Hall Bjørnstad aims to redress current misapprehensions of French absolutism and its conceits by analyzing manifestations of royal exemplarity from Louis XIV's reign. Bjørnstad considers how scholarship approaches the (ir)realities of what written and visual sources from the period express about royal authority in their seventeenth-century context. He acknowledges ongoing debates about the nature of French absolutism and its institutions, arguing that current discussions ignore early modern mentalities surrounding Louis XIV as monarch. Bjørnstad sees in modern appraisals a positivist tendency to distort French absolutism and reduce its artifacts into interpretative models that claim either elite instrumentalism, outright sycophancy, or an anachronistic use of the idea of propaganda. He invites readers to eschew modern sensibilities and allow for the ostensible dream of absolutism that, he argues, Louis XIV and his contemporaries shared. He broadens our conceptual knowledge of late seventeenth-century French kingship on its own terms, exploring claims of absolutism that informed the ethos of Louis XIV's reign.
Chapters provide analysis of four principal sources to elucidate the dream of absolutism. Chapter 1 revisits Louis XIV's Memoires. Bjørnstad makes a case for why scholars should reexamine this text from the early part of Louis XIV's rule, explaining that the Memoires became a primer for understanding monarchy itself. For Bjørnstad, the Memoires outlines the idea of royal exemplarity within the person of the king, and argues that the dauphin should emulate this idea after Louis XIV's death. In this way, Bjørnstad interprets the text as the king's dream of exemplifying the future monarchy by establishing a heuristic of sovereign action and submission to divine authority.
Chapter 2 centers on the central canvas from Le Brun's cycle for the galerie des glaces at Versailles, in which Minerva's shield reflects Louis XIV's face. Bjørnstad compares the king's physical visage, gazing impassively at an allegory of Gloire (Glory), to the expression of intense desire depicted in his reflection. He connects artistic conventions of emotion that Le Brun previously established with the juxtaposition of the physical king, wholly in control of his exteriority, with his reflection exhibiting the royal exemplar's inner self-longing to satisfy Gloire. His physical gaze belies the interiority of absolutism that is known to the king alone, as only the king could know it. The canvas functions like Louis XIV's Memoires, as an expression of a dream that is at once present in the king's physical being and extending into the future. Chapter 3 considers two lesser-known literary works that serve as evidence that Louis's subjects saw him as the singular exemplar favored by Gloire. Here Bjørnstad most clearly asks scholars to look beyond putative textual absurdities to grasp ways in which subjects too perceived the dream of absolutism as concentrated within Louis XIV.
Bjørnstad's analysis is felicitously nuanced, and there are few critiques to offer. Two concerns, however, emerge in Bjørnstad's conceptualization. First, the book centers on the idea that absolutism was a collective dream. Bjørnstad contends throughout the text that this idea epitomizes the imaginary in which Louis XIV and his subjects functioned, and yet he employs the term logic as frequently. Bjørnstad defines his Pascalian interpretation of the term dream in depth in the introduction, but the interchange of dream and logic seems at odds in the text (although Bjørnstad concludes that this tension is inherent in his analysis). He alternates so often between the terms dream and logic, however, that his overarching claims about the dream itself and the import of his otherwise masterful readings are obscured at times. Early modern French political theorists claimed that royal sovereignty was subject to reason. One wonders if Bjørnstad could reconcile his rich ideas through additional definition of the early modern understanding of reason and logic as much as the dream paradigm.
Finally, Bjørnstad uses the admittedly fraught designation absolutism throughout the text as the collective object of Louis XIV's and his subjects’ dream. The political nomenclature of absolute monarchy or absolutism did not yet exist as such in the seventeenth century, and it becomes apparent that Bjørnstad's project is not actually about absolutism. It seems that Bjørnstad employs this more familiar category for the sake of his readers, but he is instead adeptly articulating for his skeptical, modern audience the complex (il)logic on which rested the paradoxical-cum-ineffable, though insecure, foundations of French divine right kingship ineluctably comprising royal exemplarity and its imperative toward Gloire. With these slight considerations in mind, this book is of great importance for scholars and students invested in the reign of Louis XIV and early modern history and ideas, and it serves as a model of close textual analysis.
