Louis XIV

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis XIV ruled France for 72 years and 110 days, the longest reign of any sovereign monarch in history. He came to the throne on the 14th of May 1643, a boy of four, after the death of his father Louis XIII. He would not loosen his grip until he died in 1715. He called himself the Sun King, Le Roi Soleil, and built a court at the Palace of Versailles that drew the nobility of Europe to him like moths. But the king who would dominate a continent was first a frightened child, hidden in a bed while a mob of angry Parisians filed past to look at him. How did that boy learn to distrust his own capital so deeply that he abandoned it forever? How did he turn proud aristocrats into courtiers who waited all day for a glance? And why did a man who craved glory leave his successor a kingdom buried in debt and weary of war? The answers run through palaces, treasuries, battlefields, and one ruinous decision about faith.

• 2. A Child Of The Fronde

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  On the night of the 9th to the 10th of February 1651, when Louis was twelve, a mob broke into the royal palace and demanded to see their king. He was led to lie in the royal bed-chamber, feigning sleep. The Parisians gazed at him, were appeased, and quietly left. This was the Fronde, a civil war that erupted as the Thirty Years' War ended. The Frondeurs were the political heirs of a disaffected feudal aristocracy. They sought to protect their old privileges from a royal government that grew more centralized by the year, and they resented the recently ennobled bureaucrats, the nobility of the robe, on whom the monarchy increasingly relied.

  Queen Anne of Austria, Louis's mother, ruled as sole regent and was determined to hand her son absolute authority. She imprisoned any aristocrat or member of parliament who challenged her will, and one jailed leader of the Parlement of Paris died in prison. In 1648 she and Cardinal Mazarin tried to tax members of the Parlement de Paris. The members refused and ordered the king's earlier financial edicts burned. The arrest of the popular leader Pierre Broussel set Paris rioting, and Anne was forced to free him.

  The first Fronde, the Parliamentary Fronde of 1648 to 1649, gave way to the Fronde of the Princes from 1650 to 1653, a tangle of sordid intrigue and half-hearted warfare. The royal family was driven out of Paris twice, and at one point Louis and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the palace. The historian's verdict was blunt. The family home became at times a near-prison, abandoned not in carefree outings but in humiliating flights. One observer noted that in one sense Louis's childhood came to an end with the outbreak of the Fronde. These years planted in him a hatred of Paris and a determination to move out of the ancient capital as soon as possible, never to return.

• 3. The God-Given Dauphin

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  Louis was born on the 5th of September 1638 in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and his contemporaries called his birth a miracle. His parents had been married for 23 years. His mother had suffered four stillbirths between 1619 and 1631, so the leading figures of the day regarded this surviving son as a divine gift. He was named Louis Dieudonné, Louis the God-given, and bore the title of French heirs apparent, the Dauphin.

  Anne of Austria spent, by the accounts of eyewitnesses, all her time with the boy. Both mother and son loved food and theatre, and the bond was uncommonly affectionate for the period. Louis later wrote that nature was responsible for the first knots which tied him to his mother. He added that attachments formed by shared qualities of the spirit are far harder to break than those formed merely by blood. From her he absorbed his belief in the absolute and divine power of his rule.

  Louis fell in love with Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini, but the romance was crushed. Anne wanted her son to marry the daughter of her brother, Philip IV of Spain, for dynastic and political reasons, so Mancini was sent away to be married in Italy. All of Louis's tears and pleas did not move his mother. In 1660 he married Maria Theresa, Philip IV's eldest daughter, under the Treaty of the Pyrenees. That marriage would shape French foreign policy for the next 50 years, and through it the Spanish throne would one day pass to the House of Bourbon.

• 4. I Shall Govern Myself

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  In March 1661, on the death of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis astonished his court by announcing that he would rule without a chief minister. Up to this moment, he told his secretaries and ministers, he had been pleased to entrust the government of his affairs to the late Cardinal. It was now time that he govern them himself. He ordered them to seal no orders except by his command, to sign nothing, not even a passport, without his word, and to render account to him personally each day.

