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.