Absolutism in the Hapsburg Empire - Essay Example

Absolutism in the Hapsburg Empire The glorious dreams of an absolute monarch that was realized in France under King Louis XIV was something that the Hapsburgs wanted to recreate. The central thrust behind the urgency to seek absolute power was that the empire consisted of four distinct and relatively autonomous regions that needed to be formed into a single cohesive state. Even more problematic was that these regions were separated by ethnic differences and language barriers. The need for a unifying authority therefore was based upon the concept of establishing order among competing groups that really did not exist in France.

The attempt to forge these states together through absolutism resulted in attempts to establish agricultural interests in the regions of Moravia and Bohemia. In Hungary, the track toward unification and the conferring of absolute power meant political deals with the nobles there who expressed a far more independent streak than the nobles in the other regions. The support of agricultural interests convinced the landed gentry in Moravia and Bohemia to sacrifice some of their own independence.

What the move toward absolutism the Hapsburg Empire reveals is the link between economic interests and political power. Whereas Louis XIV in France used the threat of security to establish the concept of power in a strong centralized monarchy as a rallying point, the impetus for absolutism among the Hapsburgs was unification of various interests. The ethnic interests of the various groups who lived within the factions that the empire wanted to bring together represented one obstacle. The economic interests within those ethnic areas represented a further complexity that needed to be address.

Another way in which the Hapsburg absolutism differs from the model in France upon which it was essentially based was the manner in which the nobility was handled by the crown. The power of the local nobles tended to dampen the attempts to centralized power in the hands of Leopold I. Leopold broke with the French model by investing influence in the government at the hands of the nobles without initially taking the move of establishing control of the land holdings of the nobility. As a result, the nobility obstructed the movement toward absolutism in a way that that Louis never allowed his nobles to do in France.

In essence, the centralization of power became limited mainly to Austria as the nobles in Hungary and Bohemia moved to retain their local sovereignty. The primary difference between the absolutism that was practiced in the Hapsburg empire as compared to its precursors and model in the French court of Louis XIV was that Leopold version of an absolute monarchy was severely tempered by the autonomy possessed by the nobility. The base of the nobility had strong support at the local levels through the regions outside of Austria.

In other words, Leopold was dealing with a kind of absolutism that was constricted in ways that Louis XIV would never have allowed. Whether Leopold actually recognized this failure and ignored, or whether he simply did not have access to the military power that the king of France had to fight back against the encroaching power of the nobles remains uncertain. One thing is for sure, however: the concept of absolute monarchy was itself not an absolute entity. The details and definitions of absolutism could vary from one empire to the next and one king to the next.

If France represented the purest possible form of absolutism, then the Hapsburgs represented what happens when the full centralizing of power could not be effectively accomplished.