The Dream of Absolutism: Louis XIV and the Logic of Modernity

The Dream of Absolutism examines the political aesthetics of power under Louis XIV.

What was absolutism, and how did it work? What was the function of the ostentatious display surrounding Louis XIV at Versailles? What is gained—and what is lost—by approaching such expressions of absolutism as propaganda, as present-day scholars tend to do?

In this sweeping reconsideration of absolutist culture, Hall Bjørnstad argues that the exuberance of Louis XIV's reign was not top-down propaganda in ...