  The treasury in 1661 verged on bankruptcy, and up to that year only 10 per cent of income from the royal domain reached the king. Louis first neutralized Nicolas Fouquet, the Superintendent of Finances, who had entertained the king at the opulent château of Vaux-le-Vicomte and privately fortified the remote island of Belle Île. Fouquet was charged with embezzlement, sentenced to exile by the Parlement, and then to life imprisonment when Louis altered the sentence himself.

  Jean-Baptiste Colbert, chosen as Controller-General of Finances in 1665, turned the deficit of 1661 into a surplus by 1666. Interest on the debt fell from 52 million to 24 million livres, while revenue from indirect taxation rose from 26 million to 55 million. The revenues of the royal domain climbed from 80,000 livres in 1661 to 5.5 million in 1671. Colbert's mercantilist policy founded new industries, backed the Lyon silk manufacturers and the Gobelins tapestry manufactory, and lured Murano glassmakers, Swedish ironworkers, and Dutch shipbuilders to France.

  Louis remade more than money. Through Michel le Tellier and his son, the Marquis de Louvois, he modernized the army into a professional, disciplined force and curbed the independence of the old nobility of the sword. His Great Ordinances unified a patchwork of legal systems. The Code Louis of 1667 imposed uniform civil procedure and later became the basis for the Napoleonic Code.

• 5. The Theatre Of Versailles

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  Louis took delivery of an African elephant, a gift from the king of Portugal, as part of his extravagance at Versailles. The palace, in the words of the historian Philip Mansel, became an irresistible combination of marriage market, employment agency and entertainment capital of aristocratic Europe, boasting the best theatre, opera, music, gambling, sex and, most important, hunting.

  Nobles who came for the pensions and privileges had to wait constantly on the king. An elaborate court ritual was built around him, so that he became the center of attention and was observed throughout the day by the public. With an excellent memory, Louis could see who attended him and who was absent, which guided how he handed out favors and positions. Censorship was another tool, often involving the opening of letters to learn their writers' opinions of the government.

  Louis prohibited private armies and drew leading nobles away from their regional power bases, where they had once waged local wars and plotted resistance. He turned the old nobility of the sword into ceremonial courtiers and raised commoners or the newer nobility of the robe to high office, judging that such men could be more easily dismissed than nobles of ancient lineage. This victory over the aristocracy, rooted in his memories of the Fronde, may have ensured the end of major civil wars in France until the Revolution about a century later.

  His court drew the wider world as well. The arts reached what was called the Grand Siècle, the century of Louis XIV, served by the playwrights Molière and Racine, the man of letters Boileau, the composer and dancer Lully, the painter Le Brun, and the landscape architect Le Nôtre. He founded the French Academy of Sciences and built the 240-kilometer Canal du Midi in southern France.

• 6. Glory Through War

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  France under Louis was driven into conflict by what one description called a mix of commerce, revenge, and pique. He sensed that war was the ideal way to enhance his glory, and in peacetime he concentrated on preparing for the next war. He taught his diplomats that their job was to create tactical and strategic advantages for the French military. No European state exceeded France in population, and none could match its wealth, central location, and strong professional army.

  The War of Devolution began after the death of Louis's uncle Philip IV of Spain in 1665. Louis used the unpaid Spanish dowry of 500,000 écus as a pretext to claim that Brabant should devolve to his wife, Maria Theresa, justifying an attack on the Spanish Netherlands. In May 1672, France invaded the Dutch Republic, an act that toppled Johan de Witt and brought William III to power. The French were forced to retreat from most of the Republic, which so shocked Louis that he withdrew to St Germain, where almost no one was allowed to disturb him.

  Louis turned to legal pretexts where force alone fell short. He set up the Chambers of Reunion to determine the full extent of his rights under deliberately ambiguous treaties, and in 1681 he annexed Strasbourg, a strategic crossing on the left bank of the Rhine. He had Algiers and Tripoli bombarded to free Christian slaves, and in 1684 launched a punitive mission against Genoa, whose Doge led an official apology to Versailles. France gained a reputation for brutality and arrogance, and by the late 1680s it was increasingly isolated in Europe.

