Louis XIV

King of France (r. 1643-1715)

• Born: September 5, 1638
• Birthplace: Château de Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France
• Died: September 1, 1715
• Place of death: Versailles, France

Known as Le Roi de Soleil, the Sun King, Louis XIV led France to the pinnacle of power and prestige in seventeenth century Europe, and more than any other monarch, he embodied the principle of absolutism in royal authority. Dedicated to bringing glory to France, he was the sponsor of what became magnificent cultural achievements but left his country bankrupt and weakened through a series of costly wars.

Early Life

Louis XIV was born the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria . At age four, he succeeded his father to the throne, under the regency of his mother. As a result, much of his character and outlook was shaped in a harrowing environment of court intrigue and conspiracy, as noble factions fought one another for power and influence. Though regarded by French law as a sacred person, he was frequently neglected. Once, he wandered into a pond and nearly drowned. When he was nine, many of the nobility, supported by the Parlement de Paris (a powerful law court), revolted against the prime minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin . As the symbol of power, Louis was dragged about the country and often simply left in places supposedly safe from the rebels. One evening, some of them burst into his bedroom, and he barely escaped with his life.

After five years of civil war known as the Wars of the Fronde (1648-1653), Mazarin finally quelled the revolt and began rebuilding the central government and administration, as well as training Louis for the role of king. By age fourteen, when Louis reached his legal majority, he had acquired an education in horseback riding, dancing, hunting, and the uses of power. As a king, he would be expected to lead his armies, so he served his apprenticeship in the war that had erupted between France and Spain in 1635. This conflict was part of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), in which political leadership in Europe passed from the Habsburg rulers of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire to France.

As Louis matured, he developed an inveterate hatred for anyone who would seek to limit his authority. When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis astonished his royal council of ministers by announcing that no successor to Mazarin would be appointed—he himself would assume all power and responsibility for ruling the kingdom.

Life’s Work

For the next fifty-four years, Louis dedicated his life to the task of ruling France. No detail of administration escaped his notice, and he tried to control every action of his government, from the system of administration to proper etiquette at court. In fact, he used the ceremony and protocol of the court to help him resolve the greatest long-standing threat to the authority of the French monarchy: the landed nobility.

Since the development of the feudal system in the Middle Ages, French kings had had to contend with the determination of the nobles to rule their territories independently of the Crown. Because the nobility formed the officer corps of the army, medieval French kings had often been at their mercy. An informal alliance between the kings and the rising middle classes, however, had gradually given the monarchy the tax income to create a professional army, and technological changes had made the mounted knight obsolete. This eliminated the feudal justification for the power of the nobility. The nobles were not to be humbled without a fight, and they had frequently revolted against the growing centralization of the royal government. The Fronde was the last of these revolts, proving that the nobility was still a force with which to be reckoned.

Louis accomplished this task by building a magnificent palace, the envy of Europe, at Versailles and luring the nobles to his court with high-sounding but meaningless titles and the opulence of court life. He kept them occupied with a constant round of entertainment, sponsoring playwrights such as Molière and Jean Racine and composers such as Jean-Baptiste Lully and fostering a complex web of competition and intrigue for his favor. The lord who could best master the intricate system of courtesies, ceremonies, and flattery might well be rewarded with a high-sounding but inconsequential position, while the real work of government was performed by Louis himself and a small circle of trusted ministers.

Among these ministers was Jean-Baptiste Colbert , a financial genius who attempted to revolutionize the French economy through the establishment of a mercantilist system. Under Louis’s supervision, Colbert sought to make France self-sufficient through the construction of a merchant fleet and a navy to protect it. He awarded monopoly charters to royally subsidized companies to trade with French colonies and implemented a massive program of road, port, and canal construction. At the same time, Louis’s minister of war, the marquis de Louvois, modernized the French army by limiting the practice of purchasing officers’ commissions, expanding its peacetime base to more than 100,000 men (and more than 400,000 in wartime) and developing an efficient procurement and supply system. Between them, Colbert and Louvois forged the state and the army into an effective instrument of royal policy.

Louis soon put this instrument to use. In 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years’ War and established the “balance of power” as the fundamental principle of international relations within Europe. Even though Louis’s Habsburg rivals had seen their fortunes decline in the war, they were still in control of the thrones of Austria, which possessed territories on the eastern border of France, and of Spain, which also ruled the portion of the Netherlands that became Belgium. Thus, Louis was surrounded on three sides by enemies. In 1667, he invaded the Spanish Netherlands, claiming that they were the rightful inheritance of his wife, the daughter of the Habsburg king of Spain. This inaugurated a half century of wars, which eventually gained for France the provinces of Lorraine and the Franche-Comté to the east, and part of Flanders to the north.

Yet these rewards had a terrible price. Not only did Louis expend tremendous sums of money and large numbers of men but also he earned the enmity of nearly every other power in Europe. Then, he created hostility and fear within France itself by revoking the Edict of Nantes, which had guaranteed religious and political rights to the Huguenots, or French Protestants, since 1599. The revocation prompted a wave of persecution, forced conversions to Roman Catholicism, and drove thousands of refugee Huguenots into the arms of Louis’s enemies. Since most of the Protestants were hardworking businessmen and skilled artisans, France was thus deprived of a great national resource. Many historians have dated the beginning of the decline of France’s industrial development from this time.

In 1688, the English, the Dutch, and the Habsburgs united to break Louis’s hegemony over Western Europe in a war that lasted until 1697 and forced Louis to return part of the territories he had won. Finally, in 1700, Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, died, leaving his kingdom to Louis’s grandson, Philip of Anjou. Louis had little choice but to accept the inheritance, since declining it would have meant Austrian control of Spain. The Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I , immediately contested the award and began constructing another coalition against France. In the resulting War of the Spanish Succession , lasting from 1701 to 1714, Louis lost nearly all the territorial gains of previous wars, bankrupted his treasury, and gained only the hatred of his own people.

