Gallery 4: Ideas That Questioned Kings
1Wall text. In the 1600s many European kings claimed absolute power: the right to make laws, collect taxes and punish people without answering to anyone. During the Enlightenment of the 1600s and 1700s, writers used reason to ask where a government's power comes from and what limits it should have. The objects in this gallery trace that argument.
2Case 1: Portrait of Louis XIV of France (ruled 1643–1715). Louis claimed to rule by divine right, the belief that a king's power comes from God and that he answers only to God. He built the palace of Versailles and ruled without calling France's assembly of representatives. A saying often credited to him is "I am the state," though historians doubt he said it.
3Case 2: First edition of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651). Hobbes wrote after living through England's civil war. He argued that without government, life would be "nasty, brutish, and short." To escape that, people agree to a social contract: they give up some freedom to a ruler, who in return keeps order. Hobbes thought that ruler should hold very strong power.
4Case 3: Two Treatises of Government by John Locke (1689). Locke wrote that every person is born with natural rights to life, liberty and property. People form governments by their consent to protect those rights. If a government breaks that trust, Locke argued, the people may change it or replace it.
5Case 4: Printed copy of the English Bill of Rights (1689). After Parliament invited William and Mary to take the throne, the new rulers accepted this law. It says the monarch may not suspend laws, raise taxes or keep an army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and that members of Parliament may debate freely.
6Case 5: The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu (1748). This French writer, who admired England's government, divided power into three kinds: making laws, carrying them out and judging cases. He warned that when one person or group holds all three, liberty is lost, so each branch should check the others.
7Case 6: Letters on the English by Voltaire (1733). Voltaire had been jailed in the Bastille, a royal prison in Paris, for poems that mocked France's rulers. Later he lived in England and praised how people there could follow different religions. French officials banned these letters and had copies burned.