  The Nine Years' War, from 1688 to 1697, began a decline in Louis's fortunes. His pre-emptive scorched earth policy, the Devastation of the Palatinate, scarred southwestern Germany. When an allied army besieged French-held Namur in 1695, Louis ordered the bombardment of Brussels to divert them. More than 4,000 buildings were destroyed, including the entire city center, yet Namur fell three weeks later. A century afterward Napoleon called the bombardment as barbarous as it was useless.

• 7. The Revoked Promise

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  On the 15th of October 1685, Louis issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, which revoked the 1598 Edict of Nantes. That earlier edict, granted by his grandfather Henry IV to end the French Wars of Religion, had awarded the Huguenots political and religious freedom. Louis saw the survival of Protestantism as a disgraceful reminder of royal powerlessness, and he was guided by the contemporary principle cuius regio, eius religio, that the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the realm.

  Louis quartered dragoons in Protestant homes, a campaign known as the dragonnades that inflicted severe financial strain and atrocious abuse. Between 300,000 and 400,000 Huguenots converted, drawn by financial rewards and exemption from the soldiers billeted on them. The Edict of Fontainebleau ended all toleration. No new churches could be built, existing ones were to be demolished, pastors faced exile or secular life, and those who had resisted were to be baptised forcibly.

  About 200,000 highly skilled Huguenots defied the royal decrees and fled France, roughly one quarter of the Protestant population, or 1 per cent of the French population. They carried their skills to Protestant states, weakening the French economy and enriching their hosts, though some historians argue most of France's preeminent Protestant businessmen converted and stayed. Pope Innocent XI, with whom Louis was already feuding over Gallicanism, criticized the use of violence even as French Catholic leaders exulted.

  Louis's standing across Protestant Europe was dealt a severe blow. The deeper reckoning came long after him. French society changed enough that his descendant Louis XVI welcomed tolerance in the 1787 Edict of Versailles, restoring civil rights and open worship to non-Catholics, before the Revolution of 1789 granted Protestants full equality.

• 8. The Spanish Inheritance

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  Charles II of Spain died in 1700 having produced no children, leaving a vast empire of Spain, Naples, Sicily, Milan, the Spanish Netherlands, and numerous colonies with no direct heir. On his deathbed he changed his will, offering the entire empire to Louis's grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, provided it remained undivided. Louis faced a hard choice: accept a partition and avoid a general war, or accept the will and alienate much of Europe.

  Louis's foreign minister, the Marquis de Torcy, argued that war with the Emperor would come either way, so it might be preferable to be already in control of the disputed lands. Louis accepted the will, and Anjou became Philip V, King of Spain. He confirmed that Philip kept his French rights, sent troops into the Spanish Netherlands to evict Dutch garrisons, and recognized James Stuart as King of England on the death of James II, infuriating William III. Britain, the Dutch Republic, the Emperor, and the German states formed a Grand Alliance and declared war in 1702.

  John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Eugene of Savoy broke the myth of French invincibility. Their victory at Blenheim let the Allies occupy Bavaria, Ramillies delivered the Low Countries, Turin forced Louis to evacuate Italy, and Oudenarde opened the way to invade France. Between 1693 and 1710, over two million people died in two famines, made worse as foraging armies seized village food supplies. By the winter of 1708 to 1709 Louis was willing to accept peace at nearly any cost, even agreeing to surrender the whole Spanish empire and return to the frontiers of the Peace of Westphalia. He balked only when the Allies demanded he single-handedly attack his own grandson to enforce the terms.

  France recovered its pride with the decisive victory at Denain in 1712, and a changed political situation in Austria reshaped the war. Archduke Charles inherited all his brother's Austrian lands, and the prospect of him also holding the Spanish empire alarmed Britain and the Dutch as much as a Franco-Spanish union. Anglo-French talks produced the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. When Louis died in 1715, he left his great-grandson Louis XV a powerful but war-weary kingdom in major debt from a war that had raged since 1701.