"Absolutism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... suppose she was tired of Siberia, and liked the journey.' When I married, I found in your uncle a character exactly opposed to my father's, but not perhaps more suited to mine. The invincible reserve, the minute despotism, or rather absolutism, of his nature, raised between us the same barrier, which worldliness of mind and absence of warm feelings had caused to exist between my father and myself. You have seen and observed this drawback to our happiness, Ellen, or I should not have pointed out ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Hanoverian envoy at St. Petersburg, discovered that Russian civilization is "merely artificial," and first published to Europe the short description of the Russian Constitution,—that it is "absolutism ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... for the presentation to our people of the fact that we have in this Democracy a method of doing whatever we wish done, which avoids the necessity for anything like revolutionary action. The objection to Bolshevism is that it is absolutism—as Lenine has said himself, the absolutism of the proletariat. It is an economic government by force, while our Democracy ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... dominant races in modern history—the Germanic and the Romanic races. The Germanic races tend to personal liberty, to a sturdy individualism, to civil and to political liberty. The Romanic race tends to absolutism in government; it is clannish; it loves chieftains; it develops a people that crave strong and showy governments to support and plan for them. The Anglo-Saxon race belongs to the great German family, and is a fair exponent of its peculiarities. The ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... present ministry I could expect but little; they consisted of men, the greater part of whom had been either courtiers or employes of the deceased King Ferdinand, who were friends to absolutism, and by no means inclined to do or to favour anything calculated to give offence to the court of Rome, which they were anxious to conciliate, hoping that eventually it might be induced to recognize the young queen, not as the constitutional but as ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of Treitschke and Bernhardi, which glorifies war as an end instead of holding it in abhorrence as an evil thing? Properly speaking militarism is a school for the people and an instrument to further political ends. But in the patriarchal absolutism of a military monarchy, militarism exploits politics to further its own ends, and can create a situation which a democracy freed from junkerdom would ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... memories of the Marian persecution, the papal bull dethroning Elizabeth, Guy Fawkes' Plot, and by apprehensions that a Catholic could not be a loyal subject so long as he recognized the temporal power of the Pope. The second was political and assumed that Catholicism was the natural support of absolutism. As Shaftesbury, the leader of the opposition, stated, popery and slavery went hand in hand. Such fears were deepened as the general purport of the Treaty of ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... was not altogether ruled by his younger son, had declined to expend his seductions upon Mr. Gladstone in the cause of a possible laying of too heavy a rod upon England's back, and had recommended his erratic son to let the barbarism of absolutism alone in the future, and try his genius upon that of democracy. Dartmouth, accordingly, had spent a winter in Washington as Secretary of Legation, and had entertained himself by doling out such allowance of ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to an understanding of its workings, and of its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. Save one turn to England or to the British colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel for the astounding absolutism of Comstock and his imitators in any civilized country. No other nation has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... have pictured a youth of splendid hope, for he must have been entering upon manhood in 1848 when kings, remembering their brother of France, went about with an uneasy crick in their necks; and perhaps that passion for liberty which passed through Europe, sweeping before it what of absolutism and tyranny had reared its head during the reaction from the revolution of 1789, filled no breast with a hotter fire. One might fancy him, passionate with theories of human equality and human rights, discussing, arguing, fighting behind barricades ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the other, and either is advanced by the prosperity and success of the other.' Where a people make a stand for spiritual liberty, they always by necessity advance civil freedom. Prelacy was bound up with the absolutism of the throne in the State as well as in the Church; Presbytery with the cause of free government and the sovereignty of the popular will, as declared in their laws by the chosen representatives of ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... convinced republican, but he was also an evolutionist, and he knew that republics are not created by fiat. He believed the tendency toward republicanism to be irresistible, but he believed also that there must be intermediate stages in the transition from monarchy. Absolutism is succeeded by constitutionalism, and that by parliamentarism, and that in the end must be succeeded by a republicanism that will free itself from all the traditional forms of symbol and ceremonial. He had also ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... seen FLINK's surprise, gets up). Listen to me! Suppose we had a king who said: "Either you help me to establish a democratic monarchy—purged of all traces of absolutism, purged of ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... beautifully and officially expressed it, "Democracy at last seated herself on the imperial throne, embodied in the Caesars,"—those worshipful incarnations of democracy, brought to our view in the tableaux of Suetonius and by the accounts of Tacitus. We have at last returned to Caesarism, or Asiatic absolutism, improved by modern light, and making the emperor a Second Providence, opening and shutting the mouths of the universal-suffrage people, for words or bread, as imperial divinity finds best. This is the progress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... explanation would be only to let the term mislead, for they were not representative