The term “absolutismˮ denotes firstly the form of government of the increasingly centralized early modern princely state, and secondly the epoch from the early 17th to the late 18th century (Age of Absolutism) that was dominated by such princely states, a constitutive foundation of modern Europe. Like the term Ancien Régime (“Former Regimeˮ), it originated in journalistic discourse of the French Revolution (1789) and indicates, likewise with a delimitative and pejorative bias, “…