National states are so central a focus for the mobilization of opinion today that we often forget that this was not always so. During the centuries prior to absolutism in western Europe, national states worthy of the name could hardly be said to exist. “On the one hand,” writes Norbert Elias in State Formation and Civilization,

In such a system, contention was constant, largely territorially based, and changed its contours according to whether the monarch was temporarily ascendant or suffering a crisis.

From roughly the fifteenth century on, this pattern began to give way, as the expansion of a money economy gave kings the power to hire mercenary soldiers, build roads on which to deploy them, and hire civil servants to collect taxes, administer rules, and overcome provincial nobles. Where they could establish a rough balance between the aristocracy and the rising burghers of the towns, they developed a “royal mechanism,” which led to the formation of absolutist states – as in France (Elias 1994: ch. 2).