The Early Demise of Divine Right and the Rise of Legitimacy by Royal Authority

• In Event: The Road to Representative Institutions

Abstract

When did the ancien régime end? The conventional wisdom holds that the church-state alliance, the bedrock of political authority in the premodern period, ended with the French Revolution. Drawing on new insights from the historical literature as well as from economic history, I argue that the alliance had crumbled by the early eighteenth century in favor of the state thanks to the growth in state capacity. Infrastructure penetrated the society, the state’s ability to govern its population became more effective, and the ruler grew more assertive as a result. Afraid of losing the “monopoly” status in society, the church gave up its power to appoint officials and offered to pay up to hold its end of the alliance. This paper offers a new theory of political legitimacy developed at the turn of the modern period, between the divine right to authority that was practiced up to the end of the eighteenth century and popular sovereignty that began to be installed in the early nineteenth century.

As this paper highlights an under-explored dimension of political legitimacy, it focuses on generating hypotheses rather than testing them. I draw primarily from pre-revolutionary France as the “eldest daughter of the church.”

In this paper I develop a new theory of political legitimacy by drawing upon the recent advances in early-modern European history. In the period between 1100 and 1500, the church was influential and ran more effective administration than the state. The state then emulated the church for many areas of governance, including inheritance, succession, and royal administration. When it comes to conflict resolution, the church had developed sophisticated legal systems based on Roman law, which, in turn, influenced secular states’ legal framework in resolving conflict among lords and merchants (Berman 1983).

The Protestant Reformation marked the turning point at which the state began to grow more powerful over the church. In England, the state expropriated church properties and monasteries, which brought in significant revenues to the state as well as weakened church influence. As a result, by 1689 the English church was no longer able to compel attendance at services (Aston 2012). In eighteenth-century France, the crown achieved exclusive control over investiture (Jones 2002). At the time, state officials constantly challenged the jurisdictions of canon law, and the church increasingly relied on the state for the protection of its privileges and patronages. To demonstrate its support for the regime, the Clergy of France regularly met to offer a large sum as a “free gift.”

This paper is relevant to at least three strands of the literature. The first is state capacity. Recent research in comparative politics highlights the role of religion in understanding the growth in state capacity (Dincecco 2023, PoP). Scholars argue that the Catholic church was particularly influential in early-modern Europe by forming temporary alliances with secular rulers and instigating conflict among secular authorities (Grzymala-Busse 2020 Ann. Rev, 2023 APSR). This scholarship indicates that the church’s influence waned as secular states grew by modeling on it. My paper strengthens this line of argument by arguing that the state became powerful enough to relegate the church into diminished roles to the extent that it generated legitimacy through (royal) authority.

The second is political history, more specifically political development in comparative historical analysis. Recent scholarship underscores how elites in a new regime resorted to power in establishing the political process to select leadership (Bensel 2022). It demonstrates that how these elites exercised authority, combined with a country’s imagined tradition, shaped the ways in which subsequent leaders derived authority. This literature stresses the analytical importance of historical continuity and change, such as critical juncture and path dependence, to understand variation in political development (Mahoney and Thelen eds. 2015). My paper highlights the “drifting” of the longstanding church-state alliance, which made way to a new form of political legitimacy before the rise of popular sovereignty.

The third is international relations, especially with respect to the development of internal sovereignty. Recent research examines how different factors such as the Protestant Reformation (Nexon 2009), trade (Abramson 2017 IO), and warfare (Cederman et al. 2023 IO) systematically affected changes in state borders and, by implication, state sizes across early-modern Europe. In addition, some European states consolidated authority by adopting cutting-edge technologies, such as grid-based mapping (Branch 2014). This literature largely takes the divine right to authority for granted throughout this period. Thus my paper highlights a new dimension of understanding the consolidation of internal sovereignty by analyzing the weakening of the church-state alliance.

Author

• Yu Sasaki, University of Tokyo