Louis XIV

I

Introduction

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 economic and administrative modernization and a great flowering of French culture.

II

Early Years and Private Life of Louis XIV

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”).

On May 14, 1643, when Louis was four-and-a-half years old, Louis XIII died. His mother Anne, aided by Cardinal Jules Mazarin as her first minister, ruled France as regent. His father’s death spared Louis the beatings and abuse usually meted out to French princes, and his education by kindly but mediocre tutors—first, the Marshal of Villeroy, and second, Hardouin de Péréfixe, the future archbishop of Paris—was feeble and more practical than intellectual. His mother formed his rules of conscience, teaching him a simple kind of Roman Catholicism laced with superstition. Mazarin, who was also Louis’s godfather, instructed him in court ceremony, war, and the craft of kingship.

The years between 1648 and 1653 were dominated by the Fronde—two rebellions by the aristocracy against the Crown. They marked the last insurrection of the French nobility against the monarchy, and at one point, in January 1649, forced the royal family and the court to leave Paris for Saint-Germain-en-Laye. On September 7, 1651, Louis officially came of age, and in December 1652 he arrested Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz, one of the leaders of the Fronde, and the rebellion began to collapse. Although the power of the king was reinforced, the Fronde impressed upon Louis the need of bringing order, stability, and reform to France and also fostered in him a deep suspicion of the nobility.

The nation’s military situation also improved at this time. Mazarin brought the Thirty Years’ War to a successful conclusion, weakening the Habsburg dynasty of Austria and gaining Alsace for France. In 1659 the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended the war with Spain that had begun in 1635, won France the provinces of Artois and Roussillon.

In 1660, in accordance with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, Louis married his Spanish cousin, Marie-Thérèse, thereby providing France with a claim on Spain’s empire. With his queen, Louis had six children, the only one to survive into adulthood being Louis de France, “Le Grand Dauphin” (1661-1711). Louis also conducted affairs with several women, including Louise de la Vallière, duchesse de Vaujours, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart, marquise de Montespan, and Marie-Angelique de Scoraille, duchesse de Fontanges. As a result, he produced many illegitimate children, later marrying them into families of the highest nobility, and even into branches of the royal family itself. Louis’s marriage to Marie-Thérèse would last until her death in 1683. After this he secretly married a pious and previously obscure woman, Françoise d'Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, who was governess of his illegitimate children. As the leader of the French court, she was known for her beauty and wit, and she exerted a great influence on the king in religious and political matters. She also introduced an atmosphere of excessive austerity to the court, and urged Louis to suppress the immorality that was rife there.

III

Government of Louis XIV

When Mazarin died on March 9, 1661, Louis shocked France by refusing to name a first minister. Although Louis appreciated the considerable successes gained by Mazarin in foreign affairs, the Fronde and the years of war had made him determined to reinforce royal authority in a more centralized state, and he silently disapproved of much of Mazarin’s management of the country’s affairs. This attitude was reinforced by his belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely: “L’État c’est moi [the State, it is me].” He decided then to rule alone and selected Jean-Baptiste Colbert as his closest adviser.

Despite his rakish youth, Louis proved a hardworking king. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday he presided at a council meeting in which he and a select group of ministers, some of whom were drawn from the middle class, formulated policies that affected the lives of his 20 million subjects. This necessitated Louis developing a corps of professional diplomats, under Hugues de Lionne, as an effective new instrument of power.

The results were a rapid modernization and a continuation of the policy of political and administrative centralization carried out for several centuries by Louis’s predecessors. One of his first acts, in September 1661, was to arrest his superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, for embezzlement. Fouquet’s subsequent sentencing, by Louis, to life imprisonment served as a warning to ministers to be in a state of constant subordination to Louis and not to exceed their limits in terms of independence and personal enrichment. In 1665 Louis made Colbert comptroller-general of finance. He drastically overhauled finances, fought corrupt officials, and repudiated some bonds. He also used protective tariffs, state control of industry and trade, and various navigation laws to organize trading and colonization companies and create new factories, thus succeeding in further developing French industry and trade. In 1669 Louis appointed him secretary of state for naval affairs, and under him new canal and road networks were built, sea ports were fortified, the French navy was greatly strengthened, and marine and colonial legal codes were devised. Louis entrusted the reform of the army to Michel le Tellier, and later his son, Louvois. Improvements in conscription, training, discipline, and promotion helped make the army a new instrument of power for Louis and one of the best in Europe, capable of being mobilized from its standing, uniformed force of 72,000 to one of 300,000 in times of war.