bodies or parliaments in the ordinary sense: their powers were chiefly judicial and they were no barrier in the way of the steady march to absolutism. The political structure of the Bourbon realm in the age of Louis XIV and afterwards was simple: all the lines of control ran upwards and to a common center. And all this made for unity and autocratic efficiency in finance, in war, ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... descendants could becomingly receive fealty and homage. (foi et homage) from their feudal retainers. There was, however, nothing here to remind one of the lordly pageantry of other times—the days of absolutism—of the dark era, the age of lettres de cachet, corvees, lods et ventes, and other feudal burthens, when the flag of the Bourbons floated over the fortress of New France. In 1846, at the time of my visit, in vain would you have sought in the farm yard for ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... passage to set over against that of the Yogi quoted above! But is not the good Abbot a little hard on the Westerners? For the full truth is that while the Yogi represents the old Absolutism, the Abbot is feeling his way to a wider and more human world-view. Buddhism has evidently better days in store. Let our views of ultimate Reality be what they may, the nature-mystic's position demands not only that man may hold communion ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... had fitted him to watch the course of events in which, according to the course of nature, he might be expected so soon to take chief part. But the years which made his sire venerable passed, and still he had no opportunity to shape public affairs. Absolutism feared his influence and that of his liberal and strong-minded English wife. The prime of life was his; but his best years were behind and not before him as at the age of fifty-five he filially and devotedly filled his own place, the loved ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... on the merchant class. They feel that they have created modern industrial Germany. The military caste (of which the naval and all government bureaus are branches) has organised the nation for war with the efficiency of the managers of a great American corporation. The government is an absolutism. No Jew can become an officer. Officers of crack regiments do not go to the homes of persons in any kind of business. A business man is called a "Kaufmann," as we speak of a house painter. Some tame professors are paid by the State to ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness of a political and social regime on its defence. He loathed rebellion by instinct. And Razumov reflected that the man was simply unable to understand a reasonable adherence to the doctrine of absolutism. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... than that these excesses should produce other excesses, in a contrary direction. Moved by hatred or fear of revolutionary absolutism, nations seek an asylum in governmental absolutism, or they retrograde towards the middle ages, and consider the mutual bond of protection and dependence of that period as the ideal and the realization of true liberty. History is ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... too, the remedy for absolutism lies in calling these same minorities to council. As the king-in-council succeeded the king by the grace of God, so in future democracies the toleration and encouragement of minorities and the willingness to consider ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... wear the human form, and must, therefore, realize the various states of infancy, youthfulness, and manhood—of germ, growth, and fruitage. This is true of whatever national form. Nationalities founded upon the principles of absolutism, embody and express the same laws and conditions. Their principle of supreme external authority is first a condition of germination, then of growth or labored effort toward maturity, and lastly of fruitage, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... to imagine how he had conspired against them. The poor Cardinal de Bourbon languished sadly in his palace, devoting his revenues to works in the Cathedral, till he died in 1823 at the beginning of the reaction, leaving his place to Inguanzo, the tribune of absolutism, a prelate with iron-grey whiskers, who had made his career as deputy in the Cortes at Cadiz, attacking as deputy every sort of reform, and advocating a return to the times of the Austrians as the surest means of saving ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of patience, this arrogance of the University, this presuming upon the ignorance of the million, this assertion of an indispensable necessity to make the boy of the nineteenth century a mere expert in some subdivision of one of the sciences. The obstinacy of an hereditary absolutism, which the world has outgrown, still lingers in our schools of learning. Let us admit the divine right of Science, admit the fitness of a limited number of our youth to become high-priests in her temple, but no divine right of fossil ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... The unchecked absolutism of a Socialist State will hardly be palatable to Socialist workers who have been told that Socialism means freedom, and these see the only solution in the establishment of Anarchism: "The damnable idea of being marshalled and drilled or numbered ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... logic of events is contradicting each and every assertion based on these notions, and proving that the American struggle is, after all, the ever-recurring one in human affairs between right and wrong, between labour and capital, between liberty and absolutism. When such an issue comes to be presented to the people of Great Britain, stripped of all the disguises which have been thrown over it, it is not difficult to predict at least which side it will not ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... degree or lasting importance until the American colonies of Great Britain questioned the policy of the mother country toward her all too energetic children. Hobbes' "Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil," appeared in 1651, a powerful argument for absolutism, but cast in such a form as to make the [36]writer an unwelcome adherent ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... return would labour to introduce what they had learned. Their efforts were seconded by the clergy, through the close connection with canon law which was in force in Germany. German emperors and territorial lords also favoured Roman law