ABSOLUTISM CHALLENGED: THE ENLISH REVOLUTION / Edhem Eldem - March , 19 Wednesday

At a time when France—and to a certain extent Spain—are developing the absolutist model, the English monarchy is facing a most violent challenge to its authority.

The English crown had been trying, throughout the sixteenth century, to consolidate its power against possible contenders. Henry VIII and Elizabeth are the embodiment of the English path to absolutism.

However, they were never able to neutralize Parliament in the same way as the French monarchs had been able to limit the power of their parliaments.

The desire of the Stuart monarchs, James I (1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649), to confirm royal supremacy meets with an increasing parliamentary opposition. Charles I’s attempt at governing without Parliament (1629-1640) proved a total failure: unable to face the Scottish rebellion, he soon faced a strong opposition from a newly elected Parliament.

The tension soon leads to the English Civil War (1642-1648), which opposes the Cavaliers (royalists) to the Roundheads (supporters of Parliament). Charles I is tried and eventually executed in 1649.

What follows is the Commonwealth, a republican experiment under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, who eventually takes on the powers of a dictator in 1653 as Lord Protector. His death in 1658, however, creates a political vacuum that is filled in 1660 by the restoration of the monarchy.

Charles II (1660-1685) and James II (1685-1688) show a growing desire for absolutism, combined with a strong Catholic identity. This latter issue provokes the Glorious Revolution (1688) that replaces James with the Dutch William III of Orange, and the establishment of parliamentary supremacy.

The 1689 Bill of Rights confirms the new regime, an oligarchic system based on a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government.

Europe thus discovers two paths to modernity: the absolutist path taken by France, based on a discrepancy between political and economic elites, and the parliamentary path taken by England, based on a convergence of political and economic elites.

England is thus able to set up a system that favors economic development and prepares the ground for the ‘boom’ of the end of the eighteenth century prefiguring the Industrial Revolution.

France, on the contrary, is still caught in the logic of absolutism and will therefore have to ‘solve’ this political problem exactly a century after England, and in a much more violent way.