Louis was also active in religious affairs. He saw both Protestantism and the Roman Catholic movement known as Jansenism as weakening the cohesion of the nation, and associated both with various political opposition movements. The spiritual centre of Jansenism, since its beginning in the 1640s, was the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs near Paris, where numerous nobles, royal judges, and intellectuals sympathetic to the movement made religious retreats. Louis’s fight against Jansenism intensified in 1679, when he expelled many of the boarders at Port-Royal-des-Champs, thus helping to tighten his control over the Roman Catholic clergy. Eventually he closed the convent down and had it razed in 1709. His campaign against Protestantism began in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau, thus revoking the Edict of Nantes that had in 1598 given partial religious freedom to French Protestants, or Huguenots. Louis was concerned that his Huguenot subjects would pledge their allegiance to the United Provinces (the independent states of the Netherlands) or England, and wanted to ensure, through a policy of mass forced conversions, that Protestantism became a marginal practice. However, more than 200,000 Huguenots chose to leave France rather than convert, and as they represented a significant element of the economic and intellectual elite of the country, their settling in Germany, Switzerland, England, and the United Provinces profited those countries, with their dynamism and their entrepreneurship, and damaged France. The exile of the Huguenots also ignited the revolt of the Camisards of southern France between 1702 and 1710.

IV

Louis XIV’s Foreign Policy

In foreign affairs, Louis's consistent aim was to glorify France, to gird its fortress defences 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 means of its control over Spain and Germany.

In four major, but expensive, wars Louis 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 in the War of the Devolution. His quick victories, including the capture of Lille in August 1667, prompted England, the United Provinces, and Sweden to check France and force the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668. By this, Louis gained 12 fortresses in Flanders.

In 1672, having isolated the Dutch by negotiating English and Swedish neutrality, Louis launched the War of Holland against the United Provinces, whose maritime and trading power threatened France directly. For six years the United Provinces, aided by Spain and Austria, strongly resisted attacks by the French armies led by Louis II, Prince de Condé, and Henri, Vicomte de Turenne. The French navy, under Vivonne and Abraham Duquesne, was also unable to defeat the United Provinces’ navy, led by Admiral Michiel Adriaanszoon de Ruyter. The war of attrition ended with the Treaty of Nijmegen in 1678. This did not dismantle the United Provinces but gave Louis the Franche-Comté region and more forts in Flanders. It also marked the apogee of the reign of Louis XIV, with his power recognized not just in Europe but across a commercial empire that touched North America, the West Indies, West Africa, India, and South East Asia.

However, overconfident and ill-advised, in 1688 Louis sent an army into the Rhineland to claim the Palatinate for his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria. Although the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was applauded by his Catholic subjects, it stiffened resistance to Louis in Protestant Europe, and the Nine Years’ War, also known as the War of the League of Augsburg, revealed serious deficiencies in Louis’s army. Despite the devastation of the Rhineland, and French successes at Staffarda (1690), Fleurus (1690), Marsaglia (1693), and Neerwinden (1693), there was no decisive victory for either side. Although the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 saw Spain cede to France the western part of Santo Domingo (now Haiti), and France retain the whole of Alsace and Strasbourg, it did not improve French defences or add to the glory of the monarchy. It did demonstrate, however, that an alliance of England, the United Provinces, and Austria was capable of checking Louis’s expansionist ambitions. The war had also exhausted France, coinciding as it did with catastrophic harvests and famine.

Louis’s last military venture, the War of the Spanish Succession, stemmed from the will of Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, who died in November 1700 leaving his entire realm—Spain, its overseas dominions, the Spanish Netherlands, and lands in Italy—to Louis’s grandson, Philip, Duke of Anjou. The immediate cause of the war, in which France was opposed by an alliance of the European powers, was Louis’s acceptance of the Spanish throne on behalf of Philip. Beginning at a time of great economic difficulty for France, it proved to be a long and ruinous war. Early victories at Friedlingen (1702) and Ekeren (1703) were followed by heavy defeats at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenaarde (1706), shattering the myth of French invincibility. France’s “half-victory” at Malplaquet (1709) and the triumph of Denain (1712) recovered some territory and lost pride and hastened the treaties of the Peace of Utrecht that ended the war for France between 1713 and 1714. Although France won control of Spain, and Philip was recognized as its king, it lost its North American territories of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay Territory to Great Britain, but kept Strasbourg. The treaties marked an end to the French hegemonic threat to Europe, while simultaneously strengthening its opponents. Louis’s final war had succeeded only in creating something approaching a genuine balance of power.