DIVINE RIGHT AFTER THE REFORMATION
The Reformation tended to emphasize the sacred character of kingship. The reformers set up the authority of the State against the authority of the Church, which they rejected and condemned. Providence, they argued, had never sanctioned the Papacy, but Providence had really ordained the State and had placed over it a king whom it was a religious duty to obey. Even those who were not reformers distorted the Christian idea that government has a divine basis to represent kings as God's vicegerents upon earth, as in fact earthly deities.
BOSSUET ON DIVINE RIGHT
The theory of divine right received its fullest expression in a famous book [4] written by Bossuet, a learned French bishop of the seventeenth century. A hereditary monarchy, declared Bossuet, is the most ancient and natural, the strongest and most efficient, of all forms of government. Royal power emanates from God; hence the person of the king is sacred and it is sacrilege to conspire against him. His authority is absolute and autocratic. No man may rightfully resist the king's commands; his subjects owe him obedience in all matters. To the violence of a king the people can oppose only respectful remonstrances and prayers for his conversion. A king, to be sure, ought not to be a tyrant, but he can be one in perfect security. "As in God are united all perfection and every virtue, so all the power of all the individuals in a community is united in the person of the king."
242. THE ABSOLUTISM OF LOUIS XIV, 1661-1715 A.D.
CARDINAL RICHELIEU
France in the seventeenth century furnished the best example of an absolute monarchy supported by pretensions to divine right. French absolutism owed most of all to Cardinal Richelieu, [5] the chief minister of Louis XIII. Though a man of poor physique and in weak health, he possessed such strength of will, together with such thorough understanding of politics, that he was able to dominate the king and through the king to govern France for eighteen years (1624-1642 A.D.).
POLICIES OF RICHELIEU
Richelieu's foreign policy led to his intervention on the side of the Protestants at a decisive moment in the Thirty Years' War. The great cardinal, however, did not live to see the triumph of his measures in the Peace of Westphalia, which humiliated the Hapsburgs and raised France to the first place among the states of western Europe. Richelieu's domestic policy—to make the French king supreme—was equally successful. Though the nobles were still rich and influential, Richelieu beat down their opposition by forbidding the practice of duelling, that last remnant of private warfare, by ordering many castles to be blown up with gunpowder, and by bringing rebellious dukes and counts to the scaffold. Henceforth the nobles were no longer feudal lords but only courtiers.