Louis XIV of France
2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Historical figures
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Louis XIV (baptised as Louis-Dieudonné) ( September 5, 1638 – September 1, 1715) ruled as King of France and of Navarre. He acceded to the throne a few months before his fifth birthday, but did not assume actual personal control of the government until the death of his Prime minister ( Premier ministre), the Italian Jules Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. Louis would remain on the throne till his death just prior to his seventy-seventh birthday in 1715. His reign thus spanned seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days, the longest documented of any European monarch to date.
Louis XIV is also known as Louis the Great (in French Louis le Grand or Le Grand Monarque, "the Great Monarch"), because, following his victory in the Franco-Dutch War and the Treaty of Nijmegen, the Parlement de Paris decreed that all public inscriptions and statues of the king should carry that epithet attached to his name.
He is also popularly known as The Sun King (in French Le Roi Soleil) because of the idea that, just as the planets revolve around the Sun, so too should France and the court revolve around him. As a result, he was commonly associated with Apollo Helios, the Greco-Roman god of the Sun. As a patron of the arts, this association was fitting because Louis was, like Apollo Musagetes, the "leader of the Muses".
During his reign, he increased the power and influence of France in Europe, engaging in three major wars—the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession—and two minor conflicts—the War of Devolution, and the War of the Reunions.
The political and military scene in France during his reign was filled with such illustrious names as Mazarin, Fouquet, Colbert, Michel le Tellier, Le Tellier's son Louvois, the Great Condé, Turenne, Vauban, Villars and Tourville. Under his reign, France achieved not only political and military pre-eminence, but also cultural dominance with various cultural figures such as Molière, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Lully, Le Brun, Rigaud, Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin Mansart, Claude Perrault and Le Nôtre. The cultural achievements accomplished by these figures contributed to the prestige of France, its people, its language and its king.
Louis XIV worked successfully to create a centralized state governed from the capital in order to sweep away the fragmented feudalism which hitherto persisted in France, thus giving rise to the modern state. As a result of his efforts, which seemed absolutist, Louis XIV became the archetypal absolute monarch. The phrase "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State") is frequently attributed to him, though considered an inaccuracy by historians. Quite contrary to that apocryphal quote, Louis XIV is actually reported to have said on his death bed: "Je m'en vais, mais l'État demeurera toujours." ("I depart, but the State shall always remain").
Early years
Birth and ancestry
Louis XIV was born in the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 5, 1638 and bore the heir apparent's traditional title of Dauphin. His birth came after the almost twenty-three years of childlessness of his estranged parents, Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. As a result, contemporaries regarded him as a divine gift and his birth as a miracle, and, in a show of gratitude to God for the long-awaited arrival of an heir, he was named Louis-Dieudonné ("God-given").
His ancestors were figures from some of Europe's most noteworthy ruling houses. His paternal grandparents were Henri IV of France and Marie de' Medici, who were French and Italian respectively; while both his maternal grandparents were Habsburgs, Philip III of Spain and Margaret of Austria. In this manner, he counted as his ancestors various historical figures, including Charles V and Frederick Barbarossa, both Holy Roman Emperors. He also found himself descended from the founder of Russia's first dynasty, Rurik the Viking, as well as Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, the poet Charles, Duke of Orléans, and Giovanni de' Medici, last of the great condottieri. Most importantly, he traced his paternal lineage, and hence his and his descendants' right to the throne, in unbroken legitimate male succession from Saint Louis, King of France, and through him, from Hugh Capet.
Louis XIII and Anne had a second child, Philippe, duc d'Orléans in 1640. Unsure of Anne as regent, Louis XIII decreed that a regency council, of which she was named head, should rule in Louis' name in the event he succeeded to the throne before the age of majority, intending, by its existence, to prevent her from ruling as sole regent.
Minority and the Fronde
Nevertheless, on May 14, 1643, after Louis XIII died and his young son became Louis XIV, Anne had her husband's will annulled by the Parlement, did away with the regency council and became sole Regent. She entrusted power to Cardinal Mazarin, her Prime minister, who was despised in most French political circles because of his foreign origin, despite having already become a naturalized French subject.
