instead, ex post explanations have been concocted, both inside Russia and out, which have gained considerable credence and are held to be verified by the otherwise unexplained tendencies to expansion—an example of reasoning in a circle, by no means uncommon in the social sciences. Among the motives thus postulated are the urge for Pan-Slav unification, the desire to liberate the Christian world from the Mohammedan yoke—even a mystical yearning for Constantinople on the part of the Russian people! And as often happens when such analysis encounters difficulties, refuge is sought in the allegedly bottomless depths of the “national soul.” Actually, the continued momentum of acquired forms of life and organization, fostered by domestic interests, is entirely adequate to explain the policies of, say, Catherine II. True, from the subjective viewpoint a war policy undoubtedly recommended itself to her as the natural outcome of tradition, and, in addition, presumably as an interesting toy. Moreover, there was the example of the great lords whom she was copying. War was part of their settled order of life, so to speak—an element of sovereign splendor, almost a fashion. Hence they waged war whenever the occasion was offered, not so much from considerations of advantage as from personal whim. To look for deep-laid plans, broad perspectives, consistent trends is to miss the whole point.