because they saw how well suited it was to absolutism; they liked to engage jurists trained in Italy, especially if they were doctors of both canon and Roman law. Nor did the German people object. From the fourteenth century many schools of jurisprudence were established on ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... for what it talked about, and mentally swore that, as soon as by means of such stuff they could get places, and fill their pockets, they would be as Jacobite as the Jacobs themselves. As for the Tories, no great change in them was necessary; everything favouring absolutism and slavery being congenial to them. So the whole nation—that is, the reading part of the nation, with some exceptions, for, thank God, there has always been some salt in England—went over the water to Charlie. But going over ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... His commercial interests showed him the death of trade in the Maximum, and in political convulsions, which are always destructive of business. Moreover, like a true perfumer, he hated the revolution which made a Titus of every man and abolished powder. The tranquillity resulting from absolutism could alone, he thought, give life to money, and he grew bigoted on behalf of royalty. When Monsieur Ragon saw that Cesar was well-disposed on this point, he made him head-clerk and initiated him into the secrets of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in times of revolution; but their right to rule is ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the unreasonableness of compelling his associates to swallow his opinions as being absolute and final. This disposition to govern his circle co-existed, however, with the most lavish appreciation of every good quality displayed by the members of it, and all the little uneasiness to which his absolutism may sometimes have given rise was much more than removed by constantly recurring acts of good-fellowship,—indeed it was forgotten in the ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... which they did not comprehend, and uncomplainingly and as a matter of course giving nearly one-half of the fruit of their toil for the privilege of living in their own land! When her sovereigns had Tatar blood in their veins and Tatar ideals in their hearts, Russia was on the road to absolutism. All things were tending toward a centralized unity of an iron and inexorable type—a type entirely foreign to the natural free instincts of the Slavonic ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions altogether. The executive, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... good Russian; he held the belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. Rightly envisaged, the Crimean war was the end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in Europe. It threw the way open for the liberation of Italy. The war in Manchuria makes an end of absolutism in Russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... journal has attempted any refutation of the charge. It cannot be refuted, for it is true. And be assured, my dear sir, it is no extravagant prediction when I say that the question of Popery and Protestantism, or Absolutism and Republicanism, which in these two opposite categories are convertible terms, is fast becoming and will shortly be the great absorbing question, not only of this country but of the whole civilized world. ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... paternal one; and Odo's attempts to put before him the new theory of government, as a service performed by the ruler in the interest of the ruled, resulted only in stirring up the old sediment of absolutism which generations of feudal power had ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... are planning to strike at civilized government throughout the world, in the effort to restore the days of autocracy. It knows you are planning a world federation of states, based on the principles of absolutism and aristocracy. It is aware of the immense financial resources behind the movement. Also that you have obtained the use of certain scientific discoveries which you believe will aid you ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... suffered to fall into the hands of rulers, and to vindicate and maintain the liberties of the subjects in all these things which concern their consciences, persons, and estates." In short, it was a testimony for constitutional government in opposition to absolutism. ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... But this wealth is not used for the benefit of the country which produces it. There are neither schools nor highways nor hospitals in Bessarabia. Ignorance and misery are the sole companions of that population, every national sentiment of which is smothered under the sway of Russian absolutism. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in morals of the inhabitants, which are completely dominated by Roman Catholicism, to that of the inhabitants of Protestant America, but we have made this comparison in a general way; but we now want to select a country which for its absolutism of Catholic monarchy has no comparison, ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... to recover their national consciousness. This revival marked the beginning of the Czecho-Slovak struggle for the re-establishment of their independence. The movement was at first literary, and only in the forties became political. It was a continuous struggle against reaction and absolutism, and if the Czecho-Slovaks to-day can boast of an advanced civilisation, it is only owing to their perseverance and hard endeavours, and not because of any good-will on the part of the Austrian Government which put every possible obstacle ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... element of absolutism in the man, his uncompromising severity, his command of the situation regardless of cost, sorrow or suffering to other men, is seen in his realistic physiognomy. We study these facts more and more, as we ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... tend to be most constantly confused. One hears without surprise of a Bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of Socialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person, but men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Henry, the second of France, a young man apparently immersed in sports and pleasures. The Turks had been defeated by Charles' fleets in the Mediterranean. The Council of Trent, at first refractory, seemed yielding to his wishes. Spain, where at one time he had faced a violent revolt against