From Absolutism to Liberalism

Under absolute monarchy, the state became the great protagonist of western constitutional history, as the uncontested power of the king proved extremely effective at consolidating a set of very powerful states in Europe.

Absolute control of the state by the king, however, crumbled in the wake of the American and French Revolutions, replaced by the ascendant power of assemblies aspiring to control the state in the name of the people. This system, however, proved ineffectual when not furnished with a strong executive power. Hence, a system with dominant assemblies gave way in the United States to a presidential regime featuring a strong executive, while in France power was concentrated in the hands of Napoleon, who effectively ruled as a monarch, and ultimately a presiden­tial republic was established.

Following the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, absolute monarchy was restored in the rest of Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, though with some exceptions. In the UK, the model of a monarchy with a powerful Parliamentary counterbalance (parliamentary system) was clearly consolidated after the British defeat in the American War of Independence and the insanity of George III, the last British king who sought to wield uncontested monarchical power. In the rest of Europe, the constitutional model according to which the state was controlled by the assembly on behalf of the nation became an alternative to the restoration of absolute monarchy, and was a formula pursued by successive liberal revolutions in 1820, 1830 and, finally, 1848. In reality, the new ruling parliamentary assemblies did not represent the common people of these nations, but rather their ruling classes: the English “gentry” or its equivalent in the different European nation-states.

This liberal regime was, in any case, extremely effective and the different European nation-states became extremely wealthy through expansive colonial policies, with the result that almost the whole world was controlled by the European nation-states by 1900. Besides the fact that this model generated pro­nounced and dreadful social differences—an issue that we will address in the next chapter—the major drawback and danger inherent to this model was that the nation­states were engaged in a state of perpetual competition as they struggled to impose their hegemony on their rivals. The trend which had produced a series of wars, dating back to 1648, was taken to new levels by France in its revolutionary wars, during which mass conscription dramatically increased the number of soldiers fighting for the nation, and ultimately left huge numbers of dead soldiers, from nations all across Europe, on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars. After Napo­leon’s defeat and the reorganization of Europe through the Congress of Vienna, the nation-states struggled to forge and maintain a status quo through the Metternich System, which endured until being strained by the revolutions of 1848. The struggle for hegemony flared up again and reached a new peak when Prussia’s Bismarck successively defeated Austria and France. The rise of Prussia as a world power triggered the growing tensions of the “armed peace”, which prompted the formation of a series of defensive alliances between European nation-states. This network would constitute a tinderbox that exploded in the form of World War I, which marked the demise of the liberal model of the state and spawned a profound crisis in western history.

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