General Notes

Louis XIV (1638-1715), king of France (1643-1715), known as the Sun King, who
imposed absolute rule on France and fought a series of wars trying to dominate
Europe. His reign, the longest in European history, was marked by a great
flowering of French culture.
Louis was born on September 5, 1638, at Saint Germain-en-Laye. His parents,
King Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, grateful for an heir after 20 barren
years of marriage, christened him Louis Dieudonné (literally, the "gift of
God").

Early Reign
In 1643 Louis XIII died. Anne of Austria, aided by her minister, Cardinal
Mazarin, ruled France as regent. His father's death spared Louis XIV the
beatings and abuse usually given French princes; kindly but mediocre tutors
gave him a feeble education. His mother formed his rules of conscience,
teaching him a simple kind of Roman Catholicism laced with superstition.
Mazarin instructed him in court ceremony, war, and the craft of kingship. The
Fronde-two rebellions against the Crown between 1648 and 1653-impressed upon
Louis the need to bring order, stability, and reform to France and also
fostered in him a deep suspicion of the nobility. In accordance with the
Franco-Spanish Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), Louis married his Spanish
cousin, Marie-Thérèse, in 1660. When Mazarin died the following year, Louis
shocked France by refusing to name a first minister; he decided to rule alone
and select Jean Baptiste Colbert as his financial adviser. Colbert encouraged
domestic industry and foreign exports and rebuilt the French navy.
Despite his rakish youth, Louis XIV proved a hardworking king. Every Monday,
Wednesday, and Saturday he presided at a council meeting in which he and a
select group of ministers formulated policies that affected the lives of his
20 million subjects. Louis developed two effective new instruments of power: a
corps of professional diplomats and a standing, uniformed army. After 1682 the
king spent most of his time at Versailles, near Paris, where he had built a
magnificent palace that became the showplace of Europe.

Foreign Wars
In foreign affairs, Louis's consistent aim was to glorify France, to gird its
defenses on the northern and eastern frontiers, and to prevent any resurgence
of the power of the Habsburg dynasty, which had formerly threatened France on
two sides by its control over Spain and Germany. In four wars he displayed
before all of Europe his prowess as a military leader. In 1667, claiming his
wife's right of inheritance (jus devolutionis), Louis invaded the Spanish
Netherlands. His quick victories prompted England, Holland, and Sweden to
check France and force the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668). Louis gained 12
fortresses in Flanders and soon isolated the Dutch by buying English and
Swedish neutrality. In 1672 he hurled an army against Holland. For six years
the Dutch, aided by Spain and Austria, staved off French attacks. The treaties
signed at Nijmegen (1678) did not dismantle Holland but gave Louis the
Franche-Comté region and more forts in Flanders.
While his armies were battling Dutch Protestants, Louis had been denying
religious liberty to the Protestants (Huguenots) of France and tightening
control over his Roman Catholic clergy. In 1685, determined to force
conversion of the Huguenots, he revoked their charter of liberties, the Edict
of Nantes, forcing more than 200,000 into exile and igniting the Camisards'
revolt. Although applauded by his Roman Catholic subjects, the revocation
stiffened resistance to Louis in Protestant Europe. Overconfident and
ill-advised, he sent an army into the Rhineland in 1688 to claim the
Palatinate for his sister-in-law Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria. This War of
the League of Augsburg (1688-97) revealed serious deficiencies in Louis's
army. Despite the devastation of the Rhineland, the Peace of Ryswick (1697)
did not improve French defenses or add to the glory of the monarchy.
Louis's last military venture, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13),
stemmed from his acceptance of the Spanish throne on behalf of his grandson,
Philip. Louis's armies, opposed by an alliance of the European powers, lost
most of the major battles, but won control of Spain. The Treaty of Utrecht
(1713), which awarded several French territories in North America to the
British, also recognized Philip as king of Spain. Louis ruled a war-weary
France until his health broke in 1715. Suffering from fever and gangrene, he
mustered enough strength to say, "I depart, France remains," before dying on
September 1, 1715, at Versailles.

Achievements
Parallel to Louis's quest for glory in war was his patronage of glory in the
arts. Molière and Jean Baptiste Racine wrote plays performed at his court.
Paintings by French masters ornamented his palaces, where the music of Jean
Baptiste Lully charmed his guests. Louis founded the academies of Painting and
Sculpture (1655), Science (1666), and Architecture (1671), and in 1680 he
established the Comédie Française. His grand palace at Versailles afforded the
ideal setting for his lavish court.
After Queen Marie-Thérèse's death in 1683, Louis secretly married a pious and
previously obscure woman, Françoise d'Aubigné, known as Madame de Maintenon;
she urged him to suppress spectacles and sin. Louis's interest in improving
Paris, however, never waned. He razed the city's medieval walls, built the
Invalides as a home for disabled veterans, planned the great avenue of the
Champs-Élysées, and refurbished the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Louis XIV was never able to resolve the tensions between a governing elite
committed to efficiency and a society organized by rank, birth, and privilege,
which explains many of the failures of his reign. His personal example of
long, dedicated rule, however, made France the bureaucratic model for
18th-century, absolutist Europe.