his absolutism, was now wholly submissive. Germany seemed equally overcome. The Emperor was at the summit of his ambitions. Europe lay ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of a (revocable) commission: in the view of the one, the sovereignty of the people is entirely alienated, "transferred," in that of the other, administrative authority alone is granted, "conceded," while the sovereign prerogatives remain with the people. Bodin is the founder of the theory of absolutism, to which Grotius and the school of Pufendorf adhere, though in a more moderate form, and which Hobbes develops to the last extreme. Althusius, on the other hand, by his systematic development of the doctrine of social contract and the inalienable sovereignty of the people, became the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the church. The royal lawyers found in the civil code a system which referred everything in society to the emperor as the origin of power, rights, and honor. They adopted this standpoint for the kings of the new dynastic states and, in the might of the Roman law, they established royal absolutism, which was unfavorable to the church and the feudal nobles. They found their allies in the cities which loved written law, institutions, and defined powers. Stubbs[101] regards the form of the Statute of Westminster (1275) as a proof ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... gently upon me. Take off his tattooing, make him white, and clothe him! With his masterful carriage, his soft, cultivated voice, and his attitude of absolutism, he might have been Leopold, King of the Belgians, a great ambassador, a man of power in finance. Nevertheless, I thought of the death by the Stinking Springs. How could one explain his benign, open-souled deportment and his cheery laugh, with such damnable appetites and actions? Yet generals send ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... interest for the masses, was not unwilling to submit itself without reserve to the guidance of a strong ruler provided he could guarantee peace both at home and abroad. Practically speaking, hitherto absolutism had been unknown. The rights that had been won by the barons on the plains of Runnymede were guarded jealously by their descendants, and as a result the power of the king, more especially in regard to taxation, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... life within her life. From this point young girls are apt to develop into either extremely high-minded women or saints. But, during this beautiful period of their youth they have in their heart, in their ideas, a sort of absolutism: before their eyes is the image of perfection, and all must be celestial, angelic, or divine to satisfy them. Outside of their ideal, nothing of good can exist; all is stained and soiled. This idea causes the rejection of many a diamond ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... important lands of continental Europe; its influence was strongly felt in England, and even in the United States. Passing through the phases of constitutional reform, of anarchy, and of military despotism, the movement seemed for a time to have failed, and to outward appearances absolutism was stronger after Waterloo than it had been half a ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "Great is the Lord," and then struck two. The sound of these chimes brought back to Nekhludoff's mind what he had read in the notes of the Decembrists [the Decembrists were a group who attempted, but failed, to put an end to absolutism in Russia at the time of the accession of Nicholas the First] about the way this sweet music repeated every hour re-echoes in the hearts of those ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the Mississippi,—cargoes made up ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... same infection in its acute, "childish" form. The social and cultural anti-Semitism of the West did not undermine the modern foundations of Jewish civil equality. But Russian Judaeophobia, more governmental than social, being fully in accord with the entire regime of absolutism, produced a system aiming not only at the disfranchisement, but also at the direct physical annihilation of the Jewish people. The policy of the extermination of Judaism was stamped upon the forehead of Russian reaction, receiving ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... policy of absolutism was extended also to the New World. Revoking the charter of De Caen the Huguenot merchant, he organised the Company of One Hundred Associates, of which he was himself the head. In return for sovereign powers and a perpetual monopoly of the fur trade, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... Leonardo Donato, "and there is one fault. It limits his power to achieve; it increases his absolutism. It is near-sightedness—smallness ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... her to ward off the immediate result. She secured her throne,—she was able to maintain, in the rocking of those movements, her own political and spiritual supremacy,—she made gain and capital for absolutism out of them,—the inevitable reformation she herself assumed, and set bounds to: whatever new freedom there was, was still the freedom of her will; she could even secure the throne of her successor: it was mischief for Charles I. that she was nursing. The consequence ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... to blame, but are only correlates to a dominant—we advertised a predicted eclipse that did not occur at all. Now, without any especial feeling, except that of recognition of the fate of all attempted absolutism, we give the instance, noting that, though such an evil thing to orthodoxy, it was orthodoxy ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... all have endeavored to do something to elevate France, to win for her new glories, and to regain for her her old position. The expedition into Spain, in 1823, ostensibly made in the interest of Absolutism, was really undertaken for the purpose of rebaptizing the white flag in fire. Charles X. and M. de Polignac were engaged in a great scheme of foreign policy when they fell, the chief object of which, on their side, was the restoration to France of the provinces of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the victims escaped to the British colonies, and became a part of them. The Huguenots would have hailed as a boon the permission to emigrate under the fleur-de-lis, and build up a Protestant France in the valleys of the West. It would have been a bane of absolutism, but a national glory; would have set bounds