Louis XIV

Louis XIV Louis XIV (1638–1715), known as Louis the Great and the Sun King, was King of France from 1643 until his death, a reign of seventy-two years, the longest recorded of any monarch of a major European country. He built France into the dominant power of Europe, centralised royal authority, and made the palace and gardens of Versailles the centre of courtly culture and of French classical art.

Minority and the Fronde

Louis was born on 5 September 1638 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the son of Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. He became king at the age of four on his father's death in 1643, with his mother as regent and Cardinal Mazarin as chief minister. His childhood was overshadowed by the Fronde, a series of civil wars in which nobles and magistrates rose against the crown between 1648 and 1653.

The royal family was driven from Paris during the worst of the troubles, and the young king never forgot the humiliation. He resolved that the nobility must never again be able to threaten the crown, and that the great nobles must be drawn away from their provincial power bases and attached to the court. That resolve shaped the centralising policies of his entire reign.

He was declared of age in 1651, but Mazarin continued to govern until his death in 1661. Louis then astonished the court by announcing that he would rule without a first minister, taking personal charge of his councils. From that day he worked at the business of government with extraordinary regularity, and his own hand and judgement were felt in almost every department of state.

Absolutism and the Machinery of the State

Louis constructed the most complete system of absolute monarchy in Europe. He tamed the nobility by means of the court at Versailles, where privilege, pensions and preferment depended on the king's favour, and by appointing intendants — royal officials drawn from the gentry and the middle class — to supervise the provinces. The state was administered by a series of specialised councils, and the king presided over the most important of them himself.

Economic policy was entrusted to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a brilliant administrator who built up manufactures, improved roads and canals, protected trade, and created the navy and the colonies that supported it. Colbert's mercantilism was designed to make France self-sufficient and to increase the wealth available to the crown. His reforms gave France the strongest economy in Europe, although the cost of the king's wars later undermined the gains.

Louis also controlled religion and culture. He revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had guaranteed toleration to the Huguenots, and drove many skilled Protestant artisans and merchants into exile; the decision weakened the economy and strengthened the enemies of France. In the church he asserted the independence of the French crown against Rome, and he made the state the patron of art, letters and science through academies and pensions.

Court, Culture and Versailles

The palace of Versailles, transformed from a hunting lodge into an immense residence and garden, became the stage on which the king performed the drama of monarchy. Court etiquette revolved around his person, and nobles competed for the privilege of assisting him at his lever, his meals and his coucher. The elaborate ritual fixed rank and kept potential rivals under the king's eye.

Versailles set the standard for European courts and for the arts. Under Colbert's direction the Academy of Painting, the Academy of Architecture and the French Academy in Rome trained and honoured French artists, and the classical style of the period left its mark on literature, music, architecture and garden design. Molière, Racine, Boileau, Lully and Le Brun all worked under royal patronage.

Louis's interest in the theatre and in the visual arts was genuine as well as political. He danced in court ballets himself in his youth, and his taste helped create a distinctly French classicism. The image of the Sun King, dispenser of light and order, was broadcast through medals, paintings, engravings and monuments, and it became one of the most effective pieces of political imagery in European history.

Wars and the Legacy

Louis's foreign policy was driven by the pursuit of gloire and of defensible frontiers. He fought four great wars: the War of Devolution, the Dutch War, the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession. Early campaigns won him territory and prestige; later ones, especially the long struggle over the Spanish inheritance, exhausted the treasury and united Europe against him. His grandson Philip was nevertheless placed on the throne of Spain, securing a Bourbon dynasty that endures.

The cost of war weighed heavily on the French people. Taxation rose, harvests failed, and famine and hardship spread in the last years of the reign, while the court continued to spend on display. The contrast between the splendour of Versailles and the suffering of the countryside became one of the grievances remembered by critics of absolute monarchy, and contributed to the strains that the crown carried into the eighteenth century.

Louis died at Versailles on 1 September 1715, four days before his seventy-seventh birthday and after a reign of seventy-two years. His great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV. He left France the strongest state in Europe and a model of centralised royal government, but also a heavy debt, a legacy of war and a courtly culture that later reformers and revolutionaries would attack.

See also

• Cardinal Mazarin
• Jean-Baptiste Colbert
• Palace of Versailles
• War of the Spanish Succession