"I am the state" — the formula attributed to Louis XIV describes his idol more precisely than any treatise. The state was reduced to the person of the monarch: not France as a people and a land, but the king as the embodiment of everything. Under such an order the subject exists only insofar as he is useful to the throne — as a tax for the treasury and a soldier for the king's wars. The living person, with his conscience and his faith, was dissolved into the will of a single man who had declared himself the center of the nation.
The catastrophe of this self-deification was twofold. In 1685 Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, which for a century had guaranteed France's Protestant Huguenots the right to their faith. The dragonnades began — soldiers were billeted in Huguenot homes with license to run riot — and around two hundred thousand people, among them the finest craftsmen and masters, fled the country, to the enrichment of Holland, England, and Prussia. France bled itself dry for the sake of uniformity. And the Sun King's endless wars drained the treasury and the people: the glory of the court was paid for by the ruin of the villages.
The captivity was a gilded cage. Versailles, that dazzling palace, was conceived also as a trap: the king gathered the nobility there so that they might revolve around him in the daily rituals of his rising and his retiring, forgetting their own power and their own provinces. The nation found itself locked within the will of a court — brilliant, extravagant, and deaf to the life of the country beyond its gilded gates.
The return was born as a counterweight to the very excess. Absolutism, pushed to its limit, called into being a mode of thought seeking a different foundation for power. In 1689 the Englishman John Locke published Two Treatises of Government: power, he argued, is not the property of the monarch but a trust placed in his hands by the people for their own good — and if the ruler violates that trust, the people have the right to revoke it. Thus the idea of the social contract was born. The tension between "I am the state" and "power comes from the people" would build for a whole century and would discharge in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The idol of a single man's will was not remelted at once — but the word to be raised against it had already been forged.