to English colonization, and changed the face of the continent. The opportunity was spurned. The dominant Church clung to its policy of rule and ruin. France built its best colony ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... has been (as our authors hint) too much the ally of the politician; he has used his knowledge as material for preaching democracy in the United States, absolutism in Prussia, Orleanist opposition in France, and so on (English readers will easily recall examples from their own countrymen's work): in the century to come he will have to ally himself with the students of physical science, with whose methods his own have so much in common. It is not ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... "The Emperor has fallen because the people wished no more of him;" others added: "The people wished the king; no, liberty; no, reason; no, religion; no, the English constitution; no, absolutism;" and the last one said: "No, none of these things, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... Grandcourt had no intention to get rid of her; on the contrary, he wanted to feel more securely that she was his to do as he liked with, and to make her feel it also. Moreover, he was himself very fond of yachting: its dreamy do-nothing absolutism, unmolested by social demands, suited his disposition, and he did not in the least regard it as an equivalent for the dreariness of the Maremma. He had his reasons for carrying Gwendolen out of reach, but ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... the struggle for constitutional liberty, which led to the revolutions of 1848, Jews took a considerable part on the more practical side. Everywhere during that critical year Jews had a hand in the upheaval against absolutism.[E] ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... of absolutism in Italy was complete. Courts-martial sat all over Italy. Morelli, the officer who had led out the so-called sacred band of Nola, was shot. His followers were expressly excluded from all amnesty acts. An attempted insurrection in Sicily cost the conspirators their lives. Hundreds of persons were ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... nearly half this crowd were ladies, but M. Paul afterwards told me, these were "des dames," and it was quite proper for them to contemplate what no "demoiselle" ought to glance at. I assured him plainly I could not agree in this doctrine, and did not see the sense of it; whereupon, with his usual absolutism, he merely requested my silence, and also, in the same breath, denounced my mingled rashness and ignorance. A more despotic little man than M. Paul never filled a professor's chair. I noticed, by the way, that he looked ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... rapidly, under fearful exigencies, to the absolutism which, in a republic, alone can summon the full forces into the field. Power must be concentrated, and wielded with promptitude and precision, else we shall fail to achieve our independence. All obstructions ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... these differences did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... advisers of the Emperor determined to take a stronger tone in foreign affairs, while the out-and-out Bonapartists jealously looked for any signs of official weakness so that they might undermine the Ollivier Ministry and hark back to absolutism. When two great parties in a State make national prestige a catchword of the political game, peace cannot be secure: that was the position of France in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... constraint he exercises, with what crushing weight his absolutism bears down on the most tried devotion and on the most pliable characters, with what excess he tramples on and wounds the best dispositions, up to what point he represses and stifles the respiration of the human being, he knows as well as anybody. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... almost apologetic to his countrymen for abstaining from an act of political folly. He pleaded strenuously for delay in the introduction of parliamentary institutions into Egypt, on the ground that our attempts "to mitigate predominant absolutism" in India had been slow, hesitating, and tentative. He brought poetic metaphor to his aid. He deprecated paying too much attention to the "murmuring leaves," in other words, imagining that the establishment ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... obedience in all the four quarters". He was the sort of benevolent despot whom Carlyle on one occasion clamoured vainly for—not an Oriental despot in the commonly accepted sense of the term. As a German writer puts it, his despotism was a form of Patriarchal Absolutism. "When Marduk (Merodach)", as the great king recorded, "brought me to direct all people, and commissioned me to give judgment, I laid down justice and right in the provinces, I made all flesh to prosper."[279] That was the keynote ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... been judiciously observed that in that age of growing absolutism, both spiritual and temporal, only a skilful Thomistic scholar could have discerned the limits to the legitimate exercise of the royal authority which Las Casas so clearly perceived and so boldly defined in the very presence of the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... it does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion. The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it were a ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... position, and character, one of these communities of freemen stands forth as the most conspicuous representative of this antagonism,—Liberty and Absolutism, New England and New France. The one was the offspring of a triumphant government; the other, of an oppressed and fugitive people: the one, an unflinching champion of the Roman Catholic reaction; ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... believe a word of!" cried Beulah, appropriating the last as a lunge at her favorite absolutism. Rising, she placed her drawings in the portfolio, for the sun had crept round the corner of the gallery and ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... their preservation and enforcement. That which was experimental in our plan of government was the question whether democratic rule could be so organized and conducted that it would not degenerate into license and result in the tyranny of absolutism, without saving to the people the power so often found necessary of representing or destroying their enemy, when he was found in the person of a ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... that grates upon us, but when he wrote as he did he was probably not aware that his years of residence in the "garden" had indeed accustomed his ear to some un-Roman sounds.