The Thirty Years' War, which had commenced in the previous reign, ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, made up of the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück, the work of Mazarin. This Peace ensured Dutch independence from Spain, awarded a degree of autonomy to the various German princes and granted Sweden territories which gave her control of the mouths of the Oder, Elbe, and Weser, as well as seats on the Reichstag. It marked the apogee of Swedish power and influence in German and European affairs. However, it was France which had the most to gain from the terms of the Peace. Austria ceded to France all Habsburg lands and claims in Alsace; and the petty German states eager to dislodge themselves from Habsburg domination placed themselves under French protection, paving the way for the formation of the League of the Rhine in 1658 and leading to the further diminution of Imperial power. The Peace of Westphalia humiliated Habsburg ambitions in Europe and laid to rest any notion that the Empire held secular dominion over all of Christendom.
In the closing years of the Thirty Years' War, a civil war, the Fronde, which effectively curbed France's ability to make good the advantages gained in the Peace of Westphalia, broke out. The Frondeurs originally sought to protect traditional feudal "liberties" from an increasingly centralized and centralizing royal government. On the other hand, Cardinal Mazarin had continued and would continue to follow the policies of centralization pursued by his predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, seeking to augment the power of the Crown at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements. In 1648, he sought to levy a tax on the members of the Parlement de Paris, a judicial body composed mostly of nobles and high clergymen. The members of the Parlement not only refused to comply, but also ordered all of Cardinal Mazarin's earlier financial edicts burned. When Mazarin, strengthened by the news of the victory of Louis II de Bourbon, prince de Condé (le Grand Condé) at the Battle of Lens, arrested certain members of the Parlement in a show of force, Paris erupted in rioting and insurrection. A mob of angry Parisians broke into the royal palace and demanded to see their king. Led into the royal bedchamber, they gazed upon Louis XIV, who was feigning sleep, and quietly departed. Prompted by the possible danger to the royal family and the monarchy, Anne fled Paris with the king and his courtiers. Shortly thereafter, the signing of the Peace of Westphalia allowed the French army under Condé to return to the aid of Louis XIV and his royal court. By January 1649, Condé had started to besiege rebellious Paris; the subsequent Peace of Rueil temporarily ended the conflict.
After the first Fronde (Fronde parlementaire, 1648-1649) ended, the second Fronde, that of the nobles (Fronde des princes, 1650-1653) began. This second phase of upper-class insurrection, unlike that which preceded it, was characterized by tales of sordid intrigue and half-hearted warfare. It was conducted by aristocrats for whom it represented a protest against and an attempt to reverse the centralisation of France and their consequent demotion from vassals to courtiers. This Fronde was led by France's highest- ranking nobles, from Louis' uncle Gaston de France, duc d'Orléans, and first cousin, Anne d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier (known as la Grande Mademoiselle); to more distantly-related princes du sang such as Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti, and their sister Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, duchesse de Longueville; to dukes of legitimated royal descent, like Henri II d'Orléans, duc de Longueville, and François de Bourbon-Vendôme, duc de Beaufort; and to princelings descended from foreign dynasties (known as princes étrangers), such as Frédéric Maurice de La Tour d'Auvergne, duc de Bouillon, and his brother, the famous Marshal of France, Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, as well as Marie de Rohan-Montbazon, duchesse de Chevreuse; and scions of France's oldest families, like François VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld. Even the clergy was represented by Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz.
With the coming of age of Louis XIV and his subsequent coronation, the Frondeurs, who could hitherto have claimed to have been acting on his behalf and in his real interests against his Regent-mother and her first minister, had lost their pretext for revolt. The Fronde thus gradually lost steam until it ended in 1653, when Mazarin returned triumphant from abroad after having fled into exile on several occasions. The result of these tumultuous times, when the Queen Mother reputedly sold her jewels to feed her children, was a king filled with a permanent distrust for the nobility and the mob.
