What class do absolute monarchs represent?

[heiss93]

What class do the European Absolute Monarchs of the 1500s-1800s represent? On the one hand they broke the power of the feudal lords, and created the economic nation-state necessary for the growth of capitalism. In the early days they allied with the bourgeoisies against the nobles. Yet starting in the 1700s they allied with the feudal nobility against the bourgeois democratic forces. In addition Absolute Monarchs were always keen to preserve the social structure of feudalism.

They are too complex to classify neatly as tools of the feudal or bourgeoisie class.

[Dros]

They are historically members of the Feudal ruling class although some of them eventually (especially in the 19th) century took on the productive role of the Bourgeoisie such as in Germany.

The transition is as you have pointed out a complex one. Ultimately, they represent the last gasp of Feudal elites attempting to maintain control over the superstructure even as the economic base was moving away from them. This of course culminated in the Bourgeois revolutions that swept Europe during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.