A Doctrine the Revolutions Ended

Divine right theory's political fortunes were tied closely to the absolutist monarchies that promoted it, and the doctrine lost practical force wherever those monarchies fell or were constitutionally constrained: England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 replaced any working divine right claim with a settlement in which Parliament's consent was explicitly required for the crown, and the French Revolution ended the doctrine's clearest European statement along with the monarchy that had made it.

Political philosophers writing in the same period developed rival theories of political legitimacy explicitly against divine right, most influentially social contract theory in the work of Hobbes, Locke and later Rousseau, which grounded legitimate authority in an agreement, actual or hypothetical, among the governed rather than in a direct grant from God, a shift historians treat as one of the central intellectual movements separating early modern from modern political thought. Comparable claims to sacred, divinely sanctioned kingship persisted and persist outside the specific early modern European doctrine, including in Japanese imperial ideology before 1946 and in various sacral kingship traditions this atlas records separately, so divine right of kings proper is best understood as the particular Western European doctrinal form of a much wider recurring human claim.