[6] Octavian was of course not unaware of the advantage that accrued to the ruler through the Oriental theory of absolutism, and furtively accepted all such expressions. By the time Vergil wrote the Aeneid the Roman world had acquiesced, but then, to our surprise, Vergil ceases to accord ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... a restlessness in society, which made bad subjects for an absolute monarch. The religious Reformation, which began in Germany and spread to the westward, was but the legitimate result of the intellectual agitation which preceded it; and the political absolutism of kings could no more expect exemption from searching criticism and final revolution than the religious absolutism of the Pope. The German Reformation was blind to the magnitude and significance of its own mission; for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... democratic as opposed to despotic in any and all shapes. And this idea has become so ingrained in the American mind that it will be difficult to gain credence for the assertion that the terms constitutionalism and absolutism represent the forces or systems which, have really been antagonistic ever since Christianity began to affect and animate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... of citizenship under the rule of the Queen and the Imperial Parliament. The cultured Roman Catholics of England and Ireland look with pain and regret at the insensate bigotry and domineering intolerance which made the exposures in County Meath possible. They see in these wild claims of absolutism in the domain of temporal as well as spiritual affairs, a grave danger to all pure religion. They perceive that the revival of the old sectarian passions in Ireland cannot fail to react on Great Britain, and even if the Keltic ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... absolutism of the crown, the interesting and important relations of France to America, and the causes of the ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... all this noise which is made nowadays about liberty may end in the suppression of liberty; it is plain that the internationals, the irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, are, all three of them, aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily they are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to turn ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... present war he again illustrated his spirit of fanatical absolutism, which at times inspires him, by saying ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... time, was at an end. Tilly, whose purposes were the complete restoration of Catholicism in Germany, held the provinces conquered by him with an iron hand. Wallenstein, who seemingly had in view the weakening of the power of the League and the raising of the emperor to absolutism, broke down all opposition ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... subordinate to any higher authority; for instance, the highest Courts were called cours souveraines. Now Bodin gave quite a new meaning to the old term. Being under the influence and in favour of the policy of centralisation initiated by Louis XI of France (1461-1483), the founder of French absolutism, Bodin defines sovereignty as the 'absolute and perpetual power within a State.' However, even Bodin was far from considering sovereignty to give absolutely unfettered freedom of action, for he conceded that sovereignty was restricted by the commandments of God and by the rules of ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim
... the oath of the prince-president, constituted the will of France;—the policy of Napoleon was accepted by many because it was his: it was his, because he knew it would be acceptable to many as the only safeguard against anarchy, and the only form of absolutism that could be substituted for liberty, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... something of her old absolutism, came to his house continually to inquire and give orders, and to his room to see him every afternoon, found out for herself in the course of his convalescence this strange death of the sensuous side of Jocelyn's nature. She had ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... a part in the English-speaking province. With his disinterestedness and unselfishness, with his hatred of political injustice and oppression, Canadians who remember the history of the constitutional struggles of England will always sympathise. Revolt against absolutism and tyranny is permissible in the opinion of men who love political freedom, but the conditions of Upper Canada were hardly such as justified the rash insurrection into which he led his deluded followers, many to misery and some to death. Mackenzie ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... native newspaper said so when he first came, having painfully selected the phrase from a "Dictionary Of Polite English for Public Purposes" edited by a College graduate at present in the Andamans. True, later it had called him an "overbearing and insane procrastinator"—"an apostle of absolutism"—and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader,—"laudator temporis acti." But that the was because he had withdrawn his private subscription prior to suspending the paper sine die under paragraph so-and-so of ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... this latter theory that the University of Paris, then the first university in Europe, had just appealed from the Pope to a General Council. In Germany opinions were on the whole divided between this and the theory of Papal absolutism. Again, the view that neither the decisions of a Council nor of a Pope were ipso facto infallible, but that an appeal therefrom lay to a council possibly better informed, had already been advanced ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Avoiding unnecessary pain! It is obvious that the method of police absolutism is open to very great abuse. In practice it works out as galling tyranny. A quotation from the Japan Chronicle illustrates ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... griefs, point d'argent." On December 11 came a royal message to the States-General which, while promising certain concessions regarding the taxes, the Collegium Philosophicum and the language decree, stated in unequivocal terms the principle of royal