End of war and marriage
Despite the end of the Thirty Years' War and the Fronde, war with Spain continued. The French received aid in this military effort from England, then governed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. The Anglo-French alliance achieved victory in 1658 with the Battle of the Dunes.
The subsequent Treaty of the Pyrenees, signed in 1659, fixed the border between France and Spain at the Pyrenees; according to its terms, Louis XIV pardoned Condé, who had gone into the service of Spain, against his king, while Spain ceded to France the whole of Roussillon, the northern half of Cerdanya and various provinces and towns in the Spanish Netherlands. The treaty signalled a change in the balance of power in Europe with the decline of Spain and the rise of France.
By the terms of the treaty, Louis XIV became engaged to marry the daughter of Philip IV of Spain, his double first cousin, Maria Theresa (Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche). The Spanish had understandably been ill-disposed to the idea of such a marriage since Marie-Thérèse had been heir presumptive for many years. Moreover, she appeared likely to return to that position since the latest heir apparent, her brother Philip Prospero (ultimately to die in 1661), was a toddler. The possibility of Marie-Thérèse's acceding to the Spanish throne therefore loomed large. This made the prospect of an eventual personal union between the two countries, resulting from a royal marriage, all too probable, and it was, in the eyes of Spanish diplomats, to be avoided.
To get around Spanish hesitation and intransigence, Mazarin, in the words of Bussy-Rabutin, "invited the Duchess of Savoy to meet Louis and his Court at Lyon and to bring the princesses her daughters with her, ostensibly for the purpose of marrying her eldest (Marguerite of Savoy) to the King". According to Bluche, on hearing the news of the meeting at Lyon and the possibility of an impending Franco-Savoyard union, Philip IV reputedly exclaimed, "Esto no puede ser, y no será" ("This cannot be, and will not be"). The marquis de Pimentel was thus promptly dispatched to Lyon to commence negotiations for a Franco-Spanish marriage.
This resulted in a marriage contract and treaty stipulating an immense dowry of 500,000 gold écus, to be paid in three installments; its non-payment would later serve as a pretext for the War of Devolution as well as that of the Spanish Succession. Louis and Marie-Thérèse were married, first by proxy on June 3, 1660 at Hondarribia, on the Spanish side of the Basque Country, Don Luis de Haro representing Louis. On June 9, the actual marriage ceremony officiated by the bishop of Bayonne took place at the Saint Jean-Baptiste church in Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the French side of the Basque Country. According to the terms of the marriage contract, as translated by Ian Dunlop, "that on condition (que moyennant) that the sums are made over to His Most Christian Majesty (Louis XIV)... the said most serene Infanta (Marie-Thérèse) will rest content with the said dowry and not thereafter sue for any other of her rights", and thus she would renounce for herself and her descendants all claims to the territories of the Spanish Monarchy. Since the dowry was not fully paid, Spain being at the time bankrupt, the renunciation was theoretically void and was not recognized as binding by the French Crown.
Personal reign and reforms
Within France, upon the death of Cardinal Mazarin, his first minister, in 1661, Louis XIV assumed personal control of the reins of government. He was able to exploit the widespread public yearning for peace and order, which had resulted from the long foreign wars and domestic civil strife, caused by events such as the Fronde and abuses of the people perpetrated by some nobles, to consoliate central authority at the feudal aristocracy's expense. Trials such as the Grands Jours d'Auvergne were used to impose order by punishing some of the most outrageous abuses by nobles, to "lift the people up from the oppression of the powerful" in the words of the Procureur-Général Denis Talon, and to increase public support for Louis' policies.
At the same time, the French treasury stood close to bankruptcy. Louis XIV eliminated Nicolas Fouquet, the Surintendant des Finances, commuting the sentence of banishment, passed by the Parlement, to imprisonment for life, and abolished Fouquet's office. Jean-Baptiste Colbert was appointed as Contrôleur-Général des Finances in 1665. To be sure, Fouquet had committed no financial indiscretions which Mazarin had not committed before him and which Colbert would not commit afterward. Moreover, Fouquet had competently and loyally discharged his duties, but his growing ambition to succeed Richelieu and Mazarin in power was such that Louis had to rid himself of him if he was to rule alone.