At the same time, he suffered untold personal grief, as his son, two grandsons, and a great-grandson died within the space of a few months. The new heir to the throne, Louis’s sickly great-grandnephew, was only five years old. This nearly guaranteed that a domestic power struggle over the regency would ensue upon Louis’s death. Louis attempted to avoid this by drawing up a will that gave the actual power of the regency to the duc de Maine, his son by one of his mistresses. After Louis died, however, on September 1, 1715, the Parlement de Paris was convened to nullify the will. In so doing, the parlement asserted a new political power: As the body charged with responsibility for registering royal edicts before they became law, the parlement now claimed the right to approve or disapprove of edicts before they were registered. Without a strong king to suppress this power, the Parlement de Paris was able to defer royal reforms that might have prevented the French Revolution. Thus, ironically, the king who had brought royal power to its peak may also have been responsible for its ultimate destruction. As Louis’s funeral cortege carried his body to the tomb of French kings in the basilica at Saint-Denis, his own people jeered and spat upon him.

Significance

The reign of Louis XIV lasted seventy-three years, the longest of any known monarch in history. So thoroughly did he stamp his imprint into the consciousness of Europe that historians refer to this period as the Age of Louis XIV. His brilliant court and the unparalleled splendor of Versailles were the envy of and model for all the other crowned heads of Europe, who vainly tried to copy French culture, manners, and power. Louis made French the international language of royalty and diplomacy. On the other hand, those same crowned heads feared Louis’s ambition, regarding him as a bloodthirsty tyrant who sought to conquer them all.

Louis embodied both the principle of absolutist monarchy and the myth of the glory of France. In fact, Louis identified so completely with his role as king that it is virtually impossible to discern an individual personality lurking beneath the role. Louis was proud, courageous, highly self-disciplined, intolerant, and passionate in his love for beauty and order; yet all these qualities are reflected in his actions as king, rather than in his personal life. When asked what defined the French state, he is said to have replied, “L’etat, c’est moi” (I am the state). This was not an expression of arrogance but of his belief that God had entrusted him with the responsibility for the power and prosperity of France.

As is true for many other of the greatest figures in history, a balance sheet of Louis’s reign reveals a roughly equal total of credits and debits. His support of Colbert’s program brought France a colonial empire and encouraged industry and internal development, but his view that colonies existed solely as a royal preserve discouraged settlement. As a result, the more populated British colonies easily overwhelmed French North America only fifty years after Louis’s death. While the new roads and canals Colbert created reduced internal trade barriers, Louis’s persecution of the Huguenots precluded the maximum utilization of France’s economic potential. Louis’s destruction of the power of the nobles ended much of the anarchy of provincial administration, but it also centralized the government to the extent that it became removed and remote from the people of France and could no longer cope well with local problems. Louis preferred to think in grander terms, and he ignored grievances of the rural peasantry that would eventually fuel the French Revolution and destroy the monarchy. Louvois made the French army the largest, best-trained, and best-equipped in Europe, but Louis wasted it in ill-advised wars; yet, when he died, Louis left France more territorially secure and slightly larger than it had been.

The king’s patronage of the arts fostered a renaissance in French music, literature, drama, and painting, and his regal tastes became those of Europe. His palaces, monuments, and court, however, came to be seen as an expensive irrelevance by a peasantry without bread and a middle class without status. These contrasts have made Louis’s reign subject to much interpretation and furious debate. None could deny, however, that his impact and influence upon the course of European history was immense.

Bibliography

Beik, William. Louis XIV and Absolutism: A Brief Study with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000. A collection of newly translated documents, with commentary, demonstrating how Louis became an absolute monarch. The documents examine a range of issues, including the problems of the Fronde, Colbert’s understanding of finance, popular rebellion, and royal image-making.

Bernier, Oliver. Louis XIV: A Royal Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Well written and entertaining, this intimate biography cites modern research to suggest that many of the traditional criticisms of Louis are no longer valid.

Cronin, Vincent. Louis XIV. London: Collins, 1964. Well written and thoroughly researched, this biography is exceptionally useful for the general reader. Focuses sympathetically on Louis as both individual and monarch.

Dunlop, Ian. Louis XIV. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Dunlop presents Louis XIV as his contemporaries saw him—an adored monarch who was the power and glory of France incarnate.

Erlanger, Philippe. Louis XIV. Translated by Stephen Cox. New York: Praeger, 1970. Biography with excellent illustrations by a well-known expert on French history. Takes a balanced, if somewhat melancholy, view of Louis’s reign.

Levi, Anthony. Louis XIV. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004. Probes Louis’s personality, depicting him as a man conflicted by his normal insecurities and his pursuit of grandeur.

Lewis, W. H. The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1997. A classic look, first published in 1953, at French life during Louis’s reign. Includes a brief biography of Louis and information on politics, the life of peasants and nobility, religion, the army, medicine, and literature.

Lossky, Andrew. Louis XIV and the French Monarchy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Details Louis’s domestic, international, and religious policies to show the evolution of his political ideas over the course of his life. Focuses on Louis’s failure to establish Catholic uniformity in France.

Moote, A. Lloyd. The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643-1652. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Examines the anarchy and conflict within French society and government early in Louis’s life. Essential reading for an understanding of Louis’s attempts to centralize authority.

Packard, Laurence Bradford. The Age of Louis XIV. New York: Henry Holt, 1929. A classic, brief introduction to the period. Summarizes developments in France and Europe, and includes a thorough, annotated bibliography.