e right"
which allowed them to rule without consulting their subjects.

Of course, the king could not attend to everything in person. He was
obliged to surround himself with a few helpers and councillors. One
or two generals, some experts upon foreign politics, a few clever
financiers and economists would do for this purpose. But these
dignitaries could act only through their Sovereign. They had no
individual existence. To the mass of the people, the Sovereign actually
represented in his own sacred person the government of their country.
The glory of the common fatherland became the glory of a single dynasty.
It meant the exact opposite of our own American ideal. France was ruled
of and by and for the House of Bourbon.

The disadvantages of such a system are clear. The King grew to be
everything. Everybody else grew to be nothing at all. The old and
useful nobility was gradually forced to give up its former shares in
the government of the provinces. A little Royal bureaucrat, his fingers
splashed with ink, sitting behind the greenish windows of a government
building in faraway Paris, now performed the task which a hundred years
before had been the duty of the feudal Lord. The feudal Lord, deprived
of all work, moved to Paris to amuse himself as best he could at
the court. Soon his estates began to suffer from that very dangerous
economic sickness, known as "Absentee Landlordism." Within a single
generation, the industrious and useful feudal administrators had become
the well-mannered but quite useless loafers of the court of Versailles.

Louis was ten years old when the peace of Westphalia was concluded and
the House of Habsburg, as a result of the Thirty Years War, lost its
predominant position in Europe. It was inevitable that a man with his
ambition should use so favourable a moment to gain for his own dynasty
the honours which had formerly been held by the Habsburgs. In the year
1660 Louis had married Maria Theresa, daughter of the King of Spain.
Soon afterward, his father-in-law, Philip IV, one of the half-witted
Spanish Habsburgs, died. At once Louis claimed the Spanish Netherlands
(Belgium) as part of his wife's dowry. Such an acquisition would have
been disastrous to the peace of Europe, and would have threatened the
safety of the Protestant states. Under the leadership of Jan de Witt,
Raadpensionaris or Foreign Minister of the United Seven Netherlands,
the first great international alliance, the Triple Allian