The commencement of Louis' personal reign was marked by a series of administrative and fiscal reforms. Colbert reduced the national debt through more efficient taxation. His principal taxes included the aides, the douanes, the gabelle, and the taille. The aides and douanes were customs duties, the gabelle a tax on salt, and the taille a tax on land. While Colbert did not abolish the historic tax exemption enjoyed by the nobility and clergy, he did improve the methods of tax collection then in use.
He also had wide-ranging plans to strengthen France through commerce and trade. His administration ordained new industries and encouraged manufacturers and inventors, such as the Lyon silk manufacturers and the Manufacture des Gobelins, which produced and still produces tapestries. He also brought professional manufacturers and artisans from all over Europe, such as glassmakers from Murano, ironworkers from Sweden, and shipbuilders from the United Provinces. In this manner, he sought to decrease French dependence on foreign imported goods while increasing French exports, and hence to decrease the flow of gold and silver out of France. Outside of France, Colbert supported and encouraged the development of colonies in the Americas, Africa and Asia not only to provide markets for French exports, but also to provide resources for French industries.
Colbert also made improvements to the navy to increase French naval prestige and to gain control of the high seas in times of war and of peace, improvements to the merchant marine to remove, at least partially, control of French commerce from Dutch hands, and improvements to the highways and the waterways of France which decreased the costs and time of transporting goods around the kingdom.
| Silver coin of Louis XIV, dated 1674 | |
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| Obverse. The Latin inscription is LVDOVICVS XIIII D[EI] GRA[TIA] ("Louis XIV, by the grace of God"). | Reverse. The Latin inscription is FRAN[CIÆ] ET NAVARRÆ REX 1674 ("King of France and of Navarre, 1674"). |
While Colbert, his family, clients and allies at court, focused on the economy and maritime matters, another faction, led by Michel le Tellier and his son François-Michel le Tellier, marquis de Louvois, turned their attention to military matters.
Louis XIV sought to play these factions off against one another and thus create some checks and balances, ensuring that no one group would attain such power and influence at court as to destabilize his reign.
Le Tellier and Louvois had an important role to play in government, curbing the independent spirit of much of the nobility at court and in the army. Gone were the days when army generals, without regard to the bigger political and diplomatic picture, protracted war at the frontiers and disobeyed orders coming from the capital, while quarrelling and bickering with each other over precedence. Gone too were the days when positions of seniority and rank in the army were the sole possession of the old aristocracy. Louvois, in particular, pledged himself to modernizing the army, organizing it into a new professional, disciplined and well-trained force out of the old. He sought to contrive and direct campaigns and devoted himself to providing for the soldiers' material well-being and morale, and he did so successfully. Like Colbert and Louis XIV, Louvois was hardworking.
Louis also instituted various legal reforms. This is reflected in the sheer number of Great Ordinances enacted during his reign. The Grande Ordonnance de Procédure Civile of 1667, also known as Code Louis, was a comprehensive code regulating civil procedure in all of France in a uniform manner. It made it compulsory to record baptisms, marriages and burials in the registers of the State (as opposed to the registers of the Church). The Code Louis played an important part in France's legal history as it was the basis for Napoleon I's Code Napoléon, which is itself the basis for many of Western Europe's modern legal codes. It sought to provide France with a single system of law where there were two: customary law in the north, and Roman law in the south. Another important Great Ordinance was the Ordonnance Criminelle de 1670, which was an early attempt at the codification of criminal procedure in France.
One of Louis XIV's more infamous decrees was the Grande Ordonnance sur les Colonies of 1685, also known as Code Noir. It granted sanction to slavery, although it did extend a measure of humanity to the practice by prohibiting the separation of families. However, no person could own a slave in the French colonies unless he were a member of the Roman Catholic Church, and a Catholic priest had to baptise each slave. Another important legal text enacted under Louis XIV was the Code Forestier, which sought to control and oversee the forestry industry in France, protecting forests from destruction.
