Not so long ago, it was widely agreed that Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced an age of absolutism. ‘Absolutism’, remarks Peter Wilson, ‘was once a certainty. It was seen as a distinct form of monarchy that dominated the European continent and defined an entire age. It coordinated and centralized power, pushing political development towards the modern state’ and assisted ‘in the monumental transition from feudalism to capitalism’. In the past few decades, however, the old certainties about absolutism have given way to doubts. To quote Wilson again, ‘Generations of historians have been chipping away at an edifice which, even if its precise shape was in dispute, at least had seemed solid enough and its basic dimensions agreed by all’. But in recent years the ‘hammers and chisels have been replaced by power tools, and what seemed so imposing has been revealed as nothing more than a stucco façade. As the plaster fell away, the once omnipotent inhabitants of the palace are exposed as frauds who disguised their lack of real power with a lot of showy display’ but who did not really differ much from rulers at other periods of human history, and who were ‘bound by customary and practical constraints to consult traditional institutions and important social groups’.

On the old view, absolutism, and in particular royal or monarchical absolutism, was established as the characteristic form of government in Europe during the seventeenth century.