absolutism. To quote the words of a ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of gold—ah, more alone than even he knew. Alone with his bruised ambitions, his hectored egoism, his watery aims. Alone and plotting the ruin of those who had dared bid him halt in his mad, destroying career. Alone, this high priest of the caste of absolutism, of the old individualism which is fast hurrying into the realm of the forgotten. Alone, and facing a new century, with whose ideals his own were utterly, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... "is for the liberation of Europe. It is a vast struggle, an Armageddon in which the forces of reaction, absolutism, tyranny, a military caste are ranged against democracy. It is their last appearance upon the stage of history. Vindicated ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... not be supposed, however, that her self-will was a passionate, moody absolutism. She had outgrown that, and was too well-bred ever to show much temper. The tendency of her mature purposes and prejudices was to crystallize into a few distinct forms. With the feminine logic of a narrow mind, she made her husband an exception to the people among ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... notable books of later times-we may say, without exaggeration, of all time—must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself—a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, has succeeded ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... compensate the utter isolation of the throne; the lonely grandeur of one who can hardly have a friend, since he can never have an equal, among those around him. I do not wonder that a tinge of melancholo-mania is so often perceptible in the chiefs of that great House whose Oriental absolutism is only "tempered by assassination." But an Earthly sovereign may now and then meet his fellow-sovereigns, whether as friends or foes, on terms of frank hatred or loyal openness. His domestic relations, though never secure ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... period began, England was a Commonwealth. Charles I., by obstinate insistence upon absolutism, by fickleness and faithlessness, had increased and strengthened his enemies. Parliament had seized the reins of government in 1642, had completely established its authority at Naseby in 1645, and had beheaded the king in front of his own palace ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... English view, sprang also the great intellectual movement of the age. Voltaire visited the England of Addison and Pope; Montesquieu studied the English Constitution of 1689; and these two men were the writers who overthrew absolutism in Europe, who paved the way for the epoch of Revolution that was to follow. Montesquieu's Persian Letters, satirizing French society, appeared as early as 1721. Voltaire's sarcasms and witty sneers got him into trouble with the French Government as early as 1715. He was imprisoned ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... humanity, of security and repose, will be the result. The exclusion of half the population from the polls, is not merely a gross injustice, but an immense loss of brain and conscience, in making up the public judgment. As a nation we have discarded absolutism, monarchy, and hereditary aristocracy; but we have not fully attained even to manhood suffrage. Men are proscribed on account of their complexion, women because of their sex. The entire body politic suffers ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... governed, more or less, by one and the same inspiration: our nobles have lived upon the crumbs of royal favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an historical element: it has furnished some fortunate Condottieri, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town; it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being nearly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... insurrection in England and the execution of Charles I. The provocation was the same in the two nations; the result highly different. In both cases it was a revolt against the tyranny of the court and the attempt to establish absolutism. But the difference in results lay in the fact that England had a single parliament, composed of politicians, while France had ten parliaments, composed of magistrates, and unaccustomed to handle great questions of public policy. Richelieu had taken from the civic parliaments ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... age of progress. Wars of succession are no more. Absolutism must forever hang its head. Fling a glance at France; peer into Prussia, Vox populi is the voice of the King, and the voice of the king is therefore vox Dei. When a king speaks for his people he must speak sooth; what he says of other peoples must be taken with a grain of salt. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... traditions of the past, but had a much less vague conception of the moral to be drawn from them than had the multitude. Athens, for him as for them, was to be the first state in Hellas; she was above all to be the protectress of democracy everywhere, against both absolutism and oligarchy, and the leader of the Hellenes in resistance to foreign aggression. But, unlike the multitude, Demosthenes saw that this policy required the greatest personal effort and readiness ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... Spanish inquisition, then across Europe and Asia, to the mines of Nertschinsk, in the ever-frozen Altai. We lost all we had on earth; seemingly we were always beaten; but Portugal and Spain enjoy to-day a constitutional regime that is an improvement on absolutism. France has expelled forever the Bourbons, and universal suffrage, spelt now by the French people, is a progress, is a promise of a great democratic future. Germany has in part conquered free speech and free press. Italy is united, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... strange at the present day that the absolutism of the king did not bring about a widespread rebellion earlier than it did. One of the chief causes of his strength is to be found in the bands of mercenary soldiers which he maintained, ready to do any bidding at a moment's notice, under the command of men who were entirely his ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... feared by her fellow-citizens, who will not trust her with power, and shunned by the industrious aliens who seek our shores, because they will not become members of a society in which individualism and absolutism are the supreme law—for was it not to