Patronage of the arts
The Sun King proved a generous spender, dispensing large sums of money to finance the royal court, and supported those who worked under him. He brought the Académie Française under his patronage, and became its "Protector". It was under his reign and indeed his patronage that Classical French literature flourished with such writers as Molière, Jean Racine and Jean de La Fontaine whose works still hold great influence to this day. The visual arts also found in Louis XIV their patron for he funded and commissioned various artists, such as Charles Le Brun, Pierre Mignard, Antoine Coysevox and Hyacinthe Rigaud whose works became famed throughout Europe. In music, composers and musicians like Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières and François Couperin thrived and influenced many others. Even in the art of gardening did Louis prove a patron with his support of André Le Nôtre.
Louis XIV ordered the construction of the military complex known as the Hôtel des Invalides to provide a home for the officers and soldiers who had served him loyally in the army, but who had been rendered infirm by either injury or age. While the practice of pharmacy was still quite elementary, the Hôtel des Invalides pioneered new treatments and set new standards for hospice treatment. Louis considered its construction one of the greatest achievements of his reign, which, along with the Château de Versailles, is one of the largest and most extravagant monuments in Europe.
He also improved the Palais du Louvre, as well as many other royal residences. Originally, when planning additions to the Louvre, Louis XIV had hired Gian Lorenzo Bernini as architect. However, his plans for the Louvre would have called for the destruction of much of the existing structure, replacing it with an Italian summer villa in the centre of Paris. In Bernini's place, Louis chose the French architect Claude Perrault, whose work on the "Perrault Wing" of the Louvre is widely-celebrated.
| Monarchical Styles of King Louis XIV Par la grâce de Dieu, Roi de France et de Navarre |
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| Reference style | His Most Christian Majesty |
| Spoken style | Your Most Christian Majesty |
| Alternative style | Monsieur Le Roi |
Early wars in the Low Countries
After Louis XIV's father-in-law and uncle, Philip IV of Spain, died in 1665, Philip IV's son (by his second wife) became Charles II of Spain. Louis XIV claimed that Brabant, a territory in the Low Countries ruled by the King of Spain, had "devolved" to his wife, Marie-Thérèse, Charles II's elder half-sister by their father's first marriage. He argued that the custom of Brabant required that a child should not suffer from his or her father's remarriage, hence having precedence in inheritance over children of the second or subsequent marriages. Louis personally participated in the campaigns of the ensuing War of Devolution, which broke out in 1667.
Problems internal to the Republic of the Seven United Provinces (the Netherlands) aided Louis XIV's designs on the Low Countries. The most prominent political figure in the United Provinces at the time, Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary, feared the ambition of the young William III, Prince of Orange, who in seeking to seize control might thus deprive De Witt of supreme power in the Republic and restore the House of Orange to the influence it had hitherto enjoyed until the death of William II, Prince of Orange. Therefore, with the United Provinces in internal conflict between supporters of De Witt and those of William of Orange, the "States faction" and the "Orange faction" respectively, and with England preoccupied in the Second Anglo-Dutch War with the Dutch, who were being supported, in accordance with the terms of the treaties signed between them, by their ally, Louis XIV, France easily conquered both Flanders and Franche-Comté.
Shocked by the rapidity of French successes and fearful of the future, the United Provinces turned on their former friends and put aside their differences with England and, when joined by Sweden, formed a Triple Alliance in 1668. Faced with the threat of the spread of war and having signed a secret treaty partitioning the Spanish succession with the Emperor, the other major claimant, Louis XIV agreed to make peace. Under the terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668), France retained Flanders, including the great fortress of Lille, but returned Franche-Comté to Spain.
