Louis XIV

Running parallel to Louis's quest for glory in war was his patronage of glory in the arts and sciences, designed to make France the centre of European civilization. Molière and Jean-Baptiste Racine wrote plays performed at his court. He purchased many paintings by French masters to ornament his palaces, where the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully delighted his guests. Louis also founded the academies of Painting and Sculpture (1655), Science (1666), Music (1669), and Architecture (1671), and in 1680 he established the Comédie Française.

Louis’s most spectacular contribution to French culture was his magnificent Palace of Versailles, a few miles to the west of Paris, which became the showplace of Europe. Construction began in 1661 and the palace was designed as a manifestation of the prestige of royalty. When finished it would prove to be the ideal setting for his lavish court, as well as an international symbol of his and France’s power and cultural sophistication. Fronted by a large court containing statues of famous Frenchmen, and including numerous galleries, salons, and royal apartments, all lavishly decorated and fitted with ornate furnishings, Versailles thereafter characterized the style of Louis XIV. Although building took four decades to complete, Louis, his court, and the various departments of government began to occupy the palace in 1682, after which Louis spent most of his time there, underlining the concentration of the power of the state.

Louis was also concerned to improve Paris. He razed the city's medieval walls, built Les Invalides as a home for disabled soldiers, planned the great avenue of the Champs-Élysées, and restored the cathedral of Notre Dame.

The last years of the reign of Louis XIV were conducted over a war-weary France and were marked by famines, military defeats, crippling taxation, a wrecked national economy, and a series of royal deaths that threatened to overwhelm the monarchy. His health finally broke in 1715. Suffering from fever and gangrene, he died on September 1, 1715, at Versailles. His great-grandson, Louis XV, then five years old, succeeded him.

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.

See also Le Grand Siècle.