Social Change and Its Management

Absolutist construction occurred amid profound social changes that both facilitated and complicated royal authority's growth. Traditional hierarchies persisted formally while being transformed substantially. The monarchy's success lay in managing these changes to its advantage while maintaining social order.

The nobility's transformation from independent warriors to court dependents marked the period's most significant social change. Military service remained important but within royal armies rather than private forces. Court attendance became essential for maintaining status and obtaining royal favors. The expansion of venal offices allowed wealthy commoners to enter nobility, diluting traditional aristocracy while binding new nobles to royal service. This transformation, though generating tensions between sword and robe nobility, created a service aristocracy dependent on monarchy.

Urban growth and bourgeois wealth accumulation created new social forces requiring management. Royal offices provided advancement opportunities for educated bourgeois. Commercial privileges and monopolies enriched merchant elites willing to support royal authority. Urban corporations and guilds, regulated by royal authority, maintained order while limiting popular independence. These policies created bourgeois constituencies supporting strong monarchy as guarantor of order and opportunity.

Peasant conditions showed contradictory developments. Population growth and agricultural improvement potentially improved rural life. Yet increased taxation, seigneurial reaction, and military depredations often negated gains. Royal authority, distant from village life, offered little protection against immediate oppressors. Peasant revolts, brutally suppressed, revealed rural misery that absolutism exacerbated rather than relieved. This narrow social base would ultimately prove absolutism's fatal weakness.