The Triple Alliance did not last very long. In 1670, Charles II, lured by French bribes and pensions, signed the secret Treaty of Dover, entering into an alliance with France; the two kingdoms, along with certain Rhineland German princes, declared war on the United Provinces in 1672, sparking off the Franco-Dutch War. The rapid invasion and occupation of most of the Netherlands precipitated a coup, which toppled De Witt and allowed William III, Prince of Orange, to seize power. William III entered into an alliance with Spain, the Emperor and the rest of the Empire; and a treaty of peace with England was signed in 1674, the result of which was England's withdrawal from the war and the marriage between William III, Prince of Orange, and Princess Mary, niece of the English King Charles II. Facing a possible Imperial advance on his flank while in the Low Countries in that year, Louis XIV ordered his army to withdraw to more defensible positions.
Despite these diplomatic and military reverses, the war continued with brilliant French victories against the overwhelming forces of the opposing coalition. In a matter of weeks in 1674, the Spanish territory of Franche Comté fell to the French armies under the eyes of the king; while Condé defeated a much larger combined army, with Austrian, Spanish and Dutch contingents, under the Prince of Orange, at the Battle of Seneffe, preventing them from descending on Paris. In the winter of 1674–1675, the outnumbered Turenne, through a most daring and brilliant of campaigns, inflicted defeat upon the Imperial armies under Montecuccoli, drove them out of Alsace and back across the Rhine, and recovered the province for Louis XIV. Through a series of feints, marches and counter-marches towards the end of the war, Louis XIV led his army to besiege and capture Ghent, an action which dissuaded Charles II and his English Parliament from declaring war upon France and which allowed Louis, in a very superior position, to force the allies to the negotiating table. After six years, Europe was exhausted by war, and peace negotiations commenced, being accomplished in 1678 with the Treaty of Nijmegen. While Louis XIV returned all captured Dutch territory, he gained more towns and associated lands in the Spanish Netherlands and retained Franche-Comté, which had been captured by Louis and his army in a matter of weeks. As he was in a position to make demands which were much more exorbitant, Louis' actions were celebrated as evidence of his moderation in victory.
The Treaty of Nijmegen further increased France's influence in Europe, but did not satisfy Louis XIV. The King dismissed his foreign minister Simon Arnauld, marquis de Pomponne in 1679, viewed as timorous and as having compromised too much with the allies. Louis XIV also kept up his army but, instead of pursuing his claims through purely military action, utilised judicial processes to accomplish further territorial aggrandizement. Thanks to the ambiguous nature of treaties of the time, Louis was able to claim that the territories ceded to him in previous treaties ought to be ceded along with all their dependencies and lands which had formerly belonged to them, as had in fact been stipulated in the peace treaties, but had separated over the years. French Chambers of Reunion were appointed to ascertain which territories formally belonged to France; the French troops later occupied them. The annexation of these lesser territories was designed to give France a more defensible frontier, the pré carré suggested by Vauban.
Louis sought to gain cities and territories such as Luxembourg, for its strategic offensive and defensive position on the frontier, as well as Casale, which would give him access to the Po River valley in the heart of Northern Italy. Louis also desired to gain Strasbourg, an important strategic outpost through which various Imperial armies had in the previous wars crossed over the Rhine to invade France. Strasbourg was a part of Alsace, but had not been ceded with the rest of Habsburg-ruled Alsace in the Peace of Westphalia. It was nonetheless occupied by the French in 1681 under Louis' new legal pretext, and, along with other occupied territories, such as Luxembourg and Casale, was ceded to France for a period of twenty years by the Truce of Ratisbon.
Height of power in the 1680s
By the early 1680s, Louis XIV had greatly augmented his and France's influence and power in Europe and the world. Louis XIV's famous minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who died in 1683, exercised a tremendous influence on the royal treasury and coffers, with royal revenue tripling under his supervision.
The princes of Europe began to imitate France and Louis XIV in everything from taste in art, food and fashion to political systems; many even took " official mistresses" simply because it was done at Versailles.
In the sphere of foreign affairs outside Europe, French colonies were multiplying in the Americas, Asia and Africa, while diplomatic relations had been initiated with countries as far afield as Siam (through the embassy of Chaumont), India and Persia. For e