Unspoken Assumptions: Voice and Absolutism at the Court of Louis XIV

In: Journal of historical sociology, Band 11, Heft 3, S. 283-315

Abstract

This paper indicates how what Norbert Elias described as the disciplining of the aristocracy in 17th‐century France, which he took to be essential to the ascendancy of Louis XIV and the growth of the modern state, was itself part of a broader pattern of voiceless politics. The French political bureaucracy and the monarch in this period were able to accumulate power by restraining public political speech, and using a combination of rituals of subjugation and material forms like fortresses to exemplify the power and social efficacy of this political regime. The result was a new form of power, importantly demonstrated in the land and its people: what we have come to call the territorial state.