escape these parasites that they expatriated themselves from the shores of the Volga, the Danube and the Rhine? Men will not make their homes among people who, spurning the accepted canons of justice and the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... the Segretario Reale went out from the presence, his soul revolting at the absolutism that forced him to accept; and he ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... under her feet, gained power by the aid of Tartar swords and spears or through sheer dread of the Tartar name, and when the Golden Horde was at length overthrown the Grand Prince took the place of the Great Khan and ruled with the same absolute sway. It was the absolutism of Asia imported into Europe. Step by step the princes of Moscow had copied the system of the khan. This work was finished by Ivan the Great, at once the deliverer and the enslaver of Russia, who freed that country from the yoke of the khan, but laid ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... reverence and defiance, for Donald Finch was an obstinate man, with a man's love of authority, and a Scotchman's sense of his right to rule in his own house. But while he talked much about his authority, and made a great show of absolutism with his family, he was secretly conscious that another will than his had really kept things moving about the farm; for he had long ago learned that his wife was always right, while he might often be wrong, and that, withal her soft words and gentle ways, hers ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... Revolution of 1830 and the expulsion of Charles X revived the hopes of the liberal party in Spain, which party the bigoted absolutism of the king and his minister had vainly endeavored to exterminate. The liberals saluted that event as a promise that the nineteenth century should see the realization of their aspirations, and the exiled members of the party at once came to France to attempt an invasion ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... the softening of nature; and not even Miss Wodehouse, looking anxiously after them, heard what further words they were that Mr Wentworth said in her ear. "I am for your service, however and wherever you want me," said the Curate, with a young man's absolutism. Heaven knows he had enough to do with his own troubles; but he remembered no obstacle which could prevent him from dedicating all his time and life to her as he spoke. When Lucy reached her own room, she threw herself upon the sofa, and wept like a woman inconsolable; ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... and we can observe the formation of the opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature—and he never lost his trust in reason—was against the high Roman or sacerdotal absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he discerned plainly enough ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... attacked as involving an indefensible 'State absolutism', a denial of 'personality' to lesser groups, even as a negation of the right to lesser loyalties. Mr. Figgis, in a number of suggestive, if unconvincing, writings, has recalled the theories of the Jesuits and other anti-state minorities ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... likely to conclude that he (like Boileau and Pope) must have thought they and Nature (good sense) were the same. In a number of passages, however, Rapin depends solely on the Ancients. Two examples will suffice to illustrate his absolutism. At the beginning of "The Second Part," when he is inquiring "into the nature of Pastoral," he admits: And this must needs be a hard Task, since I have no guide, neither Aristotle nor Horace to direct me.... And I am of opinion that none can treat well ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the secluded convent of Yuste, in Spain, where, notwithstanding the time spent by him in religious exercises, and in his favorite diversion of experimenting with clocks and watches, he remained an attentive observer of public affairs. Political and religious absolutism was the main article in Philip's creed. He was more thoroughly a Spaniard in his tone and temper than his father, who was born in the Netherlands, and always loved the people there, as he was loved by them. Philip was cold and forbidding in his manners. He ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... influence, patronage, power, preponderance, credit, prestige, prerogative, jurisdiction; right &c. (title) 924; direction &c. 693; government &c. 737a. divine right, dynastic rights, authoritativeness; absoluteness, absolutism; despotism; jus nocendi[Lat]; jus divinum[Lat]. mastery, mastership, masterdom[obs3]; dictation, control. hold, grasp; grip, gripe; reach; iron sway &c. (severity) 739; fangs, clutches, talons; rod of empire &c. (scepter) 747. [Vicarious authority] commission &c. 755; deputy ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... especially in summer, and indeed, if the mind and body are active from an early hour, a little repose is useful, if not necessary, after mid-day. Busy men however like Cicero could not always afford it in the city, and we find him noting near the end of his life, when Caesar's absolutism had diminished the amount of his work both in senate and law-courts, that he had taken to the siesta which he formerly dispensed with.[434] Even the sturdy Varro in his old age declared that in summer he could not possibly do without his nap in the middle of the day.[435] On the other hand, in the ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... note Fernando, p. 34, 5. Ferdinand welcomed the intervention of the French in Spain to support him in his absolutism against the advanced party, which clamored for constitutional liberties. The French expedition (1823) was completely successful, the resistance being so slight that the French describe the invasion as a ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... were accompanied by report after report from the rest of Germany, shaking the old structure of absolutism like the repeated ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... married Isabella, daughter of Charles VI of France, and henceforth seems to have adopted French ideas, and to have made pretensions in the direction of absolutism. He proceeded to arbitrary prosecutions which led to the violent death of several leading nobles. Richard also quarrelled with Henry, son of John of Gaunt, whom as Duke of Lancaster he succeeded in 1399. The year before, Richard had banished Henry for ten ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various |
