bitrary government." However, in fact, the people who lived in Louis XIV's era "might fear that absolutism would become tyrannical, but they classed only two countries as possessing rulers who governed without the restraint of the law." Those countries did not include France, but rather the Ottoman Empire ruled by the Sultan, and Muscovy, ruled by the Tsar. These two rulers, unlike Louis XIV, in the view of Hatton, "claimed the right to dispose over a subject's life and property according to personal whim and not according to the processes of the law" (Hatton 67-68).
Thus Hatton argues that the concept of absolutism as generally used by historians to describe kingly rule in early modern Europe is badly misleading and inaccurate. Absolutism is too often equated with outright despotism, instead of being seen as a description of broader and more varied forms of monarchic rule. Therefore, Hatton aims in part to re-define the governments the term absolutism was meant to describe in a way that will be useful to the understanding of the era and the governments in question. Monarchies were not "absolute" in terms of force and despotism and the crushing of liberties. In this context, Louis XIV can be said to have been absolute when he wielded his power to establish specific political, social and economic policies at home and in relations with other nations, and limited when he negotiated over their subjects' rights.
Hatton also argues that at the time Louis XIV rose to power the people had become profoundly dissatisfied with the state of their nation in a number of ways. Among the issues paramount at that time was the war with Spain, coinage issues negatively affecting economic matters, trade and manufacture problems, colonial questions, and other difficulties created by France's involvement in the Thirty Years War. The people required a strong leader who could effectively attack these and other problems which had been long simmering. Ha...